Half a Hero Part 30

"But you don't believe it is?"

"We can't help our thoughts, but----" and another laugh ended his sentence.

Benham looked round. They were alone. Cautiously he drew a bag of money and a roll of notes from his pocket. For a moment he opened the bag and showed the gleam inside; wetting his forefinger, he parted the notes for a second.

"Some one believes it," he said, "up to five hundred pound."

"That's the sort of belief I'd like to inspire," laughed Gaspard, watching the money back into its pocket with a curious eye.

"Come, you're not drinking," urged the hospitable Benham.

"You don't show me the way," untruthfully answered the guest, as Benham complacently b.u.t.toned up his coat, little imagining that his neighbour was weighing a question, very momentous to him, in the light of fresh information.

Five hundred pounds! The duty of removing Benham began to look rather imperative again, but from a different point of view. Francois had of late worked for his living, a mode of existence which seemed to him anomalous, and ill suited to his genius. Five hundred pounds meant, to a man of his frugal habits and tact in eliciting hospitality three years'

comfortable idleness. It was no doubt apparent now that Benham had already parted with his secret, and that, if anything happened to him, the secret would still remain to vex the good Medland. Gaspard regretted this; he would have liked to combine public and private advantage in the job. But a man must not ask everything, or he may end by having to take nothing. Here sat a drunken fool with five hundred pounds; opposite to him sat a sober sharp-wit with only five. The situation was full of suggestion. If the five hundred could be got from the fool without violence, well and good; but really, thought Mr. Gaspard, their transference to the sharp-wit must be effected somehow, or that sharp-wit had no t.i.tle to the name.

"Care to play any more?" asked Benham.

"Not I, my friend, I have robbed you enough."

"And about time for the luck to turn, isn't it? Well, I don't care! What shall we do?"

"What you will," answered the Frenchman absently.

Benham pulled his beard, then leant forward and put a question with an intoxicated leer. A laugh of feigned reproof burst from Gaspard. Benham seemed to urge him, and at last he said,

"Oh, if you're bent on it, I can be your guide."

The two men left the house arm-in-arm, went down the street, and crossed Digby Square. It was late, and few people were about, but Gaspard saw one acquaintance. The doorkeeper was strolling along on his way home, and Gaspard bade him good-night in a cheery voice as they pa.s.sed him.

The doorkeeper stood and watched the pair for a minute as they left the Square and turned down a narrow street which led to the poorer part of the town, and thence to the quays. He heard Gaspard's high-pitched voice and shrill laughter, and, in answer, Benham's thick tones and heavy shout of drunken mirth. Once or twice these sounds repeated themselves, then they ceased; the footsteps of the Frenchman and his companion died away in the distance. The doorkeeper went on his way, thinking with relief that Mr. Gaspard, for all his tall talk, was more at home with a bottle than with a knife or a bomb.

Notwithstanding his dissipation, Gaspard was afoot very early in the morning. It was hardly light, and the deep scratch of finger-nails on his face--it is so awkward when drunken fools wake at the wrong minute--attracted no attention from the few people he encountered. He did not give them long to look at him, for he hurried swiftly through the streets, towards the quays where the ships lay loading their cargoes. He seemed to have urgent business to transact down there, business that would brook no delay, and that was, if one might guess from his uneasy glances over his shoulder, of a private nature. With one hand he held tight hold of something in his trousers pocket, the other rested on his belt, hard by a little revolver. In his business it is necessary to be ready for everything.

Meanwhile Mr. Benham, having no affairs to trouble him, and no more business to transact, stayed where he was.

CHAPTER XIX.

LAST CHANCES.

At an early hour on Sunday all Kirton seemed astir. The streets were alive with thronging people, with banners, with inchoate and still amorphous processions, with vendors of meat, drink, and newspapers.

According to the official arrangements, the proceedings were not to begin till one o'clock, and, in theory, the forenoon hours were left undisturbed; but, what with the people who were taking part in the demonstration, and those who were going to look on, and those who hoped to suck some profit to themselves out of the day's work, the ordinary duties and observances of a Sunday were largely neglected, and Mr.

Puttock, pa.s.sing on his way to chapel at the head of his family, did not lack material for reprobation in the temporary superseding of religious obligations.

The Governor and his family drove to the Cathedral, according to their custom, Eleanor Scaife having pleaded in vain for leave to walk about the streets instead. Lady Eynesford declined to recognise the occasion, and Eleanor had to content herself with stealthy glances to right and left till the church doors engulfed her. The only absentee was Alicia Derosne, and she was not walking about the streets, but sitting under the verandah, with a book unopened on her knees, and her eyes set in empty fixedness on the horizon. The luxuriant growth of a southern summer filled her nostrils with sweet scents, and the wind, blowing off the sea, tempered the heat to a fresh and balmy warmth; the waves sparkled in the sun, and the world was loud in boast of its own beauty; but poor Alicia, like many a maid before, was wondering how long this wretched life was to last, and how any one was ever happy. Faith bruised and trust misplaced blotted out for her the joy of living and the exultation of youth. If these things were true, why did the sun shine, and how could the world be merry? If these things were true, for her the sun shone no more, and the merriment was stilled for ever. So she thought, and, if she were not right, it needed a philosopher to tell her so; and then she would not have believed him, but caught her woe closer to her heart, and nursed it with fiercer tenderness against his shallow prating. Perhaps he might have told her too, that it is cruel kindness unasked to set people on a pinnacle, and, when they cannot keep foothold on that slippery height, to scorn their fall. Other things such an one might well have said, but more wisely left unsaid; for cool reason is a blister to heartache, and heartache is not best cured by blisters. Never yet did a child stop crying for being told its pain was nought and would soon be gone. Yet this prescription had been Lady Eynesford's--although she was no philosopher, to her knowledge--for Alicia, and it had left the patient protesting that she felt no pain at all, and yet feeling it all the more.

"What do you accuse me of? Why do you speak to me?" she had burst out.

"What is it to me what he has done or not done? What do you mean, Mary?"

Before this torrent of questions Lady Eynesford tactfully retreated a little way. A warning against hasty love dwindled to an appeal whether so much friendliness, such constant meetings, either with daughter or with father, were desirable.

"I'm sure I'm sorry for the poor child," she said; "but in this world----"

"Suppose it's all a slander!"

"My dear Alicia, do they say such things about a man in his position unless there's something in them?"

"It's nothing to me," said Alicia again.

"Of course, you can do nothing abrupt; but you'll gradually withdraw from their acquaintance, won't you?"

Alicia had escaped without a promise, pleading for time to think in the same breath that she denied any concern in the matter. She was by way of thinking now, and all that Lady Eynesford had said repeated itself in her mind as she looked out on the garden and the glimpses of the town beyond. She understood now d.i.c.k's banishment, her sister-in-law's unresting hostility to the Medlands, and the reason why she had been pressed to go to Australia. She spared a minute to grief for Daisy, but her own sorrow would not be denied, and engrossed her again. In the solitude she had sought, she cried to herself, "Why didn't they tell me before? What's the use of telling me now?" Then she would fly back to the hope that the thing was not true, that her friends had clutched too hastily at anything which would save her from what they dreaded, and, she confessed to herself, rightly dreaded. No, she would not believe it yet; and, if it were not true, why should she not be happy? Why should she not, even though she did what d.i.c.k had not dared to do, and what, when c.o.xon asked her, she had laughed at for an absurdity?

There began to be more movement outside the gates. The first note of band-music was wafted to her ear, and the roll of wheels announced the return of the church-goers. She roused herself and went to meet them.

They were agog with excitement, partly about the meeting, partly about the murder. While Eleanor was trying to tell her of the state of popular feeling, the Governor seized her arm and began to detail the story of the discovery.

"You remember the man?" he asked. "He was at our flower-show--had a sort of row with Medland, you know. Well, he's been found murdered (so the police think) in a low part of the town! The woman who keeps the house found him. He didn't come down in the morning, and, as she couldn't make him hear, she forced the door, and found him with his throat cut."

"Awful!" shuddered Lady Eynesford. "He looked such a respectable man too."

"Ah, I fancy he'd gone a bit to the bad lately--taken to drinking and so on."

"He was a friend of Mr. Kilshaw's, wasn't he?" asked Alicia.

"A sort of hanger-on, I think. Anyhow, there he was dead, and with his pockets empty."

"Perhaps he killed himself," she suggested.

"They think not. They've arrested the woman, but she declares she knows nothing about it!"

"Poor man!" said Alicia; and, at another time, she might have thought a good deal about the horrible end of a man whom she had known as an acquaintance. But, as it was, she soon forgot him again, and, leaving the rest, returned to her solitary seat.

In the town, the news of the murder was but one ruffle more on the wave of excitement, and not a very marked one. Few people knew Benham's name, and when the first agitation following on the discovery of the body died away and the onlookers found there was no news to be had, they turned away to join the processions or to stare at them. The police were left to pursue their investigations in peace, and they soon reached a conclusion. The landlady of the house where Benham died lived alone, save for the occasional presence of her son: he was away at work in an outlying district, and she had been the only person in the house that night. She let beds to single men, she said, and the night before two men had arrived, one the worse for drink. They had asked for adjoining rooms. As they went up-stairs, she had heard the one who had been drinking say to the other, "What are you bringing me here for? This isn't the place for what I want." His companion, the shorter of the two, whom she thought she would know again, had answered--"All in good time; you go and lie down, and I'll fetch what you want." Soon after, the short one came down and asked if she had any brandy; she gave him a bottle half full and he went up-stairs again. She heard voices raised as if in dispute for a few minutes, and one of them--she could not say which--said something which sounded like "Well, finish the drink first, and then I'll go." Silence followed, at least she could not hear any more talking; and presently, it not being her business to spy on gentlemen, she went to bed, and knew nothing more till she woke at seven o'clock. Going up-stairs, she found one door open and the room empty, not the room the two men had been in together, but the other. The second door was locked, and she did not knock; gentlemen often slept late. At half-past ten she ventured to knock, got no answer, knocked again and again, and finally, with the help of the man from next door, broke the lock and found the taller of the two men dead on the bed. She had at once summoned the police; and that, she concluded, was all she knew about the matter, and she was a respectable, hard-working woman, a widow who could produce her marriage certificate in case any person present desired to inspect it.

The Superintendent listened to her protestations of virtue with an ironical smile, told her the police knew her house very well, frightened her wholesomely, took down her very vague description of the missing man, and kept her in custody; but he did not seriously doubt the truth of her story, and, if it were true, the man he wanted was evidently the sober man, the shorter man, who had introduced his friend to the house on a pretext, had called for drink, and vanished in the early morning, leaving a dead man behind him. Who was this man? Where did he come from?

Had he been missing since last night? On these inquiries the Superintendent launched several intelligent men, and then was forced for the time to turn his attention to the business of the day.

To search a large town for a missing man takes time, and the searchers did not happen to fall in with Company B of Procession 3, which at one o'clock had mustered in Digby Square, prepared to march to the Public Park. Had they done so, it might or might not have seemed to them worth noticing that Company B of Procession 3, which was composed of carpenters and joiners, had missed some one, namely the officer whom they called their "Marshal," and who was to have ordered their ranks and marched at their head; and the name of their Marshal was none other than Francois Gaspard. The Superintendent himself was keeping watch over Company B, but, in a professionally Olympian scorn of processions, he was far from asking or caring to know who the Marshal was, and indeed, if he had known, he would scarcely have drawn such a lightning-quick inference as that the missing Marshal and the missing murderer were one and the same. So Mr. Gaspard's absence was pa.s.sed over with a few curses on his laziness, or, from the more charitable, a surmise that there had been a misunderstanding, and Company B, having appointed a new Marshal, went on its way.

One demonstration of the public will is much like another in the shape it takes and the incidents it produces. This Sunday's was, however, as friends and foes agreed, remarkable not only for the numbers who took part, but still more for the spirit which animated it, and when the Premier and his colleagues made their appearance on the great platform there was no room to doubt that somehow, by his gifts or his faults, his policy or his demagogic arts, his love of humanity or his adroit wooing of popularity, Medland held a position in the eyes of the common people of the capital which had seldom or never been equalled in the history of the Colony. He had caused them to be called together in order to raise their enthusiasm, and to elicit from them a visible, unmistakable pledge of support. But, when he stood before them, bareheaded, in vain beckoning for silence, their cries and cheers told him that his task was rather to moderate than to stir up, and the first part of his speech was a somewhat laboured proof of the consistency of gatherings of that nature with the proper independence of representative a.s.semblies. The people heard him through this argument in respectful silence, clapping their hands when, at the end of it, he paused before he pa.s.sed to the second part of his speech. At the first sign of attack, at the first quietly drawn contrast between what the seceders had promised and what they were doing, his audience was a changed one. Fierce murmurs of a.s.sent and groans became audible now, and when Medland, caught by the contagion that spread to him from his listeners, gave rein to his feelings, and launched into a pa.s.sionate declaration that, to his mind, the liberty claimed for members did not mean liberty to betray those who had trusted them, the murmurs and groans rose into one tumult of savage applause, and men raised both hands over their heads and shook them, as though they would have clenched every word that fell from him with a blow of the fist.

Daisy Medland sat just behind her father, exulting in his triumph, and, at every happy stroke, glancing at Norburn, and by sharing her joy with him doubling his. When the Premier had finished, and the last resolution had been carried, she ran to him, crying, "Splendid! I never heard you so good. Wasn't he splendid?" and looking so completely joyful that Medland was sure she must quite have forgotten d.i.c.k Derosne. She took his arm, and they made their way together to a carriage which was in waiting. An escort of police surrounded it, to save the Premier from his friends, and he, with Daisy, Norburn, and Mr. Floyd, the Treasurer, got in without disturbance. The coachman drove off rapidly down the main avenue, distancing the enthusiasts who would have had the horses out of the shafts. They pa.s.sed a long row of carriages, belonging to people who had not feared to come and look on from a distance, and at last, knowing the procession would go back another way, Medland bade his driver stop under the trees, and lit a cigar.

"And I wonder if it will all make any difference!" said he, puffing delightedly. He had all an old political organiser's love for a big meeting, which does not exclude scepticism as to its value.

"Oh, you gave it 'em finely," said the Treasurer.