CHAPTER VII
THE SKELETON AT THE DANCE
The affair of the following evening was evidently far from proving the formidable rite which Fullarton had appeared to dread. He took a mild interest in the preparations, and made a favorable impression upon the guests. Active help he certainly could not give; but Irralie felt that he would have been of but little use in any case; and sadly admitted to herself (though not to another soul) that her friend was not and could never have been a dancing man. She felt it only less than his dreadful singing. But there were no more absurd suspicions. He was with her all the day; and if he had not a single suggestion for the floor, or for the arrangement of chairs and lights, he had plenty to tell Irralie about Harrow, Oxford, and California. He had been superannuated from the first, sent down from the second, and had bade the last farewell in a red shirt and no boots. Luckily the overseer was out of the way. He was superintending the pitching of the tents. Irralie and he had not spoken again.
As for the guests, they arrived between noon and sundown in some dozen buggies, which for lack of stable-room were arranged in a sort of laager near the tents. The Brownes of Quandong drove over four-in-hand; and there were several young men who rode with their dress-clothes in valises at the saddle-bow. Finally, some forty persons sat down to an early dinner in the back veranda, and thereafter retired to their rooms and tents to dress.
They reappeared upon a delightful scene. The southern day had ended with its usual abruptness; the rising moon had already cleared the pines. The main building wore a necklace of Chinese lanterns hung by Irralie between the veranda posts, and the symmetry of this was well relieved by the purely random lighting of the yard. The gross effect, however, would have been better, undoubtedly, without a moon; as it was, by ten o'clock the night was lighter than many a northern day.
About this hour two things happened. The new owner, then making himself most attentive to Mrs. Browne of Quandong (whose diamonds were worthy of Park Lane), felt a tug at his armless sleeve. He turned his head, and there was Irralie. The girl was dressed in white, trimmed (by her own hands) with rowan-berries; there were more berries in her hair; and earlier in the evening, at all events, health and youth and radiant high spirits had made her beautiful in many eyes. She was now, however, very visibly overheated, for she had been dancing everything with the utmost abandon; and she was also, in the judgment of Mrs. Browne of Quandong (who had spent a recent year in England), decidedly "bad form."
"Well, Miss Villiers"
The new owner was cut short as he rose to give her his chair.
"Don't Miss Villiers me! I'm far too hot to be reminded I'm all that—or to sit down, thanks all the same. I came to say the next two are ours."
"Ours?"
"Yes; and you don't need to look like that, or you'll make Mrs. Browne more ashamed of me than she is already. Oh, I know you didn't ask me—I can't help that! I'm simply too hot to dance another step till I've had a good long rest in the cool. And, as I can't possibly ask the able-bodied to give up their pleasure for me, I appeal to you. Come and get me something to drink, and bring Mrs. Browne as well!"
The face of the lady of Quandong was a study of the first order. It is true that the girl was unfashionably excited, and very likely her speech was all it appeared to Mrs. Browne, who, however, did not know how much of it had been made for her benefit. Nor could she doubt but that her late aristocratic companion was as deeply disgusted as herself; nor help pitying him as the young minx carried him off. And this was one thing that happened about ten of the clock.
The other was less public; indeed, the horse was not seen till much later, and such as saw the Skeleton among the pines took him probably for an on-looker from the hut. Yet none can have seen him very well, or his dress would have excited immediate remark. He wore riding-breeches beautifully cut, and gaiters of the newest. His eye was garnished with a single glass, and in his hand he carried an English hunting-crop. He found his way through the pines with vigilant, unfamiliar steps, and he surveyed the Chinese lanterns and the flitting faces from the shelter of a well-grown hop-bush. Some were dancing on the veranda itself. The stranger watched them with the half-frown and half-smile of a man who appeared to find the novelty of the sight its most striking feature.
Meantime, Irralie under the moon with the new owner was a very different person from Irralie in the ball-room with Mrs. Browne of Quandong. She was much quieter, and, it is possible, a little less like herself. That unspeakable mistake of hers still rankled in her bosom whenever she found herself in Fullarton's company. She had tried to make amends to him since the accident; but she was not at all sure that she had succeeded; and gradually the wish had grown upon her to speak to him candidly about the whole matter. Rightly or wrongly, her soul was still burdened, and she wished to unburden it; a few words—the fewest possible—and she would breathe more freely in his presence. There are natures that must cry peccavi after every realized offence; and Irralie's was one.
So at last she said, "Mr. Fullarton, I have something on my mind, and you know what it is as well as I do. I am ashamed of myself!" For it was characteristic of Irralie that, however long she might be in making up her mind to say or do a thing, the speech or the action itself was invariably crisp and to the point.
The other halted in his stride.
"Ashamed?" said he. "What in the world about?"
"You know," said Irralie.
"I! Let me think."
"Think back to yesterday."
"Yes?"
"To yesterday afternoon."
"Good. What then?"
"Oh, you don't help me a bit!" cried the girl. "I made a fool of myself. I thought all sorts of idiotic things! I hadn't even the decency to conceal my thoughts from you; you saw them—and behaved handsomely! Yes, you did; you might have given me away before them all; but not you! And I am grateful—more grateful and ashamed than I can ever say. I want to thank you and to apologize with the same stone."
"This is very serious," said Fullarton, smiling. "Of course, if you say it was as bad as all that, I must take your word for it. But—who on earth did you imagine I was?"
"Stingaree!"
"I thought so! It occurred to me when you showed me that grave in the pines."
"Oh, I was an idiot. It makes me feel hot whenever I think of it; and yet I'm the better for telling you the worst. It was the old clothes and the revolver and all that. Can you possibly understand? "
"Easily," said Fullarton, reassuringly. "There's only one thing I can't fathom."
"What's that?"
"Why on earth you didn't promptly tell your people!"
There was a pause. They had entered the plantation, but at its southerly extremity; the stock-yards and out-buildings lying to the north. Very faintly in the distance, they could catch the high notes of the fiddler from Hay, with an occasional chord from the piano. But this was only while Irralie paused.
"I was too ashamed," she said at length. "Besides, I didn't believe it myself—I only couldn't help thinking it."
"You might have told them what you couldn't help thinking; or at least let them know that I was armed."
"I might, certainly."
"Why didn't you, Miss Villiers?"
They were now approaching the southerly edge of the homestead clearing. The illuminations shone in their eyes through the thinning trees. The music had ceased; it was not missed, however, in the pines; and thus the rather singular lack of open-air promenaders went also unremarked. Fullarton repeated his question.
"I can't explain it," replied Irralie. "You were one against many; that may have been it. And then, you never looked the villain!"
"Suppose I had!" he said, eagerly. "Suppose you had known me for Stingaree himself; what then?"
Irralie made no reply. They had struck the fence and found a horse there, tethered. The girl was puzzled.
"I wonder who has come?" said she.
"Don't wonder! Answer my question—please, Miss Villiers!"
"Say it again."
"If I had been the brute you thought me, would you—have stood by me even so?"
"No, indeed! I should think not. How can you ask?"
"I only wanted to know."
They squeezed through the wires, and had the yard to themselves. And here Irralie was still further mystified. The ball-room windows stood open to the floor; nobody was dancing, and yet the room was full. The music had ceased, but the sound of a high, drawling voice floated out into the yard.
"Who's that talking?" said Irralie. "It's a voice I don't know at all!"
She looked at her companion; and his expression was still puzzling her, when a sudden uproar burst upon them from the open windows. Men were tumbling pell-mell through them, shouting like lunatics, and armed with native weapons snatched from the walls.
"Stingaree!" they roared. "There he is! Run, Miss Villiers; that's Stingaree!"
Irralie never forgot the wild voices or the wilder scene. As one man they had dashed at her companion. He turned and ran for the tethered horse. The reins were whipped from the fence before he could mount; but he was first through the wires, when, instead of running on, he wheeled round to reason or remonstrate with his pursuers. Irralie saw his gestures without hearing a word; but when they cut him short with a roar and a dash, and struck at his head with their spears and boomerangs, she saw the hand become a fist, and the fist planted in the middle of the first shirt-front to breast the wires. Next moment they were scaled by all, and the many fell headlong upon the one.
Again and again he shook and hit and hacked them off; he fought like a wounded tiger; and now he tugged out his injured hand, and began fighting with that. It looked ghastly in the moonlight—big as a boxing-glove with lint and bandages, and white at first, but quickly reddening from within as it struck and struck and struck among the crumpled shirts and loose white ties. Every blow left a smear. But the end came suddenly; the gallant wretch was grasped from behind in deadly grips; a heavy, livid face writhed beside his own, and George Young bore him to the ground.
Irralie turned away her head. The veranda was all red lanterns and white faces and torn trains. But among them was a new face, with drooping whiskers and a single eye-glass; and as Irralie looked a dapper Englishman, in gaiters, riding-breeches, and twinkling spurs, stepped down from the veranda, and strutted over to the fence with his hands in his pockets.
"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" she heard his high voice drawl. "No undue violence, gentlemen, I beg!"
And he headed the procession which marched through the yard a few moments later, and in the midst of which, with a face all blood, pallor, and cynical resignation, walked the man who for forty-eight hours had passed unchallenged as the owner of Arran Downs.