“Here,” said the squatter, “is a gentleman whom I know you will be heartily thankful to see again.”
The gentleman stood forward with outstretched hands and a quivering lip.
It was John Merridew.
CHAPTER VI. NEW CONDITIONS
The following were the facts, as Denis grasped them by degrees.
Not many minutes had elapsed between the mishap to the port life-boat and the resolution of the North Foreland into so much wood and iron at the bottom of the sea, with a single top-gallant mast standing out to mark the place. But during those few minutes the minor disaster had caused another.
The loss of the first boat augured ill for the rest; and, indeed, only the chief officer’s lived to salute the sun; but before it was launched, Miss Merridew had been swept overboard through the little faith of her own friends, who had lashed her life-belt to a fallen spar, only to give a gratuitous handle to the next great wave.
It was Captain Coles whose last remembered act had been to prevent one or both gentlemen from diving after her to their death — some said with his revolver at their heads; and, as if because neither seemed to care any longer for his life, these were the two male passengers to be saved. They were dragged into the mate’s boat. The boat was successfully launched by a mixture of good management and better luck. But it was entirely to the mate’s credit that she immediately stood out to sea, and so continued until picked up by a coasting vessel, which landed the party in Melbourne before night. The post-haste journey to the landward scene of the wreck, all that night and nearly all next day (it was a matter of a hundred miles up and across country), was only such as any father would have undertaken in the circumstances, and most men in Ralph Devenish’s position would have taken with him.
But Captain Devenish did not accompany Mr. Merridew to the little outbuilding in which Denis lay; nor did Jim Doherty, or his master, remain even so long as to see the older man take the bandaged hands, tenderly, tremulously, in both of his.
The interview which followed was an affecting one; but Denis had done too much, too recently, to take a very emotional view of his exploits. In his heart he took little credit for them. It was not he who had saved Nan Merridew’s life, but a merciful God who had merely used him as His tool; and while, perhaps, more thankful than he now knew for that supreme preferment, the prostrate man was almost morbidly alive to its disadvantages. Thus, when Mr. Merridew led the conversation back almost to the point at which their last had been interrupted, it was Denis who created the awkward silence. He was touched by the uncontrolled revelation of a hard man’s soft side, by the contrast between the exceedingly deliberate and rather irritating voice that he remembered on the poop, and the voice that still broke with very tenderness. But his own voice was so much the more dispassionate, and apparently perverse.
“I unsay every word,” said Mr. Merridew, for the second time, and more pointedly than ever; for, even in his really generous emotion, he could not help feeling that it was unsaying a great deal.
Denis nodded from his pillow, but only to signify that he heard. “You are very kind,” he answered at length, with no ironic intent; “too kind, I almost think. You might live to regret it.”
“No, no; never, never! Now I know what you are.”
“I am a junior officer in the merchant service — with a captain’s certificate.”
Mr. Merridew was genuinely pained. “Dent,” said he, “I take back my words twice over, and still you throw them in my teeth! Surely you must see that everything is altered now?”
“But it might have happened to anybody else,” urged Denis, with gentle tenacity. “You should look at it in that way, Mr. Merridew. Suppose it had been one of the stewards; for all you knew, or seemed prepared to believe, I was no more eligible than they, the night before last. I have been infinitely lucky — no, blessed, blessed! — but that’s all. It doesn’t give me ten thousand pounds to put to hers.”
Mr. Merridew jumped up from the bedside. It was partly with temper that he was trembling now.
“Have you changed your mind already, Mr. Dent, or is all this so much affectation on your part? Did you mean what you said to me that night before we struck or did you not?”
“Every word of it,” answered Denis, in a whisper that brought the other back to his former position on the bed, only now he was peering into eyes averted from his own.
“You do love her, don’t you, Dent? I can see it — I can see it — whatever you may say!”
Denis could only nod. His weakness had come upon him very suddenly. But by an effort he was able to prevent it from rising to his eyes. And soon he was sufficient master of himself to attend to what Mr. Merridew was saying with so strange an eagerness of voice and manner.
“You must come back with us. That’s what you must do. Melbourne’s a perfect pandemonium: street upon street of tents, teeming with the very sweepings of the earth, and ship upon ship without a man on board. But there’s a fine clipper, the Memnon by name, lying ready for sea at Geelong, and we’ll all go home in her together. She’s bound to be under-officered, and I suppose you would be happier so than as a passenger; but let this voyage be your last. You said you were as good a man ashore as at sea, if my memory serves me as well as yours. Well, now I can believe you, and in you, as I shall show you — as I shall very soon show you! I have no one to follow me in the firm, Denis — that’s your name, isn’t it? — and you don’t mind my calling you by it, do you? But if you became my son, Denis ... can’t you see ... can’t you see?”
The man’s tongue had run away with him, as the unlikeliest tongues will, under strong emotional strain: so we prattle of our newly dead, magnifying the good that we belittled in their lives. But here the strain was far greater; for she who had been dead was alive again; and this, this was her saviour, for whom nothing, not even the girl herself, was now too good.
“There is one thing you have forgotten,” said Denis, without withdrawing his hand from the nervous grasp that now hurt considerably. “I had not got my answer — the other night. And how can I press her for it now? Don’t answer yourself, sir, till you have thought it over, if I may ask that much of you, alone; and then I know you will agree with me. She ought not to be allowed to give me her answer now. And I — I ought to go away without seeing her again — until I have really shown myself — —” He could not finish. His weakness and his sincerity were equally apparent: deeply moved, the elder man took his leave, with but one more syllable, and that to promise Denis, from the door, not to repeat a word of their conversation to Nan.
But Denis had not said all that it was in him to say, for in the first place he had not the heart, and in the next he was not too proud of his latest resolve; but it was a resolve no less, and already it might have been the resolve of his life.
“This is not the real man,” he lay saying to himself. “The real man had his say on the poop — and the sounder man of the two. I won’t take advantage of either of them. Let me make that money. I can, and I will. Then she shall give me her answer — not before.”
And yet he had an uneasy conscience about his new resolve, plausible as it became in words; but the qualm only hardened it within him; and he lay in the twilight with set teeth and dogged jaw, quite a different Denis from the one who had leaned forward to listen to Jimmy Doherty, but every inch a Dent.
Doherty came stealing back with the face of a conspirator; his worldly wisdom did not as yet include a recognition of the difficulty of picking up broken threads, even when they are threads of gold. Denis would not promise to speak to Mr. Kitto, would hear no more, indeed, of Ballarat; all he seemed to care to know now was what Captain Devenish was doing with himself.
“Him with the whiskers?” said Jimmy. “I can’t sight that gent!”
“What do you mean?”
“Beg yer pardon, mister, but I don’t like him. He speaks to you like as if you was a blessed dingo. That sort o’ thing don’t do out here; we ain’t used to it.” And young Aust
ralia shook a sage old head.
“But what’s he doing with himself, Jimmy?”
“Oh, lookin’ at the papers an’ things, an’ yawnin’ an’ smokin’ about the place.”
“And Mr. Merridew?”
“With the young lady. She ain’t a-goin’ to show up to-night, the young lady ain’t; and you can take that as gospel — for I had it from the missus herself.”
The boy’s eyes were uncomfortably keen and penetrating. Denis got rid of him, and lay thinking until it was nearly dusk. Then they brought him his first solid meal; and presently Mrs. Kitto paid a visit to a giant so refreshed that nothing would persuade him to keep his bed without a break. He must have a breath of air: he was quite himself. So early evening brought him forth in a pair of Mr. Kitto’s slippers.
The very first person he saw was Ralph Devenish, reading by lamplight in one of the many rude verandas which faced and flanked one another under the bright Australian stars. Denis went limping up to him with outstretched hand.
“I am glad to set eyes on you, Devenish,” he said gravely.
“Really?” drawled the other, with light incredulity; but he could hardly refuse the bandaged hand.
“Ralph Devenish,” pursued Denis, chilled but undeterred, “I make no apology for the sudden familiarity, partly because we’ve both been so near our death, and partly because we’re cousins. My mother was a Devenish; you may open your eyes, but I would drop them if I came of the stock that treated her as her own people did! I never meant to tell you, for there can be no love to lose between your name and mine, but I blurted it out in a rage just before we struck. I want to say that I’m heartily ashamed of the expressions I made use of then; that I apologize for them, and take them back.”
“My good fellow,” replied Devenish, with engaging candour, “I don’t recollect one of them; the fact is, I was a little drunk. As to our relationship, that’s very interesting, I’m sure; but it’s odd how one does run up against relations, in the last places you’d expect, too. I can’t say I remember your name, though; never heard it before, to my knowledge. If there’s been anything painful between your people and mine, don’t tell me any more about it, like a good feller.”
“I won’t,” said Denis, secretly boiling over, though for no good reason that he could have given. It certainly was not because Devenish continued occupying the only chair, leaving the lame man to stand. Denis was glad to have so whole a view of him as the lamplight and the easy chair afforded. Save for the patent fact that his clothes had not been made for him, the whiskered captain looked as he had looked on board, a subtle cross between the jauntily debonair and the nobly bored. As Denis watched he produced the same meerschaum that he had smoked all the voyage, a Turk’s head beautifully coloured, with a curved amber mouthpiece, and proceeded to fill it from the same silken pouch.
“Another soul saved, you see!” said Ralph Devenish, as he tapped his Turk affectionately; it was the acme of sly callousness, even if intended so to appear. Denis turned away in disgust, but turned back for a moment in his stride.
“Are you going home with the Merridews?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Devenish. “Are you?”
“I don’t know,” echoed Denis. “But I think — not.”
“Really?” drawled Devenish. “Well, as a year’s leave don’t last forever, I’m not so sure.”
And as Denis saw the last of him under the lamp, he had not yet resumed the filling of the Turk’s head.
CHAPTER VII. DENIS AND NAN
Miss Merridew continued prostrate, yet so exempt from bodily mischief that her case began to baffle all except the other woman, who had charge of it.
Mr. Merridew allowed himself to be dissuaded from obtaining indifferent medical advice at exorbitant cost, but his anxiety increased with his perplexity, and was only allayed by his instinctive confidence in Mrs. Kitto. That lady proved as practical and understanding as she was good and kind. Yet even Mrs. Kitto was puzzled just at first. They had to deal with one singularly reserved — who could lie for hours without closing an eye or uttering a word — and the father’s way was to force her to say something, at the pain of his own passionate distress. But Mrs. Kitto would bring in her sewing, of which she seemed to have a great deal, and sit over it, also by the hour, in a quietude as grateful as her sparing speech. She was very observant, however, and the one thing that puzzled her only did so in the beginning. This was the anomaly presented by a patient whose face was often in a burning fever while her head and hand kept perfectly cool.
The wreck was never mentioned in the sick-room, nor did Nan guess that an inquest on the bodies was held within a few yards of where she lay. Yet it was she who eventually broke the ice.
“Is Mr. Dent still here?” she asked, but in a tone so magnificently offhand that a less astute person than Mrs. Kitto would have detected its anxiety as soon.
“He was this morning,” replied Mrs. Kitto, smiling.
“Do you mean that he isn’t now?” the girl demanded, half-rising on an elbow.
“No. I think I should have heard of it if he had thought of leaving us to-day.”
Nan Merridew fell back upon her pillow.
“I wish he would go on board,” she said petulantly, “if he is going.”
“On board?” queried Mrs. Kitto; and she set down her work.
“Isn’t he to be one of the officers on the ship we are all going home by?”
“I didn’t know of it,” said Mrs. Kitto, with equal embarrassment and surprise.
“But he is,” declared the girl, with all an invalid’s impatience. “I understood that from papa the day he came; he had spoken to the agents, or he was going to speak to them, and Denis — I mean Mr. Dent — was to have the best berth they could give him. I do wish he would go on board. I — I almost wish he hadn’t saved my life!”
And she tossed her face to the wall, for it was burning as it had burned so often since her deliverance.
“It’s meeting him again,” said Mrs. Kitto to herself; “and she does care for him, or she would mind less.” It made it all the harder to ask aloud, “Did your father say he had succeeded, dear?”
“We have never mentioned Mr. Dent again,” said Nan to that, quite haughtily.
“Because I don’t think he’s sailing in the Memnon at all,” continued Mrs. Kitto, gently. “I think he’s going to the diggings instead.”
“Going where?” the girl asked after a pause. The first sentence was all that she had heard.
“To Ballarat or Bendigo — to make his fortune.”
“I hope he’ll succeed,” said Nan, after a pause; but her voice was a sweet bell jangled, and an hour went before she turned her face from the wall. It was still red, but there was a subtle difference in the shade. And in the hazel eyes, which were the most obvious of Miss Merridew’s natural attractions, there was a crude, new light.
“I am going to get up,” said she.
Mrs. Kitto proved not unprepared for the announcement; it appeared that all her needlework had been for Nan, and now it was as though the last stitch had just been put into everything. It was all a surprise to the girl, who had not given the matter a thought. She was to get a fresh outfit at Geelong, before the ship sailed, but Mrs. Kitto insisted on sending her so far equipped by herself. And the dress which the kind soul had been so busy altering was almost the last remnant of her own trousseau, and some years behind the fashion.
In point of fact it was what used to be called a “double robe” of lavender cashmere; and it was trimmed with braid of the same colour, but the braid was a shade darker than the rest, and its criss-cross pattern as unlovely in its way as the voluminous skirts it was intended to adorn. But the fabric was soft and fine, and the delicate tint happened to suit Nan Merridew, who had a singularly clear and pale skin, and dark gold ringlets almost the colour of her eyes. For she was of the type dear to the pre-Raphaelites, with rather more flesh and blood, and a much more conspicuous spirit of her own, perha
ps a little too conspicuous when Nan reappeared in the sunlight, with quite another light in her eyes, on the fourth day after the wreck.
It was near the close of a radiant afternoon, and Mr. Merridew was absent for the day; but Captain Devenish had been seen strolling toward the cliffs, and Nan thought that she would stroll after him in spite of the direction. No one must think of accompanying her; she would so enjoy finding the way for herself. To this Mrs. Kitto pretended to make no objection, but expressed a belief that Mr. Dent was with Captain Devenish, thinking she had named the last deterrent. On the contrary, it only decided Nan to go quickly; and go she did with that peculiar light stronger than ever in her eyes.
Now the way led through a belt of young pines, by which the station was almost surrounded, and in the middle of them Nan met a man in moleskins and a red shirt. Him she was approaching with downcast eyes, as one who must regard her curiously, when his voice thrilled her at close quarters.
“Nan! And you’d have passed me without a word!”
Denis was standing in her path, a common wide-awake drooping from one hand, the other reaching out for hers.
“I didn’t recognize you,” she said, scarcely touching his hand. “And I was looking for Captain Devenish — can you tell me where he is?”
“He has gone down to bathe,” replied Denis with some reluctance. To bathe where a ship’s company had been drowned that week! No wonder Nan winced. “Can’t you spare me a few minutes instead?” he added as she was about to turn.
“Oh, yes, if you wish it.”
“Of course I wish it!” exclaimed Denis. His shoulders looked very square under the coarse red flannel; but they were heaving, too.
Nan was her own mistress on the spot. “I couldn’t know,” said she. “You see, you never sent me any message — not one word.”
“I shall tell you why.”
“And then I understood you were going to the diggings.”
“So I am,” said Denis. His voice was preternaturally deep and vibrant. She looked up at him with the odd light in her eyes.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 266