The Beach of Atonement Page 11

  “Ellen, by God ! Ellen at last!”

  “And then he sprang at me. His face was awful. And his eyes, Hester—his eyes ! He frightened me so that I couldn’t move. I could do nothing but stare at him, do nothing till the instant he almost reached me, when I found myself suddenly running. I ran towards the beach with him close behind me, and he was shouting all the while:

  “Ellen, I’ve got you! Why run, Ellen? Never again shall you leave me, Ellen!”

  “The sand clogged my feet, Hester. It was just like having a nightmare, you know, when one is chased by a terrible monster and one’s feet are made of lead. I screamed as I ran. I heard him fall with a crash behind me. I took to the bush, I remember, and next I was standing on Big Hill, hardly able to get my breath. Then I saw him, down on the rocks, running back and forth along the edge of the Pontoon, waving his arms towards the sea. The waves knocked him down again and again, and sometimes I could hear him shouting:

  “Ellen, come back! Ellen, come back!”

  “Well?” urged Hester Long, after a short silence. She felt her work-scarred hands seized in those of the girl; she saw a tear-drenched face, marred by anguish, thrust close to hers ; heard Edith’s voice suddenly hardened:

  “Who—who is Ellen? Do you know?”

  For a moment their eyes held.

  “Yes,” Hester Long nodded. “Ellen is his wife.”

  “His—his wife!”

  The proudly-held head suddenly bent forward, and with fierceness in her movement Hester Long drew the shaking figure within her arms, patted a firm shoulder with one hand and smoothed the golden hair with the other. And thus they remained till the boys came back with the loaded basket.

  “Now, Harold, you light a tiny fire over there beside the creek, and Jim can fill the billy with water,” Hester Long directed. “Get busy, now, and make us some tea. Miss Mallory is better, but she wants to tell me about her holiday in Perth. To-morrow she is going to tell you some wonderful stories about Perth.”

  “All right, mum!” responded Harold, the elder boy, cheerfully-frank-faced, steady-eyed, sturdy. “Come on, Jim: fill that billy, quick. I’ll get some sticks.”

  “You think that Mr. Cain did not recognize you ?” inquired Hester Long quietly of Edith Mallory, now a little more composed.

  “No. No—he took me for—for his wife.”

  “He was drunk?”

  “Yes. Not ordinarily drunk. Mad—just mad with drink. Did he tell you about his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  When Edith looked at Hester Long it was to find the elder woman’s face turned towards the sea, her eyes wide and blank, and not registering the scene upon her mind.

  “Tell me what he told you,” she urged, the hint of tears in her voice.

  “Edith!” Hester Long turned quickly. “Edith, you have got to call upon all your strength and kill your love for Hector Cain. In spite of your fright of this afternoon, I can see that you love him now no less. You must realize the fact that Hector Cain can never, never be anything to you.”

  “Why?”

  The girl’s eyes were wide and brilliant. Hester Long saw in their violet depths the living flame of youth awakened—youth courageous, confident, defiant of failure. And Hester Long came thereby to know that no bars of convention would restrain the flood of passion till then pent up by the gates of hope. She knew in that moment that Edith, Mallory was from that mould of women who forsake all, sacrifice all, for love. Hester Long felt a slight glow of satisfaction that she had been armed by Hector Cain himself with a weapon that would protect Edith Mallory against her own heart.

  “The world is a beautiful place, dear,” she said softly, “but some of the men and women who live in it tend to foul its beauty. At first one is shocked by the evil in human beings, but as one grows older one is able to shut away the nasty things and regard only the beauty. I’ll tell you about Hector Cain and Ellen his wife only because you love Hector. They say a woman can never keep a secret. I can keep a secret. So can you. Keep the one I am going to tell you.”

  She related the manner in which Arnold Dudley had first become acquainted with his wife’s infidelity; described how he had stolen into his own house, how he had heard voices in his wife’s room, and how he had sat outside the door in the passage. Incredulity was followed by amazement, then horror, in the changing expressions in Edith Mallory’s eyes. The girl’s gaze was fixed entranced on the narrator’s old, seamed, maternal face. She heard how Arnold Dudley had waited; how the door of his wife’s room had opened to reveal his wife embraced by the seducer ; and how he had shot the man dead.

  “So you see, Edith dear,” said Hester Long in conclusion, “that there can be no question of your winning Hector Cain through death of his wife, or divorce from her. He is a murderer, a man-killer, a man condemned by man—and God.”

  “He may have killed the beast, but he is not a murderer,” came the counter-statement fiercely. “He was within his rights to kill. I would have killed, had I been a man situated as he. Hector did a manly thing. Had—had—had it all happened two hundred years ago, he—he would have been honoured for wiping away the stain from his name. He should have killed her, too, the hussy, the slut, the—the wanton.”

  “Hush, dear,” Hester Long said soothingly. “She may have been what you called her. Hector may have done the right thing. But this is nineteen-twenty-nine, not seventeen-twenty-nine. If ever the police get him he wi11 be hanged as a murderer; or, at the very least, he may escape with his life to live the remainder of it in a prison. You see, he can’t plead self-defence; he can’t plead overwhelming provocation, as he might have done had he stepped into the room and found them together. He did the very worst thing for himself by waiting in the passage.”

  For a moment neither spoke. When Edith Mallory did, her voice was low, calm, almost without intonation.

  “It’s terrible—terrible,” she said slowly. “It is even more terrible because it seems that he still loves her. Oh! I know he does. His love was in his voice when he took me for his wife. And I—it’s terrible for me, too, because I love him. I think I loved him when I spoke to him sitting on the rock on top of the sand-hill the day you got the hook in your hand. I didn’t know it then. Actually I disliked him when he boasted, as I thought, about getting the eagles; but I knew it so well that day he brought them to your house hung round the truck. I shall—It doesn’t matter to me if he has killed a hundred men. I love him. Hester!” she gripped her companion’s arms suddenly. “Hester, you know what love is, don’t you? Would you love your boys the less if they turned out bad, wicked men? You know you wouldn’t. You know you would love them even more, and try to make them good.”

  “Yes, maybe, Edith. Nevertheless, you cannot become anything to Hector Cain. Apart from the impossibility of your winning him, a murderer, he does not love you, because he loves his wife as deeply as ever he did. You see, don’t you, how hopeless it all is? You must see it, realize it. You must let your love of him be swamped by the waters of common-sense.”

  “You speak as though that would be easy.”

  “It will not be easy, God knows, Edith dear. But it can be done. And the greatest aid in the doing is work. Work enabled me to keep living in happiness and content when I thought there was nothing in life when my man was taken.”

  Mention of the death of her husband revived in her companion’s mind memory of Arnold Dudley’s being knocked down by the waves on the Pontoon.

  “Oh, Hester, suppose Hector is hurt out there on the rocks! Suppose he is drowning, or is drowned,” Edith said tearfully, hysteria threatening again. Hester Long, observing the sign, said:

  “It will save a lot of trouble if he does get drowned. He will be all right, though.”

  “But he mayn’t! Anyway, there is still a lot of spirits left. I saw several full bottles on his table.”

  “Now, look here, Edith! It’s no good getting yourself into a pet. We must keep calm and think. It is too late to do anything to-day. As it is,
you will now have to stay and milk my cows and cook the dinner. To-morrow, if you come over early, I’ll go down to the beach and have a heart-to-heart talk with Hector Cain. He has got to stop drinking, and he has got to start working. I am forgetting what he has done. I only remember what he is, a nice man rapidly going to perdition, and I am woman enough to stop him if I can.”

  “Then—then you don’t shrink from him? You don’t loathe him because he is a—a murderer?” Edith said very softly.

  “Shrink from him?” countered the wonderful Hester. “He was a fool to take the law into his own hands, and I told him so. I don’t shrink from a fool; I try to make him wiser. I don’t care what the law would say about it all, but I am going to save Hector Cain from himself.”

  CHAPTER XII

  DUDLEY GOES HOME

  HESTER Long rose very early the following morning, despite the fact that it was very late when finally she slept after hours of thinking of the separate tragedies of Arnold Dudley and Edith Mallory.

  Edith she had come to regard affectionately as a younger sister. In the first years of her Australian life, when her husband was alive and the motherless Edith came home but seldom from school, she watched the girl grow into a beautiful woman with the fervent interest she always felt when face to face with the beautiful. Continually searching for beauty, she continually discovered it. She was amazed that late afternoon at the beauty of the soul of her irresponsible, outwardly cynical brother, when it left its war-shattered habitat. She never ceased to be amazed at the beauty of her husband’s love, and at the greater beauty of the unfolding flower of her babies’ lives.

  She came to know that Edith Mallory’s beauty was not skin deep at the tragic period of her life, following the death of her husband. Then a capable young woman of twenty-one, Edith had been a rock on which was set the light of Eternal Hope. For a time Tom Mallory, a bachelor, and his two hired hands, fended for themselves; for Edith left them to live with and help with all her young strength the older woman weakened and broken by grief.

  It would have been Hester Long’s delightful ambition to have helped her friend win the man she had come so unfortunately to love, had not circumstances made so happy a consummation impossible. This being so, her efforts would have to be directed to helping Edith Mallory to live down her new-found love, even as Edith had helped her so wonderfully to live down her loss of husband-lover. Time would show her the way to deal with that problem. The other problem, the problem of Arnold Dudley, was impatient of Time for its solution. Quite apart from the man’s confession that he had killed another man, Hester Long was assured that he was a man frightfully wronged. He was an outcast, first because of that wrong, and a long way second because he had exacted a terrible vengeance for it. To Hester the consummation of that vengeance had been a very natural climax. A stern puritan by nature, she regarded the violent death of the seducer as no more than a just punishment, simple justice avenging the spoliation of another man’s wife.

  A woman of vivid but balanced imagination, Hester Long visualized Tracy fairly accurately. She made of him a man ordinarily good-looking, abnormally magnetic, and utterly without scruple. Ellen she visualized even more clearly. She saw her as daintily-lovely, gay and passionate and weak. At one angle was the man with the magnetic personality ; at the second angle the gay, weak, and passionate young woman ; and at the third angle the confident, proud husband of the woman, possibly absorbed in his business, which had outrivalled the love of youth. And there again was the eternal triangle.

  Because she herself was a woman, Hester Long understood her sex. She knew that it was possible, quite possible, for a woman to be in love with one man, and yet capable of allowing herself to be swept by passion into another man’s arms. She understood how such a paradox in feminine character could be arrived at. At least she thought she did. The passionate side of a woman’s love for her husband may wane, leaving the maternal side still strong and ardent. It remains then for another man with sufficiently attractive sex-magnetism to reawaken for himself the woman’s passionate sex-love, a conquest easily made of a woman weak in will-power.

  It was whilst she was sipping a cup of tea before the dawn of another day that she asked herself why it was the man she knew as Hector Cain aroused her sympathy so keenly. Ever ready at self-analysis, she probed first her heart, and found that although she liked Arnold Dudley she did not love him. To her own question why she liked him, she found the answer to be because in his character she found beauty.

  Memory of her first meeting with him remained fresh. There was beauty in the way he shrank but steeled himself to cut the hook out of her thumb. There was beauty, too, in the incident of his slipping the fish into the back of her buggy; and surely there was beauty in the sadness he felt and revealed over the shooting of the shag, regarded by most as winged vermin?

  She had found nothing coarse in Arnold Dudley’s make-up. A strong man mentally as well as physically, she knew him to be tender-hearted and loyal. The man who still loved his wife in spite of the wife’s failure, the man who would replace his wife on the pedestal after she had deliberately cast herself from it, proved emphatically his loyalty. That was it. Loyalty was the trait in Dudley’s character which chiefly attracted Hester Long.

  Her reverie was interrupted by the melodious notes of a butcher-bird roosting in the topmost branch of the fig-tree, outside the kitchen. Clear, in perfect harmony, the bird sent forth one of the four identical tunes rendered by another of his species who had come to overlord Dudley’s camp. Knowing it would be the prelude to the most exquisitely beautiful fantasia in the world, she quickly went to the kitchen-door and stepped outside.

  Beyond was the east. The morning mist lay black along the ground, hiding the trunks of the near apple-trees, blanketing the paddocks back of them, shrouding the stately box-trees left standing to provide shade for the stock. Higher, through the branches and withering leaves of the apple-trees, the mist was almost white against the background of the softly-pink dawn.

  The world was hushed. It was as though a vast, silent, electrically-expectant concourse of people awaited the performance of a super-orchestra. The woman was the sole audience, a few birds the musicians. She awaited the rendering of what she called “The Melody of Heaven”, a melody that no composer could write for instruments to reproduce, a melody not to be heard in any other part of the world.

  The bird in the fig-tree repeated his five notes and paused. He was invisible, yet Hester knew that his black and white head would be held slightly on one side, listening. Out from the mist came the lower and softer notes of the Australian magpie. Far away a hen butcher-bird piped two notes. Hester’s bird sent out his four melodies in challenge, and the challenge was instantly taken up by butcher-birds and magpies stationed in near trees, and trees far away in the bush. So still was the air that birds a mile away could be heard.

  Now without cease Hester’s bird sang his melodies over and over again, other birds warbled the same bars, magpies piped and throbbed, so that from the very sky there fell on the woman’s straining ears the music of God. God’s music it was, a glorious paean of praise, earthly only in its likeness to the swelling chant of men and women within a vast cathedral accompanied by a mighty organ and heard from a distance on a quiet, magic summer evening in England.

  And people crowd in cities, and are satisfied with life. Poor people, to be satisfied with counterfeit!

  The topmost level of the mist became pink, shell pink; the sky above it was pale orange, to deepen whilst the seconds fled. If only Time would stop for a minute, just one brief minute, to allow each divine shade of colour to sink in one’s mind and be a possession for ever! Lower sank the shafts of pink into the mist, as though forced downward by the bars of purple laid by the brush of the Almighty. Upward to the zenith fled the golden light of coming day, extinguishing the brilliant stars.

  Colour and song allied! The softer chirpings of small birds intermingled now with the louder tones of the larger songsters in the gra
nd finale. The fantasia was almost over. The colours of the dawn seemed suddenly to vanish. As suddenly the birds stopped their anthem. It was day. The mist was white now from top to ground. The dew-drenched spiders’ webs among the fig-tree branches and the dewy grass beneath appeared as blown glass. Hester’s butcher-bird dropped to earth to uphold his name.

  And people live in cities and slumber when the dawn of day arrives. Poor people! Sleep on, sleep on!

  Hester was smiling, a radiant yet wistful smile, when she realized that her “Melody of Heaven” was finished. It had been a fitting prelude to the day she intended setting aside to rescue Arnold Dudley from his Slough of Despond.

  Re-entering the kitchen, she added fuel to the stove, and took her milking buckets to the cow-bails. Out then into the paddocks to drive in the cows, regardless of the wet grass which soaked her feet in the first dozen yards. As usual the cows were at the far side, and twenty minutes were spent in rounding them and getting them to the stockade enclosing the wall-less shed thatched with small scrub.

  She was milking the last cow when Edith Mallory arrived on her horse, and, seeing Hester at work, she removed the saddle and took the animal into the cow paddock before removing the bridle. Hester met her outside the stockade with a cheerful smile, which brought to Edith’s flushed face a wistful expression.

  “Are you going down to see Hector this morning, as you said?” she asked almost eagerly.

  “I am going to give Mister Cain a piece of my mind, Edith. Do not let us forget that he is not yet an intimate friend, permitting us to call him by his Christian name.”