Under Two Skies Page 16

  “There’s no need to say anything,” said Whitty awkwardly. “There was no danger.”

  Barbara took him up sharply.

  “You know that there was. You know as well as I do those brown snakes are deadly. I do detest humbug! Yet—I must thank you.”

  Her tone turned to honey. She held out her hand to him; he gave her his; she turned, and drew it through the window to the light, and critically examined it, her little head on one side. No, there was no bite there.

  “If you had been bitten,” said Barbara, dropping his hand, “do you know that it would have made me the most miserable woman in the Colony?”

  Seth was staggered.

  “Because, you see, I should have felt I had killed you! Imagine it. Who could have been happy after that? But, do you know,”—here the coquetry in her voice became sad to hear,—“I rather wish it had been not quite a deadly snake, and that it had bitten you, not quite mortally. Can you guess why?”

  Seth hung his head.

  “You might have been less rude, and less cruel, the last time we talked together, Sergeant Seth!”

  He could contain himself no longer.

  “Oh, Barbara,” he cried, with an effort, raising his face to her, “please, please, forgive me! Let us be friends. You don’t know how I have hated myself ever since for that evening’s words. I was beside myself that night. If you will only forgive me—if you will only make friends—”

  Barbara raised her hands to the sash.

  “Of course I forgive you. There, it is all forgotten!”

  She shut down the window. A minute later all was in darkness, and Seth went back to the barracks in a tumult of honest emotions—not suspecting for a moment that he had stultified himself and utterly undone the wholesome effect of his admirable attitude on Christmas Day.

  As for Barbara, her vanity had been liberally gratified. Moreover, a sore point, dating from Christmas, was now healed. And lastly, she had played the rôle she revelled in—the rôle that was out of the question with the man she really loved. So altogether she may have gone to bed an extremely happy woman. But I try to think that she came to feel slightly ashamed of herself before falling asleep.

  IV.

  Sergeant Seth and the schoolmistress were now good neighbours; and as she did not again treat him so reprehensibly as at their reconciliation (which makes one really think she was ashamed of herself, that time), the sergeant had at least a less bad time than before. Indeed, a nice little larceny in the township, and a pretty case of horse-stealing on a neighbouring run, made it, in part, quite a good time. So some weeks passed. Then fell a thunderbolt.

  Lovatt came to the barracks one morning in a state of mild excitement, and got up in his best available clothes. His fingers fidgeted with a letter.

  “A solicitor fellow has smelt me out, Heaven knows how,” he said. “He is in possession of important documents from home, so he says, and he will only deliver them personally into my hands. So I am off to Melbourne by the coach, to see what they are; it’s just as well, you know; and Barbara advises it. I’ve just said good-bye to her, and she’s gone into school. You see, Seth, it may mean money—and money, I suppose,” Lovatt added, after a moment’s pause, “means marriage.”

  He said this thoughtfully, and his manner, at the moment, was not sprightly. It was his manner, in fact, that made Whitty look up quickly and scrutinise the young fellow’s face. Jack Lovatt was soothing his moustache. Whitty might have remembered that the one defect in Jack Lovatt’s good looks, before his moustache grew, was his weak, irresolute mouth.

  Whitty went down to the Royal and saw the coach start with Jack Lovatt in the best place (trust him for that) by the driver; and he did not think very much more about Jack Lovatt until three days later; and then, in the evening, the sergeant received a letter which fairly electrified him.

  The letter was from Jack Lovatt in Melbourne, and it read thus;

  “Scott’s Hotel, Collins Street, W.

  “7th March,

  “Dear Seth—I want you to give the enclosed to Barbara, but first to break to her some news which will, I fear, just at first, distress her greatly. Before this reaches you I shall have sailed for London! Think what you will of me; but do take the trouble to read the circumstances first.

  “You are already aware that I have not been in communication with my people for nearly five years—never, in fact, since I left home. I learnt last night that my brother—I had only one—who was heir to everything, has been dead these two years, and that my father was at death’s door two months ago. I cabled at once to learn his condition. The reply is just to hand. He is still lingering on; he desires to see me. What can I do but sail at once? The steamer leaves to-morrow; there is no time to go back to Timber Town and bid Barbara good-bye, and I dare not put off starting for a week. As it is, I do not expect to find my poor father alive; and in that case I should return at once—well, long before the end of the year—to marry Barbara. I have a mother and a sister, you know: there will be matters to arrange for them; but they shall not keep me from Barbara one day longer than I can help. My first thought shall be of her. My first thought now is of her; and I am downright cut up on her account. She will feel it sorely; but the letter I enclose is far more explicit than this one; and she is so sensible, she will understand. And she will trust me, and wait patiently, and confidently, till I come back and carry her off. And then, instead of going to two hundred acres and a hut, she will go one day to an estate in Norfolk and another in Scotland! I don’t say I relish the idea of all this; I have got so used to the bush, and so content with it; but, as we should have been happy with less than our needs, so we ought to be happy with more than our wishes. At present, however, I can’t realise it at all; I only realise that I sail to-morrow in the Orient liner.

  “Only one word more. Seth, I know something of your old relations with Barbara. She told me. She was terribly at fault, and she knows it. But you will forget all about this now, won’t you? No, I believe you have forgotten about it. Fellows always do get over these things: you know I did. But even if you hadn’t got over it, I believe you would do what I’m now going to ask of you without my ever asking at all. Yet I do ask—I implore it. I implore you, Seth, to look after her, to watch over her, to be good to her. She is sensible; she will listen to reason. So yours will only be a difficult task in the beginning. The breaking of the news will of course be worse than difficult. But you will do it as nicely as anybody could; and so we two shall be grateful to you for the term of our natural lives; and one day the three of us (I hope) will smile over the memory of this rather ugly dawn of more booming days than ever we dreamt of. Good-bye. To you I commend her.—Yours ever,

  “J. A. Lovatt.”

  Now there was not a little sincerity in this letter, in spite of its conspicuous egotism and its frequent jauntiness of expression. Moreover, there was a touch or two of genuine feeling, and one questions whether Lovatt wrote the whole letter with dry eyes. Yet, when the letter was written, and the emotion of the moment over, it is very possible that his confidence in himself was as shaky as his confidence in Barbara was profound. He may have trusted to Barbara’s great love, and hoped for the best with regard to himself. But the chances are that he had not the pluck conscientiously to investigate his own feelings.

  When Sergeant Whitty had read to the end of the letter, he delivered himself first of a round oath, and then of the following peculiar sentiment:

  “If my father had turned me adrift as his turned him—well, I’d have let him die first before I’d have left my girl without saying good-bye! No, by Heaven! before I’d have gone at all—without her!”

  He looked at the letter again.

  “Curse his good spirits!” he cried, and tore it to pieces. Then he fumed up and down the room until his eye fell upon the enclosure, a swollen envelope; and at that he ran his hands through his hair and ground his teeth.

  Barbara was seated sewing, alone, and in the same little room where the
snake had frozen her blood. She was making—is it difficult to guess?—something or other for her house. But she was not in her usual spirits: Jack was away in Melbourne.

  There came an unexpected knock at the outer door. Barbara dropped her work, jumped up, and stood for a moment in alarmed surmise. Then a great thought struck her; it was Jack!

  She flew down the passage; it was not Jack; of all people, it was the sergeant.

  “Barbara, I want a word with you.”

  His tone was as extraordinary as the words. She drew back coldly.

  “It is a queer time to choose, Sergeant Whitty. Say your word by all means, however.” Her attitude plainly added, “Say it here.”

  The perspiration broke out over the sergeant’s face.

  “It’s news!” he gasped desperately.

  “News?”

  “Yes, news.”

  She stood one instant, straining her eyes at him through the dark, then seized his arm, dragged him to the sitting-room, caught up the lamp, and held it to his face.

  “It is bad news!” she cried in a hard, hollow tone. “He is dead! Oh, is he dead?”

  “God forbid!” said Whitty loudly.

  “Then ill?”

  “He is not ill.”

  There flashed across the woman a worse alternative still.

  “Then he has—”

  She could not get it out. She seemed about to drop the lamp. Seth took it hastily from her, and led her to a chair. She sank down, trembling violently. He dropped on one knee before her.

  “Barbara,” he said very gently, “he is neither dead, nor ill, nor untrue to you. But you must prepare for a terrible surprise, a terrible shock.”

  “Do not keep me in suspense!” she murmured piteously.

  “Then here is a letter that he has sent me to hand to you. It will explain all.”

  He took the envelope from his pocket. She snatched it from him, and was tearing it open; all at once her fingers closed upon it, and were still.

  “I will read it alone,” There was new strength in her tones. “Leave me now, please. And thank you, Seth, from my breaking heart!”

  Seth went back to the barracks, and strode up and down his verandah. The moon rose, and poured into the verandah in a gleaming flood. Seth marched to and fro, a black sentinel in the pale pure light. For hours the tread of his feet and the jingle of his spurs upon the boards were the only sounds in the sleeping township. Then there came another sound—the click of a latch. Seth heard it, stopped, and turned; and Barbara was coming up the path towards him, her white frock shining mystically in the moonlight. She paused some paces from the verandah, and her face was as ghostly as her dress, and stained with tears.

  “He has done right,” she said in a low clear voice. “He has done his duty. I say so. Oh, tell me, Seth, that you think so too?”

  There was the slightest pause; then, with extreme emphasis, Seth said after her:

  “I think so too.”

  “Thank you, Seth. More than for everything else, thank you for this!” She turned wearily away, and then sobs shook her frame. Seth followed her hastily, took her hand in his, placed it within his arm, and led her to her own door.

  He came back and slammed the police-barrack gate, midnight though it was.

  “She has begun by making me a liar,” he swore savagely, “a mean, miserable, cowardly liar, if there is one in the Colony!”

  V.

  To follow Jack Lovatt to England.

  The first week of the voyage he was wretched. Doubts grew upon him as to whether he had done the right thing after all. He became haunted by the thought that he had treated Barbara inexcusably, and that she was breaking her heart for him across the sea in lonely little Timber Town.

  When there was more sea between them, Timber Town seemed still farther away. It seemed to exist in his brain only.

  To cheer himself up he made friends with other passengers. He found one who knew his people at home—in fact, a neighbouring Norfolk squire out globetrotting. These two talked of the old country all day long: of London, of Oxford, of Norfolk, Scotland, and the shooting. Cold fires were rekindled in the young man. Of “pleasures and palaces” he had not seen much, or at all events the pleasures were belittled in looking back on them from the steamer, and home, in anticipation, was all the sweeter,

  Not only in point of distance did England come nearer and nearer every day, and Australia sink back, and back, and back. This went on in Jack Lovatt’s heart as well.

  The five years out there compressed themselves into about as many months. The most recent events of those five years seemed to have happened five years ago. The brain-picture of the little township assumed more and more portable dimensions, and it was more often veiled than not. Barbara haunted him still, but less obtrusively.

  Leaning over the rail at night and watching the wake reel out like a great, endless, creamy ribbon, the thoughts with which he had last beheld this sight came back to him, and with them the same faces, the same voices, the same regrets that had haunted him then. It was intoxicating to awake from these reveries and to realise that he was not fleeing from those faces now, but hastening towards them. There were, of course, sad circumstances in his return, and there had been cruel circumstances in his going away, which his return revived; but the sense of home-coming was overpowering; it out-balanced everything else.

  In due course they steamed up Channel. By that time the five years in Australia were little better than a dream. And what Barbara was, Heaven knows.

  Lovatt’s sister met him at the docks, with a male cousin. They were both in mourning. The news was broken almost without a word, and it made the meeting, at any rate, silent. But afterwards, in the train, they talked of other things. The sister, Ethel, had been in short frocks when Jack went out; she was now a handsome girl of twenty, and he was enchanted with her. She told him other news besides the family trouble and its phases before they got down to Norfolk—news of an entirely different order, à propos of which Jack was able to ask quite naturally:

  “What of Laura Eliot—I mean Laura Brown, or Jones, or whatever it is?”

  Ethel leant across the compartment. “Did you never hear of that?” she whispered.

  “Of what?” Jack turned white. Was Laura dead too?

  “Her engagement was broken off. Oh, it must have been directly after you sailed. They were never meant for each other, you know. No one could understand the engagement; and now I don’t think Laura will ever marry at all.”

  For a minute Jack’s face was transfigured. It shone with a light that did not seem human, though it cannot have been divine. During that minute Australia was wiped clean from his mind. And it was a disastrous minute for poor Barbara over the seas in Timber Town.

  VI.

  The antipodean winter of that year is still remembered for its excessive rainfall, and for the floods that resulted in certain districts. In Victoria the damage was widespread, but, mercifully, for the most part it was also “spread out thin”; and among scores of Victorian townships, which, without attracting popular sympathy by becoming the scene of any tragical disaster, still suffered sufficiently in an undistinguished way. Timber Town was one; its single street was for many days a running river, and for several weeks a festering bog. Business (what there was of it in Timber Town) was at a standstill, except at the bars. That sort of business received an impetus, until the casks ran dry; and then, the state of the roads entirely preventing the approach of wheels, the excellent township endured a short, bitter period of enforced sobriety. As a local wag put it (in chalk, on the verandah of the Royal Hotel), there was

  “Water, Water Everywhere, But Not A Drop Of Drink!”

  The feminine disadvantages were almost as serious. The women saw nothing of one another, save at a distance; and gossip, if shouted across gulfs of rushing water, quite ceases to be gossip. They tried it, and found this out, and waited patiently for the flood to dry up, themselves setting the example. Meanwhile, indeed, the fairest game
for gossip was invisible. This was the schoolmistress, who was engaged to that young Lovatt, who had gone away on the coach one day in the autumn, and had never to Timber Town knowledge been heard of since. She was a complete prisoner in the schoolhouse, and very nearly a solitary prisoner. A few parents, however, did from time to time land their offspring on the schoolhouse verandah either from rafts or from the paternal shoulders. These children reported the teacher as being cross and irritable and feebly indulgent by turns; but, on being closely questioned, they also compared her wrists to pipe-stems and her face to a sheet.

  Their mothers’ curiosity mounted to fever-heat The moment the mud would bear them they called in person upon Barbara. Idle, gossiping women are not necessarily unfeeling; what they found made some of them shed tears on the walk home.

  Barbara was the shadow of her former self—herself of a few weeks ago. Thin and pale and bright-eyed, irascible, listless, limp, she was indeed a proper object for compassion; and compassion was the last thing Barbara could stand. Yet, though the callers were sent away with their sympathy still on their hands, they did not toss it to the winds for that reason. It was impossible to resent the schoolmistress’s incivility while the schoolmistress looked so. One or two of them felt for her all the more, and sent the children to school with little presents of butter and eggs and apples. These offerings Barbara accepted ungraciously enough from the inoffensive bearers, but afterwards grew ashamed, and sent those children home with courteous, grateful little letters. All such presents, however, were invariably the servant’s perquisites.

  Barbara’s servant—a mere girl herself, no older than her mistress—had come with her from Kyneton. She knew very well that her mistress was eating her heart out, and she knew why, though not from Barbara, who, as we have seen, was by no means free from pride. The whole township was more or less in possession of this fact and its obvious reason. But Annie, the maid, knew one little circumstance which no one else guessed; this she longed to disclose to some sympathetic ear, and at last she did disclose it to the motherly soul that kept house for Sergeant Whitty.