# Under Two Skies/Sergeant Seth

pp. 240-317. A novella
The sun had made him very dark indeed; but it had not blistered him as it blisters your 'new chum'; he was an Australian by birth, and he only bronzed. And this man's eyes this morning shone with a happy, hopeful, youthful light, having good reason so to shine: for Trooper Whitty had had his chance, and seized it; Trooper Whitty had covered himself with honour and glory; the immediate promotion of Trooper Whitty was certain, and something a million times nearer to his heart than prosperity and promotion and fame Trooper Whitty was all but certain of, and intended to make dead certain of, that Christmas Day.
SERGEANT SETH
I
TROOPER WHITTY was off for a holiday at last. The circumstance was in itself strange enough, for Whitty had been two years in the Mounted Police without ever once seeking leave of absence until now. What, however, seemed really unique was that a man who took only one holiday in two years should be content to go and spend it in a dismal, dead-alive hamlet like Timber Town.
'Some jokers are easily pleased, we know, and you're one; but what can be the attraction in that dull hole, Seth?' Whitty's sergeant asked him the night before he started. 'If there is one you might have ridden over there any day these eighteen months; but I never heard you had a friend there, did I?'
​'No; but then I didn't know it myself until the other day,' said Whitty. 'It was only then that I heard of an old friend of mine being there.'
The sergeant pulled reflectively at his pipe.
'Your friend should welcome you with open arms, Seth,' said he presently. 'Your friend should leave you his money for looking him up just now, Seth. It will be the making of him, this Christmas, to be seen along with you. It would be the making of any one not a teetotaller, at any time, but Christmas for choice, to be seen along with the man that took Red Jim. I know Timber Town; I know Timber Town ways; there'll be liquor enough going to float an Orient liner. Take my tip, Seth—keep in your depth!'
Whitty laughed. 'No fear, sergeant. You don't know my friend. But if it's as bad as you say, you ought to come too, and see me through, since we were both in the Red Jim go. Bad luck to Red Jim! I'm not going to Timber Town to get clapped on the beck and made a feel of. I'm going to see a very old ​friend, sergeant—a very great friend. I'll go in plain clothes.'
It was Christmas Eve at the loneliest little police-barracks in those ranges. The verandah was too dark for the sergeant to see how the younger man's face flushed, how his eyes glistened, as he spoke of his friend. Nor did the sergeant know, in the early morning following, with what high spirits his subordinate set off. Seth hummed in his bedroom, whistled in the stables, and burst into lusty song as he rode out of the yard at daybreak; and the sergeant would certainly have been interested had he been awake, for Seth was seldom so ill-advised as to try to whistle or sing, while his normal temper was sedate and self-contained to a degree unusual in young men.
It is a matter of opinion, however, whether Seth Whitty was a young man; and if he was not, there was something highly refreshing in the middle-aged fellow's boyish behaviour. In dry fact, Seth was just thirty; but a man, one knows, does not age only by years. Seth looked more than thirty. Often he looked nearer forty. The times when one would have stood ​a chance of gauging his years accurately were rare; but this morning was such a time.
Whitty was so very happy this Christmas morning; his face showed it so very plainly, too. It was not by any means a striking face: the cheek bones were prominent, the nose aquiline and thin; but a broad high forehead and good brown eyes, and a certain regularity of features, gave him at least average good looks. Moreover, his short black beard and long black moustache, though they helped to make him look so old, became his dark style very suitably.
The sun had made him very dark indeed; but it had not blistered him as it blisters your 'new chum'; he was an Australian by birth, and he only bronzed. And this man's eyes this morning shone with a happy, hopeful, youthful light, having good reason so to shine: for Trooper Whitty had had his chance, and seized it; Trooper Whitty had covered himself with honour and glory; the immediate promotion of Trooper Whitty was certain, and something a million times nearer to his heart than prosperity and promotion and ​fane Trooper Whitty was all but certain of, and intended to make dead certain of, that Christmas Day.
No wonder he rode away singing. When the sun got up (which was not just at once) and struck fire from Seth's spur and stirrup on the near side, he was singing still, in his own quaint fashion. Ultimately Whitty fell into a more natural mood. He grew silent and sensible. But the joyous light shone as bright as ever in his eyes; though his mind was occupied with some very ticklish questions.
'Shall I find her the same?' This was the main question. 'It's eighteen months ago; lots of time to change. We have heard nothing of each other all the time; every facility for getting out of it. But no, no, no: she promised; I promised too, and to-day I'll fulfil—my future being so certain now—though even if it weren't I couldn't help it, knowing her so near. If only she thinks as she thought then! But all life is change. Eighteen months ago! Who'd have dreamt then that Barbara Lyon would clear out of the station to work for her living? Who could fancy Barbara as schoolmissis? ​But it shall not be for long, Barbara; it shall be for a very, very little while now, my darling!'
This, in fact, was tho 'very old friend'—Barbara Lyon. It is not strictly true that she was a very old friend. Whitty's first six months in tho constabulary ho was quartered near Kyneton, and within pistol-shot of Barbara's father's boundary fence. Tho very old friendship was squeezed into that half-year.
The ride to Timber Town was a long one: fifty miles. Whitty left home at four in the morning; he hoped to arrive, riding easily, not much later than noon. Rapid travelling was impossible, for the track was not only very rugged, and often steep, but it was so extremely faint, in the hard flinty places, that some vigilance was required merely to follow it. But it was wild, picturesque country, and the morning air was fresh and cool; and Whitty was not much more impatient than most men would have been in the circumstances. At nine he breakfasted at a queer little hostelry deep in a gully of gum-trees. Then came a ​long, slow, tiresome ascent; but Seth was on the southern edge of the ranges well before noon, winding slowly down to the thickly-timbered flats. Just below him, thin columus of smoke ascended through the tree-tops. The chimneys that the smoke came from were invisible; but deep down there, at the bottom of that leafy sea, and on the very edge of the level country, lay Timber Town; and Timber Town was just sufficiently civilised to have its State school; and the Timber Town State scholars were so inexpressibly privileged as to have Barbara Lyon for their schoolmistress—at the moment.
Whitty's predatory designs upon the Timber Town scholars swelled within him when his sharp eye descried the Timber Town smoke. He pressed on down the steep winding path. The trees closed over him; the track twisted, turned, but still descended; and Seth lost patience at last, and was riding recklessly, when a loud shout from the hill-side on the right startled him. He pulled up with some difficulty. Peering upward through the colonnade of smooth round trunks, he saw a tent, ​and, what was more alarming, a human ball bounding down headlong through the trees; and in an instant an acrobatic young man—a well-built and particularly nice-looking young man, of the Saxon order—stood breathless at the horse's head.
'Seth Whitty, as I live!' gasped the acrobat.
'That's my name, mate; but—'
'Mean to say you don't know me?'
'I'll be shot if I do.'
'You don't remember the new chum who brought a letter of introduction to your father, stayed at your farm at Whittlesea for weeks on end, shot—but you're playing it too low down, Seth! Never pretend you don't remember Jack Lovatt!'
Seth jumped from his horse and wrung the young fellow's hand.
'How should I have remembered you? You were a boy then, without a hair on your face; now you sport a thundering great moustache—'
'And have just shaved off a thundering great beard: made to.'
'Then, too, you were a bit of a wild young spark; frankly, I never thought you'd do much ​good; I made sure you'd either be back home years before this, or at the dogs; but now—'
'Now I've gone in or complete reformation: made to!'
'Who is it that's taken you in hand?'
Jack Lovatt winked, but said there was time enough for that, and that he too had some questions to put. And he soon learnt how Seth's old father had been dead and buried those two years; how the arm at Whittlesea had been sold, and at a cruel figure; and how Seth had joined the Mounted Police and been quartered six months near Kyneton and eighteen at his present station in the ranges. Lovatt said that Seth's being in the force was no news to him—for wasn't Trooper Whitty a public hero? A hand-shaking over the Red Jim affair naturally followed, Lovatt being bound over to hold his tongue about it in the township. Then the two men strolled down the track together, Whitty leading his horse; and it was Lovatt's turn to give an account of himself. He had been four years and a half in the Colonies, and he proceeded to tick off the items on his fingers.
​'Those weeks at Whittlesea; three or four months travelling about; three weeks billiard-marking in Queensland, when I'd travelled away all my money. That was the first half-year. Nine months store-keeping, Queensland station; eight months droving—fat wethers—Melbourne market; one month's spree, Melbourne. First two years. Next two years on Riverina station, overseer; another month in Melbourne; rest of my time here. Rest of my days—here!'
'What, never going home again?'
'Never.'
'You still don't write?'
'Not a line.'
'So they don't know whether you're dead or alive?'
'They know nothing about me: I know nothing about them.'
'Forgive' us, Jack; but have you quite forgotten—her?'
Lovatt burst out laughing.
'Years ago, my good fellow. Why—' he hesitated.
'What?'
​'I'm going to marry here! I'm engaged. That tent you saw is the site of my homestead; I've taken up two hundred acres.'
Trooper Whitty stopped short in his walk, and whistled. But he did not get a chance to say much; Jack Lovatt took care of that. Jack Lovatt opened his heart.
Whitty listened with very natural sympathy, seeing what his own condition was; but he did not speak of his own condition. He listened with great interest, but with an unpleasantly vivid remembrance of a previous occasion when Jack Lovatt had opened his heart to him about the girl in England who had engaged herself to some one else. Jack's calm, reasonable, blissful state to-day did not contrast to Whitty's liking with the wild, hopeless, honest fervour of four or five years ago. But then Jack was so much older now, so much more sensible. There was no reason for supposing that he was less in love now than he had been then, simply because he showed it less. In any case, Seth, who was such an accomplished hand at concealing his own feelings, should have been the last person to suspect ​this; nor did he suspect it; it merely occurred to him.
Rather jauntily, perhaps, but with sufficient gusto, Jack told everything—everything except who and what the lady was. But these are really unimportant details when you are telling a fellow about a thing of this kind, if there is no chance of his having met the girl anywhere. Whitty only gathered that she lived in Timber Town, of which he was glad, for Barbara's sake. Before Jack gave him time to edge in a question the road had become wide and level; the trees had parted; they were in the township.
Timber Town was unpretending in those days: it is now a respectable centre. Then most of the houses were public-houses, or at any rate gave that impression; and, of course, on that particular day the public-house verandahs were black with Christmas customers. But even then there were the State school and the police-barracks, cheek by jowl, with the little iron church (now neither little nor iron) opposite—all three at the north end of the single broad and straggling street. This was the end at which the two men entered the ​township. They stopped at the barracks and leant against the fence, to which Whitty tethered his horse. He was most interested, of course, in the State school; but Lovatt drew his attention to the church over the way.
'They're in at service now, but they'll be out directly; and then, Seth—'
'She's there, of course?'
'Rather! She plays the harmonium for them. Hark! there it goes! That's the last hymn?
It was strange to hear the glad old Christmas hymn across that glaring road, in the breathless heat, under that sky of flawless sapphire; at least, it should have struck the Englishman as strange. As for Seth, his only ideas of English Christmases came from English Christmas cards; and as he stood listening he was wondering how it was that Barbara did not play the harmonium for the Timber Town folks. Barbara was so very musical. He was wondering also why Lovatt was not in church with his sweetheart on Christmas morning, as he himself would have been with Barbara, could he only have managed to reach Timber Town ​earlier. And as he wondered and speculated, and as his pulse quickened—his meeting with Barbara, who of course was in church, being so very near—the hymn ended. Then there was a short silence; then the voluntary sounded, and the small oddly-assorted congregation poured out.
'I'll go and fetch her,' said Lovatt. 'Stop where you are; you shall be introduced to her now at once.'
He hurried over.
Seth felt that he ought to go too—that he must go; yet he remained where he was. He could not move. He was trembling with excitement. He had no desire just then to see Lovatt's sweetheart; he was straining his eyes to find his own. She did not come. Yet all the other people were now clear of the church—all but the organist. Was she a friend of the organist—of Lovatt's intended? Was she waiting back for her? Stop. The voluntary is over at last. Here is Jack Lovatt—
'Ah!'
Seth Whitty started back against the picket fence. His hands clutched it. His eyes ​fastened themselves upon the pair who came so slowly towards him. A moment, an hour, a lifetime—and he was introduced to Lovatt's fiancée.
Whitty laboured to pull himself together, and uttered a grating laugh.
'You needn't have troubled,' he got out at last indistinctly. 'We're old friends—quite old friends, eh, Miss Lyon?'
Barbara gave him her hand. In the shadow of her great hat her face seemed gray and bloodless; but her blue eyes never flinched, and her lips only slightly trembled, and her little head was proudly raised. Barbara was lovelier than ever.
II
'Seth! Seth Whitty! What ails you, man?'
It was Lovatt's voice. Whitty removed the hand he had pressed to his forehead, and stood stiffly erect.
'Forgive me, Miss Barbara; I feel silly like. It must be the sun. These felt things are no protection once you're used to the helmet.'
​No pretence could have been older, more decrepit; but, as it happened, it was the one pretence of all others that was absolutely certain to take folks in just then at Timber Town. Lovatt looked alarmed, and glanced involuntarily at the front windows of the barracks, where the blinds were drawn. At the same moment, raising his hat to Barbara, Whitty turned hastily away and went in at the barrack gate.
'Stop,' cried Lovatt, but softly. 'Don't go in there!'
Whitty faced about. 'Why not? We receive each other with open arms, we fellows. Why shouldn't I go in?'
'Because the sergeant's lying dead there from sunstroke!'
Whitty had not known that sergeant even by name. He had nothing to say to his death. But he returned to his horse, and unfastened the reins from the fence.
'Where shall you go?' asked Lovatt doubtfully.
'One of the publics.'
'Do you feel better?'
​'All right again, thanks.'
'I feared it was our poor sergeant over again. You had such a jolly bad look a moment ago; hadn't he, Barbara?'
Barbara said nothing.
'But look here; don't be in such a hurry, if you're all right!' Lovatt caught hold of the bridle. 'We two are going to picnic at the selection. Join us. Since you know Barbara—a rum coincidence that—you won't mind? And as for us, we shall be delighted; sha'n't we, Barbara?'
Again Barbara did not speak.
'Come and make up a jolly party, and blow the proverb!' said Levant persuasively.
Whitty vaulted into the saddle, with another grating laugh, and rode off without so much as a thank-you.
Higher up the street, in the alcoholic region, he met one of his own kind, a trooper, but on foot, and in full uniform. He was the poor sergeant's temporary substitute, and he and Whitty had met before. They stopped and conversed now. The man who was in uniform complained of the man who was not.
​'If you'd got the togs on,' he said, 'you might have been of some use, and seen me through, instead of playing the bloated civilian.'
'Then there aren't two men stationed here? Township duty must be pretty light duty if one's enough.'
'It is; but not at Christmas,' grumbled the war-paint man. 'You might have seen a fellow through.'
Trooper Whitty regretted he couldn't and went on to say he was particularly anxious that no one there should know he was Trooper Whitty. Trooper Whitty had been ass enough to make himself notorious, but, oddly enough, had not the least wish to get drunk at the expense of Timber Town. The other trooper made promises accordingly, and claimed to be rendering good for evil.
Whitty rode on, and put up his horse at Burns's Royal Hotel, one of the slightly less disreputable establishments. Already there was a good deal of advanced drunkenness there. Seth had never been a drinking man, but the sight of the men lying serenely senseless in the shade filled him with a sudden, passionate ​envy. They had forgotten their troubles, those happy wretches. The means lay handy for drowning his trouble too. A savage craving came over him, and held him one hellish minute. He conquered it, and strode alone into the breathless solitude of the surrounding forest.
First the township was left behind; then all its sounds, and there were no sounds at all save the chattering of parrots, the murmuring of leaves, and the swish of Whitty's legs through the ferns and long rank grass. The latter sound was exchanged from time to time for a ringing tread on the dry bed of a creek or in odd spots where the ground was hard and flinty; but the swift restless footsteps never ceased. What was more peculiar, Whitty never raised his eyes from the ground—never directed his steps by one moment's reflection. He was reflecting, indeed, but of the dead past that had died that day. The present was nothing to him; the future, which until to-day had been all in all to him, was less than nothing to him now. But what was all over now had never been so dear to him. When the body is newly dead, and even more beautiful than it seemed ​in life, it is sweet to linger by it, to muse upon it, to remember all: and it is sometimes thus with events and time.
The shadows of the tall trees, drawn out until there was no room for their full length on the ground, climbed the trunks of other trees and leapt the bodies of the fallen, overlapping and interlacing in labyrinthine complexity. Here and there the level sun-rays cut the forest like a flaming sword, and the high lights and deep shadows might have embarrassed any one who happened to be walking anywhere in particular. But any direction was Seth's direction; he cared nothing where his wandering led him. If he thought of it at all no doubt he made up his mind that he could not lose himself, simply because for once he wasn't anxious not to loss himself. But it is more probable that, during most of that long afternoon, he was mentally unconscious of the bodily exertions he was making. Yet his clothes were heavy with perspiration, and for some time before sundown he had been tramping steadily up-hill.
At last, quite late, when the sun was setting, ​Whitty stumbled across a blue-gum newly felled. He went on and came to another, at which he looked up, and there, straight in front of him, was Lovatt's tent. He had come in a circle right round to Lovatt's selection. The rough downward track ran twenty yards below.
Seth smiled bitterly. His unconsidered wandering seemed to show the guidance of a malignant fate, now that it had led him here. He stood still, and inspected the spot grimly. There were the traces of the lovers' picnic, the white ashes of the fire still hot, and the air above it tremulous. Here they had sat, hand in hand, on this smooth round trunk. These nodding sapplings had heard their whispers, their tender tank, their lovers' sighs. Seth stepped over to the place, and sat down where they had sat, with a strange cold-blooded complacency. It did not move him to sit there, lonely and humiliated: so, then, nothing could move him any more, and the jangling of their wedding-bells would fall quite peacefully upon his ears.
His foot touched a book that lay in the long ​grass, a book they must have forgotten, with the nice, becoming forgetfulness of true lovers. He picked up the book and opened it: it was poetry; he did not look to see whose poetry. He shut the book and laid it on the trunk beside him; there was no poetry in Seth. He rested his elbows upon his knees, and his temples between his hands. The short sharp twilight set in. Seth did not move. Had his attitude been but a thought more comfortable, you would have said that the soft continuous rustling of the leaves all around him had lulled him to sleep; only in that ease he would not have detected so instantly a rustle of a different kind—the rustle of a dress.
He did detect it instantly, and looked quickly up, and Barbara Lyon, in her cool white dress and wide straw sombrero, stood calmly before him; and, as if her calmness were not enough, a smile of friendliness and of sweet unconcern stole slowly over her face.
'My book,' said she.
He got up and gave it to her, and did not sit down again, nor walk away, but stood gravely peering into her blue eyes, until they ​flinched and fell, and Barbara blushed a lively crimson. She drew away from him; then hesitated; then, with an unconcern which this time was but imperfectly reigned, she sat deliberately down upon the felled tree, and looked him fearlessly in the face.
'If you have anything to say to me,' said Barbara, 'say it here, and now. Of course I did not dream of finding you here; I came for the book I left. But now that we have met, I sha'n't run away.'
Nothing could have been colder than her tones. Seth stood before her, upright and grave—more grave than sad, Barbara was piqued to think.
'There is very little to be said, Barbara,' he answered her. 'There is a good deal to think over, quite calmly; there is a good deal for me to grasp, a good deal for me to——'
There he hesitated.
'To judge?'
'Ay, to judge.'
'And you will judge so hardly!'
'That will not hurt you.'
Barbara's heel went deep into the grass. ​She took off her great round hat and played nervously with the strings. The soft twilight fell on her with great purity, leaving neither line nor shadow from the undecided edge of her hair to the extremely decided curve of her chin. She raised her eyes.
'Now, Seth, be frank. Tell me candidly that you have not been thinking about me all these mouths—that you have not been counting upon me. You are hurt, you are mortified; but frankly, admit that you are not heart-broken?'
'You really want an answer?'
'Yes, I do.'
'Then I say that I have thought of you all these months, every day and every hour. As for counting, I am human; and until to-day I believed in things, so I have counted too. My feelings at the moment are beside the point; it is of no account whether I am hurt, or so on. But as for breaking my heart for you, it may seem unmannerly, but I shall not do it. I should also say that I shall not think about you much more.'
Barbara winced. Her heel sunk deeper in the ground. Her eyes flashed.
​'Is this all you have to say?'
'I said it wouldn't be much.'
'Then I may go?'
'I never asked you to stop.'
Barbara turned white with anger, rose up, and went. Seth raised his wideawake; she took no notice. He stood watching her until she reached the road, and the trees and the gloaming hid her from him; she never looked round—he could scarcely have expected that.
When he knew that she was quite gone, and that this was the last of her in his life, something seemed to strike and shake him to the core. A shiver went through his frame. He tottered to the felled tree, sat down there once more, and buried his face in his hands. It had been quite dark for some time when he got up. And the hard palms of his hands were wet.
His bearing in Barbara's presence had been very different.
It was seven in the morning when Trooper Whitty got back to the lonely little barracks in the ranges. The sergeant ran into the ​verandah with the soapsuds on his chin, razor in hand.
'What on earth brings you back at this hour? You must have heard!'
'Heard what?'
'Your own good luck. I congratulate you—Sergeant Seth Whitty!'
Whitty stared like a feel.
'You're promoted,' the other sergeant went on. 'I told you they'd take the first opportunity, and they've taken it. You're to be sergeant, and sole boss of the show—for they don't need two there—at Timber Town. What's wrong? Isn't it good enough? You look like death, mate!'
Seth tumbled out of the saddle and stood just outside the verandah, shaking.
'I can't go there!' he said in a low hollow voice. 'Anywhere else, but not there. I'll leave the force!'
Certainly his bearing before Barbara had been very, very different.
III
Of course Seth Whitty did not leave the Mounted Police, and of course he went to Timber Town, as sergeant, in the end. He was the last man to obey on calm reflection the impulse of a craven moment. At the same time, the calmest reflection could not deny that Timber Town, in the circumstances, held out a prospect of personal discomfort such as a man might well be justified in shirking; and Whitty went there with set teeth and a heart of lead.
Timber Town made a fuss about him, but not the fuss it would have made at Christmas. It was a reactionary period: the New Year was just in; Timber Town had a headache: so Whitty got off cheaply. It was not the only respect in which he was to get off cheaply. For weeks and weeks he had nothing at all to do. Timber Town showed its high appreciation of his professional parts (as exemplified in the fate of Red Jim) by a temporary lapse into respectability; so that offences worth troubling about were unheard of, and even ​common assault became the most uncommon thing in the district. They were slack weeks at the barracks. With the schoolmistress's love affair going on under his nose, the weeks were something worse than slack for Seth. Now, had the authorities only sent some one else to Timber Town, Seth would have been spared all this, while the other fellow might have filled up his odd half hours very agreeably with Lovatt and Barbara. If a student of human nature, he never need have been dull; the characters of this pair were so well worth looking into.
Any one but Seth would have begun by making friends with his little neighbour the schoolmistress—of whom Seth had made an enemy on Christmas Day. He would have admired her greatly, and without danger or reservation, seeing she was already engaged; he would have admired above all things her pluck and spirit in coming out into the world to work for her own living, though not more than Seth did, who knew the circumstances. He would have discovered in her all the sweetest attributes of woman, and some masculine little traits ​as well. Only—he would have found her a coquette. Any one but Seth, it is to be feared, would have found her a dire and a mischievous coquette—and the worst one in that she had fallen too desperately in love with Jack Lovett to work off her coquetries any more upon him. To Sergeant Seth (though one would think he might have known by this time what Barbara was) this experience was denied at present for a very simple reason: he was barely on bowing terms with the schoolmistress.
As for Jack Lovett, he would have afforded a still more entertaining study, though one that required a key. The key to Lovatt's character was his past life. You would not have thought it of the energetic young bushman, but he was a gilded youth, with the gilt gone. Eton had expelled this free-selector; Christ Church had sent him down; at twenty his character had been too bad to be permissible in any commoner. Jack was only the son of successful public man, and not even his heir; in him such conduct was intolerable. You have no idea what a devil of a fellow he was at twenty. Yet at that very time the fellow was in love. ​A double crisis ensued. The girl gave up Jack for some one else, who was not going to the deuce, but in quite the contrary direction—got engaged, in fact, to her uncle's curate; and, contemporaneously, Jack's father cut him off with a thousand and closed the doors upon him.
So Lovatt came out to Australia. On the voyage he saw his follies in the plain light of reflection, and brooded fiercely over what he had lost, but railed at his family. And the first thing he did in Melbourne was to take a few letters that were awaiting him, slip them unopened into a big envelope, and post them home with his initials. Then he went to Whittlesea (a fellow-passenger gave him the introduction), and was quiet there. He was quieter still in the far interior. Gradually he came to forget, more than to regret; but before that, he had made up his mind never to return to England, and had dismissed that thought finally. So he did not hanker for home, as some exiles do. On the other hand, he fell in love with bush life. Moreover, he became a highly respectable member of bush society; in spite of those occasional months ​in Melbourne, his moral colour toned down to a decent drab; and ultimately young Lovatt saved some money and determined to 'select.' His selection went rather farther than he had intended it to go; it so very soon included Barbara.
Lovatt was five-and-twenty now, and ciently attractive still; his attractiveness had been the ruin of him in England. He had hair like Byron's; nor was his hair the only point in which he plagiarised from that poet: one need not name them all; one need only mention that he was addicted by turns to infectious high spirits and a peculiarly winning form of melancholy. It was when the latter fit was on him that he met Barbara, and told her his story, omitting the love episode. Between them they substituted a new episode of a similar nature. There was plenty of intensity about this one too. Barbara, especially, was quite ridiculously in love; and Lovatt possessed the very qualities to keep her in love: thorough-going masculine selfishness, and a command of others which was as strong as his self-command had been weak.
Sergeant Whitty, during his first weeks at ​Timber Town, saw a good deal of Lovatt, and, as has been indicated, next to nothing of Barbara. To the sergeant's thinking, the Colonies, and the Colonies alone, had made a man of Lovatt; and, allowing for Colonial bias, there is no doubt that the sergeant was mainly right. Certainly Lovatt had roughed it a good deal, and that is always improving. His English conceit (Seth called it 'English') was, at least, no longer conspicuous: those English mannerisms which, in the new chum, had been so very offensive to Colonial Seth, were invisible in the energetic selector. Yet the young fellow's charm of manner remained, and this was considerable; it had made even the new chum popular, and popular even in the hush. It was not difficult to conceive how Barbara had been fascinated by this young man; Seth was fascinated himself. Seth should have hated him; but it was impossible to hate the fellow. Seth came nearest to hating him when he fancied (as he sometimes did fancy, from little things) that Lovatt did not value Barbara quite as he ought.
Theoretically, it is better that you should ​not think a girl perfection just because you are in love with her, but there is generally something wrong somewhere if you don't. Perfection had once been too weak a word for Seth's estimation of Barbara. Unfortunately it was so still. But it was not a word that would have occurred to Lovatt There was something wrong somewhere.
Lovatt worked hard and heartily on selection, clearing the ground and preparing the site for the homestead; Barbara was happily at work in school; their spare hours they spent together. It was only the sergeant who was idle, and lonely, and sad.
Seth was no reader, so hooks could not help him through. Nor had he ever been a particularly sociable follow; so the verandah of Royal Hotel had no attractions for him. occupied himself during the first week or two by setting his house and garden in order; but the garden, unfortunately, had been very well cared for by his predecessor, so there was no lasting labour there: and crime was still scarce. At length came a regular inspiration. Whitty offered to lend a hand at the selection, and the ​offer was accepted. Here he toiled the harder of the two. A craving for Barbara's good opinion lent him feverish energy, for it was an odd fact that what had principally troubled Seth of late weeks was the haunting recollection of that uncomfortable interview with Barbara on Christmas Day. He was ashamed of his part in it. Not only did the memory of it prey upon him, but Barbara's cold looks reminded him of it whenever he saw her. If he had only kept her for his friend! As it was, she let him slave out there at her future home without rewarding him by so much as a smile. So at last he gave that up too, and sank into deeper dejection than ever. He gnashed his teeth over the continued law-abiding character of Timber Town, and yearned for another Red Jim to rise up and depredate the neighbourhood.
No such luck was in store; but an exciting thing did happen one evening in February. It was late, and the sergeant was smoking gloomily in his front verandah, when it all came about very suddenly. It began with a single sound: the sergeant just heard it, and it tightened ​every constabulary nerve; it was a woman's short, stifled cry of alarm.
The sergeant bounded out of the verandah, and crouched an instant to listen and to draw his revolver. In that instant the cry was repeated, still more faintly, but he knew now that it came from a back room in the schoolhouse, and from Barbara's lips. He leapt two fences and was in the school verandah in three seconds. The door was locked. He tried it with his shoulder; it would not yield. Barbara's cry came again. Then Seth stood back a yard and brought his flat foot with full force against the door right over the keyhole. The door flew in. Seth followed. A light came from under a door at the far end of the passage. Seth ran down the passage and opened this door upon a curious scene.
The room was a sitting-room—Barbara's sanctum, in fact; and at the far side of it, under the window, Barbara was sitting at a little round work-table, with her work-basket not twenty inches from her dilated eyes, and a brown snake rearing itself out of the work-basket.
Barbara never took her eyes from the snake ​when the door opened. The sergeant saw that she was paralysed with fright. Therefore the first thing he did was to say three words in a confident whisper:
'He's not deadly!'
But Barbara did not scorn to hear.
Whitty was a fine shot with a revolver. But the snake was in a dead straight line between his hand and Barbara's bosom, picked out sharply against her loose white blouse, like a shadow on a screen. Whitty shifted his revolver to the left hand, crept forward with his right extended, and forefinger and thumb forming the capital letter C—pinched the snake just below the head in this forceps, and whisked it like lightning through the window.
Barbara glanced up in his face one instant; then she lay back in her chair and burst out sobbing.
The sergeant went away and conscientiously despatched the snake. When he had killed it to his entire satisfaction, having smashed the vertebræ in seven different places, he stood for a moment in indecision. A faint voice came to his rescue, calling him to the window.
​'Sergeant Whitty!'
Barbara leant in silhouette across the sill. Seth went up to the window.
'You are very, very brave—and foolish,' she murmured. 'I don't know what to say to you. Thanks will not do.'
'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 whole​some 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 neigbbours; 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 fellows 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, yea 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 it—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 bleed. 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:
'! 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, miserables 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 globe-trotting. 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 toward 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 outbalanced 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 moan 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 everwhere, 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 fews 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 stanch 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.
​They had been discussing poor Barbara rather freely, but very far from unkindly.
'Mrs. Waters,' Annie said, 'shall I tell you a secret?'
'If you like, my dear. You know I can keep a secret. But I don't ask you to tell me nothing.' Mrs. Waters was old and guarded.
'Well, but I must! It mustn't go no further, and I know it won't; but I can't keep it to myself no longer. Did you ever guess that my mistress and your sergeant was acquainted before?'
'Are you sure?' cried Mrs. Waters.
'Positive. Two years ago.'
Mrs. Waters threw up her hands. 'That accounts for everything!'
'For what?'
'For his pacing the room, or the verandy, one or t'other, till all hours, night after night—for a hundred other things—for goodness knows what all! You mean he was in love with her?'
Annie nodded.
'Mark my words, then, Annie: he's in love with her still, but too honourable to speak it! ​And he as fine a man as ever walked: and she going throwing her heart away on a villain that's cleared out and left her!'
What Mrs. Waters went on to say there is no need to record. She inveighed vehemently against the idiocy of women generally, and that of Barbara in particular, and worked herself into such a temper that Barbara's servant began to regret having said anything at all. And from that day the sergeant had the old woman's eyes upon him. She noted his moodiness, his depression, the growing shortness of his temper. The latter failing only drew from her daintier dishes than the sergeant had ever before enjoyed at his housekeeper's hands. But the sergeant was not to be comforted in this way. It would have been some comfort to him if the State school had been swept away by the floods, and he had had the rescuing of Barbara It would have been an inexpressible consolation to the sergeant to have got at Jack Lovatt in some lonely place and torn him to pieces: he would have gone exultant to the gallows after that. But the floods did no important damage at Timber Town; ​and the scoundrel Lovatt was, no doubt, safe in England, though no one knew for certain; and nothing short of the heroic or the outrageous could have afforded the smallest satisfaction to Sergeant Seth now.
The sergeant saw Barbara often enough, but seldom said much to her, and, when he did, never mentioned Lovatt's name—that is, never after Lovatt ceased writing; and he only wrote once on the voyage—never afterwards. But one day, when the floods were over, the sergeant came across her suddenly, and she asked him without preamble:
'Do you think he is dead?'
'No, I don't,' said Seth bluntly.
'Your reason—?'
'I am having the English papers searched, week by week, in Melbourne.'
Her eyes filled with tears. 'How good you are! Will you keep on having them searched, please? And will you tell me the moment you hear anything?'
'I will.'
'Anything, mind!'
'I promise.'
​The weeks went on—without one word.
Barbara began to live it down. Her expression became sweet, and sad, and gentle—but brave. Had you seen her now you never could have believed that this frail, meek woman had delighted but lately in cruel coquetry; and, indeed, the coquette was dead. The cross schoolmistress was dead, too. The scholars took home glowing accounts of the new Barbara: she never scolded them now; on the contrary, she was making school a far less odious thing than it had ever been before; she had even taken to reading story-books aloud, after lessons, to those who liked to stay. But one day one little boy went home with a sad tale, and cried in telling it. It was a Sunday afternoon; he had been out nesting, and, in striking down to the road, had chanced to cross Lovatt's clearing; and there, seated upon an old, moss-covered, felled tree, he had found Miss Lyon, weeping as though her heart would break. She had called him to her, and kissed him, and made him promise not to tell a soul But he couldn't help telling his mother, and his mother chanced to be the ​kind soul who had been the first to send the eggs and things; she sent spring flowers the very next day; and promised her boy a thrashing and a half if he told another soul what he had told her.
That was in September. A week or two later Seth made a delightful discovery: Barbara had taken once more to practising the harmonium in the little church. She had never given up playing it at service, but she had given up practising, which would have been plain enough to a more musical audience. Of old she had practised very often indeed, for love of it. Many a time, during his first weeks at Timber Town, Seth had sat in his verandah and sadly listened to the sweet strains stealing across the broad, quiet road. He heard those strains, for the first time after an interval of months, one evening as he rode home from a neighbouring township. He cantered across to the church, and sat outside in his saddle until the music ceased and Barbara came out. Then Seth dismounted, and crossed the road by Barbara's side, leading his horse. Barbara seemed cheerful, and Seth, ​who was never mirth-provoking, combed out his wits to amuse her, and to hear her sweet laughter once more. He almost succeeded: Barbara did smile; but before they separated her face changed, and sad eyes asked a question that was never spoken now.
Seth shook his head. There was no news yet. Barbara drooped, and went into her house with heavy steps.
And the very next day the news came.
The people in Melbourne who were searching the English papers for Whitty sent him a London evening paper with the following small paragraph framed in red ink:
'A marriage has been arranged to take place early next year between Mr. John A. Lovatt, of Durley Hall, near Norwich, and Castle Auchen, N.B., and Laura, daughter of Major-General Ralph Eliot, R.H.A.'
Seth read it in his verandah while the bell was ringing for afternoon school, and the school-children were straggling past. The news must have had some visible effect upon him, of which he was unconscious, for the children turned round and stared at him Of ​this he did become conscious, and turned hastily into the house. But the paper had slipped from his fingers the moment the marked paragraph was read; the wind caught it (it was the first hot-wind day of that spring), and, as chance had it, the paper was whisked out of the verandah and fell at the feet of the most incorrigible little boy in the school. This small savage appropriated the paper, folded it small, and carried it into school for surreptitious perusal, while the sergeant played the caged tiger up and down the long-suffering carpet of his room.
The news had come at last, and it was no worse than Seth had anticipated; indeed, he had looked with confidence to receiving sooner or later the announcement of Lovatt's marriage. He knew all about Laura Eliot, you see; and five years ago he had told Lovatt—from what Lovatt told him—that he shouldn't be surprised if that engagement with the curate never came to anything. Nor did Whitty think any worse of Lovatt because of this news than he had already thought of him for his heartless behaviour; that, indeed, would have been impossible. What troubled the ​sergeant now had no reference to Lovatt; it had all to do with Barbara The news had come; the news must be broken. It was the second time Seth had been compelled to break a blow to Barbara, but then last time Barbara had been a very different woman, one infinitely better able to bear bad tidings. He was seriously considering what use, if any, the motherly Waters might be to him in the present case, and whether the risk of ill consequences was sufficient to justify his taking a third party into Barbara's affairs, when, in a blank moment, he missed the paper.
He hastened back into the verandah; but the paper was not there. He ran out into the road; not a sign of it was to be seen. It had been blown away, then, but how far? Where to? Just then Seth would have given his earthly possessions to have prevented that paper, with its flaming red-inked paragraph, from falling into other hands.
As he stood irresolute, and in despair, there was a sound of commotion in the schoolhouse hard by; the school poured out pell-mell; Seth was surrounded by white, frightened faces.
​'Sergeant, make haste!' shrill voices screamed in his ears. 'Teacher's dead!'
Seth scattered them right and left, and was in the schoolroom in a twinkling. At the same moment Annie, the maid, burst in by another door.
The benches were empty—not a child had remained; and, on the raised platform at the end of the room, Barbara lay lifeless. Seth ran across the desks, sprang upon the platform, and knelt beside her. Annie stood shrieking at the door, until the sergeant looked up and reviled her.
'You idiot! She has only fainted. Fetch Mrs. Waters.' And he lowered her head gently upon the boards, so that it should lie no higher than the rest of her, and fanned her face with both hands.
The young woman returned with the old one.
'She is coming to,' said the sergeant quietly, still kneeling and fanning. 'Which is her room? Lead the way, one of you.'
He lifted her tenderly in his arms, and followed Annie. A moment later he had laid ​poor Barbara on her own cool little bed, and left her to the women; but he had seen her eyes half open, and breath parting her pale lips: life was coming back.
On his way through the schoolroom he picked up what he had noticed the moment he saw Barbara lying senseless—his missing paper.
The whole school, to a child, were huddled together at the gate, with white expectant faces. Their uniform expression changed when they saw the sergeant. There was a look in his eyes that frightened them; besides, he was the police-sergeant. Not one of them dared to run. Seth shook the paper in their faces, and inquired—in the voice of an ogre—how it had come into Miss Lyon's hands. I regret to say that the Incorrigible was pushed forward with the utmost promptitude; and that the others, who all spoke at once, made unbecoming haste to explain how 'teacher' had caught him reading the paper, confiscated it, put it on her own desk, and immediately—without a word--fallen flat upon the floor.
Seth looked more the ogre than ever, but held the culprit with his eye only.
​'You stole the paper from my verandah—eh?'
'It b-b-blew out, sir!'
'Why didn't you blow it in again?'
No answer; tears; on the part of the others, preparations for fun—but not, most likely, for what took place. For the sergeant marched off that brat to the barracks, and clapped him into the prisoners' cell; and his schoolfellows heard the bolts drawn with horrible clangs, and slunk away in terror. It was a sufficiently high-handed proceeding, no doubt; though the incarceration lasted only an hour; and though it was from this hour that the young savage's parents (who thanked Seth with tears in their eyes) afterwards came (one hopes not prematurely) to date his reformation.
But Barbara was lying like death upon her bed.
VII
While Barbara Lyon lay senseless in the schoolroom at Timber Town, Australia, Jack Lovatt, in his bed at Castle Auchen, N.B., ​dreamed a disquieting dream. It must be remembered that, though the Australian time was between two and three in the afternoon, in Scotland it was about five o'clock in the early morning.
It was an emphatically bad dream. The Laird (Jack was the Laird at Auchen, and the Squire in Norfolk) eame downstairs looking haggard and even haunted. This was the more annoying because the Laird's fiancée had arrived from London the previous evening. To add to the annoyance (though here one adds effect to cause), he shot execrably all day, and caught the gillies smiling. Up on the moors that day they had a champagne luncheon (planned overnight), the ladies joining the shooters; but Jack was not Jack at all. His mother and sister, and some others of the party (mostly a family party), studied Laura's manner towards him for an explanation; but her manner was all that they, in Jack's place, could have desired. In point of fact, Laura was as deeply mystified as they were, and her grievance was infinitely greater.
That evening Laura's grievance became ​really grave; for after dinner she took her banjo and gently fingered it on the gray shingly drive; but Jack never strolled out with his cigarette, as he had done the previous evening—as she quite thought he would do every evening; yet he must have heard. Laura stole at last to the billiard-room window; and Jack was there, playing pool with the other men. He played pool with the horrid men until long after she had gone to bed and cried herself to sleep. Then at last Jack crept up to bed himself, but never slept a wink; billiards and brandy-and-soda had done simply nothing for him.
Next morning he looked a wreck, but in Laura's face there was calm determination. Hers was a pale, pretty, delicate face; but there was plenty of character in it. The eyes were dark and frank, the hair black and swept up clear of the forehead, the head most shapely, fitly crowning a slim, firm, graceful figure. And all that day Laura was even more erect than usual, and her head was held higher, and the glance of her eyes was braver and bolder than ever. But in the evening ​she took her banjo out into the night as before.
It was a warm night for October in Scotland, and there was a luminous moon. Laura wrapped a knitted nothing over her little head and around her shoulders, and felt perfectly prudent. She stole once more to the billiard-room window. The men were behaving themselves better to-night; more had gone to the drawing-room; there was no pool. Only two men were playing a common hundred, and Jack was sitting in an opposite corner by another window, looking gloomily on.
Laura tripped round to that window, and struck up a nigger melody—the silliest, prettiest little thing in the world. Jack, taken by surprise, looked out.
'It's a heavenly night,' Laura whispered. 'Come out quickly, you queer, melancholy Jack!'
He hesitated a moment, and then did go out—by the window.
'Play me something,' he said, and stuck his hands deep into his trousers pockets. She complied sweetly.
​The moon shone, the banjo tinkled, the soft wind sighed through the firs. The pair strolled slowly side by side, Laura playing softly. Suddenly and unexpected]y, when they were far down the drive, she whipped the banjo under her arm, half turned, and stood still.
'Jack!'
'Well?'
'Tell me what it is.'
'What what is?'
'Oh, you must know! Your trouble, your wretched looks, your silence—the way you have avoided me these two days. Jack, darling, tell me what it is: tell me what it all means!'
She pressed forward and clung to his arm. His face was raised to the moon, the curly hair thrown back from the forehead; face and forehead were wrung and wrinkled with pain.
'I cannot!' he groaned—'I cannot!'
She drew back. 'Jack, if it has to do with me—with your love for me—'
'It has not! No—do not touch me again. I am not fit for you to touch. Oh, Laura! I am a liar and a villain!'
​'I shall never, never believe it!'
'Then I must tell you everything. Can you bear it?'
'I can bear anything but your silence, Jack.'
They walked side by side in the moonlight, very, very slowly; but their shadows on the shingly drive went wider and wider apart. Often he paused; but she put in no word, no syllable, until the whole shameful tale was told.
'Is that all?'
' Yes.'
'You have kept back nothing?'
'I swear I have told you the worst.'
'Ah!'—a deep sad sigh—'well, I was hasty to say I never could believe you a coward or a villain; for I am afraid you have been both.'
Her voice was very sad, but equally firm.
'I know it! I own it!' said Lowatt in a low, husky tone. 'No one knows except myself the mean despicable cur I have been. Yet it seems hard to hear it from your lips—you that have bewitched me so! I swear, ​until two nights ago, I was bewitched! I seemed to have forgotten her, and my life out there, completely, utterly. But then I dreamt of her—dreamt I saw her dead! And now she haunts me, now that it is too late. For what can one do after so long?'
'Leave me a little; then I will try to tell you. I cannot think—in your presence.'
He moved on, bowed and broken, and leaned over the plain wooden gate at the entrance to the drive. It might have been a moment later or an hour—he never knew—when she touched him on the shoulder.
'Will you do what I tell you?'
He bowed submissively. It touched her to see him so sadly humbled, and all at once, before her stronger will. Her own power rose up before her, and frightened her. With calm, strong, spiritual effort she nerved herself to use this will of hers for once as her conscience ordered and her heart forbade.
'Will you go back to her?' The words came in a tremulous whisper; but the tremor was only the vibration of taut, resolute nerves.
When he had bowed his promise (for though ​his lips moved, no words left them), and when thus it was all over, a greater calmness, and with it a chill dread feeling, came over this strong-minded girl.
'I tell you to go back to her,' she said, speaking quite steadily now. 'Go back to her at once. Leave England within a fortnight, at latest, from now. This will be easy; we are all in our last week here; and you and I must act a part until my father telegraphs for me, which must be to-morrow. Then you go back to her, and all is over for ever between you and me. You may find her dead; but between us two all, all is over. All is over!'
Her dress whispered as she turned and went. The tall trees on either side the drive whispered too; and their dewy leaves, quivering in the moonlight, shimmered like phosphorus on a dark and tranquil sea. Over the gate the black hills cut into the moonlit sky as though heaven and hell touched one another; above, the stars were shining like the eyes of angels; below, the fir-trees sighed and sobbed like the spirits of the lost.
VIII
One night some two months later, a night of intense darkness and of intolerable heat, a young man tramped into Timber Town from the south. He did not carry the 'swag' of the common traveller, nor were his clothes bushman's clothes. He wore a suit of some thin light material, and a pith helmet; yet, for all this, he seemed to know every inch of the way.
His tactics indicated a desire to glide swiftly through the township without either stopping or being stopped, if possible without being seen. He took the very centre of the broad straggling street, and showed in this a nice judgment, for the night was so thick that from neither side of the street could one see half-way across it. But the flaring hotel verandahs on either side were plain enough from the middle of the road, and not only could the traveller hear the sounds of revelry issuing from them—for these had been audible for the last half-mile—but he distinguished some of the voices, and caught scraps of the ​high-toned conversations. In what was generally known (though not from its sign-board) as the 'opposition shanty,' they were talking politics—Colonial politics, and in that instance tipsy ones. In the verandah of the Royal, however, a more practical discussion was on foot—on the ringing of the Timber Town church-bells. One roysterer wanted to ring them at twelve o'clock—it was then 11.40—while another objected on traditional grounds. The latter said the good old English custom was to ring in the New Year, but not Christmas; the former ridiculed the notion that old English customs should obtain, unchallenged, in the bush; and this one, who was the more fluent swearer of the two, and had all the popular arguments on his side, seemed to have a majority of roysterers with him.
'The ringers win—it's odds on them,' said the new arrival; and he hurried noiselessly on.
He was soon in the region of the little iron church for whose bell-ropes those roysterers' fingers were itching. The church was invisible in the opaque darkness; but the traveller ​knew well enough where it was. The State school and the police barracks, on the other side of the road, were also invisible, at least their outlines were; but faint lights revealed their whereabouts.
The mysterious visitor now left the middle of the road, skirted the police-barrack fence, and came—with steps that all at once became halting and unsteady—to the school gate; and there he paused, and started backward with his hand upon the latch.
Barbara was seated in the verandah, leaning forward, her head bowed and her hands clasped. Seth Whitty bent over her.
'You know how I have waited,' he was pleading—and dignity and humility jostled each other in his deep manly tones; 'how long I have loved you, how hopelessly once, how deeply all through. You must know that what I profess is at least true.'
'I know that. Oh, I know that so well!'
'Yet you still refuse me.'
'No, no. I say, give me time. Do not count upon me; never again count upon a woman.'
​'And I have said I will give you until we both are gray!'
'It shall not be so long as that, if it is to be at all,' said Barbara gently; 'only do not count.'
They were both silent. Seth disturbed the eloquent silence most rudely by flying incontinent]y to the gate, where he stood motionless in a listening attitude.
'What was it?' Barbara called to him.
'I heard something.'
'Can you see anything?'
'Nothing. The night is like pitch. But I feel certain—'
At that moment the bells rang forth, and unholy shouts came with the clangour from the iron church over the way. Seth came back to the verandah.
'It was those men that you heard,' said Barbara.
'I don't think it was; it seemed like footsteps quite near, and I thought some one touched the latch. But it doesn't matter now; for it's Christmas morning—Christmas again, Barbara! And I wish you a very happy ​Christmas, and—and I will wait as long as you like!'
He pressed her band and dropped it: he took her hand again, and raised it reverently to his lips.
Those merry souls tugged at the bell-ropes until they were tired, and that was not immediately. But before the wild ringing ceased the solitary mysterious pedestrian had retraced his steps rather better than a mile. None knew his coming nor his going; and the single street of Timber Town never saw him more.
the end
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh