At Large

"Well?"

"Who is Pinckney?"

"Son of a brother officer of the Colonel's. Comes from town, I fancy."

"What does he do – besides making an ass of himself?"

"He writes, I think."

"I'm not surprised; he's got cheek enough for anything! Good-night, Robson."

XX

STRANGE HUMILITY

Dick found his room plainly and scantily furnished but delightfully fresh, clean, and comfortable. There was but one narrow strip of carpet by the bedside, but the boards were as snowy as an admiral's poop; the narrow bed stood out into the middle of the room, to the left as you came in at the door. The ceiling, and the walls, and the blind, and the bed, and the tall new candles, and the dressing-table on which they stood, were all very white indeed. At the foot of the bed Dick found his portmanteau and gun-case, and the first thing he did was to put together his gun, and stand it in one corner of the room, ready for next day. He happened to stand it in the corner nearest the bed head, and farthest from the door; but there was no design in that: the whole action was mechanical.

He undressed slowly, or rather he was long in beginning. He stood, resting his elbows on the chest of drawers, and his chin in his palms, and watched the candle burn half-way down before he so much as wound his watch. It was only the wick's last throes that reminded him to put an end to its flickering and get into bed. But by that time Dick's mind was made up. When he lay down to sleep he knew precisely what he was going to do first thing in the morning, and more or less what he meant to say. He fell quickly into a dreamless slumber.

After sleeping like an infant for two or three hours he experienced something very like a dream, and that about the very man of whom he would certainly have dreamt sooner or later. But this was no dream. Dick was awakened: he lay still for a moment, peering through the darkness, and listening with all his ears. Then he started up in his bed, and called sternly:

"Who is there? Who are you?"

At the foot of the bed a tall figure loomed through the darkness. The challenge was answered: first with a short, soft laugh, then in the mildest tones of the man who had passed himself off as Miles the squatter.

"Hush! I have come to explain."

"Oh, it is you!" though Dick had known who it was from the moment the light, stealthy step disturbed him.

"Yes; it isn't a burglar, so lie down again. I tell you I come with a frank explanation. I suppose you will listen to a man?"

"Why should I? You have broken faith with me!"

"It amounts to that, I own. It must seem to you that I deserve no further consideration at your hands. Very well; all I ask is a hearing."

The tones were so unlike anything that could have been expected from the lips of this man that Edmonstone was taken aback; they were so low as to be scarcely audible; they were humble, and they were sad. It was this very humility that at first excited Dick's suspicion.

"I will listen to you now," said he, after a moment's thought, "but it is the last thing I shall do for you. You might first strike a light. There are matches on the dressing-table behind you, and two candles, I think."

Miles complied unsuspectingly with this reasonable request. He was some time, however, in finding the matches. Yet he heard no sound (Dick's arm was so long, so lithe his movement) until the candles were alight; when two loud clicks caused him to wheel suddenly round, throwing one candlestick with a crash to the floor.

Dick was sitting up quietly in his bed, as he had been sitting a moment before; but in his hands was a double-barrelled gun – cocked – the butt not six inches from his shoulder, the muzzle not three feet from Miles's breast. It could be brought to the shoulder in a small fraction of a second. It could be fired with sufficient deadliness without being brought to the shoulder at all. A finger was upon each of the triggers. The light of the single candle glittered upon the barrels.

"Now, my friend," said Dick, "I am ready to listen to you as long as you like."

Miles stared fixedly at the hammers of the gun. He did not speak, he did not draw back. He stood there, in his shirt and trousers, motionless and silent. This was not, as we know, his first interview under arms, but it was the first in which the arms had been in the hands of the other side; moreover, he had once pressed a pistol to the head of this Edmonstone whose gun covered him now. The reversal of things was complete – the tables were turned to the last inch. The strange part of it was that the outwitted bushranger's face showed no trace of cunning baffled, or the fury of an animal at bay, which might have been expected of him. On the contrary, his countenance gradually filled with quite another expression – one of reproach.

"I am not a fool," he said, speaking at last. "I was never yet fool enough to tackle a forlorn hope. Therefore, even if I had come into this room armed to the teeth to offer you violence, I should not dream of competing against those double-barrels. But as I came empty-handed, and in peace, I, for my part, can say all I have to say comfortably into their muzzles – they can make no difference to me, unless you press too hard on those triggers in your anxiety; and if you did, perhaps it would be the best turn you or any man could do me! At the same time you are treating me like a dog. The only words that have left my lips were as submissive as any victor need want; I turned my back on you without the smallest suspicion, yet turn round again to find you pointing a gun at me!"

"You call that bad treatment!" Edmonstone sneered. "You forget, perhaps, that you have no business to be loose in the world; you forget that I found you out and shielded you, wrongly enough, on certain terms, which you have broken! Well, I am reminding you; but I am not likely to give you a second chance of playing me false. That is why I keep the sight of my gun in a line with your stud – so; that is why, if you come a step nearer, I won't answer for consequences."

"Considering," said Miles, "how I treated you a few years ago, and what you owe to that treatment, I should have thought you might behave rather differently to-night; you might have shown a little generosity, outlaw as I am."

"You remind me," said Dick, "that in '82, in the scrub near Balranald, you stuck up me and my mate, and took almost everything we had – except our money. I didn't require to be reminded of that forbearance of yours. I haven't forgotten it, and I know pretty well its worth by now, though hitherto I have overvalued it. But that old account – supposing it to be one, for argument's sake – was squared last month; you have been fool enough to open a new one."

"It is a pity," said Miles, bitterly, "that I didn't let Jem Pound knife you!"

"On the contrary, through saving me then you found one man in England actually ready to screen you from justice. If you had not broken faith with him that man would screen you still; but as it is – Steady! don't move! I am pressing the trigger."

"Do you mean that you are going to betray me after all?" cried Miles, in a quick gasp of dismay, yet drawing back – he had taken a step forward in his agitation.

"What else would you have me do? Give you another chance? Honestly," cried Dick, with honesty in his tone, "I wish that I could! But can you expect it?"

"Listen to me!" cried Miles, in a deep faltering voice. "Listen to me!"

"I am listening."

"The other day, then – I mean the night you found me out, you and those blood-suckers – I was on the brink of a new life! You smile – but before Heaven it is the truth! I had lived for weeks as I never lived before – among good people. Bad as I was, they influenced me, at first without my knowing it. It was a new side of life to me. I found it was the best side. I grew – well, call it happy. Then I looked back and loathed the old days. I began to map out a better life for myself. I was a new man, starting afresh. I thanked God for my escape, for it seemed like His act."

"If the fellow isn't in earnest," thought Dick, "this is the worst blasphemy I ever heard. I half think he means what he says, poor wretch."

"It was you that blotted out that new existence – just as it opened out before me! It was you that drove me from my haven! It was you that turned me adrift in a city full of foes! So much for your side of the balance between us!"

Dick was half-carried away by the man's rough eloquence, and the note of pathos in his deep tones. But he was only half-carried away; he was a man hard to shift when his stand was once taken. His answer was shrewd:

"That city is the safest place in the world for such as you – safer even than the bush. As to your friends, did you expect to live on them forever?"

The other's vehemence was checked.

"Perhaps you intended to become one of the family!" said Edmonstone scornfully, pursuing his advantage.

Miles pulled himself together, and dismissed this keen question with a smile and a wave of the hand; but the smile faded quickly; nor had it been anything better than a ghastly mockery.

"You do not appreciate my position," said Miles presently, fetching a deep sigh; "you cannot put yourself in my place. No honest man could, I suppose! And you shut me off from all decent living; you made me bid good-bye to the people who had befriended me, and somehow – well, made me wish I was a little less the ruffian! I became an outcast! I tried to make new friends, but failed. I had lost my nerve somehow – that was the worst of it! I resolved to throw it up, and quit England. I took my passage for New York, and – "

"Do you mean what you say? Have you actually done that?"

"Yes. The ticket is in my room, which is opposite this room." He pointed to the door. "I can bring it to show you."

"No; stay where you are; I believe you. When do you sail?"

"In a week – next Tuesday."

Dick breathed more freely. Here was an extenuating circumstance of the broken compact. On the whole, Dick was glad to find one.

"Go on," said Dick, in a slightly less hostile tone: "tell me the rest, and what it was that induced you to come up here."

"Surely you can see the rest for yourself? Surely you can put yourself in my place at this point? I own that hearing you were not to be of the party finally induced me to come – I thought you would not hear of it till afterwards; but I came to bid my friends good-bye! to get one more glimpse of a kind of life I had never seen before and shall never see again! for one more week in a pure atmosphere."