CHAPTER I.
SPRAGUE'S cottage faced south. From a nook almost on the cliff's summit, it overlooked by day the glistening white crescent of a sandy beach, the blue Pacific, and a dark-green grove of Norfolk Island pine, sprinkled with the red-tiled roofs of other and more pretentious dwellings; and by night a velvety darkness, pierced at intervals by the moving lights of ferryboats plying at fifteen knots between Circular Quay and the numberless seaside suburbs that go to make Sydney harbor the paradise that it is.
Here he lived, for the most part in his pyjamas, with a hideous mongrel that he pretended to think was a black cocker spaniel, reading, smoking, and periodically going mad—or so the neighbors averred who had passed “The Haven,” as his cottage was called, and heard him loudly declaiming to the empty air.
Indeed, one of them had taken the trouble to go further into the matter, and, crouching at the window, had seen him standing in the middle of the room, wildly waving his arms, and hurling scathing rhetoric at the blank wall, after which he had carefully placed a chair in position, retired to the doorway, and groped his way to it round the walls of the room, while the apology for a cocker spaniel slunk under the table and regarded him, head on paws, with frank suspicion. Moreover, it was not drink, as so many had been ready to suggest, for a few minutes later he had taken a bulky pile of papers from a shelf, and sat reading far into the night. Couple with all this the fact that he was an Englishman, and what further proofs of insanity were needed by the practical, law-abiding citizens of Queenscliff?
Mrs. Adams, of the Ocean Kiosk, mother of a bevy of strapping and, from her point of view, marriageable girls, and dispenser of everything from tinned herrings to authentic details concerning the royal family, was wont to wag her head prophetically over Sprague's peculiarities when an eligible bachelor happened that way.
“You see,” she would say, with a glance divided between the viceregal soda fountain and her eldest daughter, “you see what this lonely living will do for a man.” And the eligible one sometimes saw, but had an annoying habit of going elsewhere for the remedy.
Sprague was blissfully unconscious of the suspicion he aroused until the advent of a tall, austere-looking gentleman in raiment that cried aloud “plain-clothes inspector”; and then it was that after two minutes' conversation the miracle had happened—both men bursting into laughter that called for restoratives on the veranda.
“If it were not so infernally hot,” Sprague had said at parting, “I would put my hat on my feet and stand on my head at the front door regularly every morning; it would be a charity.”
“That it would,” agreed the perspiring inspector, mopping a bowler hat that somehow looked as if it ought to have been a helmet.
“I suppose it won't go any farther?” Sprague had added.
“Certainly not, sir; gentlemen's private affairs are safe in our hands.”
And so it was that when importuned by Mrs. Adams, Bagnall, the local constable, could only shake his head profoundly over his frothing ice-cream soda.
“I only know what the inspector says to me, Mrs. Adams,” he repeated for the third time, in accent sufficiently redolent of his native city and its particular quarter to quicken the pulse and loosen the purse strings of every wandering Englishman who heard them. “'Bagnall,' 'e says, 'it's all right; I give yer my word.'”
Mrs. Adams fastened a despairing eye on the wasted ice-cream soda which—in obedience to the law of suction—sank lower and lower as it traveled through its straw.
“That's all very fine,” she said; “but it isn't good enough for us. Folks may be put off that way in London, where I've heard they can't call their souls their own; but Australia's a free country; we've got equal rights, and what we want to know—what we of Queenscliff demand to know, Mr. Bagnall—is what a raving lunatic is doing here among us.”
Mr. Bagnall gravely shook his head.
“I only knows” he began; but Mrs. Adams was, as it were, launched, the restraining stays were cut, and nothing that mortal man could do would hinder her headlong rush into her natural element:
“What you police are for is more than I can fathom. Only the other night it was—I have it on the best authority—he caught up a boot and waved it over his head. 'I'll kill you!' he yells, and his eyes were that wild Luce—I mean the person who told me about it—nearly died of fright. 'Ill kill you!' And the dog ran yelping out onto the veranda, and all the satisfaction we get is—the inspector says it's all right.”
Mrs. Adams paused for breath, and on the indignant silence fell the unlovely sounds of a straw imbibing air as well as soda.
Mr. Bagnall pushed the glass from him, and leaned against the counter, reflectively studying the toe of a sensible boot. The lady saw fit to change her tactics. Studiously ignoring the empty glass, she leaned over the counter and spoke in a confidential undertone:
“Between you an' me, Mr. Bagnall, what is he?”
The constable softened visibly under the new treatment
“'E's a remittance man,” he announced
Mrs. Adams sighed. This explained much, but not all.
“What else?”
“'E's 'armless,” Bagnall nodded his head reassuringly; “quite 'armless.” Such are the inscrutable ways of women—the very words intended to pacify had the diametrically opposite effect.
“Harmless!” bleated Mrs. Adams.
“I only knows” began the unhappy constable.
“And so you'll wait till he's torn us limb from limb before you move a hand to protect us—you'll But here the tirade ended abruptly; Bagnall had drawn himself to his full height, and tapped the counter with the air of one having authority.
“I — only — knows — what — the — inspector says to me,” he repeated, with intense deliberation. “'It's all right, Bagnall,' 'e says. But I'll tell you this, Mrs. Adams, and for your own good: Don't you be sendin' Lucy to spy no more. 'E'll be having you up for trespass, that's wot 'e'll be doin'.”
Exactly what reception this announcement would have been accorded will never be known, for at that moment Sprague entered the shop.
He wore a striped white-and-green silk pyjama jacket, open at the throat, duck trousers, and white canvas shoes, without socks. A wet towel and a bathing costume were flung over his shoulder, and his hair, matted with salt water, clung to his head in untidy profusion. The dog that followed at his heels looked like nothing so much as an animated wet doormat.
“I want several things,” he said; “perhaps you had better jot them down as I think of them. Is that ginger? I'll have a jar of that, and soap—a lot of soap, yes, three bars; tea—oh, a tinful; bacon—I'll take that.”
Mrs. Adams barely repressed a gasp as he nodded indicatively at an entire ham suspended from the ceiling.
“Then there's marmalade—six tins; eggs, yes; and have you any dog biscuits?”
At the last word the doormat wagged a dilapidated stump of tail, and its whole anatomy in unison. Sprague pummeled rather than patted it on alternate ribs, its ragged body curving into reverse semicircles with each blow, while a red-flannel tongue lolled from its mouth in a canine laugh.
“Spratt's or Field's,” Sprague chanted in time with the chastisement; “Spratt's or Field's, Spratt's or—Robert has a predilection for the imported article,” he announced. “Spratt's it is.”
Something very like apprehension sat on Mrs. Adams' homely face.
“We don't keep dog biscuits,” she murmured.
“Then I'll telephone to town for some,” said Sprague. “If you'll be putting these things into a grain sack or something, I'll be back for them in a few minutes.”
The telephone box adjoined the kiosk, and it was while the wires were emitting the deafening buzz intended to signify that the line is engaged that Sprague noticed a crack in the weather boarding that separated it from the store. Through it sounds were coming quite distinctly. First the slamming of the mosquito door; then “Good morning, Mrs. Adams!” in a girl's clear, musical voice. “I want some pickled onions.
Sprague smiled to himself in the semidarkness; somehow there was something ludicrous in the connection of that voice with pickled onions. “No, not those—the sweet kind, and Whatever's this?”
For a moment there was silence, followed by Mrs. Adams' voice, subdued to a penetrating whisper:
“It's his.”
“His! Whose?”
“The young man up at the Haven; he's at the telephone.”
There followed a light, girlish laugh.
“Take care he doesn't jump out on you, Mrs. Adams.”
“He's harmless,” came the rejoinder; “I have it on the best authority”
Sprague's eye was shamelessly glued to the wall. The girl was sitting on the counter, beating a tattoo with bare feet on the boarding below her, and laughing with the whole-heartedness of youth and well-being. She could hardly be more than seventeen, he decided, although he still found it difficult to tell age in a country where girls are women at thirteen.
A towel was twisted turban fashion about her head, and a bright-colored kimono failed to hide the fact that there was nothing but a bathing dress beneath it.
“Harmless!” she gurgled; then, with sudden gravity and a potential wagging of the head that jerked the turban over her eyes: “Don't you be fooled, Mrs. Adams; he's raving—stark, staring, raving. But he's my pyjama man, and I love him,” she ended abruptly.
“You know him?” gasped Mrs. Adams.
“No, but we can see him from our veranda, and he wears the loveliest pyjamas—silk”—she ticked the items off on the fingers of a brown little hand—“white and green, white and blue, blue and green, blue and a sort of orange—that's four pairs, and they must have cost a lot Oh, that reminds me; we can't pay for these things”—she drew a scrap of paper from the kimono pocket and handed it to Mrs, Adams—“but you can put them down, and it'll be all right. Father told me to say something else, but I forget what it was.”
Mrs. Adams hesitated, glanced at the girl who smiled into her eyes, and was lost.
“Very well, Miss Meg,” she said; “but—er”
“Yes, butter, and tea, and—oh, one of those plum puddings in the little basins. I tried to make one, but it tasted horrid, so I gave it to the pyjama man's dog; he seemed to like it.”
There was a violent agitation of the mosquito door, a peremptory scratch, and a whine.
“There he is!” cried the girl, and ran to the door. “Hello, Rags!” She knelt on the doormat, thereby setting the bell a-ringing in the back room, and imprinted a kiss exactly between the hideous brute's eyes.
Sprague silently hung up the receiver and went round to the shop. The girl Was evincing unnecessary interest in the label of a ginger-ale bottle, and humming a little tune, apparently oblivious of the fact that the dog was licking her feet.
“That will be fifteen shillings,” said Mrs. Adams.
Sprague counted out the money, and deposited it on the counter.
“Thank you,” he said, swinging the bulky grain sack to his shoulder. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” said Mrs. Adams. “And a Merry Christmas!” she added tentatively.
He turned on his heel quickly enough to catch both women looking at him.
“Thank you,” he said; “the same to you. I had forgotten. Perhaps you had better let me have a plum pudding—if you have such a thing.”
He smiled reminiscently as he climbed the steep sandstone steps leading to the Haven; and, stopping half-way up to light his pipe, caught a glimpse of a fluttering blue kimono passing round a bend of the hill below him.
Robert had apparently noticed it, too, for he sat watching it with mouth agape and ears as nearly pricked as their length and limpness would allow.
“Hullo, Rags!” said Sprague.
The dog's hind quarters wriggled in the dust.
“You don't seem to mind it,” observed his master, “so why should I? 'The pyjama man,'” he mused, and smiled again as he trudged up the steps.