Nevermore Part 34

All unheeding of this careless but not inaccurate criticism, the lovers sauntered on. As they cleared the outskirts of the town, Estelle said, 'Now you must show me your hut. I _must_ see the place where you have lived your lonely life, poor fellow. How I used to pity you, when I thought of it.'

'There it is, on that rise--this track leads up to it. It's such a miserable hovel, I hardly like you to see it.'

'Nonsense! you forget I've been to Growlers' and Ballarat, and know all about diggings. Why, it's the regular thing, like a shooting-box or a bothy in the Highlands. Everybody does it. Better men than you (I was going to say) live in huts. Why, this is quite a grand hut! What fine broad slabs, and a big padlock too. I thought the miners were so honest?'

'Sometimes,' he said; 'not always.'

They walked into Ballarat Harry's hut. Estelle sat herself down on a three-legged stool by the side of the still smouldering fire, and gazed into the pile of ashes on the hearth. Here, for so many a lonely evening, had he sat and smoked and thought--ah! with what bitterness--of a lost home, a forfeited birthright, of a father's curse, which, harmless as thistledown at first, had commenced to be so fatally prophetic. It _was_ hard. Fate had been against him--against them from the beginning. But she would make up to him--as far as woman's love might repair the wrongs of destiny and the cruelty of man--for this dreadful episode of his life.

'Oh Lance--dear Lance!' she said; 'how you have lived through it all I can hardly imagine.'

'If I had not had the thoughts of you to keep me up,' he said, looking at her with eyes of bold admiration, 'I might have given in. But I kept always saying to myself, _she_ will reward me, Stella will be mine when we meet, and all the past will be forgotten--and you _are_ mine,' he said, as he took her hand in his and made as if to exact the betrothed lover's accustomed tribute.

But again a shrinking feeling of denial--for which she could not account--possessed her whole frame. She drew back shuddering. 'Pray, don't let us have any nonsense of that kind,' she said; 'there will be plenty of time by and by. At present, I feel as if I had so much rather hear all about your trial and the cruel unjust sentence which ruined you, and of your life in those dreadful hulks; I always wonder how you managed to escape.'

For one moment the flash of his eyes in stern displeasure reminded her vividly of bygone days and their lovers' quarrels at Wychwood. Then he spoke, in a voice studiously free from irritation--

'I got out through the help and managing of Tessie Lawless--a girl that cared a deal more for me than you do, if that's the way you're going to treat me. You've forgotten our old Wychwood days, I suppose. Well, as you'll have to leave to-morrow, or next day at furthest, for Melbourne, and we go different ways, we mustn't fall out, must we? I can wait. So we'd better talk over this journey.'

'Now don't be cross, my dear Lance; you must give me time. Remember, I've been a lonely and very sad woman for years, and all thoughts of love and marriage were put out of my head. Do tell me of your escape.'

'Well, I DID escape,--which is the chief thing that concerns us now,--or I believe I should have hanged myself, like the fellow that was in my cell before me--or got shot, like two other men, for trying to clear out by day. What I suffered, no tongue can tell!'--here he a.s.sumed the most tragic expression possible, and groaned as if at the recollection,--'the very thoughts of it make my blood boil.'

'But how did this girl--Tessie Lawless, was that her name?--succeed in releasing you?'

'Well, she persuaded a man who, I believe, was pretty sweet after _her_, to come one dark night with a boat to the stern of the old hulk. She sent money and bribed my warder, so I was able to get out and drop down into the boat. After I was free, she sent a man and two horses to where I could meet them, and I came up here.'

'What a brave girl! I should like to see and thank her. She must have been a great friend of yours?'

'Well, I suppose she thought a good deal of me in her way, poor thing. I believe she's in Melbourne somewhere, but I've never seen her since.'

'You don't seem to have been very anxious to thank her for all the devotion and courage, I must say. It's the way of the world, I suppose, and Australia is very like other places in essentials, I begin to suspect. And now, what are our plans to be? It will be a risk for you to remain here longer, I suppose?'

'To be sure it will. You can't tell what may happen. Any day I might be arrested. Our dart--our plan, I mean--is to get to Melbourne as soon as possible. You can go down with Holmes Dayton and Con Gray. A policeman goes with them as escort, and, I think, Gray's sister-in-law. You couldn't have a safer party. I shall go across country towards the Murray, and travel a way of my own. We can meet in Melbourne at any place you arrange, and be married at once--that is, the day before the vessel sails that we take our pa.s.sage in for San Francisco. Then we're off as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, and no one the wiser! What do you say to that?'

'I suppose,' she answered slowly and reflectively, 'that it would be the best plan.'

'The best plan!' he repeated, almost angrily, while a sudden flash shone from his eyes, and a frown of impatience crossed his face, which brought back old memories with magical suddenness. 'Why, of course it is. There can't be any other, unless I hang on here till that infernal hound Dayrell track me down. But you don't seem to be half keen about it. Can it be'--and here he changed his voice and looked earnestly, almost pleadingly, into the girl's face--'that you have changed your mind? If you have, say so. I have lost home and friends--everything--I know. Am I to lose you too?'

His eyes rested on the girl with almost magnetic power. Then a blush came to her cheek, as she replied--

'You have my promise, Lance, and the word of a Chaloner is sacred.

Surely you should know that? Of course I will do as you wish. But--and here she smiled and raised her eyes pleadingly--you must not be hasty, but bear with me a little. All things are so strange, and the time is short. After all my looking forward to our meeting, you have taken me a little by surprise.'

'Forgive me, my darling,' he said, with well-acted warmth; 'I _was_ hasty, but you know the Trevanion temper--my pride was touched. And you will be ready to start to-morrow? That horse of yours (old Vernon, or whatever his name was, is no bad judge, if he picked him) is as fit for the road as when he left Melbourne. I suppose he expected to get a commission out of you?'

'You must not talk in that way of my good old friend,' she said gravely.

'He was like a father to me; I can't be too grateful to him and his dear good wife. But I shall be quite ready to start in the morning with the people you mention. I am so glad there is a girl in the party.'

As they walked back to the inn, the arrangements for meeting in Melbourne were discussed in detail and completely sketched out. She was to go to Mr. Vernon's house, and thence, when apprised of his arrival, she would meet him at the South Yarra Church, only escorted by her friends. Mr. Vernon would 'give her away,' and she would ask them to keep the matter secret. The ceremony would be deferred till the day before the sailing of their vessel for Honolulu or San Francisco, as might be decided. Unless Fate intervened with unexampled unkindness, it seemed as though a burst of suns.h.i.+ne was about to break through the cloud of misfortune which had so long encircled them.

'By this time to-morrow evening,' he said, 'you will be on your way to Melbourne. It's lucky you've had so much practice lately in riding. I suppose you found it rather awkward at first?'

'Awkward?' she said, gazing at him with astonishment, 'Why, you surely must have forgotten that I hunted regularly the season before you left home.'

'Oh yes; of course--of course,' he said. 'But I seem to have forgotten so many things,'--here he a.s.sumed an air as of one indistinctly recalling long-past incidents. 'Then the horses out here are so different.'

'I don't think that at all,' she answered; 'I have seen some wonderfully fine horses here. And I am sure my good old Wanderer, that I rode up, is as grand a hackney as ever was saddled. You mustn't run down Australian horses, you know.'

'Never mind the horses,' he said pettishly; 'I wish _I'd_ never seen one, out here at any rate; and now let us settle it all, how we're to meet, and all the rest of it. I'm to send a note to John Vernon and Company, Flinders Lane,--is that the address?--and you'll be ready at a day's notice, won't you?'

'Yes,' she said slowly and half absently; 'I suppose so.'

'You see it's this way,' he said, coming still nearer to her and looking into her face as if to read her inmost thoughts. 'I can't afford to hang about Melbourne. What I've got to do is to find out the first steamer, take our pa.s.sages as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, then get the license: there's a church close by the Vernons, isn't there, where all the swells go?--Toorak, or some such name. We slip over there before lunch, and next day we're man and wife and at sea--clear of Australia--free and safe for ever! What a sell it will be for those bloodhounds of police!'

As he spoke rapidly, his eyes gleamed with unholy triumph, carefully schooled as was the general expression of his countenance. In spite of her deep abiding sympathy for his sorrows, the girl's gentle spirit recoiled from the savage satisfaction displayed in his closing words.

'Oh! Lance,' she said, 'do not speak like that. It pains me to hear even a tone of lightness about our deliverance. If G.o.d permits it, we should be thankful all our lives. But even if there has been pursuit, these men that you so hate have only been doing what they supposed to be their duty.'

'You are an angel,' he said, with an air of deepest conviction and tenderness, 'too good for me and for every one. For your sake, I suppose I must forgive these rascally traps, especially if they don't run me down. And now, as we shan't see each other in the morning, just one kiss before we part for the last time.'

But again she drew back; the same indefinable feeling of repulsion arose in her instinctively, as strong, as inexplicable. 'You have not long to wait now,' she said softly; 'until then, you must humour all my whims.

You will, Lance, won't you?'

'I suppose so,' he said half sullenly; 'women are all alike, full of fancies. But I _did_ think you would remember old days. You used not to be so stand off and distant.'

'We were girl and boy then,' she said. 'Everything seems so changed. I can hardly fancy even now that we are to be married in a fortnight, though I have come all this way to find you out. Some strange mysterious feeling stirs within me from time to time. I can hardly explain it. It is almost like a presentiment of evil.'

He laughed suddenly, and as suddenly stopped. '_I_ am not changed,' he said, 'except by what I have gone through'; then he dropped his voice into a mournful murmur, as he carelessly and apparently by chance touched the Chaloner ring. 'But if you can't make up your mind; if you would like to cry off, to leave me to my fate, say so in time. Perhaps it would be better for you after all.'

'No, Lance!' she said, and as she spoke she raised her eyes heavenward, moist with tears of tenderest sympathy, as the thought rushed across her brain of his lonely and desperate condition, abandoned by _her_ as by all the world. 'We Chaloners keep faith. I am your plighted bride, and I am ready to fulfil my vow, my promise to the living and to the dead.

But you must bear with a woman's weakness and consider how little time I have to prepare. What would they say at Wychwood, I wonder?'

'We're in Australia, Stella, and not in England--don't forget that,' he answered, the frown again darkening his countenance. 'I hope we shan't see the old country for many a day. We must learn to forget old ways and fas.h.i.+ons.'

'I can never do so, wherever we may wander,' she answered, with quiet emotion. 'I don't like to hear you speak of it as a thing of course, and I wish you would call me Estelle, Lance, not Stella. You never used to do so.'

'Very well, Estelle,' he said, 'I won't do it again, if it bothers you.

Stella's a common name out here; that's the reason, I suppose. And now, as we're at the hotel, we'd better say good-bye. I won't come in the morning. It's no use making people talk; they're ready enough, without helping them. You and that Miss Graham can get away with old Dayton to-morrow. It's the way everybody up here travels, and nothing's thought of it. I'll write the moment I get down. Most likely I'll be in Melbourne as soon as you.'

They parted with a simple hand-clasp, she gazing into his face as if to read the signs of a spirit worn and wearied with the worldly injustice.

His face was calm, and betrayed no emotion other than deep regret at the departure of a friend. He tried to throw into the parting words the sentiment which the occasion demanded, but it was patently an effort, and had not the ring of truth or tenderness.

'He _is_ changed,' she told herself, as she moved forward across the verandah of the hotel and sought her bedroom. 'How changed, I could hardly have imagined. But who would not have been altered by the frightful experience he has gone through! I must try and make him happy, as some poor recompense for all his sorrows.'

Could she have noted the dark and evil expression of her companion's face, as he lit his pipe and strode savagely along the path to his solitary hut, heard the foul oaths with which from time to time he essayed to relieve his feelings, or the vows of vengeance upon her for her coldness, she would have deemed him changed indeed.