Stingaree

The maid protested, wept, but was expelled, and a key turned between them; then Hilda Bouverie read her note again: —

"Escaped this afternoon. Came to your concert. Hiding in boudoir. Give me five minutes, or raise alarm, which you please. – Stingaree."

So ran his words in pencil on her own paper, and they were true; she had heard at supper of the escape. Once more she looked in the glass. And to her own eyes in these minutes she looked years younger – there was a new sensation left in life!

A touch to her hair, a glance in the pier-glass, and all for a notorious convict broken prison! So into the boudoir with her grandest air; but again she locked the door behind her, and, sweeping round, beheld a bald man bowing to her in immaculate evening clothes.

"Are you the writer of a note found on my dressing-table?" she demanded, every syllable off the ice.

"I am."

"Then who are you, besides being an impudent forger?"

"You name the one crime I never committed," said he. "I am Stingaree."

And they gazed into each other's eyes; but not yet were hers to be believed.

"He only escaped this afternoon!"

"I am he."

"With a bald head?"

"Thanks to a razor."

"And in those clothes?"

"I found them where I found the razor. Look; they don't fit me as well as they might."

And he drew nearer, flinging out an abbreviated sleeve; but she looked all the harder in his face.

"Yes. I begin to remember your face; but it has changed."

"It has gazed on prison walls for many years."

"I heard.. I was grieved.. but it was bound to come."

"It may come again. I care very little, after this!"

And his dark eyes shone, his deep voice vibrated; then he glanced over a shrugged shoulder toward the outer door, and Hilda darted as if to turn that key too, but there was none to turn.

"It ought to happen at once," she said, "and through me."

"But it will not."

His assurance annoyed her; she preferred his homage.

"I know what you mean," she cried. "You did me a service years ago. I am not to forget it!"

"It is not I who have kept it before your mind."

"Perhaps not; but that's why you come to me to-night."

Stingaree looked upon the spirited, spoilt beauty in her satin and diamonds and pearls; villain as he was, he held himself at her mercy, but he was not going to kneel to her for that. He saw a woman who had heard the truth from very few men, a nature grown in mastery as his own had inevitably shrunk: it was worth being at large to pit the old Adam still remaining to him against the old Eve in this petted darling of the world. But false protestations were no counters in his game.

"Miss Bouverie," said Stingaree, "you may well suppose that I have borne you in mind all these years. As a matter of honest fact, when I first heard your name this evening, I was slow to connect it with any human being. You look angry. I intend no insult. If you have not forgotten the life I was leading before, you would very readily understand that I have never heard your name from those days to this. That is my misfortune, if also my own fault. It should suffice that, when I did remember, I came at my peril to hear you sing, and that before I dreamt of coming an inch further. But I heard them say, both in the hall and outside, that you owed your start to me; now one thinks of it, it must have been a rather striking advertisement; and I reflected that not another soul in Sydney can possibly owe me anything at all. So I came straight to you, without thinking twice about it. Criminal as I have been, and am, my one thought was and is that I deserve some little consideration at your hands."

"You mean money?"

"I have not a penny. It would make all the difference to me. And I give you my word, if that is any satisfaction to you, I would be an honest man from this time forth!"

"You actually ask me to assist a criminal and escaped convict – me, Hilda Bouverie, at my own absolute risk!"

"I took a risk for you nine years ago, Miss Bouverie; it was all I did take," said Stingaree, "at the concert that made your name."

"And you rub it in," she told him. "You rub it in!"

"I am running for my life!" he exclaimed, in answer. "It wouldn't have been necessary – that would have been enough for the Miss Bouverie I knew then. But you are different; you are another being, you are a woman of the world; your heart, your heart is dead and gone!"

He cut her to it, none the less; he could not have inflicted a deeper wound. The blood leapt to her face and neck; she cried out at the insult, the indignity, the outrage of it all; and crying she darted to the door.

It was locked.

She turned on Stingaree.

"You dared to lock the door – you dared! Give me the key this instant."

"I refuse."

"Very well! You have heard my voice; you shall hear it again!"

Her pale lips made the perfect round, her grand teeth gleamed in the electric light.

He arrested her, not with violence, but a shrug.

"I shall jump out of the window and break my neck. They don't take me twice – alive."

She glared at him in anger and contempt. He meant it. Then let him do it. Her eyes told him all that; but as they flashed, stabbing him, their expression altered, and in a trice her ear was to the keyhole.

"Something has happened," she whispered, turning a scared face up to him. "I hear your name. They have traced you here. They are coming! Oh! what are we to do?"

He strode over to the door.

"If you fear a scandal I can give myself up this moment and explain all."

He spoke eagerly. The thought was sudden. She rose up, looking in his eyes.

"No, you shall not," she said. Her hand flew out behind her, and in two seconds the brilliant room had click-clicked into a velvet darkness.