# The Poet of Jumping Sandhills

Extracted from "Scribner's" magazine, 1911, pp. 326-336. Accompanying illustrations by Howard Giles omitted.
THE POET OF JUMPING SANDHILLS
By E. W. Hornung
OLIVE was not to know it from the outward character of her reception, which maintained the best traditions of bush hospitality, but there had been a fairly strong prejudice against her on the station. It was no fault of hers, but a vicarious reproach which a very little knowledge of the girl herself sufficed to remove. Yet the inauspicious fact remained that her brother had been there before her, not as a guest, but in a somewhat responsible position in which he had failed to give signal satisfaction. It was many years ago, in Olive's childhood, but Philip Armitage had been writing bush stories ever since, with that station and its mighty paddocks for the unmistakable background of the often impudent picture. In the silly Old Country he was said to be taken quite seriously as a representative Australian writer. If so, as Mr. Pochin averred, "it was about time those colonies paddled their own canoe"; but he and his at any rate knew the fellow for what he had been as a beardless boy in their midst. It was like his nerve to write and tell them when his young sister was going out for her health, which he described as having broken down after the strain of working for her B. A. degree. Ladies with B. A. degrees, with or without brothers who put people into books, were not wanted on Meringul Station, N. S. W. But after such a letter some little attention was the geographical necessity of an irksome situation. And so it came that Olive Armitage penetrated to the Riverina, in response to a justifiably indefinite invitation, and in happy ignorance of the literary and scholastic shadow that she cast before her.
Indeed, she had never felt prouder of her brother than on the journey, to her a triumphal progress through scenes that seemed almost as much his handiwork as that of "nature learning how to write." All through Victoria there were his forests of "weird" gum-trees, amply justifying their inseparable epithet, and in the Murray region the train put up a perfect cloud of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These were not Philip's favorite scenes or properties but he had written about them more than once. It was when she reached the coaching stage, from Denliquin to Hay and from Hay to Jumping Sandhills, that Miss Armitage felt like one of her brother's heroines. To be sure, no dandy bushranger stuck up the coach; but that "vermilion vehicle" duly "panted" on its leather springs, as described by Philip with somewhat cynical iteration. And the road-side shanties were all that he had painted them; the Jumping Sandhills did shimmer and change places, like living things, on the brazen and blue horizon; and there at last was one of Philip's own dilapidated horsemen, a figure of tantalizing interest, because there also was a tiresomely smart young man, come to meet her in an equally smart buggy, and introducing himself unconstrainedly as Godfrey Pochin.
"I remember your brother perfectly," said the young man, smiling at the long tails of the pair he drove. "I was one of his pupils. He taught us Latin grammar and sentences, and a lot of extraordinary rhymes about Latin genders. I remember some of them still, but I can't say they come in extra handy in the back-blocks."
Olive laughed quite heartily.
"Poor old boy, he had only just escaped from school himself," she urged in Philip's defence; "he was obliged to teach you something he knew!"
But she was greatly tickled, and Godfrey Pochin as pleasantly surprised as he had been by her merry interesting face and sparkling eyes. She was dark, too, and he had an idea that all the girls from Home were pink and yellow; the only difference between this one and a bush brunette was that Olive had not been sunburnt from the cradle, but had turned the very color of her own name without losing her sweet English purity of skin. Neither was she quite blinded by the reflected lustre of her brother's notoriety. She could see the humor of some of Godfrey's reminiscences, the new point of view of Philip's stories. The point of view was not obtruded, so her loyal reserves were not called out in defence of the stories, nor her lips sealed on the subject of their local color.
"It's all exactly as I pictured it," she declared at the station itself: "this red-brick veranda, these white posts, those other little buildings—the wire fences and the crows—the corrugated roofs—there! That's the very noise he says they make in the heat! There's only one thing he seems to me wrong about, but he should really be forgiven much for that—because I haven't met a single one of his characters!"
This was when they were all at tea. There was a slightly chilling pause.
"I don't think you'll meet them here," said Mr. Pochin, gazing into his cup. He was himself the fair-bearded and blue-eyed squatter of half the tales, but Olive did not see it till she had spoken, because the beard had grown gray and was close-cropped. But now she realized that Philip had never done justice to her courteous and attentive host.
"That wasn't what I meant," the girl colored up as she explained. "I was thinking of the picturesque people in red shirts and spurs, not of what he's pleased to call the parlor folk."
"That's good!" said Godfrey, encouraging her tentative smile with a broad grin. "That's one of the sayings that evidently sank into Mr. Armitage."
"I was thinking," insisted Olive, "of his little army of lost angels in the shape of gentlemanly whim-drivers, boundary-riders, and bushrangers."
"My whim-drivers and boundary-riders don't answer to that description," replied the squatter, laughing. "And as for bushrangers, Miss Armitage, the Kellys were the last authentic gang, and that was some years before your brother was out here."
"But surely you have the stockman and the tramp who have seen better days?"
"I've no doubt we have, but they don't always give it away for our benefit."
And the blue eyes twinkled merrily with the hit, at which Godfrey and Olive laughed outright.
"What about old Stafford?" asked Fred, an elder son of fewer words; and Mrs. Pochin and the girls, who began to wish they had been with Godfrey to meet the coach, remarked that they had just been thinking of old Stafford.
"To be sure!" cried Mr. Pochin. "He's the nearest thing of the kind we've got to show. I was forgetting Stafford. He's a poet."
"A poet?" queried Olive, politely sceptical. It was a word of which she thought she knew the value, and she could not help looking amused.
"When he isn't riding my boundaries or minding my sheep," said Mr. Pochin, chuckling consumedly. "Quite a character, Stafford; you must see him for yourself, and tell us what your brother would have made of him."
"We did see him, at the sandhills," Godfrey informed Miss Armitage and the company—"waiting for his Bulletin as usual."
He had no need to remind their visitor of the dilapidated horseman who had met the coach on his own account. Her single glimpse of him had appealed to Olive more than she cared to say in such civilized company, yet now her interest would have been greater if she had not seen him. That a poet! They all laughed at the serio-comic face that she made at the thought; for of course she was right, and those of them who had seen any of the lucubrations encouraged her dismay, while the laconic Fred found words to denounce the best of them as a barefaced imitation of Harvey Devlin. Poor Devlin, most mercurial of bush ballad-mongers, but a true singer in his own compass, still enjoyed a posthumous popularity in the bush itself, if not such universal fame as his indigenous admirers imagined; but it so happened that Olive Armitage, who thought she knew something about it, was a recent convert to their creed. She had bought the little selection of the real thing in Melbourne, and she wished to hear no more about the false. But here Godfrey had a word to say, and it was strangely in favor of the plagiarist and an early visit to his hut; in fact it so happened that Godfrey himself would have to be going out there next day, with some things the old man had been asking for that afternoon, and he seemed quite anxious to take Olive with him.
"You'll really rather like the old chap, Miss Armitage," said Godfrey. "He's a bit mad, but perfectly harmless, and I believe myself that he's only just missed being a genius. You should see all the extraordinary mad mottoes and things he's got plastered about the place!"
Olive saw them. They were stuck all over a hut otherwise as familiar to her as though she had been brought up in such another. She looked at once for the wide log chimney, with the white ash of ages on the hearth, the billy-can in the ashes, the slush-lamp on the Robinson Crusoe table, the ration-bags dependent from the beams; and for none of these things did she look in vain. The only feature not on Philip's list was the pencil jottings tacked like texts to the unbarked timbers, in place of the fly-blown oddments from illustrated papers which had invariably garnished that author's pet interior. The hut-keeper being out about his business, Olive lost no time in inspecting the scraps of dirty paper, to see what subjects the poor man was mad on; and Godfrey looked over her shoulder with a running chuckle.
"Poetry, of course!" said Godfrey.
And Olive read out below her breath:
"‘Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; then why
Should life all labor be?’"
"Poor fellow!" was her only comment, with a side glance into the outer radiance.
"That isn't Stafford's!" exclaimed Godfrey, emphatically.
"No, indeed, it isn't; and only one word wrong!"
Olive was looking about for books.
"I believe it's a bit your brother once gave us for dictation. I seem to remember that about the sky."
"Then he wasn't here in vain," said Olive, with a look of pleasure. It was a transitory look; the writing on the wall engrossed and troubled her. It was all of the same sort, remembered fragments of great verse, immortal images rescued practically intact from the ruins of ancient reading. The extracts ranged from a single line, as "In Tempe or the dales of Arcady," or "One day when all days are one day to me," to most of the second chorus in "Atalanta" and the opening couplets of "Locksley Hall." Olive read them all, only muttering an occasional line aloud, and Godfrey danced attendance with his eyes seldom off her dark crisp hair and clear sunburnt skin. She was so absorbed that he could look his fill at her for the first time. She knew how to dress, he noted; her white linen frock was crisp like her hair, as though hot from the iron; and yet he had never seen anybody look so cool and trim in the heat, or striking picture more tellingly composed than that of Olive in the languorous gloom of the bushman's hut, with a vertical sun still striking through stray holes in the roof, and breaking its lances on her snowy shoulders.
Godfrey was all the more disappointed and aggrieved when she turned to him in the end with glistening eyes.
"I must see something he's written himself," she whispered. "I can't think it can be as bad as you all say. And I don't believe in a man who remembers only the very best being such a slavish imitator of—Harvey Devlin!"
Godfrey rooted in a corner pink with copies of the Sydney Bulletin. In a few moments he unearthed a battered Shakepeare (who was not represented on the walls) and a quarto scribbling-book in debased American cloth.
"He keeps good company, you observe," said Godfrey, turning over the blue-lined leaves without compunction. "No, he won't mind, Miss Armitage. He's often shown me them himself."
"But that's not quite the same thing as your showing them to me," suggested Olive, whose eyebrows had already signified her qualms; but the protest went for nothing with the confident young man.
"Here's a new one, by Jove!" cried he. "I say, this is rather good; he must have written this when he knocked down his last check, at the New Year."
And there was no stopping him from reading every word of it aloud, with a marginal supply of his own remarks:
"‘There's a hut in Riverina where a solitary hand
May weaken on himself and all that's his;
There's a pub in Riverina where they keep a smashing brand
Of every sort o' liquor short o' fizz.
And I've been and blued another fifty-pounder at the pub—
You're very sorry for me, I'll be bound! But when a man is fit up free with hut an' horse an' grub,
What the blazes does he want with fifty pound?
Why the dickens should he hoard his fifty quid?
Who would be a bit the better if he did?
Though they slithered in a week
When I couldn't see or speak,
Do you think I'm here to squeak?
Lord forbid!’"
So the thing began; but Godfrey had stopped to explain that this was obviously the hut, and Stafford himself the "solitary hand." Olive seemed sorry to hear it; and quite contrary to expectation it was the reader who waxed enthusiastic as he proceeded, and the listener who grew lukewarm. In the next stanza it appeared that the reveller had been duly warned against the "pub in Riverina," which Godfrey offered to show Miss Armitage any day she liked:
"‘The boss was in the homestead. When he give me good advice
I took my oath, but took his check as well.
And to me the moonlit shanty looked a pocket Paradise,
Though the boss had just been calling it a Hell.’"
"You'll see which you think it," said Godfrey, "and what you make of the publican and sinner who runs the sink! He's hit him off to the life. Listen!" And he gabbled on to the titbit, only to give it with the greater unction:
"‘But the shanty-keeper smoked behind the bar.
Oh, his words were grave and few,
And he never looked at you,
And he just uncorked a new
Gallon jar.'
"I can see him doing it!" cried Godfrey. "But I must say I'd no idea old Stafford could do anything as good as this—if it's his own."
Olive found herself keenly hoping it was not, and thinking of the snatches of Keats and Tennyson on the walls. So she was fortunate enough to miss a little of what followed:
"‘We fed, and then we started in the bar at nine o'clock;
At twelve we made a move into the cool;
The shanty-keeper he was just as steady as a rock.
And me as paralytic as a fool.
I remember the veranda like a sinking vessel's deck.
And a brace of moons suspended in the sky—
And nothing more till waking and inquiring for my check——"
"Mr. Pochin!" interrupted Olive at this ultimate point.
"Well? What's wrong?"
"The whole thing. It's terrible!"
"It's jolly clever, if you ask me. I only want to know who really wrote it."
"I didn't mean that—not the verses as verses—but the complacent degradation of the thing itself!"
"I'm afraid that's just where it's so true to life," he answered, tuning his tone to hers. "I wish it wasn't, but it's only too true of nearly all our hands."
Olive took her eyes from the scraps of pencilled paper. He resented their drowned sparkle.
"True of this one?" she asked.
"Old Stafford? Rather! He's like all the rest; he'll slave for months and months, and then knock down a check for all his earnings at the nearest bar."
"Then I don't want to hear any more."
And she took herself to the open door, where she could turn her back without discourtesy, as though in sudden admiration of the yellow shimmering salt-bush plains, with their blobs of gray-green fodder and their smudges of bottle-green scrub. The long streak of desolate sandhills was picked out by telegraph posts running right and left into infinity, like an endless row of pins, against the loud blue sky so harped upon by her brother; and at her feet lay the shadow of the hut, sharp and dark as his standing simile of a sheet of new brown paper.
But at her elbow Godfrey was saying that she must just hear the end, and forcing her to realize the unmerited consolations of the debauchee's return to the very threshold on which she stood.
•••••••"‘Yet the gates have not come open that I shut,
I have seen no fences broken, and I've found no weak sheep bogged,
And my little cat is purring in the hut!
There's tea, too, for the billy-can, there's water in the tanks.
The ration bags hang heavy all around,
And my good old bunk and blanket beat the bare veranda planks
Of the shanty where I blued my fifty pound!
Here I stick until I'm worth fifty more,
When I'll take another check from the store;
And with Riverina men
All the betting is that then— I shall knock it down again
As before.’"
Olive was still standing in the doorway when a gaunt brown man rode up on his very counterpart in horse-flesh, and she could look upon yesterday's tatterdemalion in the light of the verse he wrote and the poems he loved.
No; he was not the fine gentleman buried in the bush; it was hardly from social heights that he had fallen, of that she was quite certain, and knew not whether to be glad or sorry. But a starved lover of literature he was; the life-long passion beamed in his tanned and furrowed face, turning its oaken hue to a rich mahogany when Godfrey told him that Miss Armitage admired his taste. Olive filled out the statement with enthusiastic detail, and in a minute he and she were capping each other's quotations while Godfrey remained mumchance on mere earth. Nor did all this sadden the battered creature, as it might have done if ever in the past he had been familiar with such as Olive; his joy in the moment was like a child's; but he had a wild eye, with a tragic twinkle in it, that kept the author of his own lines ever before the girl.
Godfrey soon had enough of it. He must push on to the sandhills with the out-going mail-bag; but he had to push on alone. Olive preferred to wait in the cool shelter of the hut. And there in another half-hour he found her somewhat hurriedly receiving a few sheets of MS., obviously torn from the old scribbling-book in the bushman's hands, and giving in receipt some verbal undertaking that Godfrey failed to catch.
"Old Stafford and you seemed as thick as thieves," said the young man, cutting his horses smartly on the way home. "Was that another poem of his that he was giving you?"
"Yes."
"One of his own writing, for a change?"
"He wrote them all, Mr. Pochin."
"So he's cracking—as they once used to say about here, and still do in your brother's books!"
"I don't see why you should disbelieve it," said Olive, warmly. "At any rate there's no question about the verses I've borrowed."
"Then we shall have a treat!"
Olive felt seriously aggrieved. All that was great in her had been touched and fired by the wild old fellow and his almost wonderful work; but she was not great enough to resist snubbing Godfrey as he deserved, even though she thought him a very nice young man, and had made a friend of him so far to the comparative exclusion of all the other members of his family. She let him have his chuckle in advance at the fun they would all have over the manuscript in her possession; then she informed him, cavalierly as she knew even at the time, that they were none of them to see a single line.
"Was that what he was getting you to promise him?" demanded Godfrey in his point-blank fashion.
"Yes—it was."
"Well, of all the cheek!"
"On my part?"
"You know I mean on his. As if it were a pearl of price, and we the swine!"
"That's not a very pretty way of putting it," retorted Olive. "But it is a little gem, in my opinion, though I don't suppose you would see its beauty even if you could!"
That was obviously the last word, but Olive was not proud of it for a single instant. She felt hot and sore, and soon not least so with herself, for her own rudeness; but that only angered her the more with Godfrey, who had brought it on himself. It was too much that she should come out there to be told what was and what was not a genuine poem. That was not exactly what had happened, but her pride of intellect was wounded; it was a vulnerable point. Olive was the last person in the world to exploit her learning or to give herself conscious airs of scholarly superiority; but she considered her opinion entitled to some respect on matters of which she might be accounted a reasonably qualified judge. She did not realize that she had a rather decided opinion on most mundane matters, and often a tart way of expressing it under opposition. An expert on some subjects, she was inclined to extend her own province unduly, and to meet rather more than half-way the slightest attack upon her intellectual frontiers. But in this case her heart was involved as well, since into it she had taken the outcast poet and all his works. And matters were not mended by the only other remark that Godfrey ever volunteered on the subject.
"I'm sorry we got to logger-heads about poor old Stafford," said the frank young man, as they exchanged good-nights on the veranda. "I've no doubt the poem you liked is all you think it. I'm no judge of that; but I know the man better than you possibly can. If it's as good as all that, you bet he's bagged the whole thing from Harvey Devlin or some other old poet!"
And this time Olive did succeed in curbing a natural pugnacity to which she had given only too much rein before; but her silence was more chilling than any words, and henceforward there was a studied coolness between two young people who had been drawn together, almost at sight, by a strong mutual attraction. Its very strength made their mutual resentment all the stronger in its turn. In her ignorance of the world, Olive had not expected to meet a young man of Godfrey's parts at its uttermost ends. He was quick-witted, capable, full of character as herself; her inferior in book-learning, but by no means in general knowledge or intelligence. Through him she gained some insight into the modern live Australian, clear thinker and plain speaker on social and industrial questions, sapper and miner in the world's advance, as opposed to the hardy upstart with a nasal twang who seemed to have made such an impression on Philip in his early wanderings. Philip, she began to fear, had not been a very great character as a young man from the old country; but Godfrey Pochin, still so young, had every strong quality except breadth and charity of view.
In much the same fashion Godfrey revised his opinion of young Englishwomen in general, and of young women with degrees before all others; but it was at a distance that the pair came to appreciate each other to such a nicety. Their intimacy was a matter of the first twenty-four hours only. They were alike in nothing more than in their pride. They had come to blows about a matter of no importance to either of them, and each was too proud to refer to it again.
Not that it was so unimportant to Olive as she pretended on occasions when Stafford and his hobby became a table topic, and she would fight his battles with a forced levity, while Godfrey sat ostentatiously aloof from the discussion. Stafford himself she saw more than once, but never again alone in his hut. It was remarked in her presence that he had beaten all his records in the length of time which had elapsed since he last knocked down a check. That was as yet her only reward for the little she had done for him, and the much, the very much, she hoped to do.
Late summer cooled into an autumn in name only, and a winter unworthy even of that, despite a fire at nights and coats on horseback, and all the wraps that one could find for a long drive across the plains. Olive thought it the loveliest weather she had ever known; it was the safest subject that she still had in common with Godfrey, and they discussed it daily with animated courtesy. Olive was to stay till after shearing, if her people at home could spare her so long; it would only mean a six months' visit then, her kind friends said. She was more than willing to stay; it was a glorious rest and change, and the girl was happy enough, and the cause of happiness to all save one. But after about three months she grew suddenly restless; the incoming mail excited her strangely; she was absurdly disappointed when there was nothing for her. And then one day her delight knew no bounds, and it was a little awkward, because Godfrey had been the one to empty out the mail-bag, and they happened to have the homestead to themselves. Olive had backed out of a ride for no other purpose than to see if her letter had not come at last; and it actually had.
"Godfrey!" she cried, as he was retreating into the store with the business correspondence. She had never addressed him so familiarly before, and did not know that she had done it now.
It brought him to her in a stride.
"Not bad news, I hope?"
"No, no, the very best! I don't know how to tell you; it seems like raking up disagreeables, and I know I was very rude. But I was right, right, right all the time!"
"Right?" he repeated. "Right about what?"
"That poor man Stafford, of course."
"Oh! I saw him this afternoon, when I got the mail," remarked Godfrey, with forced inconsequence.
"I'm thinking of three months ago. I never told you what I did at the time. You were so dreadfully unsympathetic, but I know you won't be now! I sent the poem he lent me home to Phil!"
"Well?"
"You said it couldn't be original!"
"I only said what I thought on general grounds. You wouldn't give me a chance of judging for myself."
"Well, if it wasn't original, they would hardly put it in the Scrutator, would they?"
"Not if they knew it."
"They'd know it all right!" the girl assured him, with radiant confidence. "Yet they did put it in, word for word as I wrote it out, and the very week after Philip submitted it!"
Godfrey found it good to look upon her triumph, even at his own expense. Never had he seen so keen a brain flashing through such sparkling eyes, or such a great heart flooding with its warmth a face so sweet and fine. But there was something fine about Godfrey, too; he was not the one to truckle in his discomfiture.
"Is that what Mr. Armitage says?" he inquired.
"I haven't read what he says; but here's the poem itself from the Scrutator!"
He read it while she read her letter. It was rough, but noble; even Godfrey could see the nobility; and there was nothing in the thought that might not have come to a rugged solitary over his hut fire, and found its way out in just such words. A broken cry from the wilderness, it had won a ready hearing on the other side of the earth, and now it had travelled all the way out again to wake an echo in the heart of Godfrey. And he looked back, and saw himself in the wrong.
But just as he was as near abasement as was possible to his nature, a real cry broke from Olive. And the change in her was past belief; she stood before him abashed, humiliated, demoralized by her letter.
"You were right—I was wrong—after all!" She spoke in jerks of passionate indignation. "The whole thing was a fraud! You always said so; you were absolutely right. You said it was probably taken from Harvey Devlin, and so it was, almost word for word! No sooner did it appear than some one wrote to say so—and—and there's a fearful row about it!"
She could not help smiling guiltily at what she had done. It had its humorous side, and to her credit Olive was the first to see it. She pictured poor Philip, sometimes a little self-important, always ready to do the striking thing and to boast of having done it—pictured him in person at the Scrutator office—taking the greatest and kindliest trouble, but also some little credit for her find. And then all the vials of editorial wrath on his devoted head, as his were poured on hers, and hers on the original culprit out at Jumping Sandhills!
"I'm glad there's something original about him," said Godfrey, grimly, when she used the phrase among harder sayings. And Olive laughed until she cried, which, however, was next moment, and quite bitterly. But Godfrey had not even smiled.
And then and there came the climax, with the uneven trailing of long spurs through the veranda, and the gaunt, uncouth figure of the pseudo-poet swaying in the doorway. His eyes were wilder than ever, but they steadied themselves in a long gaze upon the guilty girl, and his voice did not disgrace him when he spoke.
"Was it you, Miss Armitage, who sent my verses to a London paper?"
His speech was low and yet distinct; it afforded no excuse for immediate interference on Godfrey's part. But Godfrey was not given a chance.
"They weren't yours!" cried Olive, passionately.
"They were!" he thundered back. Godfrey sprang forward; the man stopped him with the masterful wave of his lean brown hand. "They were my property," he resumed with his former self-control. "This young lady had no right to send them to any paper. I only lent them to her. It was a wrong thing to do."
"What about foisting what you never wrote on a lady who showed you kindness, and swearing it was all your own?"
Godfrey was very severe, but he had not yet adopted the bullying tone into which the best masters fall under sufficient provocation.
"That may be worse," returned Stafford, still slowly; "I don't say it isn't. But two wrongs never made a right, Mr. Godfrey, and it's no wrong of mine that's put all this fat in the fire."
"Then you admit that the thing was lifted bodily out of Harvey Devlin?"
"Out of a suppressed edition of his poems," supplemented Olive, quickly consulting her letter—"with hardly a single alteration!"
"Oh, all right! I'll admit it if it makes you happy. Is that it in your hand, sir?"
And the man was actually holding out his own.
"What the devil do you want with it?"
Godfrey so far forgot himself in his lady's presence.
"Well, Mr. Godfrey, it's only fair that a man should see what's brought against him. I've only seen what the Bulletin's got to say about it, so far. They've got their laugh o' the old country again; but it's not my fault, not altogether. Thanky, much obliged!"
His words now telescoped in a manner worthy of his gait. He had certainly been drinking, and had abandoned a fine effort to conceal the fact. No sober impostor would have carried himself so jauntily in the hour of exposure, or gloated with maudlin humor over so futile and impudent a fraud; but the last proof of poor Stafford's condition was afforded by a sudden revulsion from fatuous fun to furious earnest.
"And you put my name to it!" he shouted, crumpling the cutting in his fist. "I'd forgotten that!"
"I didn't do it," said Olive, with unthinking penitence. "I never meant it to be done. I had to give his name," she explained to Godfrey, "but it must have been the editor in London who put it to the poem."
"Then damn the editor in London!" cried Stafford, and flung himself from the room with Godfrey at his heels.
It was his last appearance at the home station; within a very few minutes Godfrey had made out the man's account, and sent him about his business with a check for the uttermost farthing standing to his credit in the station books.
Olive, flown in more tears from the scene, did not know this at the time; when she found out it incensed her afresh against the poor young man. Had he really no sense of justice? Could he not see that this preposterous reprisal made it all the worse for her, since the whole thing was her fault in the beginning? She could not even swear that Stafford had actually said the poem was his; the fact did not affect his grievance against her; and now, so far from undoing an atom of the harm she had done, she had got him discharged into the bargain! Godfrey was bidden to repair his share of the damage without delay; and apart from all other considerations whatsoever, he had the fairness of mind to recognize that of the girl's demand.
But unfortunately a very serious delay had taken place before this scene between the two young people; and Stafford had spent a long night on frosty ground, heavily asleep in nothing more than his moleskins and his Crimean shirt. Olive had a note from Godfrey to say that the man had been reinstated in his hut; but Godfrey himself did not return, and old Mr. Pochin looked worried but said nothing.
And then next night Olive was awakened by a queer noise on the blind of her open window, and there was Godfrey just below, flogging it like a trout-stream with his buggy whip.
"It's poor old Stafford," he whispered. "He's pretty bad and wants to see you. If you'd care to bring one of the girls——"
His sentence had to wait unfinished while she dressed.
"It's only you he wants to see," he went on under the stars; "but if you'd like one of the others——"
"I'd like to start this minute,", said Olive, decidedly. "How long will it take us to drive?"
It took them the best part of the hour before dawn, and the smoke from the horses' backs was a visible pillar of cloud when they pulled up.
A tongue of orange light played in and out of the open door, and on and off the faded purple blanket spread like a canopy over four low uprights driven into the naked earth; but under the blanket ran the ridge of a great gaunt frame, and from one end a pair of cavernous eyes burnt like beacons as they entered. Olive stooped over the pinched and shrunken face, and could feel its heat as though it were a fire.
"It's kind of you to come," he whispered—but his eyes rolled uneasily. "And you've really come alone? That's right, that's right! I've something to tell you both, but no one else. You promise? Not another soul?"
They promised, and Godfrey gave him new life from a replenished flask. In another instant they were trying to talk the sick man down; for he had begun at once about those unlucky lines of Harvey Devlin's. He had another confession to make. That was quite enough for them. Olive especially begged him to say no more. But he would go on; and they must hear the truth; for that was why he had got them there together, but no third person must ever know.
"Harvey Devlin! What a poet to steal from!"
There was the gallant twinkle in his fevered eyes; they seemed to have caught the scraps of paper on the walls.
"But he was a worse man," he muttered. "You know the life he led, and how he was supposed to have finished himself in the bush? It wasn't quite true, though very nearly. He was sick of life; dead sick of writing all he wrote, and yet being what he was! He hid his head in the bush, and was very near what he thought of doing, when he came across a man who'd done it weeks before. That was the man they found and buried as Harvey Devlin. I took good care they should!"
"You?" they cried.
"And I've lived to be accused of stealing from myself!"
A sovereign effort had given him a clear run of intelligible speech, and now it was as though his voice fell dead at the post. But the tragic eyes were still twinkling as they closed in the sudden sleep of sheer prostration. The two watchers exchanged long looks, but not a word, and presently one went and stood in the doorway as she had done that afternoon three months before.
The dawn was coming up in a coppery glow, straight ahead over the sandhills, and the stars going out like street lamps at the proper time. In a minute the copper turned to paler bronze, and the bronze to dead pink gold, with a last star blazing just above. The contour of the hills stood out, studded with telegraph posts that dwindled into nothing north and south. And the new day woke with a sigh that blew a puff of sand into the hut, and fluttered the captive scrap of paper nearest the door.
Olive peered at it between firelight and daylight, and for once even she could find no flaw in the quotation:
"The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
Godfrey came very quietly and took her hand. One look told her why; for a magic casement had opened in the hut, and the young man and woman were there alone.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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