My Lord Duke Part 30

Mr. Sellwood was heavy with thought; his wife had left them; and he had heard a sob in her throat as she turned away. He had an inkling of her treatment of this poor fellow; he did not know everything, but he knew enough to hail his wife's sob with a thankful thrill. So there was a heart in her somewhere still! He had thought otherwise for some years; in another moment he doubted it once more. Lady Caroline appeared at the drawing-room window, shut it, and drew down the blind. And yet--and yet her husband had himself been wishing for somebody to do that very thing!

Olivia was still at the piano, and her performance had sounded a little too near at hand until now. It was near enough still; but the shutting of the window deadened the sound. Chopin had merged into Mendelssohn.

Olivia happened to be note-perfect in one or two of the Lieder. Her father had never heard her play them so well. But Jack had no music in his soul--could not whistle two bars in tune--and though, even while speaking, he listened visibly, it was not to the music as music, but to the last sound of Olivia he was ever to hear. Her footstep in the distance would have done as well.

"I wouldn't go to-night, old fellow," the Home Secretary said at length.

"I see no point in it. To-morrow would be time enough."

"Ah, you must think I find it easy work!" exclaimed Jack, a little bitterly for once. "It's not so easy as all that: it's got to be done at once, when you're screwed up to it, or it may never come off at all.

Don't you try to keep me; don't let anybody else try either! Let me go while I'm on to go--alone. I might take it different to-morrow!"

He spoke hoa.r.s.ely; the voice was as significant as the words. Mr.

Sellwood was impressed by both; he followed the other to the nearest flight of steps leading down to the lawn.

"Let me come with you," he urged. "Surely there is something one can do!

And I've never seen the hut; I should like to."

"Wait till I've gone," was the reply. "I want you to stand in my tracks and block anybody from following me. Head them another way! Only give me quarter of an hour to clear out of the hut, and another quarter's start, and I'm--and I'm----"

He lost himself in a sudden absence of mind. The music had stopped, and the night seemed insolently still. Jack was half-way down the steps; the Home Secretary leaned over the bal.u.s.trade above. Jack reached up his hand.

"Good-bye," he said.

Mr. Sellwood, hesitating, kept his hand. The window that had been shut was thrown up again.

"Papa, is that you?"

"Yes, my dear."

Mr. Sellwood had turned round.

"And where is Jack?"

"Not here," whispered Jack.

"Not here," repeated Mr. Sellwood; and, looking behind him, he found that he had spoken the truth.

"Then I'm coming down to you, and you must help me----"

Jack lost the rest as he ran. He thought he heard his own name again, but he was not sure. He stopped under the nearest tree. Mercifully there was no moon. Olivia could not have seen him, for he himself could see no more of the Towers than the lighted windows and their reflections upon the terrace. On that dim stage the silhouette of Mr. Sellwood was still discernible: another joined it: the two figures became one: and in the utter stillness not only the girl's sobs but her father's broken words were audible under the tree.

Jack fled.

He ran hard to the hut, and lighted it up as it had never been lighted before. He cut up a candle in half-inch sections, and stuck them all over with their own grease. Thoroughness was an object as well as despatch; nothing must be missed; but his first act was to change his clothes. He put on the ready-made suit and the wideawake in which he had landed; he had kept them in the hut. Then he pulled from under the bunk the cage his cats had travelled in, and he bundled the cats into it once more. Lastly he rolled up his swag, less neatly, perhaps, than of old, but with the blue blanket outermost as before, and the little straps reefed round it and buckled tight. He would want these things in the bush; besides, the whim was upon him to go exactly as he had come. Only one item of his original impedimenta he decided to leave behind: the old bush saddle would be a needless enc.u.mbrance; but with his swag, and his cats, and his wideawake, he set forth duly, after blowing out all the candle ends.

The night seemed darker than ever; neither moon nor star was to be seen, and Jack had to stop and consider when he got outside. He desired to strike a straight line to the gates; he knew how they lay from the hut, though he had never been over the ground before. To a bushman, however, even without a star to help him, such a task could present no difficulties. He computed the distance at something less than a mile; but in Australia he had gone as the crow flies through league upon league of untrodden scrub. Out there he had enjoyed the reputation of being "a good bushman," and he meant to enjoy it again.

But his head was hot with other thoughts, and he was out of practice.

Instead of hitting the wall, and following it up to the gates, as he intended, he erred the other way, and came out upon the drive at no great distance from the house. This was a false start, indeed, and a humiliation also; but his thoughts had strayed back to Olivia, and it was as if his feet had followed their lead. He would think of her no more to-night.

The drive was undesirable, for obvious reasons; still it was the safest policy to keep to it now, and the chances were that he would meet n.o.body. Yet he did; a footstep first, and then the striking of a match, came to his ears as he was nearing the gates. He crept under the trees.

The match was struck again, and yet again, before it lit. Then Jack came out of hiding, and strode forward without further qualms, for the flame was lighting the cigar and illumining the face of his friend Dalrymple.

"Hallo, sir!" began Jack, "I'd given you up."

"Why, Jack, is that you? I can't see an inch front of my cigar," said the squatter, as the match burnt itself out on the gravel where it had been thrown.

"Yes, it's me; where have you been?"

"Where are you going?"

"Mine first," said Jack.

"All right. I've been talking to Master Hunt. _Now_ where are you going?"

"Back to Australia!"

Jack waited for an exclamation; for some seconds there was none; then the squatter laughed softly to himself.

"I thought as much!" said he. "I knew exactly what the lawyer came to say, for I saw it in his face. Now tell me, and we'll see if I'm right."

And it appeared that he was, by the way in which he kept nodding his head as Jack told him all. Meanwhile they had retired under the trees, and by the red end of his cigar the squatter had seen Jack's wideawake; using his cigar as a lantern he had examined the cage of cats; whereon his face would have proved a sufficiently severe commentary had there been any other light for Jack to see it by.

"Now," said Dalrymple, "stand tight. _I've_ got something to tell _you_, my boy!" And he told it in the fewest whispered words.

Jack was speechless.

"Nonsense! I don't believe it," he cried when he found his tongue.

"But I'm in a position to prove it," replied the squatter. "I'll give you a particular or two as we walk back to the house. What! you hesitate? Come, come; surely my word is good enough for that! Do be sensible; leave your infernal cats where they are, and come you along with me!"

CHAPTER XXII

DE MORTUIS

The Home Secretary had never spent a more uncomfortable hour. His favourite daughter had stanched her tears, and gone straight to the root of the very delicate matter at issue between them. Much as her tears had depressed him, however, Mr. Sellwood preferred them to the subsequent att.i.tude. It was too independent for his old-fashioned notions, and yet it made him think all the more of Olivia. Indeed she was her father's child in argument--spirited and keen and fair. His point of view she took for granted, and proceeded to expound her own. Much that she said was unanswerable; a little made him fidget--for between the s.e.xes there is no such shyness as that which a father finds in his heart towards his grown-up girls. But a certain bluntness of speech was not the least refreshing trait in Olivia's downright character, and decidedly this was not a matter to be glossed over with synonyms for a spade. She wanted to know how the circ.u.mstances of the birth affected the value of the man--and so forth. Mr. Sellwood replied as a man of the world, and detested his replies. But the worst was his guilty knowledge of Jack's flight. This made him detest himself; it made him lie; and it filled him with a relief greater than his surprise when voices came out of the darkness of the drive, and one of them was Jack's.

Olivia ran forward.

"At last! Oh, Jack, where _have_ you been?"

Mr. Sellwood never heard the answer; he was bristling at the touch of Dalrymple, who had led him aside.

"Entirely my doing," explained the squatter; "but I can justify it. I mean to do so at once. Am I right in understanding the bar sinister to be your only objection to our friend?"

"You may put it so," said Mr. Sellwood shortly.