Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “And why haven’t you gone yet?”

  “I wanted to see you first.”

  “That was very kind.”

  “To tell you why I was going at all — to tell you everything, Nan, if you will let me — if you aren’t determined to misunderstand me before I open my mouth!”

  Their eyes were together now, his dark with passion, in hers a certain softening of the unlovely light that hurt him more than her tone: and her eyes were the first to fall, to wander, to espy a stump among the pines.

  “I must sit down,” she faltered. “It’s my first appearance, and I tire directly. But I’m not too tired to listen to you — I want to.”

  Yet already a change had come over her, and either she was physically weaker or else softer at heart than she had been but a minute before. At all events she took his arm to the stump, which was one of several in a little clearing lit and checkered by the slanting sun. And she sat there almost meekly in his sight, while Denis planted a foot upon one of the other stumps and said what he had to say with bare arms folded across a moleskinned knee.

  “In the first place,” he began, “I saved your life.”

  Nan’s smouldering spirit was in flames upon the word, and her face caught its fire.

  “And you remind me of it!” she cried in red scorn. “Is it the sort of thing one forgets? Is it a thing to thank you for like any common service, and are you the one to put the words in my mouth?”

  Denis did not wince.

  “I am wrong,” he said, quietly. “In the first place, I asked you to marry me; it was only in the second place, and before you had time to give me an answer, that I was so unfortunate as to save your life.”

  “Unfortunate!”

  “Most unfortunate to be the one to save you, Nan, because if it had been any one else it would have made no difference between us; as it is it makes all the difference in the world.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, trembling because she was beginning to understand so well. “I only know how brave you were — how brave!”

  And she raised her sweet face without restraint, for now she was thinking of nothing but his bravery.

  “Most men are that at a pinch,” said Denis, with a twitch of his red shirt: “but I was luckier than most. I won’t make too light of it. I can swim. But you don’t suppose I was the only strong swimmer on board. And which of the rest, I should like to know, wouldn’t have made as good use of my chance?”

  “But it wasn’t only the swimming!” the girl cried without thinking, to break off with her bent face in its besetting fever.

  “If you mean the climbing,” he continued equably, “there was still less merit in that, for it was absurdly unnecessary, as you probably know, besides which I was full of Spanish brandy at the time. Not that I’m ashamed of that,” added Denis with the absolute candour of the dales. “I believe that brandy was the saving of us both; but it was another piece of pure luck.”

  Nan said nothing for a minute. She was trying to see his hands, and he showed her with a shrug the only finger that was still in rags. His wounds had not been serious; he was scarcely walking lame; the scratches had skinned over on his face. She could look in it again, steadfastly, simply; she was even beginning to like it better between a wide-awake and an open throat than in the spruce cap and collar of the voyage. Her own scarlet she had conquered in a tithe of the time it had often taken her in secret: it was not so dreadful to be with him after all. And if he loved her nothing mattered: not even her long agony in the ti-tree thicket. Yet he had hurt her by belittling himself, and by something else of which his last words reminded Nan.

  “But you don’t look on it as luck. You aren’t a bit glad you saved my life!” And her eyes fell once more, if this time not involuntarily.

  “Glad!” he cried out. “Gladness is no word for my feeling about that — for what I feel every moment of every hour.”

  “Yet you wish it had been some one else.”

  “I don’t!”

  “But you said you did, Denis.”

  “Well, and I have felt it, too, when I couldn’t send you a single message — couldn’t make a single sign — for fear you should think — for fear you should misunderstand!”

  Nan had not raised her eyes again; his tone made it difficult now. He was leaning toward her, almost bending over her, and yet his foot clung to the pine-stump as though by conscious effort of the will, and his face was a fight between set jaw and yearning eyes. But Nan could not see his face; she could only see the sunlight and the shadows in the lavender skirts that spread about her as she sat, and a few inches of hard yellow ground beyond. She was beginning to believe in his love, to understand his position before he explained it to her, to see the end of her own doubts. His halting voice was more eloquent than many words.

  And yet for words she was constrained to probe.

  “So you determined to go up to the diggings?”

  “I did.”

  “And to leave me?”

  “Nan, I must.”

  His voice reconciled her more and more.

  “Must you, Denis?”

  “To make some money, Nan dear! And I will make it — I will — I will!”

  She felt that he would. His voice only stirred her now.

  “And then?” she asked.

  “And then,” he cried, “and then I sha’n’t mind pressing you for an answer to what I dared to ask you on the North Foreland.”

  There was a silence in the little clearing among the young pines. Only near at hand the hum of insects, and in the distance a cloud of cockatoos shrieking the sun into the sea, and the sea itself faintly booming upon the base of the sandstone cliffs. Before either spoke there was indeed one other sound, but it fell on ears doubly deaf; for Nan had flung back her dark-gold ringlets in a way of hers, and from the bold pose of her head none could have imagined the warm bloom upon her cheeks, or the tender film that dimmed the hazel eyes.

  “Suppose I prefer to give you your answer first?”

  “Nan! Nan! I would have you think it over, and over, and over again!”

  “But suppose I refused you after all?”

  “I would sooner that than be accepted in haste and — and repented of — you know!”

  It was as though he was maintaining his balance for a bet, and near the end of his endurance even so. Nan watched him with a smile touched by the last beams of the setting sun, but as she rose the red glory beat full upon her.

  “Very well!” said she. “Then if you won’t come to me for your answer, I must bring it to you.”

  Night falls like an assassin in that country, but the purple tints were only beginning when in his very ear she implored him not to leave her any more, and he held her closer, but said he must. It would not be for long. Others were growing rich in a day; he would make one more. He knew it; something told him; and again, something else told her.

  Yet she was vexed with herself for her impulsive appeal against a decision to which she had felt reconciled but the moment before; and vexed with him for scarcely listening to her appeal, unpremeditated as it was, unreasonable as it might be. He might have wavered; she would not have had him yield. His resolution was fine, heroic; she only wondered whether it was quite human, and wondering, lost the thread of his defense.

  “Think, think!” he urged. “Think what it would be for me to go home in this ship and marry you as I am, on my poor captain’s certificate and nothing else; and then, only think, if I followed in a few months with a few thousand of my own behind me! You may say I ought to have thought of this before. But I did. I told your father so a few minutes before the wreck. I wanted you to wait for me — I was selfish enough for that from the beginning!”

  The disparaging epithet pricked Nan to interrupt him and take it on herself. But Denis persisted without a smile.

  “Darling, I am selfish about it still; for if I am not worth waiting for, I am not worth having; but if you can wait only a few months — not a day more than a y
ear — I will come to you as I should come if it is to be — but come I will, rich or poor, if I am alive! Nan, darling, I have everything to gain, only these few months to lose; but I will gain all the world in them. I will, I will, I will!”

  She could not but be infected with his confidence, his enthusiasm, and his ideal. There in the dusk were the eager Irish eyes glistening and burning into hers, but there also was the strong north-country jaw set for success as the needle to the pole. And yet — and yet — she was weeping on his shoulder as the purple turned to deepest blue.

  “I could have helped you, dearest,” came her broken whispers. “But no, not here. It’s an awful country. It will break my heart to think of you in it. I thought, if you loved me ... after all we have been through ... you would never, never leave me again! But, dearest, I do believe in you, and I will wait, for you know best.”

  So after all it was a brave face, bright as her will could make it, though still wet with tears, that she held away from him, for Denis to look upon it for the first time as his own. But it was a very terrible face that hovered over the same spot but a minute later, when Ralph Devenish came crashing through the young pines to curse the very ground where they had stood, and the sea that had not swallowed one or both.

  CHAPTER VIII. COLD WATER

  The Merridews sailed for England about the middle of October. They had been less than a fortnight on dry land; and it was with a heavy and uneasy heart that Denis watched their new vessel to a speck from the highest point commanding Corio Bay.

  With all his candour, there were one or two things that he could not hide from himself, but that he had hidden from the girl to whom he was now engaged. He was a very young man. He loved adventure for its own sake, and though he had been through much, he felt to the very bone that he was only on the threshold of an exciting and successful career. There could scarcely have been a more sanguine temperament, or a character with more right to one. But the young man’s confidence in himself was neither blind nor overweening, and in his heart he was under no illusion as to his own motives. It grieved his soul to see the ship sailing away with all he loved on earth, yet he knew how bitterly he would have felt sailing in her, with never a sight of Bendigo or of Ballarat. Then he was inordinately independent. It was in the blood. He must make his own way. And here he was frank, yet not so frank as to tell his Nan that her father had definitely offered to put him in a position to make his way quietly at home; and the father was not so incontinent.

  A little incident had contributed to Denis’s depression; and he was not one to make much of little incidents. But the first person he had encountered on the Memnon, when he had gone on board to see the last of them, was another survivor of the North Foreland — a diseased being named Jewson, who had shipped in her as chief steward, only to be disrated for an incompetent sot before the voyage was a month old. The disrating had been largely due to the second officer, who did not hesitate to ask the fellow in what capacity he saw him now.

  “Captain Devenish’s servant,” was the answer, with a grin that maddened Denis, but it was the fact that rankled. He had said no more. It was too late; and the man had been saved, he deserved a fresh start; but that Devenish, of all people, should give him one, in that vessel of all vessels! It was a sign of more than Denis had time to realize until Corio Bay lay blue and bare at his feet, and the tiny sail on the horizon had vanished forever from his view.

  He sat in the sun with his face hidden in his hands. His heart had filled with prayer, his eyes with tears; he dug his knuckles into them, and missed the bloodstone signet-ring that he had worn since his father’s death. There had been no time for an engagement ring, but Nan was to wear this one until they met again. And she had given him one of hers — a ruby, a diamond, and a sapphire — that jammed in the middle of his little finger nail; but he was to wear it day and night about his neck instead, on a tiny lanyard that she had plaited for it out of her own warm hair. Denis could not trust himself to look at it yet; he could only press the ring to his heart until it hurt, as holy sinners press the scapular, but that was enough to nerve him. He could even smile as he remembered the absurd injunction which had accompanied this sweet talisman. Still smiling he looked down again through the sunshine upon the empty bay; but now the first thing Denis saw was a separate shadow on the grass.

  “Cheer up, mister! All board! It’s getting on for fifty knots to Melbourne, and the Lord knows how many bells!”

  Jimmy Doherty was standing over him, and his dark skin beamed as he rolled the nautical phrases on his tongue. Denis got up without a smile.

  “Don’t remind me of the sea, Jimmy; help me to forget about it. And as for Melbourne, we shall never see it to-night.”

  “Sha’n’t we though!”

  “What! Fifty miles between midday and midnight?”

  “It’s not so much, and I’ve got us a lift half-way.”

  “But we can’t afford that, Jimmy.”

  A shifty grin from Doherty betrayed a sort of guilty pride in his arrangements.

  “I’ve got it for love, mister, from a hawker as only wishes he was a-goin’ all the way, for the honour and glory o’ carryin’ a gent that’s done what you’ve done and got himself in all the papers.”

  Denis was divided between natural satisfaction and annoyance.

  “Very well, Jimmy, and I congratulate you; but, once and for all, never another word about that unless you’re asked! We’re mates now, remember; I might as well brag of it myself. Besides — but it’s a bargain, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Doherty said he supposed it must be; but for once his spirit was under a cloud, for he had appointed himself sole minstrel of his hero’s praises, foreseeing both honour and profit in the employment; but on reflection the embargo only made him think the more of Denis, and his first care was to whisper it in the hawker’s ear.

  The hawker was waiting with his wagon outside an inn in Moorabool Street, and Denis was relieved to find the man less palpably impressed by his exploit than Jimmy had represented him. He was a little flint of a fellow, sharp but surly, who accepted an eight-penny glass of porter with a nod and drained it without removing his eyes from the sailor’s face. But in a mile or so his tongue loosened, as the trio sat abreast under the wagon’s hood, and the scattered buildings of the budding town melted into the unbroken timber of the bush track.

  “So you’re bound for the diggings, are you?” said the hawker. “And what may you think of doing when you get there?”

  “Well,” said Denis, to enter into the man’s humour, “we did think we might dig.”

  “Oh, dig!” said the hawker, and relapsed at once into his former taciturnity.

  “What would you do, then?” inquired Denis, nudging Doherty, who, though he had plenty to say when they were alone, was a respectful listener before a third person.

  “Bake!” said the hawker, without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Bake?” echoed Denis in amused dismay.

  “It’s four-and-six the half-loaf at this moment,” said the hawker. “Same price as a quarter of sheep. On the diggings, that is. Yes, sir, I’d bake, that’s what I’d do, if I had my time over again, and capital enough to make a start.”

  “And if you hadn’t enough?”

  “If I hadn’t enough, and if they were full-handed in all the publics, and I couldn’t get a job in any o’ the stores, and the Commissioner wouldn’t give me one, and if I could borrow a license, beg some tools, and steal enough to eat, well, I might have another dig myself. But not till I’d tried everything else. You’ve heard what they got in Canadian Gully, I suppose?”

  “I have,” said Denis.

  “So had I,” said the hawker.

  “And what did you get?”

  “Not enough to eat bread on; not one in a thousand does. But you go and have your try. You may have a bit of luck in the end, and manage to bring your bones away with the flesh on ‘em, like me. That’s the most I can wish you, and it’s hoping for the best. But you take
my advice, and when the luck turns, never wait for it to turn again. You get rid of your claim for what it’ll fetch; mine fetched what you see — a hawker’s wagon, horses, and whole stock-in-trade. I just jumped in and drove away, and he jumped into my claim. And I will say I’m doing better at this game than I was at that.”

  “And how is he doing?”

  “I don’t know,” said the hawker, “and I don’t care.”

  “Prices must be good,” remarked Denis.

  “Among the middlings,” said the hawker with a sidelong glance at Doherty, who, however, was looking the other way. “I can let you have a nice pair o’ boots for a five-pound-note, and a spare shirt like what you’ve got on for thirty bob. But it’s not what it was when I came out last year. I wouldn’t come into the hawking business if I were you; you could get twenty-five bob a day as a carpenter, and three-pound-ten to four pound a week at bullock-driving. But I’d rather be a labourer on the roads, with two crown certain a day, and wood, water, and tent supplied, than peg out another claim.”

  Denis had heard enough. He was not easily discouraged, but he found it a relief to turn his attention to the scenery. They were intersecting a forest of rather stunted trees, all blown one way by the wind, which made music of a peculiar melancholy among their branches. Doherty said the trees were she-oaks, answering Denis’s question with great zeal. Similarly Denis learned the names of the various parrots that perched by the flock amid the dull green foliage, or fled from tree to tree with a whirr and a glint of every colour in the rainbow. Then a pond must be called a water-hole, it seemed — a beck a creek, and the curly-bearded aboriginals blacks or blackfellows — but not niggers. It was the earliest and most elementary stage of Denis’s colonial training, and he would have relished it if only for his mentor’s intense satisfaction in his task, to say nothing of a capacity to teach not inferior to the will. But the hawker had a last word left, which he kept, as though by demoniac design, for one of their glimpses, depressing enough to Denis as it was, of the sparkling sea never many miles distant on their right.