The Necessity for a Wedding Present
PRESENTLY OLD JEFF ceased to cry Bony’s name and the man himself heard the sound of a motor-engine roar for a short space, slow down when the driver changed gears, speed up again, slow once more, again speed up and its sound grow faint. The truck had gone without him.
Still he did not speak, nor did Marion raise her head. He heard footsteps coming along the corridor without, listened with strained intentness to their passing beyond the door, and to the gentle tapping that followed. To them came Mrs Poulton’s voice.
“Marion!”
Bony began to think the girl would never speak. Then quickly she stood up and, whilst looking at him, said:
“Yes, Mrs Poulton. What is it?”
“The master is just leaving for the fire. He would like to say good-bye.”
“Tell him I will come at once.”
They heard Mrs Poulton departing, and, when her steps sounded no more, Marion gazed steadily into Bony’s blue eyes, saying:
“Well, will you do what I ask?”
Bony’s face was drawn. Had he been white, his complexion would have been whiter than usual. Then:
“You present me with a mental battle,” he said slowly. “Leave me here while you farewell old Jeff. You must give me time-indeed you must. You ask of me a hard thing, a far harder thing than you can guess.”
And so that she should not see the pain in his eyes he turned away from her, and was but dimly conscious of hearing the door open and close behind her. His feet almost faltering, he reached a chair placed beside a writing-table, and, sinking into it, covered his face with his hands, his head falling forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
If ever a man was impaled on the horns of a dilemma, Bony then was that man. The tip of one horn represented pride; the tip of the other, a fierce admiration for the pure and the beautiful.
Pride! Yes, pride in achievement. He had been born with the white man’s blood in him and, as is sometimes the case, a skin as white as his father’s. From an early age he had felt his superiority over the other little boys at the mission station, most ofwhom were black, or of that dark putty colour there is no mistaking. At eighteen years of age he had fallen in love with a girl at the high school both attended. Life and the passion of life were opening to him as a flower-bud will open, and he revelled in his power to make the girl love him.
With the inevitability of fate his long-dead black mother claimed him from the grave, claimed him and held him. He was bathing with several companions one afternoon, and one of them remarked how peculiar it was that his legs were darker in colour than the upper part of his body. The horror, the agony, which succeeded that afternoon! The realization, the knowledge that, after all, when he had been so certain that the black strain in him would never show, it was at last asserting itself!
His soul in torment, he told the girl of his mixed ancestry. At first she would not believe it. To her honour, however, she clung to him for a year; but at last, when the colour mark had crept up his body and reached his face, she had to believe. Even so she would have married Bony, had he permitted it.
But Bony put her from him. The act cut out of his life temporarily all the joys of youth save one, and that one the joy of knowledge. Yet always was he acutely aware of his inferiority to the full-blooded white man. He strove and excelled the white man in one thing: knowledge; he equalled the white man in one other thing: personal honour.
The hereditary influences that had battled for him ever since his early manhood wearied him at times to the point of exhaustion. He seemed never to escape them, never to be free from them. He had so wanted to become a great scholar, had so dreamed of becoming a famous Australian; and, when the call of his mother, and through her the call of the vast bushlands, clashed within his soul, he knew his ambitions to be but dreams, and his dreams the epic of absurdity.
His mental gifts and natural faculties, plus fortuitous circumstances, led him into police circles. The life of a detective, especially one specializing in bush crimes, suited his complex racial make-up, and to this calling he had given his talents gladly, and lived for it and of it. The white man’s ambition denied him, the black man’s life repugnant to his finer instincts, there was but one thing left. Pride of achievement, pride of success, the joys of mental victories. His tremendous vanity was bred from his absolute immunity from failure. Never had he failed at a case entrusted to him, and in consequence he sat in the seats of the supermen.
And now this! For the first time since he had renounced the love of his youthful sweetheart he had met a white woman who never had looked down on him from a higher plane, who aroused in him the ecstasy of the worshipper of beauty, who had made him forget his inferior birth and status, and who recognized unreservedly his spiritual superiority. Knowing not who he was, she had besought him to fail in a case, had urged a service that would mean but one thing. And that thing was that his chiefs would know he was as other men, as other men who sometimes failed.
There was the torturing point of these two horns drawn together into one. This case of the missing Marks was all but complete. It was the deepest mystery he had ever had to unravel. It revealed almost the perfect crime. He was morally certain that he would complete this case as he had completed all others. Yet, knowing that, and because of Marion Stanton, was he to go back to Headquarters in Sydney and admit failure, and then on to Colonel Spender, in Brisbane, and admit to him as well that he had failed? Easily could bevisualize the Chief Commissioner’s expression of astonishment, of disbelief, and finally the look of disillusionment deep in the fierce grey-blue eyes.
Failure! What a word to include in his vocabulary!
If he allowed Dash to escape, it meant that Dot also would escape. Should he drop the case against Dash, it meant he would have to drop the case against his partner and that third man whom Ludbi had seen fighting with Marks in the runaway car. There was no way of saving only Dash. There was no way out for him, Bony. There was no loophole of escape for him from his plighted word that he would do anything for the white goddess to whom his spirit went out in worship.
When his hands fell from his face and he held up his head to gaze vacantly on the littered writing-table, beads of perspiration gathered on his fine forehead. His shoulders drooped as though the load he bore was beyond human strength to carry. And, whilst sitting thus, his eyes rested on a sheaf of letters filed on a long, straight wire with a wooden base.
In spite of his mental preoccupation he could not but be interested by the fact that this table belonged to a woman so methodical that her business letters were kept for possible reference. There must have been fully thirty of these letters bunched on that wire file, and almost at the bottom the edge of one stood out a little from those above, and there was revealed to him in block letters the name of an Adelaide firm of jewellers.
For some while he stared at it uncomprehendingly, and then words formed at the back, as it were, of the thoughts filling his mind, words that became joined as the links of a chain. Almost without conscious volition he reached forward, pulled the file towards him, slipped up the covering mass of letters and read the letter from the jewellers. Then was the cup of his anguish filled to the brim, for there beneath his eyes was the proof that was the corner-stone of the structure he had raised from the past with fine red sand.
If only he had known the direction of his drift! If only he had known, he could have steeled himself against the dark-haired, wonderful white woman with the magnetic personality. If-if he had but known at the very beginning the riddle of Dash leaving his position as jackeroo to become a trapper, at which he now shrewdly guessed! If he could have known this and have had reasonable ground to suspect what the jewellers’ letter contained, he could have thrown up the case much earlier and retired with honour.
But there were those letters to Sydney asking for vital information; there was the sending there of the small silver disk; therewas lastly and not least his orders that Illawalli be brought down from the far north of Queensland. How now to explain all that without admitting failure? How at this stage could he countermand the order to Sergeant Morris regarding the arrest of Dot and Dash?
The other point of view he did not then remember. It was not till later that he thought of his duty to the service to which he belonged, his duty to the majesty of justice. For, after all, the man Marks had been murdered, and his murderer still lived. To lay down his cards, to put before his superiors the complete chain of proofs-wanting but the body of Marks-would mean striking down the woman he had come to revere, to whom he had given his word that for her he would do anything.
So preoccupied was his mind that he was utterly unconscious of removing from the file the jewellers’ letter, as he was unconscious of hearing Jeff Stanton’s great car go purring off into the night. So preoccupied was he that he did not hear the door of the room open and close, and did not see Marion Stanton until she stood directly before him.
“Bony-why are you so troubled over the little thing I have asked of you?” she said with a frown.
He stood up and gazed deeply into her eyes, so deeply that she became uneasy, not with fear of him, but because she saw that in his face which reminded her of pictures of St Joan of Arc tied to a stake, and of King Charles standing beside the headsman’s block. It was a look that indicated renunciation, or sacrifice.
“I am no longer troubled,” he told her with a smile she saw was forced. “I promised to do anything for you, and you have asked me to do that something. I will do it. But how I wish I had known you loved this man Dash!”
“Why-why?” Once more he saw the blood dye her cheeks and, guessing rightly what was in her mind, hastened to correct her.
“To me, Miss Stanton, you have been most kind,” he said, and would have taken her hands had not she drawn back. “You have been kind in a way which no white woman has been before. To use a well-worn phrase, yet one very apt, you have stooped to conquer. From an Olympian height you have bent down to one in the mire, and my feeling for you has more of spirituality in it than of earth. I rejoice that you love this man, who is so well known and respected as Dash, the partner of Dot; and not only will I see that he does not fall into the hands of the police, but I will also guarantee to restore him to you.”
“You will? Oh, Bony, tell me, tell me how?”
“That is a question which one day he himself will be able to answer. Then you will understand how it is that now I am unable to explain. I am reminded of a task I must perform at once. Immediately afterwards I will go after him and bring him back.”
“You will, Bony-true?”
“As sure as that I shall be lectured by your father for missing the truck,” he said, with his old smile back once more. “There is, however, a little matter I would like you to explain, if you would be so generous.”
“What is that?”
“Tell me how it was Dash became a trapper.”
And without hesitation she explained the one battle she had lost to old Jeff: how, in spite of the harshness of his decision, she had seen its justice and its far-sightedness.
“The probationary period is over to-day, Bony,” she said softly, “and instead of welcoming him here, I had to warn him about Sergeant Morris. Oh, what could he have done, Bony? Nothing, nothing dishonourable, I am sure.”
“I, too, have grounds for assurance that it was nothing dishonourable,” he cried, with a smile of dawning comprehension, as one who sees a light after a long period of darkness. “Ah, all is clear now. I see-I see!”
“See! What do you see?”
But she saw the growing light of triumph fade from his blue eyes, saw it replaced by an expression of hopelessness, and then again by his old gaiety. It was all so swift that she failed then to analyse these expressions, and said again swiftly:
“What is it you see?”
For the second time he made to take her hands, and this time she permitted him to succeed. In the dim light cast by the shaded lamp she saw his face as it was ever to remain in her mind. His teeth flashed in a laugh, gentle and cultured.
“I see,” he said, quite slowly, “I see that I shall have to get you a wedding present. I will get it to-night.”
And, before she could say a further word, he had bowed with old-world grace and left her-left her wondering wherever he had learned to bow like that.