Ainslee's Magazine/Volume 31/Number 3/The Voice of the Charmer

by E. W. Hornung

 

The VOICE of the
CHARMER

By

E. W. Hornung.

OLD Duggan and Charlie Shand had been mates for years, in hut and tent, on foot and horseback, as overseer and storekeeper at the same Queensland station, but latterly as partners on a place of their own in the Lachlan back blocks. Duggan was the better bushman. Charlie Shand had brought in most of the capital. Charlie managed the business, Duggan the sheep and the men, and neither trenched upon the other's province. The partnership might have been made in heaven, and seemed in no danger of being marred on earth; in four years there had been hardly a hot word or a black look between them. Then they had a really good season and Charlie went home to England for a spell.

Old Duggan, who really was not at all old, saw him off with longing eyes, after vowing that nothing would induce him to go home himself, though he also hailed from lesser Britain. If he lied, he was rewarded for his unselfishness. It rained that summer as he had never seen it rain before; and one good season on top of another is a Pelion of pure gold on a merely auriferous Ossa. Duggan saw sovereigns pouring from the sky, and more sovereigns growing where things were not even supposed to grow. Every scrap of normal desert was swallowed by a rank oasis in which sheep could not travel until the jungle of grass had been beaten down in front of them.

Duggan stocked every acre, yet counted the months at first, and then the days, that must elapse before Charlie Shand's return. Charlie's communications he could have counted on the fingers of one hand; but at last came a cable of two welcome words, and some weeks later a long telegram from Melbourne. This telegram began in the first person plural, and ended with the hour at which Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shand expected to arrive by the coach and hoped to find the shanghai at the township to meet them.

Duggan had to steady himself with a stiffish nobbler. It was the very first that he had heard of the interloping lady. He could only suppose that Charlie had been bewitched on the voyage and married off the reel on landing. Some such marriages turned out a huge success. Charlie was no fool, either; he knew his own mind better than most, wanted only what was worth having, and saw that he got it nearly every time. He would make no mistake in a big thing like this; trust old Charlie to have done a good stroke for himself and for the station. A woman would be the making of the whole place; they had always said so. Still, was rather a sudden end to old times, rather like rushing the more civilized existence of their common dream. It would have kept a bit longer, Duggan thought on the veranda, where they had threshed out everything of old. And on the last night of his loneliness he felt really lonely for the first time.

But he rose like a bird to the last day; every minute of it went in final preparations for the happy pair. There was much to be made as shipshape and as snug as possible; sprays of scrub to be stuck about the place by way of flowers; a native turkey to be shot for the evening banquet; champagne to be raised from a next-door neighbor fifteen miles away; furniture to furbish, including a grand piano of great antiquity; and then the bridal quarters to prepare well as Duggan himself could prepare them in the time. This entailed his own migration to the bachelors' barracks of which they had never as yet made any use. They had run the place between them, those two, without the aid of any of those young gentlemen who hang about most homesteads, and are not worth their parlor rations. It might be as well to import one now, since four was at any rate better company than three. Yet there was no knowing; there were women and women, and Charlie was the very man to pick one in ten thousand. Charlie's friend grew more and more sanguine as the busy day wore on.

He had not time to drive five miles to meet them, even if he had been quite sure it was the tactful thing to do. One of the men went in the shanghai, while Duggan had his hair cut by the Chinaman, trimmed his own beard, and arrayed himself in a snowy suit hastily washed and ironed for the great occasion. It was dark when he stepped down from the veranda, shouting welcomes; but though it was dark, and also dinner time, Duggan saw enough of the bride to require a nobbler with Charlie before they all met properly at the table.

“How long have we been married?” said that sinner, as they touched glasses. “I feel as if it were all my life! So will you, when your time comes, my son; everybody does, if they pick a winner.”

“But how long, really?”

“Oh, a few weeks before we sailed.”

“Then why on earth didn't you write and tell me?”

Duggann was clearly holding himself in, his voice trembled as it was; but Charlie Shand had his answer pat: “My dear old Harry, I'd have sent a ten-pound cable rather than hurt your feelings; but, as a matter of fact, we thought we'd spare them. You see, you might have been in the devil's own funk all this time, wondering what she'd be like. You might have imagined she'd go and spoil everything; and now you can see for yourself at a glance that it'll be just the other way about. She's a topper, Harry! It was partly her idea—not to make you anxious.”

“I see.”

“You're not sick with us?”

“Of course I'm not.”

“You never will be, either. I feel twice the chap I ever was, and she's—well, wait till you know her! You wait, old son. I'll give you a week to get to know her; then you won't need me to tell you that she's just about the greatest girl God ever made!”

She was, perhaps, not quite, quite a girl at all; otherwise even Duggan could not have caviled at a word the happy idiot had said about his wife. She was a superb woman, as long as she was not too good for the bush. That was the only criticism a stranger might have formulated at the beginning of dinner ; by the end, he would probably have seen that she was really too good to be too good for any mere spot on earth. She talked capitally, and all the time to Duggan, to her groom's intense delight.

What was even more delightful, and certainly more surprising, was the way old Duggan chattered in his turn, on newspaper topics which he would simply never have mentioned in the old bachelor days. His solitude seemed to have done him good; it, at any rate, had driven him deep into his Australian, and the affairs of the outside world. Men do not really get to know each other by living alone together. It takes a woman to hold them up to one another. Charlie had always known his friend for a great gentleman; but he had never suspected that behind that bearded piece of mahogany there re- sided a society man as well. He felt deliciously out of it at the festal board. The other two talked away as if they had known each other all their lives. And Charlie only gloated over this final seal on his incredible bliss.

His turn came on the dear old veranda, where he and Duggan had spent so many peaceful evenings in the past; this was worth them all put together, from Charlie's point of view. To him it was a new veranda with a new world of stars outside. He began to babble; the others now seemed glad to listen.

Mabel—for that was her dear name—found piquant enjoyment with a cigarette that showed the tip of her neat nose every few seconds; the men had prime cigars imported by the smuggler Shand. He was rather too full of their merits and his cunning; but there was so much that even he could not say before them both. At last he gave himself an opportunity; she must sing to them to round the evening off. No voice? What about the farewell concert on the ship! Piano out of tune? Well, Mab wouldn't be; they'd never notice the piano when she got going.

“I've hardly ever been in the room since you went away. I shouldn't wonder if some of the strings had perished,” said Duggan, still backing up the bride.

Charlie was inclined to be unreasonable. A lamp was carried into the room behind them, where the poor old Broadwood was found primed with French polish, to aggravate its other infirmities. Deft fingers took a hasty trial trip over the neglected keys, while my lord and master stole back in triumph to unresponsive Duggan and his angry cigar

“Isn't she a topper?” he whispered. “But you wait till you hear her sing!”

And dour old Duggan waited without a word.

“What shall it be?” came from within in reckless tone.

“Anything you like, darling. You can't go wrong. Have you any favorites, Harry?”

“No.”

“You used to have, whenever I gave tongue, you old scoundrel!”

“I'm sure I should appreciate anything that Mrs. Shand chose to give us.”

Something in his old friend's tone— something new and not friendly—made Charlie look down sharply. Duggan was seated on the edge of the back veranda, his feet in the heavy sand that had drifted like snow on that side of the house, his eyes on the jet and jewels of trees and stars. Yet up he jumped at the first bar of the bride's first song.

Her groom was more than pacified. His proud eyes followed stealthy Duggan to the lighted room, and left him a silhouetted statue on the threshold:

“As the flight of a river
That flows to the sea,
My heart rushes ever
In tumult to thee!
A twofold existence
I have where thou art—
My heart in the distance
Beats close to thy heart.
Look up! I am near thee,
I gaze on thy face,
I see thee, I hear thee,
I feel thine embrace.”

So sang Mrs. Charlie at the old Broadwood grand, trusting to her memory for both words and music. The lamp burned behind her on a table, and behind the lamp stood Duggan, who had not heard one word. His entire being was in his eyes, which were starting out of his head with horror. They did not even see Mabel, her lamp-lit neck, or hair; they were fixed upon a big black snake that her song had charmed out of the piano, that was even now poised to strike, perhaps the very second her song should cease!

And she did not know it, and must not! And her husband left contentedly in the veranda, blissfully assured of the effect of her voice on ears that heard not. Only Duggan was there to see and act, to determine how to act before the singing ceased, to stoop and creep on the piano under cover of the singer and her song:

“And absence but brightens
The eyes that I miss,
And custom but heightens
The spell of thy kiss.
It is not from duty,
Though that may be ours;
It is not from beauty,
Though that be bestowed;
But all that I care for,
And all that I know——

But the “know” ended in a scream, as musician and music stool were sent flying in a heap; and Shand rushed indoors to find Duggan thrashing the piano with a lash that made dull thuds, and his wife still screaming as if the assault had begun on her. He was picking her up when the seeming madman turned around, and held the dead snake out at arm's length, by the neck, as he had seized it, between finger and thumb. It was nearly five feet long, and black as night, except underneath near his hand, and where the lamplight picked out a red herring-bone pattern at the base of the shining scales.

Hardly a word escaped any of them, as Duggan cast the carcass under the piano, then turned to Charlie and the lamp. Mrs. Charlie watched their backs as she might have watched the snake. Duggan had his knife out, and was doing something that sent his shoulders up to his ears.

“Now something to stop the circulation,” she just heard him whisper through his teeth. “Piano string's the thing—have at 'em with my knife!”

His voice was coming back, but the knife had slipped and stuck quivering in the floor. Charlie plucked it up, hurled the piano lid off its hinges, and hacked at the strings till they went off like little rifles, and stung him in the face. But it was Duggan whom the bride was obliged to watch; he was letting something trickle on the floor, and at the same time puffing at his cigar. It had not gone out, wherever he had had it all this time; it glowed again as he puffed and blew at it like a smith at his forge. When it was so red that tiny sparks began to fly, he raised a red wrist to meet it, and the watcher fled.

At the back of the veranda there was one of those reclining deck chairs with a socket for a tumbler at your elbow; it had not been in use that evening, but Mrs. Charlie was thankful to drop into it now. She put up her feet and was no longer fully aware of what was happening. She heard steps and voices, but only those of her husband and his friend. So, perhaps, the worst was over—there had been marvelously little fuss. Now they seemed to have gone into an inner room; or could they have come out that way without her seeing or hearing them? She sat up, suddenly herself and a woman who had made a fool of herself in the hour of need. The veranda shook under a jangling stride, and Charlie stood over her in his spurs.

“Here you are, little girl! It's going to be all right—feel able to lend a hand?”

“Oh, if I may! I've disgraced you, Charlie. Do tell me what I can do.”

“Keep an eye on him. That's about all. Keep him going—amused—talking, if he will! Don't mind if he gets a bit tight; it's the best thing that can possibly happen. He might have that long chair, but don't let him fall asleep.”

“And you, Charlie, where are you going?”

“To the township for permanganate of potash, and one or two other things we haven't got. I shan't be much more than an hour.”

“You must go yourself?”

“Yes. I know what to get, and time's an object. Besides, Duggan doesn't want them to near of it at the men's hut; he's frightfully set on that, and one must humor him.”

“But, Charlie, you said he was going to be all right?”

“So he is, I honestly believe, especially with you to keep him up. You might almost sing to him, darling; he was struck of a heap by your voice! You're the one to save his life.”

“I ought to be.” Her brave voice shook. “He saved mine, didn't he? We can save him between us, can't we, Charlie? Oh, do tell me that we can!”

He told her that they could, and would, if he got off at once—the next she heard was the hoofs of the night horse thundering into space. She lifted her hands to the winking stars, and prayed on her feet as she had never prayed kneeling down. And before her prayer was finished, a forced laugh made her turn.

Duggan was back in the lighted doorway, still steady as a rock, only facing outward this time, and with his right hand merely thrust out of sight between the buttons of his duck jacket. The hand seemed to take up a deal of room, and the sleeve looked tight. That was all she could see of the swelling, and the ligatures were out of sight. In his other hand he held a tall tumbler, very full and yellow with the light of the room striking through the liquor. It even cast its yellow double on the dusty boards at Mrs. Charlie's feet; but both substance and shadow were thus far as steady as the statuesque man himself.

“Poor old Charlie!” he chuckled, as the hoofs ceased throbbing, like the last beats of a pulse.

“Why 'poor'?” she cried hoarsely.

“He's such a new chum still! That wasn't a black snake at all. It was a diamond snake—nonpoisonous!”

“Then what were you doing to your hand—with your knife—with your cigar?”

“Oh, well, there's nothing like being on the safe side.” He was coming up to her, very slowly, without spilling a drop from his brimming glass. “In any case it was worth it,” and he smiled, “for an hour of you all to myself! I shall clear out to-night, you see, or at latest in the morning.”

She had forced herself to stand and face him. But her eyes had fallen until the blood all down his ducks ar- rested them.

“Don't tell me that you deliberately tortured yourself——”

“I didn't. Torture! You can only feel a certain amount. I'd had all I could feel before you started singing.” He swayed unexpectedly. “But I was a fool to lose so much blood. D'you mind coming over here?”

He almost staggered to the long chair at the back of the veranda; and the young wife, following automatically, drew a very deep breath. This was only what Charlie had prepared her for; no doubt he had forced quantities of spirit upon Duggan, who, for the reason given with such effrontery, could not very well refuse it. But that reason! It pulled her up, bitterly embarrassed and abased. Then she saw her old friend—for he was that—place his bumper in the wicker socket, still without a spill, and then lower himself into the chair with a sigh of simple weariness. That sigh took her to him.

“It was a dirty trick, I know,” he said. “Can you forgive me for it, Mabel?”

“If you're sure it was a trick.”

“I'm afraid there's no mistake about that. It was one thing on top of another, that's what did it. That infernal snake—just then—it was enough to make one lose one's head.”

“You saved my life first, Harry!”

“Not your life. The brute wasn't poisonous, I tell you; but it might have given you an ugly nip for all that, to say nothing of the fright, and its beastly body round your neck.”

“To think that I never saw it!”

“The funny thing is that it didn't deaden the notes.”

“It must have been lying on the long bass strings.”

“The piano must have been left open after polishing. That's when it would get in.”

So they made talk about the concrete climax of events less easy to discuss. Had she never heard of the notorious partiality of snakes for music? No; how interesting! They might have been sitting out at a dance and trying to get to know each other. but Duggan was lying down, and lying none too still in the treacherous wickerwork. It was as if he was enduring bodily twinges. He was out of the lamplight, however, which came from the room in a clear-cut beam, and illumined Mrs. Charlie when she leaned back in the chair beside him.

“Are you sure there's nothing I can get you?”

“Certain, thanks very much. I'm all right. I only think I may have touched a vein or something.”

“But that's dreadful, Harry!”

“Not with piano-wire ligatures. Old Charlie twisted 'em with the pliers; we'd better leave 'em till he comes back, then Ill be as right as the mail.”

“You're not touching your drink!'

“It's not necessary, don't you see? You keep fidgeting about what I went and did. But if it makes you happy, and you'll join me, I wouldn't mind one of those cigarettes of yours.”

She gave him one, and tried to hold the match; he was quick to take it from her in his steadier hand. But in the match light their eyes met, and his looked big with trouble; their hands touched, and his were cold.

“Why didn't you let Charlie write and tell me he had married you?” said Duggan simply, as he smoked.

“I didn't want to part you, if I could help it.”

“I see. Well, I'm going all the same.

“He knows absolutely nothing, Harry!”

“But he will have to know. It's nothing shameful, after all. You chucked me; you've done better. That happens every day. But the trio don't live together.”

He laughed ironically to himself. But she had heard him only up to a certain point.

“I chucked you?” she cried.

“I'm sorry I put it in such a beastly way. I'm sorry I said it at all.”

“Because you know it isn't true!”

“What?”

“When you came out here, and never wrote a single word!”

Her bosom labored, but not with the passion that had long been dead there; her voice broke, but only with undying indignation. That was the one emotion he might still call to life in her—a reflex spasm of humiliating pain, long past, yet never to be forgotten, and the sharper for his callous bearing about it all. But this was modified, for the moment, by the way he passed his hand across his forehead, as if it ached.

“I believe there's been some big mistake,” he said wearily. “Don't let's bother about it now! It's too late; and I didn't get you to myself to rake up the past, at least not that part of it. It's true I didn't write for ages, I was so long in making a fair start. I think we'd better leave it at that, if you don't mind.”

“But I do mind!” she burst out. “I'm not thinking of your explanation, but of mine. I haven't come out just to hurt you and have my revenge. I never knew about you until—until Charlie and I——”

“I know. I know,” he soothed her, reaching for her hand. He held it only a second. “These flukes—these meetings—of course they aren't really flukes at all—they're our fate. Thank God you did meet! You couldn't help loving him, or he you.”

“He was the first,” she whispered, “the very first I ever thought of again—after all those years without a word. I nearly broke it off when I did find out. Yet why should I? I had no reason to suppose you would mind, Charlie was quite certain you had never been in love in your life!”

“So my letter did go astray!" This more to himself than her. “I often wondered if it had; but I never had the spirit to write again. It didn't seem quite the game. The whole point was to leave you absolutely free. I promised your people that. They were never keen about me—— Mab!”

“Yes, Harry?”

“You're leaning too far forward. I like you near me, but just now I can't see your face in the light from the door.”

“It's not fit to be seen.”

“Never mind. It's my last chance. I really am going, you know. And I did want to buck about old times!”

“Buck away,” she whispered. But she still leaned forward. And that request was not rewarded.

“What about the old place? How was it looking when you came away?”

“You mean ours? We haven't lived there for ages, Harry.”

“I'm sorry. Just live there again for a minute, and let me come and see you. There!” She knew that he had closed his eyes. “Have I come to take you on the pond? I say, look out across those stepping-stones! You'd better let me give you a hand.” He held his good one out, and she took it without thinking. “That's better, kiddie!” and they both laughed at the absurd name for her now. “Or is it a dance, and we are sitting out in the rockery? If so, we may get into another row, by Jove!”

“It's not a dance, Harry——” she whispered.

“I'm not so sure. Do you remember those colored lights they played on the rockery fountain on state occasions? Emerald, and pink, and lavender; I can see 'em now. I remember the night I found out how it was done, through that trapdoor hidden in the ferns. That was only at a kid's party, Mab, but if it's going to upset you——”

“It's all right, I'm all right,” she answered, drawing at a black cigarette. His had not gone out; he lent it to her, and then sipped his whisky for the first time. At once she remembered Charlie's injunctions, but forgot Duggan's cynical confession, and urged him to drink more.

“Not another drop,” he said, spilling a quantity as if on purpose. “I've had far too much as it 1s; otherwise shouldn't have upset you by talking a whole lot of rot.”

He closed his eyes again—and now it was that terror came upon her. He was fast asleep in an instant. It was the very thing she had been charged to prevent. Was it the whisky, or was it, could it be, to her that he had lied? She shook him violently by the shoulder; and his eyes opened within a few inches of hers, opened in paradise judging from their smile.

“What is it, darling? You don't mean to say I dropped off when sitting out?”

His horror was horrible as he tried to sit up and failed.

“Of course not, Harry, dear. Don't you know where you are?”

“Rather—think I did—those lights!'

She turned round to look, her heart leaping at the thought of succor, company, anybody to share the strain. And all she saw was a frameful of twinkling stars and inky scrub between the posts and lintel of a bush veranda. Never, to be sure, were stars more brilliantly alive or in closer cluster. But those were the only lights.

“Now it's emerald—no! Now it's changed to lavender, and in another minute it'll be pink. Fairyland, I call it—yet your under gardener does it with a bit of colored glass and a bull's-eye lantern, somehow up there in the ferns—I say, Mabel—Mrs. Shand!”

“Dear Harry, I'm so thankful!”

“Why? Have I been talking some more rot? I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Shand——”

“Don't! I can't bear you to call me that!”

“Well, but I ought to, oughtn't I? It's no use telling Charlie now.”

“You mustn't go, Harry; you needn't go, I'm sure you needn't!”

He laughed funnily. “I believe I should have given the show away over that song, if it hadn't been for our friend the blacky.”

“The what?”

“That diamond snake. No harm in 'em, bless you, but good judges of music. I say, Mab!”

“Yes, Harry?”

“What on earth did you go and sing that for?”

“Don't ask me. I—I don't know.”

“Funny thing is, I didn't hear a word of it at the time. But now I do, every syllable. You'd got as far as 'all that I care for and all that I know.' If I'd let you finish, the beast might have struck. Ran it rather fine, didn't I?”

“You were splendid, magnificent!”

“I keep on telling you there was no real danger.”

“It wouldn't have made any difference if there had been.”

“Yet I was cheated out of the end; rather hard, that, wasn't it? I wish you'd give it to me now, Mab!”

“I couldn't, Harry.”

“You could!”

And he hummed, in labored whispers:

“But all that I care for—
And all that I know—
Is that without wherefore
I worship thee so!

“Which is absurd,” concluded Duggan, out of breath. “I mean—last line but one. I'd like to hear it, all same—if it doesn't bore—if anything could rouse—that's it, that's it!”

And Charlie Shand, returning from the township at the nearest approach to a gallop that he could get out of the station night horse, had the same thing running in his head all the way, to a muffled accompaniment of unshod hoofs on a sandy track. But in the home paddock all that changed into the very voice of his charmer, charming never so wisely in the very song so sensationally interrupted an hour before. It augured well that this time it was sung to a finish. Yet Charlie neither drew rein nor spared spur in his relief, and was only a few lengths nearer home when the voice rang out again—but not in song——

Charlie Shand leaped from the saddle in the station yard, caught up a lamp in his wild rush through the house, and held it on high in the back veranda till the chimney cracked and tinkled at his feet. The naked flame lit up the bowed form of his wife—beside the long deck chair—kneeling over the dead who had died in her arms.