Under Two Skies (23 page)

Next morning he looked a wreck, but in Laura's face there was calm determination. Hers was a pale, pretty, delicate face; but there was plenty of character in it. The eyes were dark and frank, the hair black and swept up clear of the forehead, the head most shapely, fitly crowning a slim, firm, graceful figure. And all that day Laura was even more erect than usual, and her head was held higher, and the glance of her eyes was braver and bolder than ever. But in the evening she took her banjo out into the night as before.

It was a warm night for October in Scotland, and there was a luminous moon. Laura wrapped a knitted nothing over her little head and around her shoulders, and felt perfectly prudent. She stole once more to the billiard-room window. The men were behaving themselves
better to-night; more had gone to the drawing-room; there was no pool. Only two men were playing a common hundred, and Jack was sitting in an opposite corner by another window, looking gloomily on.

Laura tripped round to that window, and struck up a nigger melody—the silliest, prettiest little thing in the world. Jack, taken by surprise, looked out.

“It's a heavenly night,” Laura whispered. “Come out quickly, you queer, melancholy Jack!”

He hesitated a moment, and then did go out—by the window.

“Play me something,” he said, and stuck his hands deep into his trousers pockets. She complied sweetly.

The moon shone, the banjo tinkled, the soft wind sighed through the firs. The pair strolled slowly side by side, Laura playing softly. Suddenly and unexpectedly, when they were far down the drive, she whipped the banjo under her arm, half turned, and stood still.

“Jack!”

“Well?”

“Tell me what it is.”

“What what is?”

“Oh, you must know! Your trouble, your wretched looks, your silence—the way you have avoided me these two days. Jack, darling, tell me what it is: tell me what it all means!”

She pressed forward and clung to his arm. His face was raised to the moon, the curly hair thrown back from the forehead; face and forehead were wrung and wrinkled with pain.

“I cannot!” he groaned—“I cannot!”

She drew back. “Jack, if it has to do with me — with your love for me—”

“It has not! No—do not touch me again. I am not fit for you to touch. Oh, Laura! I am a liar and a villain!”

“I shall never, never believe it!”

“Then I must tell you everything. Can you bear it?”

“I can bear anything but your silence, Jack.”

They walked side by side in the moonlight, very, very slowly; but their shadows on the shingly drive went wider and wider apart. Often he paused; but she put in no word, no syllable, until the whole shameful tale was told.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“You have kept back nothing?”

“I swear I have told you the worst.”

“Ah!”— a deep sad sigh—“well, I was hasty to say I never could believe you a coward or a villain; for I am afraid you have been both.”

Her voice was very sad, but equally firm.

“I know it! I own it!” said Lovatt in a low, husky tone. “No one knows except myself the mean despicable cur I have been. Yet it seems hard to hear it from your lips—you that have bewitched me so! I swear, until two nights ago, I was bewitched! I seemed to have forgotten her, and my life out there, completely, utterly. But then I dreamt of her—dreamt I saw her dead! And now she haunts me, now that it is too late. For what can one do after so long?”

“Leave me a little; then I will try to tell you. I cannot think—in your presence.”

He moved on, bowed and broken, and leaned over the plain wooden gate at the entrance to the drive. It might have been a moment later or an hour—he never knew—when she touched him on the shoulder.

“Will you do what I tell you?”

He bowed submissively. It touched her to see him so sadly humbled, and all at once, before her stronger will. Her own power rose up before her, and frightened her. With a calm, strong, spiritual effort she nerved herself to use this will of hers for once as her conscience ordered and her heart forbade.

“
Will you go back to her
?” The words came in a tremulous whisper; but the tremor was only the vibration of taut, resolute nerves.

When he had bowed his promise (for though his lips moved, no words left them), and when thus it was all over, a greater calmness, and with it a chill dread feeling, came over this strong-minded girl.

“I tell you to go back to her,” she said, speaking quite steadily now. “Go back to her at once. Leave England within a fortnight, at latest, from now. This will be easy; we are all in our last week here; and you and I must act a part until my father telegraphs for me, which must be to-morrow. Then you go back to her, and all is over for ever between you and me. You may find her dead; but between us two all, all is over. All is over!”

Her dress whispered as she turned and went. The tall trees on either side the drive whispered too; and their dewy leaves, quivering in the moonlight, shimmered like phosphorus on a dark and tranquil sea. Over the gate the black hills cut into the moonlit sky as though heaven and hell touched one another; above, the stars were shining like the eyes of angels; below, the fir-trees sighed and sobbed like the spirits of the lost.

VIII.

One night some two months later, a night of intense darkness and of intolerable heat, a young man tramped into Timber Town from the south. He did not carry the “swag” of the common traveller, nor were his clothes bushman's clothes. He wore a suit of some thin light material, and a pith helmet; yet, for all this, he seemed to know every inch of the way.

His tactics indicated a desire to glide swiftly through the township without either stopping or being stopped, if possible without being seen. He took the very centre of the broad straggling street, and showed in this a nice judgment, for the night was so thick that from neither side of the street could one see half-way across it. But the flaring hotel verandahs on either side were plain enough from the middle of the road, and not only could the traveller hear the sounds of revelry issuing from them—for these had been audible for the last half-mile—but he distinguished some of the voices, and caught scraps of the high-toned conversations. In what was generally known (though not from its sign-board) as the “opposition shanty,” they were talking politics—Colonial politics, and in that instance tipsy ones. In the verandah of the Royal, however, a more practical
discussion was on foot—on the ringing of the Timber Town church-bells. One roysterer wanted to ring them at twelve o'clock—it was then 11.40—while another objected on traditional grounds. The latter said the good old English custom was to ring in the New Year, but not Christmas; the former ridiculed the notion that old English customs should obtain, unchallenged, in the bush; and this one, who was the more fluent swearer of the two, and had all the popular arguments on his side, seemed to have a majority of roysterers with him.

“The ringers win—it's odds on them,” said the new arrival; and he hurried noiselessly on.

He was soon in the region of the little iron church for whose bell-ropes those roysterers' fingers were itching. The church was invisible in the opaque darkness; but the traveller knew well enough where it was. The State school and the police barracks, on the other side of the road, were also invisible, at least their outlines were; but faint lights revealed their whereabouts.

The mysterious visitor now left the middle of the road, skirted the police-barrack fence, and came—with steps that all at once became halting and unsteady—to the school gate; and there he paused, and started back-ward with his hand upon the latch.

Barbara was seated in the verandah, leaning forward,
her head bowed and her hands clasped. Seth Whitty bent over her.

“You know how I have waited,” he was pleading—and dignity and humility jostled each other in his deep manly tones; “how long I have loved you, how hopelessly once, how deeply all through. You must know that what I profess is at least true.”

“I know that. Oh, I know that so well!”

“Yet you still refuse me.”

“No, no. I say, give me time. Do not count upon me; never again count upon a woman.”

“And I have said I will give you until we both are gray!”

“It shall not be so long as that, if it is to be at all,” said Barbara gently; “only do not count.”

They were both silent. Seth disturbed the eloquent silence most rudely by flying incontinently to the gate, where he stood motionless in a listening attitude.

“What was it?” Barbara called to him.

“I heard something.”

“Can you see anything?”

“Nothing. The night is like pitch. But I feel certain—”

At that moment the bells rang forth, and unholy shouts came with the clangour from the iron church over the way. Seth came back to the verandah.

“It was those men that you heard,” said Barbara.

“I don't think it was; it seemed, like footsteps quite near, and I thought some one touched the latch. But it doesn't matter now; for it's Christmas morning—: Christmas again, Barbara! And I wish you a very happy Christmas, and—and I will wait as long as you like!”

He pressed her hand and dropped it: he took her hand again, and raised it reverently to his lips.

Those merry souls tugged at the bell-ropes until they were tired, and that was not immediately. But before the wild ringing ceased the solitary mysterious pedestrian had retraced his steps rather better than a mile. None knew his coming nor his going; and the single street of Timber Town never saw him more.

THE END.

Ernest William Hornung
(1866 – 1921) was a prolific English poet and novelist, famed for his A. J. Raffles series of novels about a gentleman thief in late 19th century London.

Hornung spent most of his life in England and France, but in 1883 he traveled to Australia where he lived for three years, his experiences there shaping many of his novels and short stories.

On returning to England he worked as a journalist, and also published many of his poems and short stories in newspapers and magazines. A few years after his return, he married Constance Aimée Doyle, sister of his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he had a son.

During WWI he followed the troops in French trenches and later gave a detailed account of his encounters in
Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front
.

Ernest Hornung died in 1921.

Discover books by E.W. Hornung published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/EWHornung

A Bride from the Bush
Under Two Skies

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © 1892 Ernest William Hornung

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eISBN: 9781448213351

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