is true that I have known for some weeks who and what this man is. I
found him out at Graysbrooke, and got rid of him for you within a few
hours. I was at fault not to give him in charge. You have good cause to
blame me--and I sha'n't want for blame by and by!--but if you will
listen to me, I will tell you all--yes, all; for I have protected a
worse scoundrel than I thought: I owe him not another moment's silence."
"Come in here, then," said Colonel Bristo, sternly; "for I confess that
I cannot understand you."
* * * * *
Up hill and down dale was the walk to Melmerbridge; but the ascents
really were a shade longer and steeper than the descents, and did not
only seem so to the ladies. For when at last they reached the long grey
stone wall at the edge of the moor, and passed through the gate into the
midst of brown heather, dotted with heads of gay green bracken, they
were greeted by a breeze--gentle and even fitful, but inexpressibly
refreshing. Now below, in the deep lanes between the hedge-rows, there
had been no breeze at all--for the morning was developing into hazy,
sleepy, stifling heat, and the sun was dim--and the flies had been most
pestilent. Accordingly they all drew breath on the moor. Mr. Miles
uncovered his head, and let the feeble breeze make mild sport with his
light brown locks. Then he lit a cigarette. As for the ladies, they sat
down for a moment's rest; and, considering that one of them was well on
in years, and the other combating with a sickness that was gradually
tightening its hold upon her, they were walking uncommonly well. But
conversation had flagged from the start, nor did the magic air of the
moorland quicken it.
When they had threaded the soft, rutted track that girdled the heather
with a reddish-brown belt, when they had climbed the very last knoll,
they found themselves on the extreme edge of that range of hills. Far
below them, to the right, stretched mile upon mile of table-land,
studded with villages and woods, divided by the hedges into countless
squares. No two neighbours, among these squares, were filled in with the
same colour; some were brown, some yellow, and the rest all shades of
green. Far ahead, where the squares were all lost and their colours
merged in one dirty neutral tint--far ahead--at the horizon, in
fact--hung a low, perpetual cloud, like a sombre pall of death. And
death indeed lay under it: death to green fields, sweet flowers, and
honest blue skies.
They viewed all this from a spot where the road had been carved round
the rough brow of a russet cliff. This spot was the loftiest as well as
the ruggedest of the whole walk. On the left the road was flanked by the
ragged wall of the cliff; on the right it was provided with a low
parapet, over which one might gaze forth upon the wide table-land, or
drop stones upon the tops of the tallest fir-trees in the wood at the
cliff's base.
Old Mrs. Parish pointed to the long black cloud on the horizon, and
explained that it was formed almost entirely of the smoke of
blast-furnaces, and was the constant canopy of a great town that they
could not see, because the town was hidden in perennial smoke. More than
this she might have said--about the mighty metals that were disgorged
from under their very feet--about the rich men of yonder town (old
Oliver, for one), not forgetting the poor men, beggar-men, and
thieves--had the old lady not perceived that Miles was gazing furtively
at Alice, and Alice gazing thoughtfully into space, and neither of them
listening to a word.
They walked on, and the descending road became smoother, but tortuous;
and trees arched over it, and the view was hidden until they stood at
the top of straight, steep Melmerbridge Bank, and the good-sized
prosperous village lay stretched at their feet.
One long row of houses and shops on the left; a long straight silvery
stream for the right-hand side of the village street; a bridge across
this stream, leading to a church and a public-house that stood side by
side, on apparently the best of terms, and without another near
neighbour on that side of the beck--such was Melmerbridge from its
bank-top.
As they crossed a white wooden bridge at the foot of the bank (for the
beck curved and twisted, like other becks, except where it did its duty
by that straight village street), a simple, modest Sabbath peal rang out
upon the sultry air.
The old church was roomy, twilit, and consequently cool. Strong light
never found its way inside those old stone walls, for the narrow windows
were pictorial, one and all. Dusk lingered in these aisles throughout
the longest days; upon them day broke last of all; they met nightfall
half-way.
After a long, hot, tiring walk there could have been no more grateful
retreat than this church of All Saints at Melmerbridge. The senses were
lulled in the very porch, nor were they rudely aroused when the quiet
peal had ended and the quiet service began. Everything was subdued and
inoffensive, even to the sermon: a vigorous discourse from the dark oak
pulpit would have grated on the spirit, like loud voices in a
death-chamber.
As for Mrs. Parish, she was soon sleeping as soundly and reverently as
the oldest parishioner. Alice, on the other hand, gave her whole mind to
the service, and her mind filled with peace. Her sweet clear voice
chimed in with every response (at which the parish clerk, with the fine
old crusted dialect, who enjoyed a monopoly in the responses, snorted
angrily and raised his tones), while in the first hymn it rose so high
and clear that the young curate peered over his book through the dusk,
and afterwards lost his place in the Litany through peering again.
Miles, for his part, looked about him with a pardonable curiosity. He
thought that he might have been christened in some church as an infant;
he had certainly been married in one as a comparatively respectable
blackleg--but that was not a pleasant thing to recall to-day. He had
since been once in a little iron Bush chapel, on a professional visit
with his merry men, the object of which visit was attained with such
complete success that all Australia thrilled with indignation. In
London, the Bristos had insisted on taking him to St. Paul's and the
Abbey. This was the full extent of his previous church-going. He was
interested for a little while in looking about him. His interest might
have lasted to the Benediction had there been less subjective food for
thought, or, perhaps, if he had been sitting there alone.
In the hush and the dusk of this strange place, and the monotonous
declamation of phrases that conveyed no meaning to him, Miles set
himself deliberately to think. Wild and precarious as his whole life had
been, he felt its crisis to be within arm's length of him now at
last--he joined hands with it here in this peaceful Yorkshire church.
Even the past few years of infamy and hourly risk contained no situation
so pregnant with fate as the present. He ran over in his mind the chain
of circumstances that had led up to this crisis.
The train of thought took him back to Queensland, where, with Nemesis
holding him by the throat at last, he had wrenched himself from her
tightening grip, and escaped. He had tumbled upon English soil with a
fair sum of money, a past dead and buried, a future of some sort before
him; by chance he had tumbled upon his feet. Chance, and that genius in
the water that had crowned his escape by drowning him in the eyes of the
world, had combined at once, and helped him to save an unknown
gentleman's life. Mother-wit and the laws of gratitude enabled him to
dupe the man he had rescued, become his close friend, live upon him,
draw upon him, extract with subtle cunning the last farthing of salvage,
and all the while he guessed--pretty correctly--that his pursuers were
arriving to learn his death and take ship back to Australia.
Thus far everything had worked out so prettily that it seemed worth
while turning thoroughly honest and beginning this second life on
entirely different lines from the old one. Then he fell in love and
believed that his love was returned, a belief that was not fostered by
his own fancy unaided; now more than ever he desired to improve on the
past, and to forget all ties and obligations belonging to the past.
Edward Ryan was dead; then Edward Ryan's wife was a widow; Miles the
Australian was a new unit in humanity; then why should not Miles the
Australian marry?
Up to this point he could look back on every step with intense
satisfaction; but here his reflections took a bitter turn. To go on
calmly recoiling step after step, beginning with the month of July, was
impossible: he tried it; but to remember that night in the park--to
remember subsequent weeks spent in scheming and plotting, in rejecting
plot after plot and scheme after scheme, in slowly eating his heart out
in the solitude of a London lodging, in gradually losing all taste for
fresh enterprise and all nerve for carrying it out--to remember all this
was to pour vitriol on the spirit. He would remember no more; he would
shut the gate on memory; he would annihilate thought; he would make his
mind a blank. Yet he was powerless to do any of these things.
In his helplessness he looked down on the white figure at his side. The
second hymn was being sung. He had stood, and sat, and knelt or leant
forward with the rest, by mere mechanical impulse. He was even holding
the book which she held without knowing it. When he realised this, his
hand shook so much that the hymn-book was almost jerked from his
fingers. At this she looked up, and caught his eyes bent down upon her.
Now Miles was at the end of the pew, next the wall, and in shadow. Alice
noticed nothing in his expression, and went on singing without pause or
break. But either her face, as she raised it, came in direct line with
the skirt of some saint, in the window above Miles, and the sun, or else
the sun chose that moment for a farewell gleam; in any case, the girl's
pale face was instantly flooded with a rich, warm, crimson glow. Miles
looked down, and this warm glow caught in his heart like a tongue of
live flame.
The hymn was over; they sank down side by side: she to listen to the
sermon, no matter its calibre--he to his thoughts, no matter their
madness.
What were his thoughts? Not reflections now. Not hesitancy, his new
unaccountable failing; not nervous doubt, his new humiliating enemy. No,
his thoughts were of the old kind, but worse. He was contemplating a
crime. He was contemplating the worst crime of his whole career. The
plain English of his thoughts was this:
"I believe that she likes me. I see that she is, in the catch phrase,
'pining.' I am told that it is for me. Very good. If that is the case
she will believe what I tell her, and do what I ask her. I have some
power of persuasion. I am not without invention. I shall represent to
her all kinds of reasons for precipitancy and secrecy--temporary
secrecy. In a word, she shall fly with me! Well, that is bad enough; but
there my badness ends. I will live without crime for her sake; I will
retrieve what I can of the past. Henceforth my life is of her, with
her--above all, it is for her. She need never know how I have wronged
her, therefore she will not be wronged."
He looked at the face beside him; it was white as alabaster. Alice was
straining her eyes towards some object that filled them with sadness and
sympathy. He followed the direction of her gaze; and he saw an old, old
man--a man who would soon come to church for the last time, and remain
outside the walls, under the grass--who was gazing with pathetic
wistfulness at the preacher, and, with wrinkled hand raised to the ear,
making the most and the best of every well-worn epithet and perfunctory
stock phrase. That was all. Miles brought back his glance to the white
profile at his side, and found it changed in this instant of time: the
long eyelashes were studded with crystal tears!
How sad she looked--how thin and ill! Would she look like this
afterwards? Would tears often fill her eyes in the time to come?
Miles shut his eyes, and again exerted might and main to blot out
thought. But he could not do it; and half his confidence was gone at the
moment when he most needed it all. He knew it, and shuddered. A thought
that had haunted him of late crossed his mind for the hundredth time: he
was an altered man not only in pretence but in reality; his nerve and
coolness had deserted him!
The sermon was over, and the congregation awake. Miles stood up with the
rest, and took between thumb and finger his side of the little hymn book
held out to him. He heartily wished it all over. In his present
unfortunate state of mind another hymn was another ordeal: her voice,
when she sang, put such weak thoughts into his head. Was he not a fool
and a madman to think at all of a woman who unmanned him so? Nay, hush!
The hymn was begun. She was singing it with her whole heart, the little
head thrown backward, the little white face turned upward. She was
singing; he could hear nothing else. She was singing; would she sing
afterwards? She was singing from the depths of her tired soul. Would she
ever sing like this again? Would he ever hear her voice again. Hush!
This might be the last time!
* * * * *
Colonel Bristo was back on the steps, gazing under his thin, hollowed
hand up the road. He looked anxious, and indignant, and determined--but
old and careworn.
"What a time they are!" said Dick, pointing to the crest of the second
hill, where the brown road met the silver sky. Next moment he would have
recalled his words, for two figures, not three, stood out black against
the sky. They were only in sight for an instant, but during that instant
they were hand in hand!
The two men on the steps waited without a word for many minutes. Neither
could bring himself to speak--perhaps each hoped that the other had not
seen everything. Besides, one was the father of the girl, and the
other--her jilted lover. More than once the father shivered, and his
fingers twitched the whole time. Simultaneously they both started in
surprise; for all at once Alice appeared over the brow of the nearest
hill, coming swiftly towards them--alone.
"Thank God!" murmured the Colonel, forgetting Dick's presence. "He has
asked her to marry him, and she has refused. The villain!"
"Then, if you are right," cried Dick with sudden intensity, "a million
times blacker villain he."
"What do you mean?"
"Mean? I mean--but there is no need to tell you now."
"You may as well tell me everything."
"Then I mean that he is married already."
XXVI
AT BAY
"Where is Mrs. Parish?" demanded Colonel Bristo, the moment his daughter
reached the gate. In spite of a gallant effort to be calm before Alice,
his voice quivered.
"The walk was too much for her." The girl's face was flushed, and her
tones faint. "She said she couldn't walk back were it ever so. She spoke
to Mrs. Commyns--who was called here, you know--and went to the Rectory.
She wants us to send the pony-trap if----"
"Where is Mr. Miles?" Alice's father interrupted her.
"He is following."
She passed quickly by them into the house. Her face was full of trouble.
Traces of tears were visible under her eyes. They heard her hurrying
upstairs. Neither of them spoke a word. Dick had his back turned; he was
watching the road.
The figure of Miles appeared on the nearest knoll. He walked slowly down
the bank, his head bent, his eyes fixed upon the ground. Dick turned to
Colonel Bristo.
"You had better leave me to speak to him," he said. "I will settle with
him on the spot."
"It ought to come from me," said the Colonel doubtfully; "and yet----"
The old man paused. Dick looked at him with some anxiety.
"You had really better leave him to me, sir," he repeated. "I am sorry
to say I am used to treating with him. There had better be no third
party to our last parley. And the fewer words the better, on Alice's
account; she need know nothing. Besides, I know your intentions----"
"Yes, yes; that for my part I will take no steps, not even to get back
my money; that he may go to-day instead of to-morrow, and leave the
country--we will not stop him. Of course, he will be only too glad to
get off! Dick, I care nothing about the paltry pounds he has got out of
me; he is welcome to them; I do not grudge him them, because of the
service he did me--yet if I saw him now, I feel that I should forget to
count that service. And you are right about Alice. Speak quietly, and
get rid of him quickly. I will not see him unless I am obliged; at
least, I will first hear from the dining-room what he has to say to
you."
A moment later the Colonel was at his post in the dining-room. His
retreat from the steps, which was really characteristic of the
man, is open to misconstruction. He feared nothing worse than an
unpleasantness--a disagreeable scene; and he avoided unpleasantnesses
and disagreeables systematically through life. That was the man's
weakness. Now if Dick had led him to suppose that Miles would do
anything but take his conge philosophically and go, the Colonel would
have filled the breach bristling with war. But from Dick's account of
his previous relations with the impostor, he expected that Miles would
be sent to the right-about with ease, and Colonel Bristo shrank from
doing this personally.
The dining-room windows were wide open, but the brown holland blinds
were drawn. Colonel Bristo did not raise them. He sat down to listen
without looking. Almost immediately he heard a sharp click from the
latch of the wicket-gate; then a louder click accompanied by a thud of
timbers. Whoever had opened the gate had passed through and swung it to.
The next sound that Colonel Bristo heard was the quiet, business-like
voice of young Edmonstone:
"Stop! I have a word for you from the Colonel. Stop where you are! He
does not want you to come in."
"What do you mean? What has happened?" The tones were apathetic--those
of a man who has heard his doom already, to whom nothing else can matter
much.
"He simply does not want you inside his house again. He is sending your
things down to the inn, where he hopes you will stay until you leave the
place according to your plans. Ryan," added Edmonstone in an altered
manner, "you understand me by this time? Then you may take my word for
it that you are as safe as you were yesterday; though you don't deserve
it. Only go at once."
There was a pause. The Colonel fidgeted in his chair.
"So, my kind, generous, merciful friend could not keep his word one day
longer!"
Miles's voice was so completely changed that the Colonel involuntarily
grasped the blind-cord; for now it was the voice of an insolent,
polished villain.
"If I had known before," Dick answered him coolly, "what I have found
out this morning, you might have cried for quarter until you were
hoarse."
"May I ask what you have learnt this morning?"
"Your frauds on the man who befriended you."
"My obligations to the man whose life I saved. Your way of putting it is
prejudiced. Of course you gave him your version as to who I am?"
"My version!" exclaimed Edmonstone scornfully. "I told him that you and
the bushranger Sundown are one."
Again Miles swiftly changed his key; but it was his words that were
startling now.
"You are mad!" he said, pityingly--"you are mad; and I have known it for
weeks. Your last words put your delusion in a nutshell. You have not a
proof to bless yourself with. You are a madman on one point; and here
comes the man that knows it as well as I do!"
In a whirl of surprise and amazement, not knowing for the moment whom or
what to believe, the Colonel pulled up the blind and leant through the
window. The Australian stood facing his accuser with an impudent smile
of triumph. For once he stood revealed as he was--for once he looked
every inch the finished scoundrel. If the Colonel had wavered for an
instant before drawing up the blind, he wavered no more after the first
glimpse of the Australian's face. He settled in his mind at that instant
which was the liar of those two men. Yet something fascinated him. He
was compelled to listen.
Robson was coming in at the gate.
"You are the very man we want," laughed Miles, turning towards him. "Now
pull yourself together, Doctor. Do you call our friend, Mr. Edmonstone
here, sane or not?"
"You said that he was not," said Robson, looking from Edmonstone to
Miles.
"And you agreed with me?"
"I said I thought----"
"You said you thought! Well, never mind; I call him sane--practically;
only under a delusion. But we will test him. You charge me with being a
certain Australian bushranger, Mr. Edmonstone. Of course you have some
evidence?"
An awkward sensation came over Dick: a consciousness that he had
committed a mistake, and a mistake that was giving the enemy a momentary
advantage. He choked with rage and indignation: but for the moment he
could find no words. Evidence? He had the evidence of his senses; but it
was true that he had no corroborative evidence at hand.
The bushranger's eyes glittered with a reckless light. He knew that the
sides were too uneven to play this game long. He felt that he was a free
man if he quietly accepted fate as he had accepted it before at this
man's hands. The odds were overwhelming; but he was seized with a wild
desire to turn and face them; to turn upon his contemptible foe and
treat him as he should have treated him in the beginning. It might cost
him his liberty--his life--but it was worth it! The old devilry had
sprung back into being within him. He was desperate--more desperate,
this half-hour, than ever in the whole course of his desperate
existence. His life had seemed worth having during the past weeks of his
cowardice; now it was valueless--more valueless than it had been before.
He was at bay, and he realised it. His brain was ablaze. He had played
the docile Miles too long. Wait a moment, and he would give them one
taste of the old Sundown!
"At least," he sneered in a low, suppressed voice, "you have someone
behind you with a warrant? No? Nothing but your bare word and the dim
recollection of years ago? That, my friend, seems hardly enough. Ah,
Colonel, I'm glad you are there. Is there any truth in this message that
has been given me, that you have had enough of me?"
"I wish you to go," said Colonel Bristo, sternly. "I wash my hands of
you. Why refuse a chance of escape?"
"What! Do you mean to say you believe this maniac's cock-and-bull yarn
about me?" He pointed jauntily at Dick with his forefinger. But the hand
lowered, until the forefinger covered the corner of white handkerchief
peeping from Edmonstone's breast-pocket. For a moment Miles seemed to be
making some mental calculation; then his hand dropped, and trifled with
his watch-chain.
"I believe every word that he has told me," declared the Colonel
solemnly. "As to warrants, they are not wanted where there is to be no
arrest. We are not going to lay hands on you. Then go!"
"Go!" echoed Edmonstone hoarsely. "And I wish to God I had done my duty
the night I found you out! You would have been in proper hands long
before this."
"Suppose I refuse to go? Suppose I stay and insist on evidence being
brought against me?" said Miles to the Colonel. Then turning to Dick
with fiery, blood-shot eyes, he cried: "Suppose, since there is no
evidence at all, I shoot the inventor of all these lies?"
The hand was raised sharply from the watch-chain and dived into an inner
pocket. That moment might have been Dick Edmonstone's last on earth, had
not a white fluttering skirt appeared in the passage behind him.
The hand of Miles dropped nervelessly.
Colonel Bristo heard in the passage the light quick steps and rustling
dress, and ran to the door. At the same instant Pinckney jumped up from
his writing to see what was the matter. They met in the passage, and
followed Alice to the steps. Her father seized her hand, to draw her
back, but she snatched it from his grasp. Her hand was icy cold. Her
face was white as death--as immovable--as passionless. She stood on the
steps, and glanced from Edmonstone at her side to Miles on the path
below. On Miles her calm glance rested.
"You seem to forget!" she said in a hard voice that seemed to come from
far away. "You are forgetting what you said to me a few minutes ago, on
the road. I understand your meaning better now than I did then. Yes, it
is true; you know it is true: you are what he says you are!"
Miles watched her like one petrified.
She turned to Dick at her side. And now a sudden flush suffused her
pallid cheeks, and her eyes dilated.