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Shadow of a Man

<h2>X</h2> THE TRUTH BY INCHES He told her with his back against the gate leading into Butcher-boy. Moya heard him and stood still. Behind her rose the station pines, and through the pines peeped hut and house, in shadow below, but with each particular roof like a clean tablecloth in the glare of the risen moon. A high light or so showed in the verandah underneath; this was Bethune's shirt-front, that the sergeant's breeches, and those transitory red-hot pin-heads their cigars. Rigden had superb sight. He could see all this at something like a furlong's range. Yet all that he did see was Moya with the moon upon her, a feathery and white silhouette, edged with a greater whiteness, and crowned as with gold. "Your father!" "Yes, I am his son and heir."[Pg 135] Her tone was low with grief and horror, but his was unintentionally sardonic. It jarred upon the woman, and reacted against the man. Moya's first feeling had been undefiled by self; but in an instant her tears were poisoned at their fount. "And you told me your father was dead!" The new note was one of the eternal scale between man and woman. It was the note of unbridled reproach. "Never in so many words, I think," said Rigden, unfortunately. "In so many words!" echoed Moya, but the sneer was her last. "I hate such contemptible distinctions!" she cried out honestly. "Better have cheated me wholesale, as you did the police; there was something thorough about that." "And I hope that you can now see some excuse for it," rejoined Rigden with more point. "For that, yes!" cried Moya at once. "Oh, dear, yes, no one can blame you for screening your poor father. I forgive you for cheating the police—it would have been[Pg 136] unnatural not to—but I never, never shall forgive you for what was unnatural—cheating me." Rigden took a sharper tone. "You are too fond of that word," said he, "and I object to it as between me and you." "You have earned it, though!" "I deny it. I simply held my tongue about a tragedy in my own family which you could gain nothing by knowing. There was no cheating in that." "I disagree with you!" said Moya very hotly, but he went on as though she had not spoken. "You speak as though I had hushed up something in my own life. Can't you see the difference? He was convicted under another name; it was a thing nobody knew but ourselves; nobody need ever have known. Or so I thought," he ended in a wretched voice. But Moya was outwardly unmoved. "All the more reason why you should have told me, and trusted me," she insisted. "God knows I thought of it! But I knew[Pg 137] the difference it would make. And I was right!" It was his turn to be bitter, and Moya's to regain complete control. "So you think it's that that makes the difference now?" "Of course it is." "Would you believe me if I assured you it was not?" "No; you might think so; but I know." "You know singularly little about women," said Moya after a pause. And her tone shook him. But he said that he could only judge by the way she had taken it now. There was another pause, in which the proud girl wrestled with her pride. But at last she told him he was very dull. And she drew a little nearer, with the ghost of other looks behind her tears. But the high moon just missed her face. And Rigden was very dull indeed. "You had better tell me everything, and give me a chance," she said dryly. "What's the use, when the mere fact is enough?"[Pg 138] "I never said it was." "Oh, Moya, but you know it must be. Think of your people!" "Why should I?" "They will have to know." "I don't see it." "Ah, but they will," said Rigden, with dire conviction. And though the change in Moya was now apparent even to him, it wrought no answering change in Rigden; on the contrary, he fell into a brown study, with dull eyes fixed no longer upon Moya, but on the high lights in the verandah far away. "There's so little to tell," he said at length. "It was a runaway match, and a desperately bad bargain for my dear mother, yet by no means the unhappy marriage you would suppose. I have that from her own dear lips, and I don't think it so extraordinary as I did once. A bad man may still be the one man for a good woman, and make her happier than the best of good fellows; it was so in their case. My father was and is a bad man; there's no mincing the matter. I've stood by him for what he is[Pg 139] to me, not for what he is in himself, for he has gone from bad to worse, like most prisoners. He was in trouble when he married my mother; the police were on his tracks even then: they came out here under a false name." "And your name?" asked Moya, pertinently yet not unkindly; indeed she was standing close beside him now. "That is not false," said Rigden. "My mother used it from the time of her trouble. She would not bring me up under an alias; but she took care not to let his people or hers get wind of her existence; never wrote them a line in her poorest days, though her people would have taken her back—without him. That wouldn't do for my mother. Yet nothing else was possible. He was sent to the hulks for life." Moya's face, turned to the light at last, was shining like the moon itself; and the tears in her eyes were tears of enthusiasm, almost of pride. "It was fine of her!" she said, and caught his hand. "She was fine," he answered simply. Yet[Pg 140] Moya's hand had no effect. He looked at it wistfully, but let it go without an answering clasp. And the girl's pride bled again. She hardly heard his story after that. Yet it was a story to hear. The villain had not been a villain of the meaner dye, but one of parts, courage among them. "There have been no bushrangers in your time," said Rigden; "but you may have heard of them?" "I remember all about the Kellys," said honest Moya. "I'm not so young as all that." "Did you ever hear of Captain Bovill?" "I know the name, nothing more." "I am glad of that," said Rigden, grimly. "It is the name by which my unhappy father is going down to Australian history as one of its most notorious criminals. The gold-fields were the beginning of the end of him, as of many a better man; he could not get enough out of his claim, so he took it from an escort under arms. There was a whole band of them, and they were all taken at last; but it was not the last of Captain Bovill. You have seen the old hulk[Pg 141] Success? He was one of the prisoners who seized the launch and killed a warder and a sailor between them; he was one of those sentenced to death and afterwards reprieved. That was in '56; the next year they murdered the Inspector-General; and he was tried for that with fifteen others, but he got off with his neck. He only spoilt his last chance of legal freedom in this life; so he tried to escape again and again; and at last he has succeeded!" The son's tone was little in keeping with his acts, but the incongruity was very human. There was Moya beside him in the moonlight, but for the last time, whatever she might say or think! And her mind was working visibly. "Why didn't the police say who it was they were after?" she cried of a sudden; and the blame was back in her voice, for she had found new shoulders for it. Rigden smiled sadly. "Don't you see?" he said. "Don't you remember what Harkness said at the start about my fellows harbouring him? But he told me that evening—to think that it was[Pg 142] only last night!—as a great secret and a tremendous piece of news. The fact is that my unhappy father was more than notorious in his day; he was popular; and popular sympathy has been the bugbear of the police ever since the Kellys. Not that he has much sympathy for me!" cried Rigden all at once. "Not that I'm acting altogether from a sense of filial duty, however mistaken; no, you shan't run away with any false ideas. It was one for him and two for myself! He had the whip-hand of me, and let me know it; if I gave him away, he'd have given me!" "If only you had let him! If only you had trusted me," sighed Moya once more. "But you do now, don't you—dear?" And she touched his coat, for she could not risk the repulse of his hand, though her words went so far—so very far for Moya. "It's too late now," he said. But it was incredible! Even now he seemed not to see her hand—hers! Vanity invaded her once more, and her gates stood open to the least and meanest of the besetting host. She make advances to him, to the[Pg 143] convict's son! What would her people say? What would Toorak say? What would she not say herself—to herself—of herself—after this nightmare night? And all because (but certainly for the second time) he had taken no notice of her hand! When found, however, Moya's voice was as cold as her heart was hot. "Oh, very well! It is certainly too late if you wish it to be so, and in any case now. But may I ask why you are so keen to save me the trouble of saying so?" Rigden looked past her towards the station, and there were no more high lights in the verandah; but elsewhere there were voices, and the champing of a bit. "If you go back now," he said, "you will just be in time to hear." "Thank you. I prefer to have it here, and from you." Rigden shrugged his shoulders. "Then I am no longer a free agent. I am here on parole. I am under arrest." "Nonsense!" "I am, though: harbouring the fugitive![Pg 144] They can't put salt on him, so they have on me." Moya stood looking at him in a long silence, but only hardening as she looked: patience, pity and understanding had gone like so many masts, by the board, and the wreckage in her heart closed it finally against him in the very hour of his more complete disaster. "And how long have you known this?" she inquired stonily, though the answer was obvious to her mind. "Ever since we met them on our ride home. They showed me their warrant then. The trooper had done thirty miles for it this afternoon. They wanted to take me straight away. But I persuaded Harkness to come back to dinner and return with me later without fuss." "Yet you couldn't say one word to me!" "Not just then. Where was the point? But I arranged with Harkness to tell you now. And by all my gods I've told you everything there is to tell, Moya!" "You should have told me this first. But you tell nothing till you are forced! I might[Pg 145] have known you were keeping the worst up your sleeve! I shouldn't be surprised if the very worst were still to come!" "It's coming now," said Rigden, bitterly; "it's coming from you, in the most miserable hour of all my existence; you must make it worse! How was I to know the other wouldn't be enough for you? How do I know now?" "Thank you," said Moya, a knife in her heart, but another in her tongue. The voices drew nearer through the pines; there was Harkness mounted, with a led horse, and Theodore Bethune on foot. Rigden turned abruptly to the girl. "There are just two more things to be said. None of them know where he is, and none of them know my motive. You're in both secrets. You'd better keep them—unless you want Toorak to know who it was you were engaged to." The rest followed without a word. It might have been a scene in a play without words, and indeed the moon chalked the faces of the players, and the Riverina crickets supplied the music with an orchestra[Pg 146] some millions strong. The clink of a boot in a stirrup, a thud in the saddle, another clink upon the off side; and Rigden lifting his wideawake as he rode after Harkness through the gate; and Bethune holding the gate open, shutting it after them, and taking Moya's arm as she stood like Lot's wife in the moonlight. <hr style="width: 65%;" />[Pg 147] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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