"Very good. I"ll tell the girl to bring them downstairs. Will you be at the front door?"
"Tell the girl?" Gale remarked. "You don"t think it"s a girl"s job, do you, to move a houseful of furniture?"
"There"s no furniture; there is nothing here belonging to Mrs. Eustace beyond her clothing, and some few odds and ends, I suppose?"
"Then you know very little about the matter, Mr. Wallace. Everything beyond that door belongs to Mrs. Eustace; everything in the residence portion of this building is hers absolutely, her own personal private property. Even that lamp on your table is hers. I have it down on my list."
"Oh, that is nonsense, utter nonsense," Wallace exclaimed pompously.
"The furniture is the property of the Bank."
"The furniture is not the property of the Bank. Ask Mr. Harding."
"He is asleep at present, but----"
"Then he had better get up, because I am about to remove the bed on which he is sleeping. It belongs to Mrs. Eustace; so do the blankets, the sheets, the coverlet, everything, in fact, even to the towels in his room."
"What absolute preposterous nonsense!" Wallace replied. "I never heard of such a thing. The Bank always provides furniture for its branches."
"And does the Bank always allow the wife of a branch manager so much a year for the use of that furniture, napery, linen, cutlery, and the rest?"
"Why ask such a ridiculous question?"
"Because Mrs. Eustace has been paid such an allowance since she has been in Waroona. Refer to the office records. They will show you whether it is so or not."
Wallace turned to the book-racks, and pulled down the ledger. Running his eye down the index, he saw the item "Furniture Account." Opening the book at the page indicated, he read enough to prove to him that Gale"s statement was correct.
"Then all I have to say is, that it is extremely unusual," he said, as he slammed the book, and returned it to its place.
"I am not concerned in that, Mr. Wallace. All I know are the facts. Now that you are also satisfied, you will see the work is hardly what a girl can carry out. I"ll send half a dozen men down at once."
"But," Wallace exclaimed, looking up aghast, "you don"t mean to say you are going to remove everything?"
"Mrs. Eustace has given me her order to remove all her belongings. That, I understand, includes everything in the living portion of the premises, and the lamp now standing on your table."
"But what am I to do? What is Harding to do? We cannot sleep on the bare boards and eat our meals raw."
"I don"t see what concern that is of mine. You requested Mrs. Eustace to vacate these premises at once, and she is doing as you asked. It is not for you to complain, surely?"
"It is, under the circ.u.mstances, most decidedly it is. Someone must always be on the premises after what has occurred; but if there is nothing on which to sleep, what can be done? Mrs. Eustace knew the furniture belonged to her and should have said so."
"I am afraid I cannot agree with you," Gale replied. "You should have known the furniture was hers. Your one desire, it seems to me, was to vent on her head the wrath of the Bank at what may, or may not have been, her husband"s fault. Whether it added to the trouble she already had did not matter to you in the slightest. But directly you find that your spite recoils on yourself and entails some inconvenience for you, there is a very different tale to tell. Personally I am very glad to think you can be inconvenienced. You had better have Harding called, as I shall be back in half an hour with my men. Oh, by the by, the servant is engaged by Mrs. Eustace, not by the Bank. She will leave with the furniture."
He enjoyed the look of consternation on Wallace"s face. The banker could not deceive himself. Gale held him in a cleft stick.
"But this cannot go on," he exclaimed. "Mrs. Eustace must see how unreasonable it is. The Bank is ent.i.tled to at least a month"s notice, before the things can be removed."
"It is the Bank that gave the notice. Mrs. Eustace was told to go at once. Well, she waived her right to demand time and said she would go at once. Now you blame her!"
"Will she sell the furniture?"
"No, she will not."
"I shall go to Taloona and see about it."
"It will not a.s.sist you if you do. In the first place, you will not be able to see her, and, in the second, even if you did see her, you would only learn that the matter has been placed in my hands."
"Then, if it is in your hands, deal with it as a reasonable business man. While Mrs. Eustace remains at Taloona she will not require the furniture; it will be at least a couple of weeks before we can have any sent up to serve us. How much does Mrs. Eustace want for the hire of what is in the house at present?"
"Twenty pounds a week," Gale replied, without moving a muscle, even when Wallace flared up at the proposal.
"Utterly preposterous," he cried. "Ten shillings a week was what was allowed her. That amount is ample."
"You are the buyer, not the seller, Mr. Wallace. You pay twenty pounds a week, or the furniture goes. Even at that sum I consider that Mrs.
Eustace is placing the Bank under a distinct obligation to her."
There was no escape; reluctantly Wallace admitted it, and agreed to the terms, humiliating though they were. But it was still more humiliating for him to learn the following day that Mrs. Eustace declined to accept anything whatever, but allowed the Bank to use the furniture and retain the services of Bessie until other arrangements could be made.
"What is the game she is playing?" he said to Harding. "Is it all part of some elaborate scheme between herself and her husband, or is she really sincere?"
The letter sewn into the lining of his coat seemed to burn itself into Harding"s back. Was it all part of an elaborate scheme, part of the "everything" she had to do "as arranged"? If he could only be sure!
"I don"t know what to make of it," he answered. "I don"t know." But while they were speculating at the bank as to the sincerity or insincerity of Mrs. Eustace, she was driving her own troubles from her mind by the constant and unremitting care of a taciturn and exacting patient.
For the first two or three days after the bullet was extracted from his leg, Dudgeon was in a high state of fever. In his semi-delirium he babbled incessantly of Kitty, grew dangerously excited whenever the doctor came near him, and would only be pacified by the presence of Mrs.
Eustace. In his lucid intervals he told her over and over again the story of his betrayal; when his mind wandered, he regarded her as the Kitty he had known before the shattering of his life"s romance. It was difficult for her to decide which experience was the more trying.
Later, when the fever left him, he was as a child in her hands, listening while she read or talked to him, taking anything she brought him without demur, and only showing signs of impatience when she left the hut for a while.
Consequently, she was unable to give any attention to Durham, and as the days slipped by the doctor began to chafe, for there were patients scattered through the bush whom he was anxious to visit, but he could not go away and leave both men to Mrs. Eustace to nurse.
It was at this juncture that Mrs. Burke put her threat into execution, and drove over to Taloona in a big old-fashioned waggonette with Patsy perched on the box and a store of blankets inside.
"I"ve come to do my share of the work," she told the doctor. "They stopped me from coming before--I was turned back by a trooper a mile from the house. But I"m tired of waiting for word how the poor fellows are, and have just come to take one of them away with me."
She had driven right up to the huts, and the sound of her voice penetrated both. Old Dudgeon, striving to sit up, stared at Mrs. Eustace with gleaming eyes.
"That devil," he muttered. "It"s her voice. I"d know it in a million.
Keep her away! Don"t let her come near me, or I"ll----"
"Hush, you must not get excited," Mrs. Eustace said, as she gently pushed him back. "No one is coming in here. I"ll see to that. I"ll shut the door and bolt them out."
In the other hut the patient"s eyes also gleamed, but with a different light. The forced inaction, the solitude, the wearying monotony of lying still, to one accustomed to a life full of incident and action, was more than trying; but when, as was the case with Durham, there was urgent and engrossing work to be done, the compulsory delay aggravated the evils of the injury he had sustained.
Through the long hours he chafed against the helplessness which prevented him from following up the clue he had already obtained, but still more did he chafe against his inability to renew his acquaintance with the woman who had fascinated him.
He was anxious to make headway in her estimation so that he would have some understanding, however slight, with her when the recovery of her papers and the winning of the reward gave him the opportunity of offering her marriage. His impatience bred many fancies in his mind.
Daily he pictured to himself the danger of someone else becoming his rival in her affections.