Irralie's Bushranger/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
TO SLOW MUSIC
"Thank you, Miss Villiers! I call that kind!"
The words followed Irralie to her room, and kept her from her bed. They sang in her ears and were written in her brain. They were the words of a villain, and yet they cut her to the heart. They cut her so cruelly, and in such open and prolonged defiance of her reason, that the shameful truth came home to her at last. They were the words of a villain whom she loved.
Yes, she had loved, as she had distrusted him, from the very first. That was why she had said nothing about the pistol. That was why she had suggested the lost overcoat. She had done this, and left that undone, on instinct simply. And instinctively she had loved him from the first.
Her thoughts had been of him and him alone from the very moment of their meeting on the box-clump edge. In all her life she had known no such anguish as her doubts of him, and no such happiness as that brief spell of confidence restored. But trust and doubt were now two things of the past. Certainty took their place; and yet the love remained.
It was monstrous, it was grotesque, but it was nevertheless a fact to be faced. She had made so dire a fool of herself that she could laugh outright; and did so, once, at a sudden sight of her own image in the glass. She had never taken off her dress; the muslin was no longer crisp; the rowans drooped upon their stalks; and at the thought of the mad folly underneath, she laughed in her own white face and burning eyes. But the laugh rang false and ended in a groan; it did not help her to face the fact; nor did she try to do so much longer, but resigned herself to her fate once and for all.
She found it less easy, however, to resign herself to the fate of the man she loved. He lay captive within thirty yards of her room. In the morning he would be taken away; then tried; then put in prison for the rest of his life; and he so young! It was terrible—unthinkable—but it should not be. But for her he would have broken prison already. She had not known her heart when she cried out to George Young; but that cry had made her know it; and now, if escape were possible, she would undo what she had then done by helping him to escape.
So Irralie decided, with a trembling but a lightened heart. The difficulty and the danger removed the lens from her own feelings, turned her eyes outwards, and gave a new tone to her nerves. Her practical side reasserted itself, and in an instant she was thinking how the thing could be done. And as she thought, the even breathing of a houseful of sleepers came through the thin wooden walls to encourage her.
So the other women were all asleep! Then surely there was little to be feared from the male encampment so much farther away; and she would have to pit her wits against those of the established guard alone. She would outwit them, never fear! She would give them a false alarm, and then tear open the door the moment their backs were turned. Thoughts wild as these darted through her brain in the first excitement of resolve; but her preparations were no less swiftly and cunningly made.
She changed her ball-slippers for a bedroom pair that would make no noise on the veranda. She enveloped herself from head to heel in an old, black waterproof cloak, which would never be seen in the shadow of a veranda or through the fronds of a pine. She put matches and a candle-end in her pocket; and thus accoutred she crept out, shutting the door very softly behind her.
The moon was setting in a blur of clouds; that was one thing already in Irralie's favor. She stole to the corner of the front veranda, and peeped round very cautiously for fear of rousing sleepy watchers from their chairs. There were none. The veranda was deserted; so was the yard. The very sentinel had been withdrawn from the iron-store door.
Irralie could scarce believe her eyes. Her heart beat high; and yet the seeming safety had in ways a greater terror for her than danger seen and realized. She bent her head and listened intently. At first nothing; then a clink, then a laugh, in the middle distance, through closed doors; and then a snatch of Mendelssohn, wonderfully played on the harsh old school-room piano, but with the soft pedal down all the time. Irralie listened with raised eyebrows and a hostile heart for the accomplished exquisite to whom she had not yet spoken a word. But a moment later she had her second glimpse of him. The lieder ended, a door opened, and out came the pianist with the strut of a game-cock and the carriage of a guardsman. One glance through his eye-glass at the iron-store, and he was gone as he had come; and a comic song of Jevons's, struck up that moment to his own vile accompaniment, was cut short in the very first bar.
Irralie now knew where the watchers were spending the night; but she was curious to discover of whom exactly the guard consisted, and whether music was its only joy. To peer through the passage and door by which the Englishman had come out and gone in again would, however, be rash, since the yard afforded no sort of cover. But there was the door at which Irralie herself had stood and looked upon the pines; she could therefore stand among the pines and look in at this door. And in two minutes' time she was actually doing so; nor had a twig cracked or a wire jingled on the way.
The door was wide open, but Irralie was too far from it to see very much of the lamp-lit room within; but she saw young Hodding, sprawled across a desk and fast asleep, and that half of the piano on the top of which stood bottles, glasses, and a bedroom ewer. This at first was all that was visible to Irralie through the door. Then Jevons came upon the narrow scene to help himself freely from a bottle and sparingly from the ewer; and the Englishman joined him, looking keenly in his flushed face, and as keenly at the prostrate tutor, before he himself opened a bottle of soda-water, and poured it ostentatiously into a glass containing no whiskey at all.
All this time but little had been said, and still less had the girl been able to overhear. The first words she could distinguish were addressed by George Young (who was invisible) to Jevons the storekeeper.
"Hodding's drunk," said he (in a voice which certified the speaker, at any rate, as beyond reproach); "and you mean to get drunker because you can stand more! If I was Mr. Fullarton—well, I wish I was!"
The owner's reply sounded tolerant, for him; it was, however, inaudible; and as he spoke he went out once more by the other door, and returned briskly next moment.
"Ah well?" asked Young.
"Right as rain! We might as well turn in."
"I sha'n't. One never knows. Besides, there's the police to fetch some time, and a horse ready saddled in the stable. If I had my way I'd fetch 'em now."
"My dear, good fellow, where's the point?" asked the Englishman, screwing round on the music-stool with his eye-glass flaming in the lamp-light. "That chap's all right! We've tied him too tight to move. In any case, when there's the least occasion for anybody to go, Mr. Young, you may rely upon due notice to that effect from me."
So saying, he turned abruptly to the piano; and Irralie, turning also, stole in deeper among the trees, with the first notes of Chopin's funeral march in her ears, and clear in her brain the image of a very formidable opponent indeed. He was brisk, alert, resolute, educated, masterful, indeed all one could wish one's opponent not to be; and the mannerisms of a coxcomb made him, even in the girl's eyes, all the more dangerous a man. This she realized while making a considerable détour among the pines. But her determination was unshaken and her nerve only tuned to a higher pitch when she emerged from the plantation at the back of the iron-store.
It was darker than ever, so that the angle of the prison roof was lost against the clouded blackness of the sky. And Irralie could touch the iron before she was sure that no face looked out upon her from the small square window. Yet the window was open, as it had been before.
She stood on tip-toe to put her mouth to the wooden sill and whisper, "Are you awake?"
"Miss Villiers! Can that be you?"
The voice came from the level of Irralie's knees. "I want to speak to you," she said. "Stand up, or we shall be heard."
"I can't. They've tied me down by the hand. They handcuffed me down before, but I slipped the handcuff."
"Well! I want to get you out altogether."
"What, after giving me away as you did to Young?"
"I didn't give you away at all. But I'll have no more words about anything that's past. I know what you are, and what you deserve. Another word about that and I leave you to your fate!"
"Very well; let it rest. Have they sent for the police?"
"Not yet. I don't know why not. They're having quite a musical evening. I believe there's a horse all ready in the stables. I mean that horse for you. Did you manage to move any of these nuts?"
"Not one."
"No more can I. I'm going to look for a screw-hammer. Oh, I don't care what you've done! I want you to have this one more chance, and not be taken here!"
She was gone before he could reply. She went as she had come, and heard on the way the finish of the funeral march. Then came a difficulty. The screw-hammer was in the tool-box—the tool-box in the store. The store was locked, and the key, no doubt, in Jevons's or George Young's or the new owner's pocket.
She went to her room and racked her brains; all she could think of was a box of boys' tools in her brothers' room. There might be a pair of pincers in that box, and a pair of pincers might do. In any case she would go and look.
The boys were sleeping heavily: they did not hear her open the door, but one of them moved in his sleep as she struck a match and then shaded it with her hand. The tool-box was under their dressing-table. She carried it bodily to her room; there were pincers, and strong ones too. But would they answer?
She crept round the veranda once more, and was about to dart across to the pines at their nearest point when once again the spruce, straight figure in the gaiters and riding-breeches strode out into the yard. He stood there a moment whistling Chopin to himself, and looking about him smartly. The girl crouched down behind a chair. Then, to her horror, he walked in the direction of the iron-store. If his step should be taken for hers!
She saw him look at the padlock, and disappear between the two iron buildings. If he had done so five minutes before! He was an age away; indeed, she saw him no more; for, from where she crouched, the school-room building overlapped the iron-store; and when she could stay there no longer for suspense, and made a dash of it for the pines, she heard him talking to Young just as when she passed before. He had returned to the school-room by the other door, and precious minutes had been lost.
"I'd given you up!"
"That man frightened me. Did you speak to him?"
"No."
"Nor he to you?"
"Only a word or two."
"I didn't hear: so they wouldn't hear us: but you must listen while I work. Listen hardest when he's not playing! If they come you must make a noise, and I'll get away while they're opening the door."
"You are very good."
"Not a word about that—or anything else. Now let me try. Ah, how difficult to do it quietly!"
For the pincers were large enough to bite the nuts, but first they snapped together, and then they banged heavily against the iron. Irralie desisted and held her breath in despair. The music had not recommenced, and sure enough there came footsteps; but the prisoner instantly began beating with his head or his knee against the corrugated iron.
"Stop that row!"
"What! mayn't I be musical, too?"
"No, you may not."
"Right you are."
The steps retreated. Irralie breathed again. Then with her fingers she felt for a dwarf sheet of iron; most of them were as tall as herself, by some eighteen inches in width; but at last she found a short strip cut to fill a gap. It was between two and three feet in height, and it reached to the ground, where it was nailed to a horizontal slab of wood. Five bolts clamped it in all: one to the strip above and two at each side. Irralie tapped it gently about the centre.
"Are you anywhere near this?"
"Just behind!"
"Then if I can unscrew five nuts you are a free man."
She went to work on the first. "Fold your handkerchief," he whispered, "and work through that. There will be less fear of a noise." For now, when it was wanted most, the school-room piano was still, And the night was darker than ever, an unmixed blessing when a ray of moonshine would have meant discovery. But Irralie felt her way and persevered. And at last a nut budged.
"One!" whispered Irralie.
"Loosen them all, but take none off yet." The next moved readily; the third stuck; the fourth was the worst of all; and the fifth was just yielding when the prisoner whispered, "Stop!"
"Hear it?" said George Young's voice.
"Not a sound! You're becoming imaginative. You'd much better go to bed."
"Or for the police."
"Oh, perdition seize the police! I've a great mind not to have them called in at all!"
"What?"
"My good Young!" responded the other in his weariest drawl; "do not, for pity's sake, scream at me like that! It's confoundedly ill-bred. If you're too dense to see my point, come back to the school-room and let me explain it where we sha'n't be overheard by the person most interested."
The voices ceased.
"He didn't speak to me like that," muttered the man in the iron-store.
"He's an affected beast!" whispered Irralie, prettily, as she set down the pincers and began taking off the nuts with her naked fingers.
"Steady now, Miss Villiers. It may crack like thunder. Be prepared to run!"
So slowly, however, did she bend the sheet down, and with so firm a hand—slipped gradually to the base—on either side, that the task was accomplished all but noiselessly. The prisoner was revealed hunched up within.
"How have they bound you?"
"The bad hand tight to my body; the other and both my feet to a plough or something."
"I haven't a knife."
"And I lost mine the other day!"
"But I have my fingers—and patience," said Irralie, "if only there is time. Ah, thank Heaven for that!" The opening movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" had come suddenly to their ears, played in the distance with improved precision, and as much feeling as the permanent soft pedal and the school-room piano would permit.
Irralie knelt with head and arms through the aperture, and began upon the knot that bound his hand. His breath was on her cheek, but she got it undone. The feet were less elaborately secured, and he was able to help with his liberated hand. In five minutes from the unscrewing of the last nut he was free to rise, and yet too stiff to stir.
At last he managed it with the loss of more time; and more yet went in replacing the iron and lightly refixing three nuts. But on this he himself insisted, and Beethoven in the school-room still gave them warrant for delay.
"The pines!" quavered Irralie, near hysterics now that her own part was played. "Come quick—come quick! The long way round to the stables—by the stock-yards—by the tents—you follow me!"
Once through the wires—once well among the trees—they flew like birds, Irralie cutting deep and circling wide. It was terribly dark, but the girl knew every inch of the ground. They passed the broken column without a word. They skirted the tents so perilously that the snores of the occupants purred in their ears. Then once more through wires—Irralie held them apart for him—and so to the stables under cover of the night alone. But now there was neither moon nor star, nor as yet any sign of dawn in the inky sky.
The stable had risen in front of them as from the ground; they could have touched it with their hands, and were about to turn a corner of the long, low, pine-log building, when Irralie seized her companion's arm and stopped him dead.
Voices were approaching from the other side.