Читать книгу A Tail of Gold - David Hennessey - Страница 6

Table of Contents

AT the Central Railway Station the Major caught an outgoing train for Toorak. He had met no one he knew, and although late, he decided to slip into the church, as he had promised his wife, and walk home with the family.

The church was near the station, and he managed to find a seat at the back, just inside the door, unnoticed save by a few unimportant people. He was thankful that no one knew of his intention to call at his office, and he was very hopeful that no one in town had recognized him.

Sitting at the back, he could look all over the church. He had guessed that Gammage would be present, for he had seen the family motor-car outside. His own pew was occupied by his wife and family.

Nearer to the pulpit was the square pew belonging to old Miss Monckton and Mrs. Maguire; there was room for three more in it, and Molly Maguire and Will Monckton being in attendance, the seat was fairly filled, as, indeed, was the whole building.

Prayers were over, and the old vicar was preaching a Christmas sermon which made a singular medley with the Major's thoughts.

When Smart sat down, he heard the vicar say: 'Brethren, the decorations of the church, the prayers we have offered, and the Christmas hymns we have sung, remind us that this birthday of our Lord should be kept by us here with solemn joy before it is observed with greetings and congratulations in the home circle.'

The Major shivered, notwithstanding the heat of the day, as he looked across to where the Hon. Ebenezer sat at the end of his pew. Mrs. Gammage had on a new hat with ostrich feathers, and three of the Miss Gammages and two young brothers occupied the rest of the seat. They were all well dressed, and made a very presentable appearance.

'I wonder,' thought the Major, who was still a bit unhinged, 'whether, after all, it may have been a murder, and whether Gammage will be hanged. I shall have to slip out quietly at the close. I couldn't trust myself to speak to him.'

But he had lost an interesting part of the sermon. The minister had been telling the congregation how a Christmas card had been placed upon his plate at the breakfast table that morning. It had upon it a wreath of holly berries encircling the miniature picture of a snowy landscape, and underneath was written the old message, 'A merry Christmas to you!'

'How like some magic mirror,' said the vicar, 'that card recalled the Christmastides of long ago. The gloom of the old land; winter was upon the landscape, and snow upon the ground; the pond upon the village green, or in the city park, was frozen inches thick, and merry skaters glanced swiftly past, and the keen, frosty, bracing air sent the quick blood tingling through the veins.'

By this reference to an English Christmas, the preacher had evidently gripped the attention of his congregation, for there was a hushed silence in the church. But it did not grip the attention of Boswell Smart. Nothing would just then!

Gammage moved and mopped his face with a silk handkerchief, and the Major, whose mind was possessed with the thought of the dead woman in his neighbour's office, thought, 'Pity it's not winterly weather here just now; there'll be a bad smell in Gammage's office by Friday.'

'Life,' continued the preacher, 'has been chequered since then; but we have not forgotten...Voices come to us through the long distance, and we see visions that belong to other days.'

'I can't stand this any longer,' said the agitated Major, almost audibly, 'that dead woman—and visions of other days indeed! Good heaven! haven't I been punished enough, without this thing coming upon me? I must get out of this. I was a fool to come. I might have known that on Christmas morning old Payne would have some mournful thing to tell us about ancient memories and past misdeeds. Curse old memories, I say! I ought to be rich, and I mean to be rich. I've never murdered any one myself, and never intend to, and the ill-luck that others have had, when on my business, hasn't been my fault. All I want is gold, and it's to be had in plenty in Australia, and I mean to have it, and no prating old fool of a parson is going to stop me, either.'

That is what the Major said to himself; but to the verger, who sat near the door, he whispered as he went out: 'Beautiful sermon, Bentley, I feel a bit faint with the heat; a little heart trouble, nothing serious. I'll stand outside in the fresh air, I think; or listen in the porch. I may walk home presently without waiting for my people. You might let them know, please.'

In this way, the Major effected a clever retreat. He had been to church. The verger could testify to that. He had successfully checkmated Gammage's move in putting a dead woman into his office...if Gammage had done it...and moreover he had seen him in church with his family, and yet avoided a meeting, which might have been embarrassing.

Yet, as he walked homeward, he told himself that he had no appetite for his Christmas dinner, and no relish for Christmas festivities. A great fear was upon him, and more than once he resolved to go and see Gammage, and to make a clean breast of it. But his courage failed him, and finally he resolved, like the coward he was, to let events take their course.

He was afraid that in wheeling the chair with the dead woman into Ebenezer Gammage's office, he had made a mistake. 'Such tragedies,' he thought, 'are best left alone,' and he cursed his luck, in that he had gone back to the office at all that morning.

Some men are always blaming their luck.

It was usual for the Smart family to have a kind of re-union of friends and relations on the evening of Christmas Day, with supper on a wide veranda overlooking the lawn. A number of relatives and friends dropped in as usual; but it was explained to them that the Major was not feeling well; and the gathering, so far as he was concerned, was not a success.

On the whole, Major Smart was an easy-going husband and father, and was usually jolly enough with his children; but, he paced the garden walks alone that night, smoking; and his wife, cowed by some remark he had made to her, said to the children: 'You'd better leave your father alone tonight, he seems frightfully out of sorts.'

On the warm night air there came to him from the house the sound of music and dancing, and laughter; but the dark mood was on him. It was not now so much this dead woman that occupied his thoughts as that her death had furnished further evidence to him of his evil fetish. His restless brain would not remain idle; he was plotting now to get Will Monckton in some way associated with him in business, in order that he might become another victim.

He would have to be careful however, lest suspicion should attach to himself, for he had a reversionary interest in the Monckton property, and his project was somehow to secure Miss Monckton's money for himself, and the hand of Molly Maguire for his eldest son Bob. In both matters Will Monckton blocked the way.

He marched up and down under the oak trees, in the warm summer moonlit night, lost to all Christmas sentiment and kindly feeling toward his fellows. He wanted to be rich...very rich...and it mattered nothing to him who went under so long as he came out on top. Fearing the dead and hating the living, he was no companion that night for the gay throng which was keeping Christmas under his roof.

It is not to be wondered that he would not go in.