Under Two Skies Read online

  “Stumpy!” he began, in a terrible voice, “you’re a little—”

  His teeth came together with a snap. Terror filled his face, for he felt as a man who has driven within an inch of a precipice, and pulled the right rein at the right second. And the words that Jim checked in his throat it would be grossly unfair to conjecture. He relieved himself by tossing Stumpy into the inner room, and banging the door.

  “Danger’s past,” he then said, smiling at the goddess aloft, with his head cocked at the rakish angle which he could not help. “You may venture on deck, miss.”

  He held up his hands to her assistance. What else could he do? But he may have done it awkwardly, for Miss Jenny stood immovable, vowing she was all right where she was. Jim thereupon threw himself with vigour into mending the fire. A modest idea occurred to him that advantage might perhaps be taken of his back being turned; and he was quite right, for there followed a flutter in the air and a light bounce on the floor; and when Jim looked round, after a decent interval, Miss Howard was standing gazing out of doors. He was glad she had not fallen and bothered him to pick her up.

  Out of doors it was raining hopelessly; nor was there any sign of the good Duncan. The heavy framework of the whim loomed dispiritingly through the rain. There was nothing to look at.

  “How do you work a whim?” all at once asked the visitor.

  “By driving a horse round and round,” Jim answered; and he came and looked out at a respectful distance from her.

  “How very lively! I should rather like to see one working.”

  “We don’t do it in wet weather; there’s plenty of water without. But if you cared to come some hot-wind day, miss, I’d show you the whole thing, and welcome.”

  There was no eagerness in his tone; the invitation was inspired by a civil instinct, nothing more; and at that moment Jim-of-the-Whim was as good a misogynist as he had ever been. But Miss Jenny was rude enough not to answer; and Jim became exasperated: and that was the beginning of it all.

  “Will you look round again to see the whim at work?” Jim asked, out of pure pique.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Make it a bargain, miss!”

  “A bargain, then. If Mr. Macdonald doesn’t come at once, I must ride back, rain or no rain.”

  Jim thought that he should not grieve if she did. “I hope you’ll do no such thing, miss,” was, however, what he said; and certainly, for a common man, he was wonderfully ready with a polite falsehood. “I’ll make you a billy of tea and a johnny-cake in true bush style, miss, if you’ll do me the honour to try ’em when made.”

  Miss Howard consented with light hauteur, and went on gazing out into the rain, wondering by what stages such a good-looking, decent-spoken man had gravitated to the bush; and whether he had ever been anything very much better than a whim-driver.

  As for Jim, he made himself very busy indeed, sitting on his heels over the fire in an attitude peculiar to back-blockers; and there was silence in the hut for several minutes. Then Miss Jenny grew tired of looking out of doors, and wandered round the room, examining the prints on the walls. Many of these she remembered in the English and Colonial illustrated papers. One from the Sketcher—one that occupied a place of honour “on the line”—she remembered particularly well; for it represented a scene from an opera of which she was passionately fond, in her passionate little way. The opera was La Traviata. In a twinkling Verdi’s airs were chasing each other in her ears. Half unconsciously she began humming the one that came first. This was the duet beginning “Parigi, o cara,” which had made a great impression on Miss Jenny once (nay, many times more than once), all because of the soulful tenor who had played Alfred. With this tenor, in fact—one Signor Roberto—Miss Howard, in common with other little sentimentalists, had fallen innocently and entirely in love during the run of Traviata at the opera-house.

  But before she had hummed the second bar of that duet, Miss Jenny turned sharply round—with animation practically suspended; for from some quarter of the hut, as if by magic, a tenor voice like unto the divine Roberto’s was boldly singing the lines that had risen faintly and formlessly to the girl’s lips—

  “Parigi, o cara, noi lasceremo.…”

  Genevieve disbelieved her ears; their evidence should have been corroborated by her eyes, but it was not. She rubbed her eyes, and fastened them upon the one possible and visible owner of a tenor voice; but the whim-driver still sat at ease upon his heels, with his face turned to the fire and his back to Miss Jenny; and, before she could make up her mind that the whim-driver and the singer were one, the voice ceased softly.

  Miss Jenny knew what ought to happen now: the soprano ought to catch up the refrain, and repeat the solo. It was only a little bit of a solo, of two dozen bars or so; then why not?

  Wild with excitement, knowing the thing by heart, she opened her lips, and out it came. It was no humming matter now; Miss Jenny was on her mettle; and if there was a slight nervous tremor in the notes, they were none the less true for that, and all the more tender.

  A moment later the pace quickened, and both voices were in the running. Then it was that Jim rose to his feet—that the singers faced one another with sparkling eyes—that the whole hut rang and trembled with enchanting sounds. After that the voices sank and slackened, and died away in a soft embrace—pianissimo. And poor little Miss Jenny knew what she had done, and was instantly stunned by the buffets of a dozen different emotions.

  “I’ve no right to know Italian; please keep it quiet, miss,” said Jim humbly, speaking first, and as though nothing much had happened, yet with a rather sad smile; “and some day I’ll—show you how the whim works.”

  For at this moment Macdonald’s buggy swept in front of the hut and pulled up.

  And Jim said that night to his mate:

  “Stumpy, you recollect what I was saying to you not so long since about wimmin? Keep clear of ’em, Stumps, my son. Never let me catch you frightening ’em no more, and getting your master mixed up in it, or I’ll chuck you down the blessed whim, little Christian though you are!”

  III.

  About this time a change came over the whim-driver at the Seven-mile. It was noticed by young Parker, who saw him frequently, and lamented by the landlord of the Governor Loftus Hotel, the nearest grog-shanty, where Jim and his cheque were now several weeks overdue. The fact was, Jim had renounced the luxury of the periodical “drunk,” and was coming out as a bush dandy. He shaved himself every morning of his life; he appeared in none but the snowiest moleskins and the pinkest and most becoming of striped cotton shirts; he even went to the extreme lunacy of shining his boots every evening before retiring to his bunk. But, what was far more remarkable, his speech was the speech of Jim-of-the-Whim no more. He dropped no aspirates, his sentences were grammatical; and without any specific deduction from his case, it may be noted as a curious fact that errors of speech may be easily acquired by any educated man who chooses to live long enough in a low grade, and takes pains to forget what culture he once possessed. He seldom swore, and when he did the short sharp pistol-crack was a mere mockery of his former bullock-driving broadside. Stumpy, could he but have spoken, would have borne valuable testimony on the latter point, since he was the party most affected (not forgetting the whim-horse, a hardened drudge) by his master’s change in this respect; and the sagacious little animal would have assured you that the endearing epithets now showered upon him were entirely inoffensive in their nature.

  It would have been taxing feline intelligence unfairly, however, to have expected the little cat to note the subtler indications of the change in Jim: the look of expectancy and hope with which he rose of mornings, the disappointment in his face at evening, the glances he would cast all day along the track towards the homestead, the frequency with which he sang, whistled, and hummed one tune. These points were too fine for the cleverest cat in the world—even Dick Whittington’s might have missed them.

  But events long looked for come in the end when l
east expected; and the coming of Jim’s goddess was a case in point.

  The whim was out of order, and Jim for once idle, waiting for the blacksmith, who had been sent out from the homestead, and gone back to his forge there with a bit of greasy paper covered with diagrams. Jim sat outside on the ground in the shade of the hut, toes up, arms folded, eyes closed. A clay pipe was between his teeth, but the ashes in the bowl were cold. Jim was asleep, and dreaming of her who was alternately minx and angel in his waking mind, but always angel in his dreams. Suddenly he awoke: and the angel sat not far from him in her saddle.

  The pipe fell from Jim’s lips as his jaw dropped. Next moment he had sprung to his feet, and a dusky colour flooded his face with one swift wave.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, snatching off his wide-awake. “I—I beg your pardon, miss.”

  Miss Jenny begged his. “I have come to be shown how a whim works,” said she.

  “Ah, I feared you had forgotten all about that!”

  “So I had,” declared Miss Jenny with unblushing readiness. “I never thought of it until, riding this way again, the whim reminded me. I am ready to be shown at once, if”—severely—“you are not too busy!”

  Jim stepped diffidently forward, gnawing at his moustache, and proffered his aid as formerly. But she cut him short.

  “No, thank you; I’m not going to get off; I can’t stay a moment longer than just to see this wonderful whim—then I’m off.”

  This was delicious. If the whim were admitted to be out of gear she would simply canter away without a thank-you; therefore Jim would admit nothing. In silence he led the way to the whim, Miss Jenny riding after him at a walk. Under the black ugly wooden framework, which was high enough for Miss Jenny to continue sitting upright in her saddle, they both stopped; and Jim began to explain.

  He began with the great wooden drum above their heads, and step by step expounded the working of the whim; but when he led the lady’s hack into such a position that Miss Jenny could see down into the shaft, he had not yet mentioned that an accident had suspended the working.

  The sides of the shafts were lined with horizontal slabs of wood; and the mischief was that one of the slabs near the top had become loose, and had at last fallen the full depth of a hundred feet, and so smashed and jammed the bucket, which was just clear of the water at the bottom, as to make it immovable. One slab having loosened itself, others were likely to do the same; the shafts were no longer secure, and the danger of descending to the injured bucket (without testing every slab on the way, as the blacksmith proposed) was great.

  There was only one shaft for Miss Jenny to look down, for the uninjured bucket hung at the mouth of the other. She did not much like looking down the smooth-sided, damp, narrow shaft; it put her in mind of the bottomless pit; yet to gaze down, down, rather fascinated her.

  “You have not yet shown me how it works,” she said presently, glancing across the raised lips of the shaft at the whim-driver, who was leaning over them and grasping the perpendicular rope a little higher than his head.

  “The whim’s not in working order.”

  As he spoke Jim watched her face, with a rather reckless light in his blue eyes, for the effect of his little sell. He expected her to ride off at once; but she did nothing of the kind. She exhibited no annoyance at all, but would know all about the jamming of the bucket at the bottom.

  “Then will some one have to go to the bottom?” she asked, shuddering—“down this endless awful rope?”

  “Some one will. There’s nothing else for it.”

  Miss Jenny’s eyes had been downcast; now she raised them swiftly. Her eyes often were downcast, and she as often raised them thus.

  “Dare you?”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  The next sound was a sharp shrill cry from Miss Jenny. The little dainty riding-whip—which she had never once dropped on all her long and lonely rides—had somehow slipped from her fingers and fallen fairly into the mouth of the shaft, and so out of sight.

  Then came a shriller, sharper cry from Miss Jenny, followed by the exclamation, “Don’t!” reiterated in great alarm.

  But it was too late: Jim was descending the single rope into the horrible pit, hand under hand. Jenny’s vision grew dim; she lost sight of him in the deeper gloom of the shaft; and as she saw him last his upturned eyes were fixed upon her with a strange, smiling, singular expression.

  Suddenly the rope, on which the girl now concentrated her trembling, anxious gaze, ceased to vibrate. He had reached the bottom, then. But why did he not shout up to her his safety? She swayed in her saddle with the suspense.

  Watching the rope with an agonised face, she hardly breathed until it began once more to vibrate; then she lowered her eyes into the impenetrable gloom; and at length a figure, spattered and stained with dirt, sweat streaming from the white forehead, and blots of blood upon the hands, with the little riding-whip between his teeth—a figure that ten minutes of strenuous effort had turned into an apparition—climbed slowly into sight, and so, hand over hand, into the open air.

  A Count de Lorge would have struck the lady with the whip; but Jim just handed it over without a word, and flung himself upon the ground. Without a word Miss Jenny received her whip; she could not speak; but she could see four deep dents in the whalebone, where Jim’s teeth had done their best to meet, in the struggle of the stifling upward climb.

  All at once a noise came from the shaft—a thumping and a bumping against its sides—growing more distant, but ending in a loud metallic crash. Jim had leapt to his feet, and was gazing down the shaft.

  “What is it?” asked Miss Jenny tremulously; her nerves were shaken.

  “Only another slab, miss. It’ll about do for the old bucket.”

  “Are the slabs so heavy?”

  “Damp, and heavy as lead.”

  “Suppose—oh, suppose you had been down below a minute longer!”

  “Why, miss, I should have been a stiff ’un!”

  There was a long pause between them. Miss Jenny broke it at last in a whisper—

  “Did you know the—the danger—before you went down?”

  The whim-driver laughed without answering; and a minute later a cloud of orange-coloured sand, far over the plain, was all that could be seen of Miss Jenny from the whim, even from the top of the framework, on which Jim had mounted.

  IV.

  The gate between the home-paddock and the horse-paddock, half a mile from the homestead: half-past nine on a hot Sunday evening in December.

  A slim figure all in white leant over the gate, and the full moon shone so brilliantly that any one within a hundred yards might have seen that it was Miss Jenny. Moreover, but for the hindering box clump on the other side of the gate, Miss Jenny might herself have seen some one hurrying across the paddock towards her, and have conquered her uneasiness; for this was Jim-of-the-Whim.

  It was their first meeting by design, but there had been accidental meetings, one, two and three, since Jim’s risky descent of the whim-shaft: at least, they appeared to be accidents—like the slipping of the whip that day from Miss Jenny’s fingers.

  All at once the night air was filled with a music that should have silenced every chirruping locust in the land—music whereat Miss Jenny sighed her deep relief and fluttered with delight.

  “La donna è mobile” sang the voice, and came nearer every second. It was Verdi at his most tuneful: in the moonlit wilderness: by the sweetest tenor out of Italy.

  Miss Jenny had heard Rigoletto with the same tenor that took more than her fancy in Traviata. For the first time—for she had only heard Jim sing once before—she compared his voice with the heavenly Roberto’s. And then and there a suspicion entered her soul that would have been torture had not the opportunity of satisfying it been immediately at hand. For the song had come to an undignified end in the full tide of the second verse,—and—and Miss Jenny was on one side of the gate and Jim on the other.

  “You were singing Rigolett
o?” said Jenny.

  “Yes; I was forced to sing something for very joy.”

  “I have heard Roberto sing that thing; and, do you know, you sing exactly like Roberto, and look like him too!”

  No answer.

  “Are you Roberto?” cried Jenny, in the greatest excitement.

  “Can it make any difference to you? Even so, should I not be miles beneath you still?”

  Miss Jenny did not answer.

  “You own that I should—and,” cried Jim, “that’s the best of it! You take me for what I am. Very well; I’ll tell you what I was—I was Roberto! Does it make any difference?”

  It did not—but it made them practically silent. The full moon sank lower, and peeped under the very broad brim of Jim’s wideawake. That was bad taste on the moon’s part.

  “You were to tell me your whole history,” Miss Jenny whispered. “Were you always on the stage?”

  “No,” said Jim. “Ten years ago I was at the ‘Varsity. You wouldn’t have thought it, would you?”

  “Oh, indeed, I—”

  “Oh no, you wouldn’t! I had forgotten it myself until—until I saw you! No, it was the common savage you liked, not the ex-gentleman; and by liking him you have saved him! My angel! My good angel! For your sake I’ll be the man I was once, so help me God!”

  The girl blushed crimson in the moonlight, and Jim liked her the better for it. The poor fellow little dreamt how much she had to blush for.

  “I’m the prodigal son of rather a well-known parent,” Jim went on. “You can see his name in any English newspaper. It is the parable all through so far, minus the happy ending. That’s what you and I are going to bring about.”

  “You mean that you are disinherited! What was it you did?”

  Inquisitiveness was innate in Miss Jenny; but at the same time, to do her justice, she was thinking of her own little dower, and of its possibilities as an aid to reconciling her future husband with his family. Yet she would have given something to know what Jim’s original crime had been.