Читать книгу The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans - William Gosse Hay - Страница 12

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The Captain's house was, perhaps, the highest on the left of the town. It can be seen to-day, reared aloft on stone retaining walls, above the golf-links; while the precipitous road leading up to it, now open to gazers in the Reservoir Valley, was then hidden in wild scrub and trees. Still well above the later born houses, the place lies secluded beneath the impregnable woods of the hills, its walls starred with the crimson blossoms of knotty old geraniums.

On an afternoon, not many days after the ball, a tall man in a pea-coat and small, black, flat-crowned slouch, started to ascend the Pitt's Villa Hill, stopping, however, before he reached the retaining wall across the top. Here, in the shadow of the hanging woods, he gave up his climb, and began to stride about among the logs and bushes by the wayside. He seemed pale with the upward tramp from the town. His face was peaked, small, doubting, and gaunt; and curious brown leather half-boots poked from the broken straps of his black frieze trousers. He had a very small mouth like a button, an immense sharp nose, and watery, uncertain eyes. His movements were stiff—his air even stupid—and he looked about him, his hat somewhat back upon his head, as if he had been born uncertain into this world, and was still far from being confident of his foundation. This dull and temporary air was not only a characteristic of his countenance, but seemed to sit even in the hang of his still aspiring neckwear. The man, after a little, wandered from the right to the left hand of the road, and here stood with his foot on a recumbent tree, looking dully down into the wood. He was there, singularly quiet, for a matter of twenty minutes, when, a noise of galloping rising from behind the trees, he immediately returned into the road and began to descend. He again stopped, however, as Sir William Heans turned into the road on a bay horse and galloped easily up the hill.

His somewhat fevered eyes were on the man from the first, and not till he was close up under the wall did he rein in, trotting up with spurring heels.

"Captain Stifft sir." he cried. "you will have to scuttle from here. The police are awake to some faddle on the way. The good lady, above, wrote yesterday. The fellow Daunt is testing the ground about me—poking into my coming and going. Give me my news, sir. Get down by the wood and in by the beach."

"Why," said the other, his dull eyes yellowing a little, "some servant-woman up there must have turned on you!"

"One of the young women, you think—more possibly a mere nosing into my business. Basset was at the Boundary and saw me as I came through. Some of them want to take away this pass. They may take a gallop along here."

"Hang it, have you been dallying with some young woman, Sir William?"

"'Pon my word," said Heans; "it doesn't always require such strong measures, does it! Come, Captain, I'll spare you two minutes!"

"Well, if they've got a vapour of evidence you've been meeting me," said Stifft, dully, "they'll never take eyes off us. I'll take my hook through the scrub. Mr. Daunt has never stood me since I dealt with Shelk. I don't know how he found out. We landed him with the sealers on Kangaroo Island. Daunt all but spoke to me."

Sir William began to shake his reins.

"Wait a minute," said Stifft. "I've got a piece of good news. Here, I have a provisionary receipt for the Emerald—yes" (he hastily held up a paper to the rider), "that's all right now, if you've got the £400. She's dirty and not much as to bottom planking, but she'll do the v'ige with a red-leading and a bit of a scrape. She goes for the seal-skins again. That's repeating my last venture with the Jargonelle; but Dawson and O'Neil made that reputable. It's a piece grim, my buying her myself."

Heans took the paper. His voice was high and his hand was trembling.

"And Dawson and O'Neil won't move?" he asked.

"No, they won't do it."

"What are they propping at?"

"They've been to look at her. They don't favour with the ship. But she's well enough. She'll do Vansittart Island."

Sir William crushed the document into his waistcoat pocket. "My Heaven, Stifft," groaned he, stretching out a lavender glove and touching the other's shoulder, "so you've done it, have you! Why, it's too good to believe!" (He drew away sharply, staring behind him.) "These great lanky trees!" he said, "I can't believe I shall ever rid my eyes of them! How shall I get those notes to you?" he finally asked. "Ought I to see you after this?"

"No," said Stifft. "I can't come again. Better not risk it all." He looked at Heans' face with a dazed, peculiar, shy look. "Would the lady—Mrs. Shaxton—er—do something for us in that line? Look, sir, I'd be at the turning into Davey Street on Tuesday after three, and she could drop them out of the fly as she drove down."

Heans glared down the hill again with his hand on his croupe. He was white in the face, but calmer.

"Would she do it?" hazarded Stifft, with that dull, peculiar stare.

"Yes, I am sure she would do it," said Heans.

"Well then, I'll wait under the oil-lamp at the corner. You can describe my features," he explained, with a facile naivete, "and she'll hear me call out 'Stifft'—so—as if I was sneezing. I needn't see you after that for the four weeks. I'll tar her outside, get the red-lead in at once, and pick the boy. When all's ready, I'll go to Fraser's and hang about. Don't speak to me. I'll pass a message to you, somehow. Just give me a nod like a respectable gentleman."

"Well, Captain," said Heans, "it will leave me—so to speak—cleaned out. You must do with the £400, and I must give up my Burgundy. 'Pon my soul, I'd sell my bed and take to 'pink champagne' for a chance of that schooner!" He flushed slowly over the face and temples. "The good woman," he said. thinking possibly of his landlady, "she'll do that much!"

"Name of Quaid, isn't it, 25 —— Street?" asked Stifft.

Sir William nodded, looking back and listening.

"Ah, faithful soul!" he sighed, settling his reins. "Thanks, Stifft. I'll get away up—I'll get her—madam—to do that, and," he put his hand again on the other's shoulder, gazing at him sternly, "help a poor devil out of it."

Stifft eyed him darkly, with his dazed, disappointed eye. "I don't know whether to warn you for or against the blessed women," he cried, in a sudden high panic. "In my knowledge, they've saved men, and they've brought men to the roads, for a lark as I see it. Spitfire beldams—beauteous, kindly natures—you can trust this one, ye can nurse that one, ye can pray to the one yonder, ye can take and dub that one in the rivulet and be in your rights. Yes, and this will go over to the enemy of its father, while that'll sit with its mother's son all its life. Oh, mercy upon us, I leave it to you gentlemen, Sir William Heans—to your gentleman's honour and cunning, if that'll tell you!"

The man snatched his hand from Sir William's saddle, and with a cry of warning, sprang away across the road, and down the embankment into the broken logs and wattle of the lower wood. Sir William did not pause to listen, but, to cover Stifft, slashed down his cane and shot his horse to a gallop. In a few terrible jerks he was round in the shelter of the retaining wall.