The House Of Cain Page 2

She laughed at that, a delicious gurgle of mirth. And then, on reading the slim pink form she took from the envelope, her eyes widened.

  “Oh, Martin! A cheque for one thousand pounds!”

  “Didn’t I say he was a dear old chap?”

  “You did, and so he is! A real nobleman, in spite of what the snobs say about him.”

  “Better still, my chief is a great man, one of the sort that make history,” Martin added.

  “Indeed he must be,” she said slowly, replacing the cheque in its envelope and returning it. “But you are a great man, too, Martin. That brain of yours is wonderful, but you work it inhumanly. Martin dear, you are like a prodigal farmer, who takes all from his land and puts nothing back. Now, for six delicious months you are going to fallow that mind of yours. You are going to give it the complete rest it has needed so long.”

  He sighed, making a slight movement which indicated that he was prepared to stretch himself luxuriously even at the mere prospect of rest.

  “What other news have you, Man? Like your machines, I am hungry for news.”

  “Hill saw me to my car to-night. He appeared unduly excited. I think I reminded him that honesty was the best policy.”

  “Hill! At the Building at a quarter to midnight!” Austiline exclaimed. There was little in the routine of the Tribune staff that was not familiar to her.

  “Yes. He was so anxious to tell us that his wife had presented him with a baby-boy this afternoon.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes softened.

  “His ugly face was transformed. It was amazing.”

  For just two seconds her moistened eyes held his, and then, turning her head slowly, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire. Woman-like, she spoke quite away from her thoughts when she said:

  “There is good in the worst of us. I knew there was good in him.”

  “There is,” he agreed. “Yes, he wanted to be decent all his life, and knew not how. He wanted to be good in gaol, and even more so when you spoke to him on Princes Bridge the day after he came out for the seventh time, without a reference, with no prospect of honest work, only the prospect of gaol again in the future.”

  “But it was you who found him work, became his friend, his ideal, almost his god. It was you who with friendship, firmness, and encouragement eased the itching of his fingers to steal. It must be dreadful to be alone in the world, without love, surrounded by indifferent or hostile people.”

  She shuddered faintly, then burst out:

  “Martin, I must go to Mrs. Hill’s to-morrow.”

  “I told Hill you would,” he asserted, rising to his feet.

  “It is getting late.”

  “But you haven’t told me when your leave commences,” she expostulated, herself rising.

  “Sorry! I forgot. It has started.”

  “Really! Oh, I’m so glad! To-day is Thursday, or rather Friday morning. And Wednesday–– next Wednesday, Martin!”

  “One hundred and thirty-two hours,” he said, his voice trembling. “Oh, Austiline! I love you so!”

  Again she was in his arms. The moments flew, the while they were locked within the Gates of Paradise, which are beyond the rainbow. When they drew apart and moved towards the door, she asked him:

  “Monty comes to-morrow-doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, at one-thirty. I will bring him here at four o’clock, if that will do?”

  “That will be nice,” she assented, squeezing his arm.

  “You shall drink afternoon tea with me. I feel so sure I shall like him.”

  “Monty! Like Monty! He is the most wonderful chap in the world. He has but to smile at a––”

  She stopped him abruptly by placing a hand gently against his mouth. Then, bending towards him, she whispered:

  “The most wonderful man in the world but one. You are the most wonderful man in my world. You, Martin! You, my––Man!”

  “And you are my own far more wonderful Woman!” he whispered back, drawing her to him.

  And, while he drove slowly to his home along the magnificent St. Kilda Road, he murmured repeatedly to himself the words: “To-morrow, at four o’clock.”

  CHAPTER II

  BROTHERS AND PALS

  TO see Monty Sherwood once was to remember him for life. To remember him was to remember power, cleanness, dependability, all compacted in one human form.

  On the morning of the second Friday in September he lounged at ease, a solitary occupant of a first-class compartment of the Bendigo-Melbourne express. Before the events to be related in this story the world outside the triangle formed by the towns of Broken Hill, Coolgardie, and Darwin was ignorant that in one man was epitomized the spirit of the vast country mapped as Central Australia. To inquire of anyone within that triangle who was Monty Sherwood was automatically to label oneself either a new-chum or a fool.

  To see him walk gave the sense of pleasure one receives while watching a good dancer. To see him ride an outlaw horse was to obliterate for ever any chance of again being thrilled by a cinema cowboy or a competitor in the Olympia Horse Show.

  If you have not yet seen his picture in the Press, imagine a man standing six-feet-two in his socks, huge of chest and narrow of hip, with a face, clean-shaven, like Atlas: power in the jaws, iron determination behind the grey-blue eyes, and yet, strange to say, a wistful gentleness about the mouth.

  Any man proud of his manhood admired Monty Sherwood on sight. As for women––! The girl at the bookstall at Castlemain Station had watched his approach with wonder and not a little misgiving; but when he smilingly asked for a newspaper her nervousness vanished, and he left her with a memory of some wonderful vision.

  To this man from the semi-desert of Central Australia the houses, now crowding together outside the carriage window to become the city of Melbourne, were imposed upon his mind much as the famous Wembley Exhibition imposed itself on the mind of many a child.

  From the silences of untrodden spaces he was being whirled into the hurly-burly of a human ant-heap. An electric train flashing past made him start back, and then laugh at himself for shying at such a trifle. Interest sprang into his eyes at sight of half a score of great dray-horses feeding on a small plot of ground beside a tall factory building; for they were well-conditioned, well-groomed, and he was a worshipper always of the king of animals. The masts and funnels of the ships at the wharves near North Melbourne brought back to him scenes of days when he and thousands of splendid men had embarked on that voyage from which for so many there was no return.

  Quite suddenly he found himself out of the train at Spencer Street Station, shaking hands vigorously with his brother Martin.

  “Well, Lazarus, how do?” he cried joyfully, his voice remarkably musical for so big a man. His tanned face beamed while he pump-handled the thin white hand––beamed until he saw the slight look of pain in Martin’s eyes. “I’m sorry, old boy,” he said softly; “I always forget that blasted gas.”

  “Quite all right, Monty,” Martin assured him, in his quick way of speech. “Only you keep forgetting that powerful grip of yours. Had a good trip?”

  “Fair…fair. Nothing happened much, bar one beautiful argument with a card-sharp who was skinning a mug t’other side of Maryborough. He got quite rude. You know what happens to rude fellers when I’m there, don’t you?”

  Martin laughed out gleefully and stooped to pick up Monty’s suit-case, leaving his brother to carry a huge brown-paper parcel.

  “Your civilizing methods are somewhat drastic, Monty, but undeniably effectual,” he said, whilst they moved with the crowd towards the exit. “Where are you stopping? No room at my digs, I’m afraid.”

  “No matter. The first pub we come to will do.”

  “Then let it be Spencer’s Hotel, across the road there. It is fairly expensive, but I expect you have plenty of ready and they welcome your sort. Mind this tram!”

  “I’m thinking it’s the tram that will have to mind me,” Monty returned, when the antiquated cable-car had rumbled past. “T
hey call this the Murder City, don’t they? What do they murder ’em with-guns or trams?”<

  “Both. Here we are, and there is the office.”

  It was five years since Monty had been in Melbourne––five years of action, hardship, and incessant toil since last he had dined in the grill-room of Spencer’s Hotel. He knew where to find the office; but, turning suddenly to Martin, he said in what was meant to be a whisper;

  “Say––isn’t she a bonzer!”

  He referred to a girl-clerk sitting at the desk. She heard him, knew he referred to her, and accordingly tried to freeze him with a look. Unfrozen, the big man strolled over to her desk, and, leaning against an upright, smiled down upon her. Martin, watching, saw the ice melt like snow in a furnace beneath the glow of Monty’s smile, and marvelled as he always did when women invariably responded to his brother in that way. He heard Monty say:

  “Miss, I’m in town for just a week. For seven whole days I am a millionaire. I want the best suite of rooms in the hotel.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said sweetly. “The second suite on the ground floor is vacant. Bedroom, bathroom, sitting-room, and drawing-room. Will you please sign here? George,” turning to a waiting page, “show this gentleman to the Corner Suite. Thank you, sir!” This to Monty, who smiled his thanks and wondered what he was being thanked for.

  And, when he followed George and was followed by Martin, the young girl at the desk gazed hard at a calendar without in the least seeing the rows of white figures printed thereon.

  The page-boy led them to a suite of rooms which, if not quite so lavishly furnished as those at the Flinders Hotel occupied by Austiline Thorpe, were equally well situated. Martin was surprised at his brother’s choice, having expected him to be satisfied with a single room. The big man, turning on the page, said:

  “Your name George, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the youth, keen as a knife-edge, and superbly conceited.

  “Well, you hop along to the bar and bring me half a dozen bottles of the best beer stocked.”

  “Beer, sir!” exclaimed the genuinely astonished boy, whose clients invariably scorned so common and vulgar a beverage as beer.

  “I said beer, son,” the big man stated gently. “Spotted Cats, High Balls, and Corpse Revivers look pretty, but I want a drink.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed George respectfully.

  “And please don’t ‘sir’ me. I’m not used to it. If you must honour me with a title, ‘mister’ will do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hell!”

  “Yes, sir,” the youth replied politely, and withdrew.

  When the door closed they both laughed. Then occurred individual action which made it conspicuous that one lived in a city and the other in the very Back of Beyond. Martin sank into a wickedly easy chair with refined grace and at once produced a cigarette-case and a silver matchbox. Monty, however, divested himself of coat and waistcoat, after which striding to the mirror over the mantelpiece, he removed his collar and tie. Then, heaving a deep sigh of relief, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves above his elbows, and, diving into his trousers pockets, brought to light a pipe of great age and much decrepitude, a plug of black tobacco, and a clasp-knife. Martin gazed at the pipe and laughed again. The answering smile which dawned upon the rugged features of Monty might well be described as sheepish, thence to broaden into genuine amusement, accompanied by a long, low chuckle.

  “Remember the days of long ago when, as a very young man on the Dad’s station, I persistently refused to wear a collar?” he said slowly, chipping at the tobacco-plug. “You and me were squatter’s sons, Martin, and it was expected of us that we should wear collars to be different to the common men. I am afraid I sadly disappointed the old Dad more than once.”

  “In some little things, Monty, perhaps. But in things that really mattered the Dad was very proud of you.”

  “The Dad was a generous man. I would to God he and the mother were alive to-day. But to revert to collars. Somehow the damned things always did strangle me. I like to feel the wind nipping at my arms and chest, to be able to move my head without hindrance, and my arms without the rustle of starch. Then I feel free. I love freedom, old son.”

  “You have it. You’re a lucky man, Monty.”

  “Because I always appreciate my luck. I love life.”

  The big man lit his pipe and then, leaning back in his chair, regarded his brother with the interest accumulated by five years of separation. His look was returned by one of unfeigned admiration.

  Between these two existed a bond of sympathy unusual between brothers. Each was the antithesis of the other in physique and in mentality, holding in common but one characteristic. No one ever would have guessed that they came from the same stock, had not both the same trick of using their eyes when amused: the same twinkle––to use an approximate word––which spoke a language easy to understand.

  They were descendants of grim, dauntless pioneers––not the so-called pioneers who came to Australia in the post-discovery days to take up fertile lands in the abundantly-watered coastal districts and draw free labour from the convict establishments; but pioneers worthy of the name, who pushed out into the waterless desert, battled with the blacks and the elements, planned, suffered, laboured for years with their own hands, to find reward in success, contentment in beautiful old age, and wonderful happiness in the love and devotion of two such sons as these.

  Bolting buggy-horses had killed old man Sherwood in 1910. Monty, a young man of twenty, became, in the interests of his mother and Martin, then at college, the manager of a three-thousand-square-mile cattle-station north of the McDonnell Ranges in the Northern Territory. Mrs. Sherwood died a year later, adding to Monty’s responsibilities. Came, three years afterwards, the Dreadful War. Monty enlisted. He was the sort of man that nothing could keep back, so he sold the station, invested the capital, and departed on the Glorious Adventure, leaving Martin to shoot skywards like a rocket in the great Tribune Building.

  During the war years he and Martin did not meet; but Martin was in France in 1917 and back in Australia again the following year, struggling against the effects of gas.

  The war interlude made little difference to the younger man’s meteoric career. His sojourn in man-made hell left outwardly no effects to speak of, but it coloured his mind with visions of a world as it should be and a sense of bitter shame at what it is. The Australian loves progress and hates stagnation. With the Tribune as a standard he led thousands. The multitude, as is the way of multitudes, sees the standard but is unaware of the bearer. Yet he is content.

  Monty, however, was affected by the war very differently. Even the freedom contained within a three-thousand-square-mile holding was as nothing compared with the freedom, disciplined freedom, of those epic years.

  While millions of others returned to their chains of humdrum existence he retained his wings, and lived like a god. Back to his beloved bush he went, to find it gripped with drought. He bought three thousand store cattle at ten shillings a head. He was laughed at and told he would never get them to a railway; but he drove them north into the very wilds, and shepherded them with the help of two blacks for eighteen months; then struck the railway at Bourke in New South Wales and trucked them to Sydney. He lost only seven beasts, but he made a profit of twenty-eight thousand pounds.

  Followed then a prospecting expedition which resulted in the discovery of the Yellow Mount: making millionaires of five sharks and adding but fifty thousand to his fortune.

  Possibly Fortune smiled on him because he did not value money; which is not to say that he threw it away, but that his needs were simple and that much money had not the same meaning to him that it has to most of us who love luxury and pleasure. Not for anything would he discard his disreputable pipe and purchase a new one.

  “How old are you?” came the somewhat surprising question from Martin.

  “You know I am forty-three,” Monty replied chidingly.

  “Have you
ever been in love, Monty?” the younger man asked soberly.

  “Hell! No,” energetically.

  “That seems marvellous to me, Monty; because, in all my experience, I have never met a man who attracted women as you do. And you’re the first man I’ve met who attracts other men quite as much as he does women.”

  “What is all this butter leading to?” demanded the big man with a broad grin.

  “Only this,” Martin continued: “that, in spite of your masculine charms, you have reached forty-three years of age––by no stretch of imagination could you be guessed to be more than thirty––without having been captured by a woman; whereas I, who look forty and make a poor figure of a man beside you, am in love with and am loved by the most glorious woman under the Southern Cross.”

  “You take it from me, old stick-in-the-mud,” the other interjected, shaking his head protestingly at his brother’s self-depreciation: “women may smile at me––I see so few that I cannot help smiling at them––but they don’t admire bulk, brute strength, and bushman’s ways. Here’s George with a snifter.”

  When the page had silently withdrawn, after having given a respectfully disapproving glance at the big man’s bare arms and neck, Monty leaned forward in his chair and said:

  “Martin, old lad! Tell me the old, old story up-to-date. Every word of it. Forget your letters to me about her. I want it first-hand.”

  The younger man’s answering smile vanquished the tired look and made his face almost beautiful.

  “I met her about twelve months ago on Princes Bridge. There was nothing so conventional about our meeting as an introduction,” Martin began. “It happened that a poor wretch just out of prison was nearly run down by a motor, and, in his effort to escape it, crashed on the pavement at our feet as we were about to pass.

  “The fall broke his ankle, and she and I rendered common assistance. It was then she learned that Hill––that was his name––was just out of prison, was without money, without work, without friends. Austiline was then renting a bungalow at St. Kilda, and insisted upon having the man taken to her home.