My last act before leaving the hotel was to sign a paper brought there by a well-known art dealer, with whom I had talked by 'phone earlier in the day. It authorized him to sell to the highest bidder a painting in oil known by the name of "Hell's Hatches," delivery to be made immediately after the closing of the spring Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. It also provided that he should receive a liberal commission for his services. It must have been something like a month later that he collected ten per cent. on three hundred thousand francs less about five hundred paid some second-rate artist for executing a slight alteration in one of the figures. It was a petty Sultan from Morocco (high card with Keeora at the moment) to whom the picture was knocked down after a spirited run of bidding with an Irish distiller and a Chicago soap-maker. The buyer's only condition was that the man lashed to the wheel should be changed to a burnoused Arab. That would tend to give the picture an atmosphere more in keeping with his desert palace, he said; also, he wanted the efrangi's face covered up. The eyes made him jumpy.
CHAPTER XIX
AFTER ALL
I had not planned by what route I should go to the South Seas, and it was only because an Orient-Pacific liner chanced to be the most convenient connection at Brindisi that I went by Australia instead of by India and Singapore. I was rather glad, on the whole, that I was going to have an opportunity to learn something at first-hand of Hartley Allen—or, Sir Hartley, as he had become since I left Australia. That much I had been able to gather from an item I had read in The Times shortly after my arrival in Paris. This stated that Sir James Allen, Bart., Agent in London for New South Wales, had just died of pneumonia. Being without male issue, it was understood that the title would pass to his younger brother, formerly a well-known racing man, and more recently in the public eye through his heroic action in navigating a labour schooner full of plague-stricken blacks through the Great Barrier Reef to Queensland.
Nothing was said in the local item of the outrage aboard the Cora Andrews, but the day following a dispatch from Sydney stated that Sir Hartley Allen was recovering his health and strength at a sanitarium in the interior, from which, however, it was not expected that he would be in a condition to be discharged for several months. The shock to his nervous system from the mysterious attack upon him in Townsville three months previously had been so great that only time could obliterate the traces of it. He had not yet been allowed to see any of his old friends, but the correspondent affirmed on good authority that Sir Hartley's reason, so long despaired of, had been fully regained.
From the fact that the attack was still spoken of as "mysterious," I took it that Allen, for some reason of his own, had refrained from revealing the identity of the person who had left him to die lashed to the wheel of the Cora. What that reason might be, was one of the things I hoped to learn when I should see him in Australia.
Hartley Allen was still in a sanitarium in the Blue Mountains, I learned on my arrival in Sydney, but of late there had been little news of him. He was believed to be getting stronger, slowly but surely, though no hope was held out that he would appear in the saddle again for at least another season. It was unlikely that I would be permitted to see him, but there would be no harm in trying. I should, of course, communicate with his physicians, not with Allen himself.
By a lucky chance, in wiring the head of the institution where Allen was under treatment, I stated that I was a former friend of his from the Islands. A reply arrived the same day, telling me to come on at my earliest convenience. The eminent nerve specialist in charge of the case drove down to meet me at the train. It was very fortunate indeed, he said, that I had mentioned in my telegram that I had known Sir Hartley during his residence in Melanesia. He had failed, very stupidly, to recognize my name as that of the famous artist who was about to paint Sir Hartley's picture when the attack upon him occurred. As a consequence, he was about to wire a refusal to my application, when he recalled that news from the Islands was the one thing in which his patient had shown any great interest. Accordingly, he had asked Sir Hartley himself if he cared to see a certain Roger Whitney, lately arrived in Sydney. The eager interest manifested by his patient was the most encouraging symptom the latter had shown since his mind had cleared. If I would carefully refrain from introducing any subject calculated to excite Sir Hartley nervously, he was confident that my visit would be productive of nothing but good. It was even possible, should it prove convenient to me, that he would want me to remain for several days. Sir Hartley was quite sound in brain and body. What he needed was increased vigour of both, and to this end he would have to develop a greater interest in living than he had yet shown. It was just possible there was something on his mind....
After leaving my coat and bag in the reception-room, the doctor led me out across a bright solarium. We would find Sir Hartley out of doors, he said, probably playing polo. He seemed to hate the very thought of having a roof over him, even to sleep under. It was a strange sight that met my eyes as we came round the corner of the veranda. In the shade of a grove of blue-gums and stringy-barks a wooden horse had been erected, saddled with a light pigskin, and provided with snaffle and curb reins running back from the angling bit of board that served as "head." Astride the saddle, in the famous short-stirruped "Slant" Allen seat, booted, spurred, and in immaculate whites, slashing smartly at grass-stained and dented bamboo-root balls that were alternately tossed in and chivied by a pair of bare-footed youngsters, was a familiar figure. Save for the white hair (which I had already seen) and the absence of the former coat of tan, he did not, from a distance, appear greatly changed. It was not until his eyes met mine at close range that I was conscious of the weary listlessness which, like a bed of ashes, smothered the coals of his old fire.