The Thousandth Woman. Hornung Ernest William

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СКАЧАТЬ and in their unpremeditated cups Toye drew him out about the bush until the shadows passed for minutes from the red-brick face with the white-brick forehead.

      "I remember thinking I would dig for gold," said Cazalet. "That's all I knew about Australia; that and bushrangers and dust-storms and bush-fires! But you can have adventures of sorts if you go far enough up-country for 'em; it still pays you to know how to use your fists out there. I didn't, but I was picking it up before I'd been out three months, and in six I was as ready as anybody to take off my coat. I remember once at a bush shanty they dished up such fruity chops that I said I'd fight the cook if they'd send him up; and I'm blowed if it wasn't a fellow I'd been at school with and worshiped as no end of a swell at games! Potts his name was, old Venus Potts, the best looking chap in the school among other things; and there he was, cooking carrion at twenty-five bob a week! Instead of fighting we joined forces, got a burr-cutting job on a good station, then a better one over shearing, and after that I wormed my way in as bookkeeper, and my pal became one of the head overseers. Now we're our own bosses with a share in the show, and the owner comes up only once a year to see how things are looking."

      "I hope he had a daughter," said Toye, "and that you're going to marry her, if you haven't yet?"

      Cazalet laughed, but the shadow had returned. "No. I left that to my pal," he said. "He did that all right!"

      "Then I advise you to go and do likewise," rejoined his new friend with a geniality impossible to take amiss. "I shouldn't wonder, now, if there's some girl you left behind you."

      Cazalet shook his head. "None who would look on herself in that light," he interrupted. It was all he said, but once more Toye was regarding him as shrewdly as when the night was younger, and the littleness of the world had not yet made them confidant and boon companion.

      Eight bells actually struck before their great talk ended and Cazalet swore that he missed the "watches aft, sir!" of the sailing-vessel ten years before; and recalled how they had never changed watch without putting the ship about, his last time in the bay.

      "Say!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, knitting his brows over some nebulous recollection of his own. "I seem to have heard of you and some of your yarns before. Didn't you spend nights in a log-hut miles and miles from any other human being?"

      It was as they were turning in at last, but the question spoiled a yawn for Cazalet.

      "Sometimes, at one of our out-stations," said he, looking puzzled.

      "I've seen your photograph," said Toye, regarding him with a more critical stare. "But it was with a beard."

      "I had it off when I was ashore the other day," said Cazalet. "I always meant to, before the end of the voyage."

      "I see. It was a Miss Macnair showed me that photograph – Miss Blanche Macnair lives in a little house down there near your old home. I judge hers is another old home that's been broken up since your day."

      "They've all got married," said Cazalet.

      "Except Miss Blanche. You write to her some, Mr. Cazalet?"

      "Once a year – regularly. It was a promise. We were kids together," he explained, as he climbed back into the upper berth.

      "Guess you were a lucky kid," said the voice below. "She's one in a thousand, Miss Blanche Macnair!"

      II

      SECOND SIGHT

      Southampton Water was an ornamental lake dotted with fairy lamps. The stars above seemed only a far-away reflex of those below; but in their turn they shimmered on the sleek silken arm of sleeping sea. It was a midsummer night, lagging a whole season behind its fellows. But already it was so late that the English passengers on the Kaiser Fritz had abandoned all thought of catching the last train up to London.

      They tramped the deck in their noisy, shiny, shore-going boots; they manned the rail in lazy inarticulate appreciation of the nocturne in blue stippled with green and red and countless yellow lights. Some delivered themselves of the patriotic platitudes which become the homing tourist who has seen no foreign land to touch his own. But one who had seen more than sights and cities, one who had been ten years buried in the bush, one with such yarns to spin behind those outpost lights of England, was not even on deck to hail them back into his ken. Achilles in his tent was no more conspicuous absentee than Cazalet in his cabin as the Kaiser Fritz steamed sedately up Southampton Water.

      He had finished packing; the stateroom floor was impassable with the baggage that Cazalet had wanted on the five-weeks' voyage. There was scarcely room to sit down, but in what there was sat Cazalet like a soul in torment. All the vultures of the night before, of his dreadful dream, and of the poignant reminiscences to which his dream had led, might have been gnawing at his vitals as he sat there waiting to set foot once more in the land from which a bitter blow had driven him.

      Yet the bitterness might have been allayed by the consciousness that he, at any rate, had turned it to account. It had been, indeed, the making of him; thanks to that stern incentive, even some of the sweets of a deserved success were already his. But there was no hint of complacency in Cazalet's clouded face and heavy attitude. He looked as if he had not slept, after all, since his nightmare; almost as if he could not trust himself to sleep again. His face was pale, even in that torrid zone between the latitudes protected in the bush by beard and wide-awake. And he jumped to his feet as suddenly as the screw stopped for the first time; but that might have been just the curious shock which its cessation always causes after days at sea. Only the same thing happened again and yet again, as often as ever the engines paused before the end. Cazalet would spring up and watch his stateroom door with clenched fists and haunted eyes. But it was some long time before the door flew open, and then slammed behind Hilton Toye.

      Toye was in a state of excitement even more abnormal than Cazalet's nervous despondency, which indeed it prevented him from observing. It was instantaneously clear that Toye was astounded, thrilled, almost triumphant, but as yet just drawing the line at that. A newspaper fluttered in his hand.

      "Second sight?" he ejaculated, as though it were the night before and Cazalet still shaken by his dream. "I guess you've got it in full measure, pressed down and running over, Mr. Cazalet!"

      It was a sorry sample of his talk. Hilton Toye did not usually mix the ready metaphors that nevertheless had to satisfy an inner censor, of some austerity, before they were allowed to leave those deliberate lips. As a rule there was dignity in that deliberation; it never for a moment, or for any ordinary moment, suggested want of confidence, for example. It could even dignify some outworn modes of transatlantic speech which still preserved a perpetual freshness in the mouth of Hilton Toye. Yet now, in his strange excitement, word and tone alike were on the level of the stage American's. It was not less than extraordinary.

      "You don't mean about – " Cazalet seemed to be swallowing.

      "I do, sir!" cried Hilton Toye.

      " – about Henry Craven?"

      "Sure."

      "Has – something or other – happened to him?"

      "Yep."

      "You don't mean to say he's – dead?"

      "Last Wednesday night!" Toye looked at his paper. "No, I guess I'm wrong. Seems it happened Wednesday, but he only passed away Sunday morning."

      Cazalet still sat staring at him – there was not room for two of them on their feet – but into his heavy stare there came a gleam of leaden wisdom. "This was Thursday morning," he said, СКАЧАТЬ