The Barrakee Mystery

Chapter Forty-One

The Midnight Visit

THE BRILLIANT sun hung over the western sand-hills and already the air had become appreciably colder. To the east a vast sheet of water shimmered under the gentle south wind, and reflected dully the foliage of the box trees growing on the submerged flats. The flood was at its highest point and about four miles north-west of Barrakee it lapped against the foot of a steep clean hill of sand.

Midway up the hillock the wind had scooped out a wideledge, and upon this was built a circular humpy of tobacco-bush. Smoke rose slanting northward from a small fire of boxwood, and about this fire Nellie Wanting was busy preparing the evening meal. Occasionally she stood to her slender height and gazed steadily out among the box trees, through which she knew Ralph Thornton would row the boat back from a fishing expedition.

He came presently, sitting in the stern and propelling the boat forward with one oar; and she waved a scarlet handkerchief in greeting, and showed her pearly teeth in a smile of welcome.

From the summit of the sand-hill Bony waited, hidden by a clump of tobacco-bush. He had been waiting there for an hour or more, and he waited yet while Ralph backed the boat and climbed to the ledge with a string of fish and a tin of swans’ eggs in his hands. The half-caste saw the youth lay his catch beside the fire and then, turning, hold out his arms and take Nellie Wanting within them; and whilst they stood toe to toe, he slid quietly down the hillock to them.

“Bony! What do you want?” was Ralph’s challenge, even before he released the girl. Instinct prompted her to hide within thewhirlie, leaving the two facing each other: anger on the face of the younger, genial friendliness on that of the older.

Ralph was dressed in plain tweed trousers and blue shirt open at the neck. He wore neither boots nor hat. Even during the short time Ralph had been away from Barrakee, Bony saw how much darker had become his complexion.

“I have come to speak to you on a matter of importance to yourself,” Bony said in his graceful manner. “I have been waiting for you for some time. Could not your wife provide us with a pannikin of tea whilst we talk?”

Ralph hesitated, then nodded and called to Nellie. They seated themselves near the fire, and Bony rolled himself a cigarette. Not until the cigarette was made and he was inhaling the smoke did he speak. Gently and slowly he told the story of King Henry’s murder, and then revealed the motive of it. He explained with wonderful tact how Ralph was not Mrs Thornton’s son, but the son of King Henry and Mary Sinclair. And when he had finished the young man sat with his face hidden upon his arms, resting upon his hunched knees.

Bony expected a wild outburst against the fate of his birth, and a feeling of remorse for having deserted the Little Lady, and for having broken his troth to Kate Flinders. When, however, Ralph did raise his head, his face was quite calm and his eyes, if a little misty, quite steady. He said:

“Then that accounts for my being here. I have been wondering why I am here. I am glad you have told me, for now that I know my mind is at rest. How does the Little Lady feel about it?”

“Badly, Ralph, badly,” Bony murmured, rolling his fourth cigarette. “In spite of it all she still loves you, still wants you with her. She is expecting you. I told her she might expect you.”

Again the young man’s head sank to his knees. “You have told me,” he said, “how when a young man you were white of skin. I suppose I shall not remain white much longer?”

“A few years at the longest, Ralph.”

“A few years! Somehow I am not greatly sorry for myself. My thoughts now are of Mrs Thornton, to whom I was and am so necessary. You would think, wouldn’t you, that such a love would keep a fellow back from this-this-And yet what you find here is irresistible to me.”

“Of course it is,” Bony agreed. “But it seems no reason why you should wholly desert Mrs Thornton.”

“It is an all-sufficing reason. I could never look into the eyes of anyone at Barrakee again. I would see shame in those of my foster-father, contempt in those of Dugdale; in Katie’s eyes I would find horror and loathing.”

“I don’t believe it,” protested Bony vigorously. “Even should you find what you expect, you will see in the Little Lady’s eyes only a hungry love, a mother’s love. She is ill, Ralph, very ill. Won’t you come back with me now?”

For a little while Ralph was silent. Then:

“No, not now. I will go to Barrakee when it is dark, when no one sees me. I want to see only my mother.” And then, after another pause, he said, looking up again: “Leave us now, Bony, please. I want to think. I must think.”

So it was that the detective went back to Barrakee, leaving Ralph with his face resting upon his knees. Nellie came out of thewhirlie and stood near him, wanting to comfort him, yet afraid. The sun went down, and when it was almost dark he said to her:

“I’mgoin ’alonga Barrakee tonight. You will stay here and if by sun-up I am not back, you will take the boat and go find Pontius Pilate.”

“Oh Ralphie,” she murmured softly.

“You will do as I have said,” he commanded, more than a hint of the buck speaking to his gin in his voice.

Nellie went into the humpy and cried noiselessly. The youth sat where he was, hour after hour, till by the stars he decided it was midnight. Then, rising he crept into the humpy, and with his hands found the sleeping Nellie. He kissed her without awaking her, and so left her, and walked down beside the floodwaters to the causeway and to Barrakee.

He was aware that Mr and Mrs Thornton occupied rooms separated by the squatter’s dressing room. He knew, too, that the Little Lady’s bedroom was between the dressing room and another she used as her boudoir. There was some doubt in his mind whether he would rejoin Nellie immediately for he foresaw the possibility that the woman who loved him might temporarily overcome his determination never again to resume his former status.

His mind, whilst he followed the causeway, was troubled by the old battle which he had considered lost, and well lost, in favour of Nellie’s embraces. No man can forget his mother; exceptionally few look back upon their mothers with no one tender memory.

The whole of his life formed a chain of tender memories of a loving woman, whom he had cherished as his mother. He felt ungrateful, ashamed, not a little frightened; yet he knew that his severance from white people was dictated by a power which only that afternoon he recognized as the power of his ancestry. Realizing that he had brought pain and anguish to the woman who had given him her all, he blamed himself less than he blamed his fate. What he did not realize was that this midnight visit represented the last link binding him to her, that when it had been strained and broken the forces of heredity would become for ever victorious.

Noiseless as a shadow he entered the garden. He moved across the lawn and round to Mrs Thornton’s rooms as lightly as a stalking cat, the inherent tracker in him enabling him unconsciously to avoid fallen leaves and obstacles the touching of which would make a sound.

He came to the boudoir door and, opening it an inch, listened. There was no sound within. Familiar with the arrangement of the furniture, he crossed silently to the bedroom door, which he found open. Still no sound reached him. As silently as he had come he crossed the Little Lady’s bedroom and closed the dressing room door, whereupon he stole to the dressing table on which invariably stood a candlestick, for he knew that the electric current would have been shut off by Mr Thornton at eleven o’clock.

Having matches with him he struck one and lit the candle. He turned then towards the bed-to see no one lying upon it. Yet there was something strange about that bed, not wholly revealed by the dim candlelight. Picking up the light, he stole towards the bed, and by it stood looking down upon the sheet that was spread over a distinctly outlined form.

Even in that terrible moment, when his limbs were shocked into paralysed inactivity, Ralph felt no fear, nor any desire to cry out or run. For a full minute he stood as a statue of marble, and during that minute the world appeared to die and become awhited grave. And then, very gently, he took a corner of the sheet in his free hand and pulled it down from the face of the dead.

The candle became slightly tilted, and drop by drop the grease fell on the sheet. And drop by drop there fell on the sheet, near the grease marks, great globes of tears from his wide eyes.

He set the candle on a bracket at the head of the bed, and very slowly bent forward and touched the Little Lady’s cold lips that would meet his never again. And then gently he lowered his head and pressed his lips to the granite cold brow and icy lips of the dead. Gently, soundlessly, he laid himself down beside the body, his brain numbed by the shock, his limbs strangely heavy. He felt inexpressibly tired. And there, with his head resting on a bent arm, he silently studied every beloved feature, whilst the large tears continued to fall.

There was something tremendous in that soundlessgrief, far more poignant than if it had been accompanied by breath-catching sobs. The lad, during those terrible minutes, saw himself exactly as God had made him, and the sight brought about the revelation of all that he had meant to the dead woman, especially when nineteen years before she had made him her own. She had given him a great maternallove, she had surrounded him with that guarding love, yet a love not potent enough to keep him safe from the power, the unseen power, of his ancestors of the bush. No power was adequate to deal with that inherent, compelling impulse.

The candle on the bed bracket burned steadily down to half its length before he moved. No man might know all that passed through his mind, wearied by the struggle of the last few months, stunned by the disclosure of his origin, shocked by the discovery that the Little Lady, his mother in all but birth, lay dead with a broken heart.

And she had sent Bony for him, and he had not come till it was too late!

He kissed her once, and after a little while kissed her again. One long look, his face saddened by tragic grief, he gave to her to whom he had belonged.

One agonized sob burst from him just before he extinguished the candle; and slowly, very slowly, he drew away from the bed which had become a bier, and passed out of the homestead of Barrakee for ever.