Part 43

Oswald stared; he would never have guessed, indeed. The unhealthy light faded from his sallow face. Even his morbid enthusiasm was a little damped.

"You must have done something to deserve it," he cried, at last.

"I did," was the reply, with hanging head. "I--I tried to take him."

"Take your benefactor--take him prisoner?"

"Yes--the man who saved my life."

Melvin sat staring: it was a stare of honestly incredulous disgust. Then he sprang to his feet, a brighter youth than ever, his depression melted like a cloud. His villainous hero was an heroic villain after all! His heart of hearts--which was not black--could still render whole homage to Stingaree! He no longer frowned on his informer as on a thing accursed. The creature had wiped out his original treachery to Stingaree by replacing the uninjured idol in its niche in this warped mind. Oswald, however, had made his repugnance only too plain; he was unable to elicit another detail; and in a very few minutes Mrs. Melvin was back in her place, though not before flicking it with her handkerchief, undetected by her son.

It was certainly a battered and hang-dog figure that stole away into the bush. Yet the creature straightened as he strode into star-light undefiled by earthly illumination; his palsy left him; presently as he went he began fingering the new melodeon in the way of a man who need not have sought elementary instruction from Oswald Melvin. And now a shining disk filled one unwashed eye.

Stingaree lay a part of that night beside the milk-white mare that he had left tethered in a box-clump quite near the town; at sunrise he knelt and shaved on the margin of a Government tank, before breaking the mirror by plunging in. And before the next stars paled he was snugly back in older haunts, none knowing of his descent upon those of men.

There or thereabouts, hidden like the needle in the hay, and yet ubiquitous in the stack, the bushranger remained for months. Then there was an encounter, not the first of this period, but the first in which shots were exchanged. One of these pierced the lungs of his melodeon--an instrument more notorious by this time than the musical-box before it--a still greater treasure to Stingaree. That was near the full of a certain summer moon; it was barely waning to the eye when the battered buyer of melodeons came for a new one to the shop in the pretty bush town.

The shop was closed for the night, but Stingaree knocked at a lighted window under the veranda, which Mrs. Melvin presently threw up. Her eyes flashed when she recognized one against whom she now harbored a bitterness on quite a different plane of feeling from her former repulsion. Even to his first glance she looked an older and a harder woman.

"I am sorry to see you," she said, with a soft vehemence plainly foreign to herself. "I almost hate the sight of you! You have been the ruin of my son!"

"His ruin?"

Stingaree forgot the speech of the unlettered stockman; but his cry was too short to do worse than warn him.

"Come round," continued Mrs. Melvin, austerely. "I will see you. You shall hear what you have done."

In another minute he was in the parlor where he had sat aforetime. He never dreamt of sitting now. But the lady took her accustomed chair as a queen her throne.

"Is he ruined?" asked Stingaree.

"Not irrevocably--not yet; but he may be any moment. He must be before long."

"But--but what ails him, madame?"

"Villain-worship!" cried the lady, with a tragic face stripped of all its humor, and bare without it as a winter's tree.

"I remember! Yes--I understand. He was mad about--Stingaree."

"It is madness now," said the bitter mother. "It was only a stupid, hare-brained fancy then, but now it is something worse. You're the first to whom I have admitted it," she continued, with illogical indignation, "because it's all through you!"

"All through me?"

"You told him a tale. You made that villain a greater hero in his eyes than ever. You made him real."

"He is real enough, God knows!"

"But you made him so to my son." The keen eyes softened for one divine instant before they filled. "And I--I am talking my own boy over with--with----"

Stingaree stood in twofold embarrassment. Did she know after all who he was? And what had he said he was, the time before?

"The lowest of the low," he answered, with a twitch of his unshaven lips.

"No! That you were not, or are not, whatever you may say. You--" she hesitated sweetly--"you had been unsteady when you were here before." He twitched again, imperceptibly. "I am thankful to see that you are now more like what you must once have been. I can bear to tell you of my boy. Oh, sir, can you bear with me?"