The Beach of Atonement Page 18

  An instant of reaction only. Swiftly she bent down and turned him over. Sand, white and moist, lay scattered in his long brown hair. It adhered to the corners of his closed eyes and about his mouth. Death had spared him, for the sand had been too moist to trickle down into the cavity his face had made, which would have meant suffocation.

  Hester Long moved his arms, and decided they were not broken. She could see no sign of injury. The drawn lines over his face made her want to cry out. She saw, with a catch in her breathing, how scrupulously shaved he was, and even whilst she looked on him the lines were banished by a tender smile, and from his lips came:

  “Ellen, oh Ellen, stay with me!”

  As suddenly as the smile came it passed. Again he spoke, but this time in his voice was anguish:

  “Ellen ! Ellen ! Come back—come back!”

  The watching woman’s hands flew to her lips. Dudley struggled in his sleep, and sat up with the name of his wife voiced in loud tones. Looking into his opened eyes, she saw first comprehension, then perplexity, flash into them. The distended pupils frightened her. Then he smiled again, saying: “Funny That’s funny! The first time Hester Long ever took Ellen’s place.” Then he sighed, sank back on the track, and, closing his eyes, slept again.

  For a moment or so the puzzled woman stood irresolute. She could not understand precisely what was wrong. In any case, whatever might be wrong, Arnold Dudley could not be left there lying on damp ground with but a few hours of daylight remaining.

  Taking him by the shoulders and partly lifting him, she dragged him along to the buggy step, whilst the youngsters demanded to know what was the matter with poor Mr. Cain.

  “I don’t know,” Hester Long panted. “We must try to pull him into the buggy and drive him to his camp. Jim, get out and hold Brownie’s head. Don’t let him move, That’s right ! Now Harold, old man, let is think.”

  A moment later she reached into the buggy and drew out the horse’s neck-rope, and, fastening one end of it round Dudley under his arms, expertly tied a non-slipping knot. The other end she passed up to young Harold and told him to pull.

  In spite of a degree of emaciation, Arnold Dudley was no light weight. In any case, a man’s live body is the most awkward of all objects to lift. Hester Long exhibited amazing strength and tenacity. Her strength surprised even herself, whilst her brain cried out that the task must be accomplished. Little eight-year-old Harold manfully assisted, and at long last Dudley lay along the floor of the vehicle in a crumpled heap.

  The youngster at the horse’s head climbed up, and slowly the old horse drew the buggy uphill and down dale till Dudley’s tent was reached.

  Getting him down from the buggy was less arduous then getting him into it. Hester Long, unable to carry him, dragged him by the shoulders into the tent, pulled the blankets off the stretcher-bed, and heaved and panted in her final efforts to lift him on it.

  Exhausted, she sank down on a wood case and looked at him for a minute or two whilst recruiting her strength; her children regarding first their mother and then the inert man who seemed to them always to be ill.

  “Light the fire, Harold, and then fill a billy with water,” she instructed, and, whilst both boys were thus busied, she removed Dudley’s boots and covered him with blankets. Afterwards she searched his ration dump for meat extract, but, finding none, made a billy of strong coffee. When it was sufficiently cooled she took into the tent a pint pannikin, and set to work to arouse the sleep-drugged man.

  Once again Dudley opened his eyes, red and hot, and blinked even at the soft canvas-filtered light. A frown of perplexity drew his brows together.

  “Why, Mrs. Long! Why are you here?”

  “We found you lying on the track, Mr. Cain,” she replied with sudden briskness. “You must have fallen. Are you hurt?”

  “Hurt ! I don’t think so. Yet my eyes are as heavy as lead. God ! I’m tired.”

  “Well, just drink this. Please—please do,” she urged.

  “All right. If you wish… But I want to sleep. All right.” With his eyes closed, Dudley drank all the coffee. Hester Long held him up with an arm about his neck, and when he had finished it, he murmured:

  “Those traps ! I must go over those traps again. I—I—”

  Hester sighed. A poignant thankfulness made her supremely happy. If Dudley were merely tired, all was well. He appeared to be unhurt. Yet for all that his condition was a mystery, and the cause of it a greater mystery still. There was nothing further she could do, and it was needless to stay the few remaining hours of daylight. In the morning she would return.

  Perplexed and worried, she turned the vehicle in the space cut out of the bush for the camp, and, explaining that Mr. Cain had been working too hard, she urged old Brownie up the steep slope of Big Hill and down its farther side to the gate and the main road. She came to persuade herself that her explanation of Dudley’s condition to the children was the correct one, and, if that were so, if Dudley had worked himself to collapse, then the power of his wife over his mind must indeed be both subtle and marvellous.

  They were half-way from the gate to the farm when she was obliged to pull to the near side of the road to allow an overtaking truck to pass. In its passing she saw a man of about fifty, with greying hair and ruddy-complexioned face, driving alone a truck that evidently was not new. A hundred yards ahead of her the man also drove to the near side of the road and pulled up. He got out, to walk slowly back to meet them, and when she pulled Brownie to a stop she found herself regarded by a pair of shrewd grey eyes half hidden by narrowed lids, which years of fierce sunshine seemed to have fixed perpetually.

  “Good afternoon, marm!” he said. “Can you tell me whereabouts I turn off to reach the Nineteen Mile Beach?”

  “Yes,” was the instant reply. “It is back about a mile and a half from here. Are you going fishing?”

  “Yes’m. As a matter of fact I am looking for a man. He is probably trapping. The storekeeper at Dongara told me that last September a stranger trapper came to Dongara and gave out he was going to trap along the coast at the Nineteen Mile Beach.”

  Hester Long’s veiled eyes searched the man’s face. In physique he was robust and well set up. It flashed into her mind that he might well be a detective, and at the thought, a mental picture of Dudley as she had left him was thrown on the screen of her mind, and her maternal instinct then and there prompted her to protect the outcast at all costs to herself. The assumed hardness she invariably adopted when doing business fell upon her in that instant, and thereupon she proceeded to embark on the telling of a chain of lies in a manner worthy of Ananias as prompted by his wife Sapphira.

  “What is his name,” she asked briskly.

  There flashed into the truckman’s eyes an expression of uneasy perplexity. There was distinct hesitation before he replied:

  “I don’t know what he calls himself.”

  That hesitation, followed by an obvious falsehood, decided Hester Long that the man was a detective. Her old suspicion that Hector Cain was not the outcast’s real name was confirmed, but she decided that she would not take the risk of naming him. Incidentally she had forgotten the names uttered by him in his drunken. ravings.

  “There was a trapper camped at the Nineteen Mile Beach,” she said. “He came and worked for me for two weeks, as he didn’t do any good there, or said he didn’t. His name was Lowery, and he went up to Walkaway when he left me.”

  “What sort of a man was he, marm, to look at?”

  “Tall and very thin,” Hester Long said instantly, prepared for such a question.

  “Clean-shaven, dark brown hair, hazel eyes?”

  “I don’t recollect his eyes or his hair,” laughed Mrs. Long. “Clean-shaven, yes.”

  “Well-spoken chap?” pressed the stranger.

  “Hum! Hardly that,” came the lie. “A Londoner, I think he was—and not much of a hand at rabbit-trapping.”

  The other frowned, and gazed pensively at old Brownie. Hester Long saw
that her disparagement of Dudley’s trapping abilities had won for her the credit which her former lies had failed to do. Then:

  “You seem anxious to find Mr. Lowery?”

  “Yes. I am anxious. I’ve been looking for him since Christmas. I started at Geraldton and worked up to Meekatharra, and then down to Sandstone and Burracoppin, and round about Merredin and Bruce Rock. I’d like to get a sight of this man calling himself Lowery. What’s his Christian name, do you know?”

  “Yes. Hector.”

  “Umph ! When did he leave you?”

  “About three weeks ago.”

  “How far is it to the beach when you get off the road at the Nineteen Mile?”

  “Oh! About four miles,” Hester replied with some dismay. “But you would never get there with a truck, I’m sure.”

  Keen grey eyes regarded her steadily. As steadily she returned the look. He looked away precisely one second before the mounting colour in her cheeks would have betrayed her.

  “Well, I’ll get along to Walkaway. Thank you!”

  With relief she watched him stride to the truck. He appeared to be a long time starting the engine, and it seemed to her, too, that he drove very slowly northward towards Geraldton.

  CHAPTER XIX

  AT THE PRECIPICE EDGE

  AT noon the next day, Hester Long, driving in her ancient, weather-worn buggy, reined in old Brownie at the summit of Big Hill. A boisterous south-westerly wind swept up the seaward slopes and gave velocity to the particles of white sand blown in her face.

  The sea was a mass of white horses far beyond the Ramparts. From her elevation she saw them marked by an irregular line of heaving, tossing foam. The water about the Sugar Loaf leapt twenty feet in the air as often as it met the foaming surf ; it boiled into snow over the sunken reef directly south of it, and crashed against the Pontoon, to be shot skyward in a long solid wall of water topped by a diaphanous veil.

  The noise of it all came up to her in an incessant roar. Two miles to the north and two miles to the south the usually plainly-marked beach was indiscernible in the mist of spray and sand. The sand-ridges smoked as a thousand railway engines racing in all directions—smoked so that beyond three miles north and south all that was to be seen was a dun-covered fog. Above the maelstrom of wind-lashed water and sand, ominous-looking clouds rushed in never-ending succession across the watery sun.

  It was cold. For Australia it was bitterly cold.

  Tiny specks of white fluttered or were settled on the brown velvet knob of the Seaweed Mountain. Hester saw there the uneasy gulls. Her gaze moved slowly south to the hummock of sand immediately behind the Pontoon, there to remain whilst her eyes carefully examined the Seagulls’ Throne.

  Seated thereon, motionless, was Arnold Dudley; and at sight of him there amid his wild solitude Hester Long was sad.

  Life! The cruelty of life! So especially cruel to men and women who have fallen. How little removed is man from the beast! A wounded wolf is killed and eaten by its kind. Let a man deviate an inch from the path of moral rectitude, and men fall on him and rend him. Let a woman fall, and women are ready and eager to keep her down.

  Men had sent Arnold Dudley to sit on the Seagulls’ Throne and watch the raging sea for the term of his natural life. They reckoned not the injury that man had done him, because the injured party was beyond the law. Dudley, still alive, was not beyond reach of the law, and men would satiate their lust of vengeance on him if ever he returned from exile. Buffeted by the wind, stung by spray and sand, his flesh blue with the cold, at the mercy of the elements: alone, tainted, marked, living out thus the few remaining days of his life, chained there on the beach as her eagles had been chained to the ground by rabbit-traps, and, also as the eagles, waiting for death itself to give release; the punishment seemed out of proportion to the crime.

  The cold blast of wind was too much for her horse to face for any lengthy space of time, and without urging old Brownie started on the downward slope to the jumble of lesser hills nearer the coast. He was pulled up before the shelter of the beach sand-hill was left, and there taken out of the shafts and tethered to the wheel.

  When she reached the open space where usually she camped with her boys and Edith Mallory, the wind tugged at her luxuriant hair beneath the comfortable velvet tam-o’-shanter, whipped the blood into her face, and brightened her eyes. Her slim, agile little body seemed as though in danger of being blown away, whilst slowly she climbed the hill of sand to come eventually to the side of Arnold Dudley who, seated on the Throne, stared vacantly across the welter of furious water.

  The roar of the angry sea filled the world. Ribbed with white, it heaved and sank, its body almost black. Twenty-five times every minute a wall of deep green and snowy white leapt into existence along the entire seaward edge of the Pontoon, blotting out the horizon line already made almost invisible in the fog of spray swept from the summits of the combers beyond the Ramparts. Columns were spouted upward from south of the Sugar Loaf, which itself seemed the kernel of an ever-changing mountain of suds.

  Dudley, crouched on the Throne level with Hester Long’s head, was watching the turmoil with complete absorption. He was totally unaware of the woman’s presence until she reached up and tugged at his coat, and when he moved his head slowly to look down on her his eyes were vacant for many seconds.

  “Come down, Mr. Cain! I want to talk to you,” she called out, obliged to shout to make him hear her above the sound of furious waters.

  Unsmilingly, showing neither pleasure nor annoyance at seeing her, Dudley heaved himself off the rock and stood beside her, looking down into her upturned, flushed face. The effort to talk there in the full blast of the wind was too great to be sustained, and, motioning him to follow her, she led down to the sand-patch and thence to her buggy in the shelter of the coast sand-dune. From the buggy she took the horse-hair stuffed seat and, laying it on the ground near one wheel, seated herself thereon, and invited him to sit with her.

  “You are not looking well, Mr. Cain. What have you been doing with yourself?”

  Looking into her eyes, he saw them bright with concern, and noted that her face was beautified by a smile, gentle and wistful, of understanding. It occurred to him in a detached way that Hester Long became in appearance a strangely different woman when she smiled. Her usual plain self was transfigured by a radiating light that made her far more beautiful than a beautiful woman in repose. The thought caused him to forget that she had asked him a question, and, since he did not speak, only stared at her, she repeated the question, and saw that he had to make a strong effort to bring his mind to even the simple task of answering it.

  “I am all right, Mrs. Long,” he said, mumbling.

  His face was deeply bronzed, but his cheeks were sunken, and his mouth more prominent than it had been ; and his eyes, she saw, were sunken into his head beneath the brows drawn together by much mental concentration. His features told a tale of incessant hardship, but his eyes revealed the ravages of the fire that was consuming him. Quite impulsively she caught his forearm in her horny grip.

  “Boy! you’ve been thinking too much,” she said.

  “Maybe,” was his reply.

  “What have you been doing since you came back here?”

  “Working when awake; dreaming when asleep.” Hunching his knees, he rested his elbows on them, and his face in his cupped hands.

  “Tell me your dreams,” she urged softly.

  “They are always of Ellen.” Arnold Dudley, in a dull monotone, described his haunting dreams. “Always has she wanted me, and always have I been unable to reach her. Is it not enough that every wakeful second I know I shall not again reach Ellen, but my sleep must torture me also? Work! God! how I’ve worked! Work is no use. It cannot help me, cannot give me peace and rest.

  “For years I have loved Ellen. For years she and I have been always together. She grew on to my life like a rose-sprig grafted on an apple-sucker. She lived on my strength, and I lived on her sweetness. And th
en Tracy came. The rose-sprig was torn away from the apple-sucker, and now the frosts have seared the wound. I am like a man used for years to consume tobacco, and suddenly deprived of it. Just like such a man am I. Think of a man whose nerves are red raw because he is deprived of his cigarettes, and telling him that work is as great a sedative as tobacco. Take a drug-fiend and seal him up in the King’s Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and you may liken him to me.”

  “Fresh scenes may help,” Hester Long suggested softly. “The novelty of this beach has worn away and there is little left to interest you. Why not go away? Why not travel up to Darwin and thence to Central Queensland? And, when you have been there a little while, you could get a passport and go out of Australia, to America, or to England. You cannot stay here. You can’t go on like this.”

  “There is nothing else but to go on,” he told her dully.

  “Indeed there is,” she said eagerly. “Let your beard and moustache grow. You’ll be safely disguised in a week. If you haven’t much money, I—I could lend you all you wanted.”

  For several seconds the man sat motionless. Her suggestion appeared to occupy that time to sink into his mind; but, when it had done so, he suddenly raised his head, straightened his legs, and turned to her sharply.

  “Miss Mallory offered to lend me money to go away,” he said. “Is she making the offer again through you?”

  “No. I know nothing of what Edith has offered or suggested. I did not know she had spoken to you since you came back.”

  “Tell me,” he demanded, “have you ever received the impression that I bore any affection for Edith Mallory?”

  She saw that his eyes were clear and alert, and in his voice she detected entreaty to be told the truth.

  “No,” she said firmly. “Why do you ask?”

  “You are a woman who can guard secrets, so I will tell you why I ask. I have never consciously done anything to arouse in Edith Mallory affection for me. Of her I have not made a confidant as I have of you. Your friend I have always looked on as a young girl just blossoming into womanhood. She is young, beautiful, and innocent. I never thought of her as a man will sometimes think of a woman. When not in her presence I don’t think I have thought of her at all. Yet she loves me. She, too, said I could not go on living here. She, too, offered to lend me money, as much as I wanted, to go and seek happiness in another country. Do you also love me?”