Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  The moon became blurred and big: his sight was dimmed.

  Adeane dreaded humiliation more than most things. He fancied the proud contempt in her voice; he had already seen it in her eyes; the memory of that look would hurt him enough without a memory of words to double the pain. That look was for the lie; he had not been able to deceive the one soul that understood his soul. The lie alone would never be forgiven him; no power on earth could make Maud Cunningham see its justification; because it was a lie — and she a woman. She was a slave to unreasoning principles, like the rest of them. And she was not only a woman, but a woman who wrote; even a lie would become a venial offence in a woman’s eyes when compared with a travesty on what the woman had written. Miss Cunningham had always struck him as too sensitive about her work. Adeane felt that he could have helped her out of this weakness; she would have helped him out of worse failings.

  He was deeply distressed, and he did not stand his distress very well. The nightingales sang, and earthlier music floated through the open windows; but he heard neither. It was long before he stirred. At last he turned, and leant with his back against the stone balustrade, fixing his eyes upon the building. He did not try to fix his thoughts upon it too; but the low soft pile, with the even windows unevenly lighted, made a more distinct appeal to his aesthetic intelligence than the moonlit meadows with the woods beyond. The moon was behind him now; he realised his pleasure that it was not behind the Abbey, hardening its outlines and blackening all within them. It threw out every buttress, and let the embrasures sink inward, instead of painting parallelograms of light on a sable screen. Even in his trouble Adeane could not help appreciating the difference; and he watched the windows with a kind of personal pride in the moonshine, which so chastened and subdued the gaslit panes. But, as he watched, the sudden illumination of one window on the basement killed his artistic sense and quickened his heart. This window belonged to Maud Cunningham’s den, which she had herself graciously shown him, within an hour of his arrival.

  He found himself moving firmly towards her window without knowing in the least what he was going to do or to say. He saw the lamp on her desk; he saw her white face behind the lamp; he had the presence of mind to delight in the swift reflection that with the lamp set on this side of her she could not possibly see him. As he came nearer he saw that she was examining a heap of manuscript, turning over the leaves impatiently — merely glancing at them, nothing more. He divined at once that the manuscript was her new novel — which was not going very well. She had told him she was out of love with it; but it was himself she was out of love with now; she had flown to her poor discarded work for consolation and refuge.

  “Miss Cunningham!” cried Adeane; and the girl started up from her chair, but sat down again as he came within the outer rays of the lamp. She was extremely pale; but the look she levelled at him across her table was uncompromisingly stem.

  He stood a foot from the low sill.

  “May I speak to you now, Miss Cunningham?”

  “I would rather you chose some other time,” answered the girl coldly. “You will find the others in the billiard-room,” she added.

  “Then I cannot speak at all! I shall be gone before any of you are down to-morrow morning; I am going by the first train.”

  “Have you ordered something to take you to the station?” asked Maud Cunningham; and she was subsequently ashamed of this sarcasm.

  “I intend to walk,” returned Adeane shortly. “I told you a lie,” he added plainly, after a pause.

  She waited for more. She had lowered her eyes; she was putting her manuscript together again. Her indifference irritated Adeane.

  “I would tell it you again!” cried the young man, with sudden vigour.

  This time he had the satisfaction of diverting Miss Cunningham’s attention from her novel to himself; her indignant stare transfixed him, and her hands grasped the arms of her chair.

  “I am afraid I should do it again,” he said more quietly, though by no means tamely. “That settles it, of course. I ought to thank you for not getting up and going out of the room after that! As you are lenient enough to remain listening, you must judge between this fellow and me. I mean Willock. He is a friend of yours; I don’t want to blacken him in your eyes so as to whiten myself; but you must know that some time ago he was a friend of mine. He knew I had written that abominable thing; he was in my room the night I began it, and I remember how he laughed at me. Would you have had him make a scene before you all — as he was trying hard to do — as he would have done had I told you the truth? Wasn’t it better to lie as I did, and score off him for the moment, and explain to you afterwards? I meant to explain to you at once; but this is my first chance as well as my last. Well, I am sorrier about the whole thing than you would be likely to believe, even if I could ever tell you how sorry I am. As to the stuff I wrote — shall I tell you why Willock laughed at me the night I began it? It was because your book had made me cry when I read it, though I had read it only to make fun of it, at my editor’s orders!”

  Miss Cunningham favoured him with a markedly incredulous smile; at the same time she could not repress a slight access of colour to her cheeks.

  “You do not believe me!” he cried bitterly.

  “Do you deserve to be believed?” Maud Cunningham inquired, in a voice, however, that had certainly been more severe some minutes before.

  “Yes, in this; you can ask Willock!”

  “Thank you, I will ask him nothing,”

  “Then it is no good my telling you. At least I liked the book; only at that time — I was forced to write much that I detested,” said Adeane, with visible shame, “or I could hardly have written for the Spider “I see; for the money.”

  “For one’s bread — to be bombastic.”

  There was no need to make a point of this. Maud Cunningham was essentially sympathetic and imaginative. As she gazed at him, certainly he was standing in the moonlight not far from where she sat; but she beheld him at the same moment, and almost as plainly, ill-dressed, ill-fed, and in a garret. Her imagination overdid the garret a little, but at any rate the picture touched her. Before she could help herself she felt the sting of that travesty less, and her sympathy with Adeane greater than she had ever felt either before. She was not likely to say so, however; she wished very much that he would go; her hands went back to her manuscript.

  “Is that the novel?” Adeane felt emboldened to inquire.

  “Yes,” sighed the girl; for this novel had stuck. “You have taken it up again? I am so glad!”

  Miss Cunningham glanced at him sharply. “Why?” she asked. “Do you hope to make fun of this one too?”

  “I hope to read it some day.”

  The manuscript was put away; the desk was shut with some vehemence.

  “That you will never do; no one will; I am done with it.”

  She spoke with the bitterness of the artist who has failed so badly as to have acute conviction of the failure; and the cause of it all stood before her, for Adeane had long ago spoilt her for her work, and sown a nobler interest only to pluck it up and leave her desolate in the end. The tears were in her eyes as she rose from her chair. Adeane saw them.

  “If you were to let me see it as it is,” he said, with much diffidence, “I might convince you that it is better than you think, or I might even suggest some way of making it so. I don’t write stories; but two heads are better than one.”

  She gazed down upon him with appealing eyes. This was exactly what she had begun of late to realise. But she did not want him to point this out to her now; she wished him to leave her. And, as always, he understood her desire; but for once he could not accede to it. Though a poet, he was a man, and this was the woman he loved; and but a few minutes ago he had dreamt of losing her for ever, of facing life without her.

  “Maud, you forgive me!”

  Her eyes told him that she did; she was raising her hand to the window sash, to shut it down; but it was caught in his, with a tend
er roughness not a little refreshing in one whose softer side was so soft as Adeane’s.

  “Then if you forgive that, you can forgive this! Darling, I love you, and I want to marry you. I want to make you happy; I believe I can. I know we were made for one another!”

  “But to think you should know I wrote for the Spider!”

  Miss Cunningham was shutting down the window at last. She paused with her hands upon the sash, and looked long and keenly at her lover.

  “You are a poet,” she said slowly, “but you are all the man as well. You have told a downright lie, and told it to me, and you are not ashamed of it. You have wounded me deeply, since it turns out that it was you who wrote the cruellest thing that ever was written about me and mine; but no, you are not greatly ashamed of that either. But we have got to know that our popular poet was on the Spider in its time; and that, and that only, has stung you. You are thoroughly ashamed of that. Do you know, I begin to think you are as bad as other men, and very, very vain after all!”

  “I always was,” he answered, in quite sad and serious humility. “I am glad you have found it out, for I am afraid I always shall be.”

  “Yet you hide it very well, you know!”

  “I do know; but that’s the acute form of vanity.”

  “It’s the best form,” said Maud Cunningham, with a touch of envy in her tone. “The complaint is common in our tribe. Perhaps you are not the only one whose troubles arise from it!”

  SERGEANT SETH.

  I.

  TROOPER WHITTY was off for a holiday at last The circumstance was in itself strange enough, for Whitty had been two years in the Mounted Police without ever once seeking leave of absence until now. What, however, seemed really unique was that a man who took only one holiday in two years should be content to go and spend it in a dismal, dead-alive hamlet like Timber Town.

  “Some jokers are easily pleased, we know, and you’re one; but what can be the attraction in that dull hole, Seth?” Whitty’s sergeant asked him the night before he started. “If there is one you might have ridden over there any day these eighten months; but I never heard you had a friend there, did I?”

  “No; but then I didn’t know it myself until the other day,” said Whitty. “It was only then that I heard of an old friend of mine being there.”

  The sergeant pulled reflectively at his pipe.

  “Your friend should welcome you with open arms, Seth,” said he presently. “Your friend should leave you his money for looking him up just now, Seth. It will be the making of him, this Christmas, to be seen along with you. It would be the making of any one not a teetotaller, at any time, but Christmas for choice, to be seen along with the man that took Red Jim. I know Timber Town; I know Timber Town ways; there’ll be liquor enough going to float an Orient liner. Take my tip, Seth — keep in your depth!”

  Whitty laughed. “No fear, sergeant. You don’t know my friend. But if it’s as bad as you say, you ought to come too, and see me through, since we were both in the Red Jim go. Bad luck to Red Jim! I’m not going to Timber Town to get clapped on the back and made a fool of. I’m going to see a very old friend, sergeant — a very great friend. I’ll go in plain clothes.”

  It was Christmas Eve at the loneliest little police-barracks in those ranges. The verandah was too dark for the sergeant to see how the younger man’s face flushed, how his eyes glistened, as he spoke of his friend. Nor did the sergeant know, in the early morning following, with what high spirits his subordinate set off. Seth hummed in his bedroom, whistled in the stables, and burst into lusty song as he rode out of the yard at daybreak; and the sergeant would certainly have been interested had he been awake, for Seth was seldom so ill-advised as to try to whistle or sing, while his normal temper was sedate and self-contained to a degree unusual in young men.

  It is a matter of opinion, however, whether Seth Whitty was a young man; and if he was not, there was something highly refreshing in the middle-aged fellow’s boyish behaviour. In dry fact, Seth was just thirty; but a man, one knows, does not age only by years. Seth looked more than thirty. Often he looked nearer forty. The times when one would have stood a chance of gauging his years accurately were rare; but this morning was such a time.

  Whitty was so very happy this Christmas morning; his face showed it so very plainly, too. It was not by any means a striking face: the cheek bones were prominent, the nose aquiline and thin; but a broad high forehead and good brown eyes, and a certain regularity of features, gave him at least average good looks. Moreover, his short black beard and long black moustache, though they helped to make him look so old, became his dark style very suitably.

  The sun had made him very dark indeed; but it had not blistered him as it blisters your “new chum”; he was an Australian by birth, and he only bronzed. And this man’s eyes this morning shone with a happy, hopeful, youthful light, having good reason so to shine: for Trooper Whitty had had his chance, and seized it; Trooper Whitty had covered himself with honour and glory; the immediate promotion of Trooper Whitty was certain, and something a million times nearer to his heart than prosperity and promotion and fame Trooper Whitty was all but certain of, and intended to make dead certain of, that Christmas Day.

  No wonder he rode away singing. When the sun got up (which was not just at once) and struck fire from Seth’s spur and stirrup on the near side, he was singing still, in his own quaint fashion. Ultimately Whitty fell into a more natural mood. He grew silent and sensible. But the joyous light shone as bright as ever in his eyes; though his mind was occupied with some very ticklish questions.

  “Shall I find her the same?” This was the main question. “It’s eighteen months ago; lots of time to change. We have heard nothing of each other all the time; every facility for getting out of it. But no, no, no: she promised; I promised too, and to-day I’ll fulfil — my future being so certain now — though even if it weren’t I couldn’t help it, knowing her so near. If only she thinks as she thought then! But all life is change. Eighteen months ago! Who’d have dreamt then that Barbara Lyon would clear out of the station to work for her living? Who could fancy Barbara as school-missis? But it shall not be for long, Barbara; it shall be for a very, very little while now, my darling!”

  This, in fact, was the “very old friend” — Barbara Lyon. It is not strictly true that she was a very old friend. Whitty’s first six months in the constabulary he was quartered near Kyneton, and within pistol-shot of Barbara’s father’s boundary fence. The very old friendship was squeezed into that half-year.

  The ride to Timber Town was a long one; fifty miles. Whitty left home at four in the morning; he hoped to arrive, riding easily, not much later than noon. Rapid travelling was impossible, for the track was not only very rugged, and often steep, but it was so extremely faint, in the hard flinty places, that some vigilance was required merely to follow it. But it was wild, picturesque country, and the morning air was fresh and cool; and Whitty was not much more impatient than most men would have been in the circumstances. At nine he breakfasted at a queer little hostelry deep in a gully of gum-trees. Then came a long, slow, tiresome ascent; but Seth was on the southern edge of the ranges well before noon, winding slowly down to the thickly-timbered flats. Just below him, thin colums of smoke ascended through the tree-tops. The chimneys that the smoke came from were invisible; but deep down there, at the bottom of that leafy sea, and on the very edge of the level country, lay Timber Town; and Timber Town was just sufficiently civilised to have its State school; and the Timber Town State scholars were so inexpressibly privileged as to have Barbara Lyon for their schoolmistress — at the moment.

  Whitty’s predatory designs upon the Timber Town scholars swelled within him when his sharp eye descried the Timber Town smoke. He pressed on down the steep winding path. The trees closed over him; the track twisted, turned, but still descended; and Seth lost patience at last, and was riding recklessly, when a loud shout from the hill-side on the right startled him. He pulled up with some difficulty. Peer
ing upward through the colonnade of smooth round trunks, he saw a tent, and, what was more alarming, a human ball bounding down headlong through the trees; and in an instant an acrobatic young man — a well-built and particularly nice-looking young man, of the Saxon order — stood breathless at the horsed head.

  “Seth Whitty, as I live!” gasped the acrobat.

  “That’s my name, mate; but—”

  “Mean to say you don’t know me?”

  “I’ll be shot if I do.”

  “You don’t remember the new chum who brought a letter of introduction to your father, stayed at your farm at Whittlesea for weeks on end, shot — but you’re playing it too low down, Seth! Never pretend you don’t remember Jack Lovatt!”

  Seth jumped from his horse and wrung the young fellow’s hand.

  “How should I have remembered you? You were a boy then, without a hair on your face; now you sport a thundering great moustache—”

  “And have just shaved off a thundering great beard: made to.”

  “Then, too, you were a bit of a wild young spark; frankly, I never thought you’d do much good; I made sure you’d either be back home years before this, or at the dogs; but now—”

  “Now I’ve gone in for complete reformation: made to!”

  “Who is it that’s taken you in hand?”

  Jack Lovatt winked, but said there was time enough for that, and that he too had some questions to put. And he soon learnt how Seth’s old father had been dead and buried those two years; how the farm at Whittlesea had been sold, and at a cruel figure; and how Seth had joined the Mounted Police and been quartered six months near Kyneton and eighteen at his present station in the ranges. Lovatt said that Seth’s being in the force was no news to him — for wasn’t Trooper Whitty a public hero? A hand-shaking over the Red Jim affair naturally followed, Lovatt being bound over to hold his tongue about it in the township. Then the two men strolled down the track together, Whitty leading his horse; and it was Lovatt’s turn to give an account of himself. He had been four years and a half in the Colonies, and he proceeded to tick off the items on his fingers.