CHAPTER XX.
Two days later, during luncheon, the Hotel Kosciusko was treated to a mild sensation.
Simultaneously with the entry into the dining room of a newly arrived couple, Mr. Walker, who had recovered sufficiently to pose as the hero of the hour, was noticed by those in his vicinity to show sudden and unmistakable signs of distress. His usually ruddy complexion faded to a dirty yellow, and his small eyes seemed to swell and protrude from their flabby pouches like those of an unhappy frog at the mercy of schoolboys.
Seeking the cause of the transformation, all eyes were turned on a tall, rather handsome woman, strikingly pale, and plainly, but tastefully, dressed, who was being escorted to a seat by a gentleman with a noticeably prominent jaw and atrocious tweeds of American cut.
The lady favored Mr. Walker with a protracted, expressionless stare, and gave her attention to the menu.
But this was not all. Mr. Walker rose with surprising dexterity, and hurried from the room, leaving the diners in a state of excited speculation.
The lady was smiling now, and, leaning over the table, she addressed a few words to the gentleman of the jaw. They had an extraordinary effect, for he whipped around as if shot, and half rose from his seat, resuming it only at the earnest entreaty of the lady.
Imagine, then, the sensation, when, an hour later, it became known in that mysterious way peculiar to idle communities that Mr. Walker had shaken the dust—or, rather, the snow—of Kosciusko from his feet, and departed by the two-o'clock lorry, leaving his wife and her dog the sole occupants of room fifteen.
“It just shows how careful one has to be,” said a member of the clique who “knew the governor general.”
After lunch Stone interviewed a stable hand.
Kippara? reflected that worthy, scenting American dollars afar. A hack would be two pounds a day, but he would hardly advise so long a ride at this time of year; a gentleman was brought in only the other night There followed a detailed account of the happenings of two nights ago. Then there was a bob sleigh and its driver who could be hired for three pounds a day. To go back by train and thence to Kippara would mean coaching half the distance and actually doubling it The hack? Very well; he would advise riding to Kippara's southeast boundary that afternoon, sleeping at one of the camps—quite a usual proceeding—and making the station comfortably the next day.
A few hours later Stone came upon Sprague stretching a wallaby skin on the wall of camp No. 4.
Their meeting was as demonstrative as Anglo-Saxons usually allow such things to be.
“Come into the smoking room,” said Sprague, “and help yourself to the whisky and soda.”
Stone seated himself on a packing case, and allowed his pale-blue eyes to wander over the mural decorations.
“First and foremost,” he drawled, “I want to tell you that you may think you're a cow-puncher—or its Australian equivalent—but you're not. You're a dramatist, with a play on Broadway that's making things hum. When I left it had run a month to crowded houses; there's two thousand doll—I mean four hundred pounds—to your credit at the Bank of New South Wales, head office, and—why the devil don't you whoop?”
Sprague filled his pipe between his knees.
“I gave up that sort of thing with my shaving and my breakfast,” he said.
Stone studied him with grave concern.
“What's the matter?” he demanded brusquely. “Where's that destiny you were chasing so assiduously aboard the Orontes?”
“I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind,” said Sprague.
Stone knew that he meant it, and, seeing the disappointment in his friend's face, Sprague hurried on:
“It's been tremendously good of you, old man, and I'll accept the four hundred gratefully, although it is a gift. I'm glad some one likes 'Lorette'; I'll try and write another one of these days. Tell me all about it.”
Stone obeyed, and Sprague marveled as he listened. The past four months had worked a miracle in the man—even in his appearance—and again he found himself involuntarily envying the fullness of the other's content. They had experienced no difficulty with the divorce, and so far as he could gather Stone had spent the greater part of his honeymoon in disposing of “Lorette.” It had been an instantaneous success; so much Sprague heard with a lack of his old-time enthusiasm that troubled Stone, so that the American was hardly prepared for the effect of his concluding remarks on the episode of the hotel luncheon table.
“There he sat,” he was saying, with an unwonted freedom of tone and gesture, “sizzling in his own fat at the head of the table. Eva, with her usual tact, let him go before she told me; but afterward we looked him up in the register. There he was as Mr. Walker—Mr. and Mrs. Walker, if you please”
“Do you mind saying that again—the name, I mean—did you say Walker?”
Sprague was gripping the other's wrist like a vise. Stone had never dreamed the man could look as he did at that moment.
“Yes,” he said. “I said Walker. “Why?”
In eight hurried words Sprague told him, and as many minutes later was galloping furiously to the hotel.
The rest can better be told in the words of the lady who—as already stated—knew the governor general.
“My dear, I was sitting in the hall when a tall man with a beard and a dirty blue shirt marched straight through it and up the stairs as if the place belonged to him. The porter and two waiters asked him what he wanted, but they might as well have been flies for all the notice he took of them. They say they followed him down the corridor and saw him knock at number fifteen, and the door open and close. Would you mind telling me what it all means? Her husband, you remember”
“What it all meant” was at that moment engaging the attention of two young people in room fifteen.
“You were never married, Meg; that's all—all that matters. That night at the cove—I should never have gone. I thought I wanted many things, but I never knew what was just the only one until I lost it. And now that I've got it—just the only one—here in my arms, may I keep it always?”
By order of the late owner, whose address is still unknown, the white house on Queenscliff has been sold, together with his other property.
The present occupant is the author of “Lorette” and other plays, and for six months of the year he may be seen almost any day, with his wife and a lame black dog, in the garden overlooking the sea.