The mutineers of the Osprey had been long since given up as dead, and the story of their desperate escape had become indistinct to the general public mind. Now that they had been recaptured in a remarkable manner, popular belief invested them with all sorts of strange surroundings. They had been—according to report—kings over savage islanders, chiefs of lawless and ferocious pirates, respectable married men in Java, merchants in Singapore, and swindlers in Hong Kong. Their adventures had been dramatized at a London theatre, and the popular novelist of that day was engaged in a work descriptive of their wondrous fortunes.
John Rex, the ringleader, was related, it was said, to a noble family, and a special message had come out to Sir John Franklin concerning him. He had every prospect of being satisfactorily hung, however, for even the most outspoken admirers of his skill and courage could not but admit that he had committed an offence which was death by the law. The Crown would leave nothing undone to convict him, and the already crowded prison was re-crammed with half a dozen life sentence men, brought up from Port Arthur to identify the prisoners. Amongst this number was stated to be “the notorious Dawes”.
This statement gave fresh food for recollection and invention. It was remembered that “the notorious Dawes” was the absconder who had been brought away by Captain Frere, and who owed such fettered life as he possessed to the fact that he had assisted Captain Frere to make the wonderful boat in which the marooned party escaped. It was remembered, also, how sullen and morose he had been on his trial five years before, and how he had laughed when the commutation of his death sentence was announced to him. The Hobart Town Gazette published a short biography of this horrible villain—a biography setting forth how he had been engaged in a mutiny on board the convict ship, how he had twice escaped from the Macquarie Harbour, how he had been repeatedly flogged for violence and insubordination, and how he was now double-ironed at Port Arthur, after two more ineffectual attempts to regain his freedom. Indeed, the Gazette, discovering that the wretch had been originally transported for highway robbery, argued very ably it would be far better to hang such wild beasts in the first instance than suffer them to cumber the ground, and grow confirmed in villainy. “Of what use to society,” asked the Gazette, quite pathetically, “has this scoundrel been during the last eleven years?” And everybody agreed that he had been of no use whatever.
Miss Sylvia Vickers also received an additional share of public attention. Her romantic rescue by the heroic Frere, who was shortly to reap the reward of his devotion in the good old fashion, made her almost as famous as the villain Dawes, or his confederate monster John Rex. It was reported that she was to give evidence on the trial, together with her affianced husband, they being the only two living witnesses who could speak to the facts of the mutiny. It was reported also that her lover was naturally most anxious that she should not give evidence, as she was—an additional point of romantic interest—affected deeply by the illness consequent on the suffering she had undergone, and in a state of pitiable mental confusion as to the whole business. These reports caused the Court, on the day of the trial, to be crowded with spectators; and as the various particulars of the marvellous history of this double escape were detailed, the excitement grew more intense. The aspect of the four heavily-ironed prisoners caused a sensation which, in that city of the ironed, was quite novel, and bets were offered and taken as to the line of defence which they would adopt. At first it was thought that they would throw themselves on the mercy of the Crown, seeking, in the very extravagance of their story, to excite public sympathy; but a little study of the demeanour of the chief prisoner, John Rex, dispelled that conjecture. Calm, placid, and defiant, he seemed prepared to accept his fate, or to meet his accusers with some plea which should be sufficient to secure his acquittal on the capital charge. Only when he heard the indictment, setting forth that he had “feloniously pirated the brig Osprey,” he smiled a little.
Mr. Meekin, sitting in the body of the Court, felt his religious prejudices sadly shocked by that smile. “A perfect wild beast, my dear Miss Vickers,” he said, returning, in a pause during the examination of the convicts who had been brought to identify the prisoner, to the little room where Sylvia and her father were waiting. “He has quite a tigerish look about him.”
“Poor man!” said Sylvia, with a shudder.
“Poor! My dear young lady, you do not pity him?”
“I do,” said Sylvia, twisting her hands together as if in pain. “I pity them all, poor creatures.”
“Charming sensibility!” says Meekin, with a glance at Vickers. “The true woman's heart, my dear Major.”
The Major tapped his fingers impatiently at this ill-timed twaddle. Sylvia was too nervous just then for sentiment. “Come here, Poppet,” he said, “and look through this door. You can see them from here, and if you do not recognize any of them, I can't see what is the use of putting you in the box; though, of course, if it is necessary, you must go.”
The raised dock was just opposite to the door of the room in which they were sitting, and the four manacled men, each with an armed warder behind him, were visible above the heads of the crowd. The girl had never before seen the ceremony of trying a man for his life, and the silent and antique solemnities of the business affected her, as it affects all who see it for the first time. The atmosphere was heavy and distressing. The chains of the prisoners clanked ominously. The crushing force of judge, gaolers, warders, and constables assembled to punish the four men, appeared cruel. The familiar faces, that in her momentary glance, she recognized, seemed to her evilly transfigured. Even the countenance of her promised husband, bent eagerly forward towards the witness-box, showed tyrannous and bloodthirsty. Her eyes hastily followed the pointing finger of her father, and sought the men in the dock. Two of them lounged, sullen and inattentive; one nervously chewed a straw, or piece of twig, pawing the dock with restless hand; the fourth scowled across the Court at the witness-box, which she could not see. The four faces were all strange to her.
“No, papa,” she said, with a sigh of relief, “I can't recognize them at all.”
As she was turning from the door, a voice from the witness-box behind her made her suddenly pale and pause to look again. The Court itself appeared, at that moment, affected, for a murmur ran through it, and some official cried, “Silence!”
The notorious criminal, Rufus Dawes, the desperado of Port Arthur, the wild beast whom the Gazette had judged not fit to live, had just entered the witness-box. He was a man of thirty, in the prime of life, with a torso whose muscular grandeur not even the ill-fitting yellow jacket could altogether conceal, with strong, embrowned, and nervous hands, an upright carriage, and a pair of fierce, black eyes that roamed over the Court hungrily.
Not all the weight of the double irons swaying from the leathern thong around his massive loins, could mar that elegance of attitude which comes only from perfect muscular development. Not all the frowning faces bent upon him could frown an accent of respect into the contemptuous tones in which he answered to his name, “Rufus Dawes, prisoner of the Crown”.
“Come away, my darling,” said Vickers, alarmed at his daughter's blanched face and eager eyes.
“Wait,” she said impatiently, listening for the voice whose owner she could not see. “Rufus Dawes! Oh, I have heard that name before!”
“You are a prisoner of the Crown at the penal settlement of Port Arthur?”
“Yes.”
“For life?”
“For life.”
Sylvia turned to her father with breathless inquiry in her eyes. “Oh, papa! who is that speaking? I know the name! the voice!”
“That is the man who was with you in the boat, dear,” says Vickers gravely. “The prisoner.”
The eager light died out of her eyes, and in its place came a look of disappointment and pain. “I thought it was a good man,” she said, holding by the edge of the doorway. “It sounded like a good voice.”
And then she pressed her hands over her eyes and shuddered. “There, there,” says Vickers soothingly, “don't be afraid, Poppet; he can't hurt you now.”
“No, ha! ha!” says Meekin, with great display of off-hand courage, “the villain's safe enough now.”
The colloquy in the Court went on. “Do you know the prisoners in the dock?”
“Yes.” “Who are they?”
“John Rex, Henry Shiers, James Lesly, and, and—I'm not sure about the last man.” “You are not sure about the last man. Will you swear to the three others?”
“Yes.”
“You remember them well?”
“I was in the chain-gang at Macquarie Harbour with them for three years.” Sylvia, hearing this hideous reason for acquaintance, gave a low cry, and fell into her father's arms.
“Oh, papa, take me away! I feel as if I was going to remember something terrible!”
Amid the deep silence that prevailed, the cry of the poor girl was distinctly audible in the Court, and all heads turned to the door. In the general wonder no one noticed the change that passed over Rufus Dawes. His face flushed scarlet, great drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and his black eyes glared in the direction from whence the sound came, as though they would pierce the envious wood that separated him from the woman whose voice he had heard. Maurice Frere sprang up and pushed his way through the crowd under the bench.
“What's this?” he said to Vickers, almost brutally. “What did you bring her here for? She is not wanted. I told you that.”
“I considered it my duty, sir,” says Vickers, with stately rebuke.
“What has frightened her? What has she heard? What has she seen?” asked Frere, with a strangely white face. “Sylvia, Sylvia!”
She opened her eyes at the sound of his voice. “Take me home, papa; I'm ill. Oh, what thoughts!”
“What does she mean?” cried Frere, looking in alarm from one to the other.
“That ruffian Dawes frightened her,” said Meekin. “A gush of recollection, poor child. There, there, calm yourself, Miss Vickers. He is quite safe.”
“Frightened her, eh?” “Yes,” said Sylvia faintly, “he frightened me, Maurice. I needn't stop any longer, dear, need I?”
“No,” says Frere, the cloud passing from his face. “Major, I beg your pardon, but I was hasty. Take her home at once. This sort of thing is too much for her.” And so he went back to his place, wiping his brow, and breathing hard, as one who had just escaped from some near peril.
Rufus Dawes had remained in the same attitude until the figure of Frere, passing through the doorway, roused him. “Who is she?” he said, in a low, hoarse voice, to the constable behind him. “Miss Vickers,” said the man shortly, flinging the information at him as one might fling a bone to a dangerous dog.
“Miss Vickers,” repeated the convict, still staring in a sort of bewildered agony. “They told me she was dead!”
The constable sniffed contemptuously at this preposterous conclusion, as who should say, “If you know all about it, animal, why did you ask?” and then, feeling that the fixed gaze of his interrogator demanded some reply, added, “You thort she was, I've no doubt. You did your best to make her so, I've heard.”
The convict raised both his hands with sudden action of wrathful despair, as though he would seize the other, despite the loaded muskets; but, checking himself with sudden impulse, wheeled round to the Court.
“Your Honour!—Gentlemen! I want to speak.”
The change in the tone of his voice, no less than the sudden loudness of the exclamation, made the faces, hitherto bent upon the door through which Mr. Frere had passed, turn round again. To many there it seemed that the “notorious Dawes” was no longer in the box, for, in place of the upright and defiant villain who stood there an instant back, was a white-faced, nervous, agitated creature, bending forward in an attitude almost of supplication, one hand grasping the rail, as though to save himself from falling, the other outstretched towards the bench. “Your Honour, there has been some dreadful mistake made. I want to explain about myself. I explained before, when first I was sent to Port Arthur, but the letters were never forwarded by the Commandant; of course, that's the rule, and I can't complain. I've been sent there unjustly, your Honour. I made that boat, your Honour. I saved the Major's wife and daughter. I was the man; I did it all myself, and my liberty was sworn away by a villain who hated me. I thought, until now, that no one knew the truth, for they told me that she was dead.” His rapid utterance took the Court so much by surprise that no one interrupted him. “I was sentenced to death for bolting, sir, and they reprieved me because I helped them in the boat. Helped them! Why, I made it! She will tell you so. I nursed her! I carried her in my arms! I starved myself for her! She was fond of me, sir. She was indeed. She called me 'Good Mr. Dawes'.”
At this, a coarse laugh broke out, which was instantly checked. The judge bent over to ask, “Does he mean Miss Vickers?” and in this interval Rufus Dawes, looking down into the Court, saw Maurice Frere staring up at him with terror in his eyes. “I see you, Captain Frere, coward and liar! Put him in the box, gentlemen, and make him tell his story. She'll contradict him, never fear. Oh, and I thought she was dead all this while!”
The judge had got his answer from the clerk by this time. “Miss Vickers had been seriously ill, had fainted just now in the Court. Her only memories of the convict who had been with her in the boat were those of terror and disgust. The sight of him just now had most seriously affected her. The convict himself was an inveterate liar and schemer, and his story had been already disproved by Captain Frere.”
The judge, a man inclining by nature to humanity, but forced by experience to receive all statements of prisoners with caution, said all he could say, and the tragedy of five years was disposed of in the following dialogue:- JUDGE: This is not the place for an accusation against Captain Frere, nor the place to argue upon your alleged wrongs. If you have suffered injustice, the authorities will hear your complaint, and redress it.
RUFUS DAWES I have complained, your Honour. I wrote letter after letter to the Government, but they were never sent. Then I heard she was dead, and they sent me to the Coal Mines after that, and we never hear anything there.
JUDGE I can't listen to you. Mr. Mangles, have you any more questions to ask the witness?
But Mr. Mangles not having any more, someone called, “Matthew Gabbett,” and Rufus Dawes, still endeavouring to speak, was clanked away with, amid a buzz of remark and surmise.
The trial progressed without further incident. Sylvia was not called, and, to the astonishment of many of his enemies, Captain Frere went into the witness-box and generously spoke in favour of John Rex. “He might have left us to starve,” Frere said; “he might have murdered us; we were completely in his power. The stock of provisions on board the brig was not a large one, and I consider that, in dividing it with us, he showed great generosity for one in his situation.” This piece of evidence told strongly in favour of the prisoners, for Captain Frere was known to be such an uncompromising foe to all rebellious convicts that it was understood that only the sternest sense of justice and truth could lead him to speak in such terms. The defence set up by Rex, moreover, was most ingenious. He was guilty of absconding, but his moderation might plead an excuse for that. His only object was his freedom, and, having gained it, he had lived honestly for nearly three years, as he could prove. He was charged with piratically seizing the brig Osprey, and he urged that the brig Osprey, having been built by convicts at Macquarie Harbour, and never entered in any shipping list, could not be said to be “piratically seized”, in the strict meaning of the term. The Court admitted the force of this objection, and, influenced doubtless by Captain Frere's evidence, the fact that five years had passed since the mutiny, and that the two men most guilty (Cheshire and Barker) had been executed in England, sentenced Rex and his three companions to transportation for life to the penal settlements of the colony.
At this happy conclusion to his labours, Frere went down to comfort the girl for whose sake he had suffered Rex to escape the gallows. On his way he was met by a man who touched his hat, and asked to speak with him an instant. This man was past middle age, owned a red brandy-beaten face, and had in his gait and manner that nameless something that denotes the seaman.
“Well, Blunt,” says Frere, pausing with the impatient air of a man who expects to hear bad news, “what is it now?”
“Only to tell you that it is all right, sir,” says Blunt. “She's come aboard again this morning.”
“Come aboard again!” ejaculated Frere. “Why, I didn't know that she had been ashore. Where did she go?” He spoke with an air of confident authority, and Blunt—no longer the bluff tyrant of old—seemed to quail before him. The trial of the mutineers of the Malabar had ruined Phineas Blunt. Make what excuses he might, there was no concealing the fact that Pine found him drunk in his cabin when he ought to have been attending to his duties on deck, and the “authorities” could not, or would not, pass over such a heinous breach of discipline. Captain Blunt—who, of course, had his own version of the story—thus deprived of the honour of bringing His Majesty's prisoners to His Majesty's colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, went on a whaling cruise to the South Seas. The influence which Sarah Purfoy had acquired over him had, however, irretrievably injured him. It was as though she had poisoned his moral nature by the influence of a clever and wicked woman over a sensual and dull-witted man. Blunt gradually sank lower and lower. He became a drunkard, and was known as a man with a “grievance against the Government”. Captain Frere, having had occasion for him in some capacity, had become in a manner his patron, and had got him the command of a schooner trading from Sydney. On getting this command—not without some wry faces on the part of the owner resident in Hobart Town—Blunt had taken the temperance pledge for the space of twelve months, and was a miserable dog in consequence. He was, however, a faithful henchman, for he hoped by Frere's means to get some “Government billet”—the grand object of all colonial sea captains of that epoch.
“Well, sir, she went ashore to see a friend,” says Blunt, looking at the sky and then at the earth.
“What friend?”
“The—the prisoner, sir.”
“And she saw him, I suppose?”
“Yes, but I thought I'd better tell you, sir,” says Blunt.
“Of course; quite right,” returned the other; “you had better start at once. It's no use waiting.”
“As you wish, sir. I can sail to-morrow morning—or this evening, if you like.”
“This evening,” says Frere, turning away; “as soon as possible.”
“There's a situation in Sydney I've been looking after,” said the other, uneasily, “if you could help me to it.”
“What is it?”
“The command of one of the Government vessels, sir.”
“Well, keep sober, then,” says Frere, “and I'll see what I can do. And keep that woman's tongue still if you can.”
The pair looked at each other, and Blunt grinned slavishly.
“I'll do my best.” “Take care you do,” returned his patron, leaving him without further ceremony.
Frere found Vickers in the garden, and at once begged him not to talk about the “business” to his daughter.
“You saw how bad she was to-day, Vickers. For goodness sake don't make her ill again.”
“My dear sir,” says poor Vickers, “I won't refer to the subject. She's been very unwell ever since. Nervous and unstrung. Go in and see her.”
So Frere went in and soothed the excited girl, with real sorrow at her suffering.
“It's all right now, Poppet,” he said to her. “Don't think of it any more. Put it out of your mind, dear.”
“It was foolish of me, Maurice, I know, but I could not help it. The sound of—of—that man's voice seemed to bring back to me some great pity for something or someone. I don't explain what I mean, I know, but I felt that I was on the verge of remembering a story of some great wrong, just about to hear some dreadful revelation that should make me turn from all the people whom I ought most to love. Do you understand?”
“I think I know what you mean,” says Frere, with averted face. “But that's all nonsense, you know.”
“Of course,” returned she, with a touch of her old childish manner of disposing of questions out of hand. “Everybody knows it's all nonsense. But then we do think such things. It seems to me that I am double, that I have lived somewhere before, and have had another life—a dream-life.”
“What a romantic girl you are,” said the other, dimly comprehending her meaning. “How could you have a dream-life?”
“Of course, not really, stupid! But in thought, you know. I dream such strange things now and then. I am always falling down precipices and into cataracts, and being pushed into great caverns in enormous rocks. Horrible dreams!”
“Indigestion,” returned Frere. “You don't take exercise enough. You shouldn't read so much. Have a good five-mile walk.”
“And in these dreams,” continued Sylvia, not heeding his interruption, “there is one strange thing. You are always there, Maurice.”
“Come, that's all right,” says Maurice.
“Ah, but not kind and good as you are, Captain Bruin, but scowling, and threatening, and angry, so that I am afraid of you.”
“But that is only a dream, darling.”
“Yes, but—” playing with the button of his coat.
“But what?”
“But you looked just so to-day in the Court, Maurice, and I think that's what made me so silly.”
“My darling! There; hush—don't cry!”
But she had burst into a passion of sobs and tears, that shook her slight figure in his arms.
“Oh, Maurice, I am a wicked girl! I don't know my own mind. I think sometimes I don't love you as I ought—you who have saved me and nursed me.”
“There, never mind about that,” muttered Maurice Frere, with a sort of choking in his throat.
She grew more composed presently, and said, after a while, lifting her face, “Tell me, Maurice, did you ever, in those days of which you have spoken to me—when you nursed me as a little child in your arms, and fed me, and starved for me—did you ever think we should be married?”
“I don't know,” says Maurice. “Why?”
“I think you must have thought so, because—it's not vanity, dear—you would not else have been so kind, and gentle, and devoted.”
“Nonsense, Poppet,” he said, with his eyes resolutely averted.
“No, but you have been, and I am very pettish, sometimes. Papa has spoiled me. You are always affectionate, and those worrying ways of yours, which I get angry at, all come from love for me, don't they?”
“I hope so,” said Maurice, with an unwonted moisture in his eyes.
“Well, you see, that is the reason why I am angry with myself for not loving you as I ought. I want you to like the things I like, and to love the books and the music and the pictures and the—the World I love; and I forget that you are a man, you know, and I am only a girl; and I forget how nobly you behaved, Maurice, and how unselfishly you risked your life for mine. Why, what is the matter, dear?”
He had put her away from him suddenly, and gone to the window, gazing across the sloping garden at the bay below, sleeping in the soft evening light. The schooner which had brought the witnesses from Port Arthur lay off the shore, and the yellow flag at her mast fluttered gently in the cool evening breeze. The sight of this flag appeared to anger him, for, as his eyes fell on it, he uttered an impatient exclamation, and turned round again.
“Maurice!” she cried, “I have wounded you!”
“No, no. It is nothing,” said he, with the air of a man surprised in a moment of weakness. “I—I did not like to hear you talk in this way—about not loving me.”
“Oh, forgive me, dear; I did not mean to hurt you. It is my silly way of saying more than I mean. How could I do otherwise than love you—after all you have done?”
Some sudden desperate whim caused him to exclaim, “But suppose I had not done all you think, would you not love me still?”
Her eyes, raised to his face with anxious tenderness for the pain she had believed herself to have inflicted, fell at this speech.
“What a question! I don't know. I suppose I should; yet—but what is the use, Maurice, of supposing? I know you have done it, and that is enough. How can I say what I might have done if something else had happened? Why, you might not have loved me.”
If there had been for a moment any sentiment of remorse in his selfish heart, the hesitation of her answer went far to dispel it.
“To be sure, that's true,” and he placed his arm round her.
She lifted her face again with a bright laugh.
“We are a pair of geese—supposing! How can we help what has past? We have the Future, darling—the Future, in which I am to be your little wife, and we are to love each other all our lives, like the people in the story-books.”
Temptation to evil had often come to Maurice Frere, and his selfish nature had succumbed to it when in far less witching shape than this fair and innocent child luring him with wistful eyes to win her. What hopes had he not built upon her love; what good resolutions had he not made by reason of the purity and goodness she was to bring to him? As she said, the past was beyond recall; the future—in which she was to love him all her life—was before them. With the hypocrisy of selfishness which deceives even itself, he laid the little head upon his heart with a sensible glow of virtue.
“God bless you, darling! You are my Good Angel.”
The girl sighed. “I will be your Good Angel, dear, if you will let me.”
Rex told Mr. Meekin, who, the next day, did him the honour to visit him, that, “under Providence, he owed his escape from death to the kind manner in which Captain Frere had spoken of him.”
“I hope your escape will be a warning to you, my man,” said Mr. Meekin, “and that you will endeavour to make the rest of your life, thus spared by the mercy of Providence, an atonement for your early errors.”
“Indeed I will, sir,” said John Rex, who had taken Mr. Meekin's measure very accurately, “and it is very kind of you to condescend to speak so to a wretch like me.”
“Not at all,” said Meekin, with affability; “it is my duty. I am a Minister of the Gospel.”
“Ah! sir, I wish I had attended to the Gospel's teachings when I was younger. I might have been saved from all this.”
“You might, indeed, poor man; but the Divine Mercy is infinite—quite infinite, and will be extended to all of us—to you as well as to me.” (This with the air of saying, “What do you think of that!”) “Remember the penitent thief, Rex—the penitent thief.”
“Indeed I do, sir.”
“And read your Bible, Rex, and pray for strength to bear your punishment.”
“I will, Mr. Meekin. I need it sorely, sir—physical as well as spiritual strength, sir—for the Government allowance is sadly insufficient.”
“I will speak to the authorities about a change in your dietary scale,” returned Meekin, patronizingly. “In the meantime, just collect together in your mind those particulars of your adventures of which you spoke, and have them ready for me when next I call. Such a remarkable history ought not to be lost.”
“Thank you kindly, sir. I will, sir. Ah! I little thought when I occupied the position of a gentleman, Mr. Meekin”—the cunning scoundrel had been piously grandiloquent concerning his past career—“that I should be reduced to this. But it is only just, sir.”
“The mysterious workings of Providence are always just, Rex,” returned Meekin, who preferred to speak of the Almighty with well-bred vagueness.
“I am glad to see you so conscious of your errors. Good morning.”
“Good morning, and Heaven bless you, sir,” said Rex, with his tongue in his cheek for the benefit of his yard mates; and so Mr. Meekin tripped gracefully away, convinced that he was labouring most successfully in the Vineyard, and that the convict Rex was really a superior person.
“I will send his narrative to the Bishop,” said he to himself. “It will amuse him. There must be many strange histories here, if one could but find them out.”
As the thought passed through his brain, his eye fell upon the “notorious Dawes”, who, while waiting for the schooner to take him back to Port Arthur, had been permitted to amuse himself by breaking stones. The prison-shed which Mr. Meekin was visiting was long and low, roofed with iron, and terminating at each end in the stone wall of the gaol. At one side rose the cells, at the other the outer wall of the prison. From the outer wall projected a weatherboard under-roof, and beneath this were seated forty heavily-ironed convicts. Two constables, with loaded carbines, walked up and down the clear space in the middle, and another watched from a sort of sentry-box built against the main wall. Every half-hour a third constable went down the line and examined the irons. The admirable system of solitary confinement—which in average cases produces insanity in the space of twelve months—was as yet unknown in Hobart Town, and the forty heavily-ironed men had the pleasure of seeing each other's faces every day for six hours.
The other inmates of the prison were at work on the roads, or otherwise bestowed in the day time, but the forty were judged too desperate to be let loose. They sat, three feet apart, in two long lines, each man with a heap of stones between his outstretched legs, and cracked the pebbles in leisurely fashion. The double row of dismal woodpeckers tapping at this terribly hollow beech-tree of penal discipline had a semi-ludicrous appearance. It seemed so painfully absurd that forty muscular men should be ironed and guarded for no better purpose than the cracking of a cartload of quartz-pebbles. In the meantime the air was heavy with angry glances shot from one to the other, and the passage of the parson was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered fashionable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering. Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line—his back to the cells, his face to the gaol wall. This was the place nearest the watching constable, and was allotted on that account to the most ill-favoured. Some of his companions envied him that melancholy distinction.
“Well, Dawes,” says Mr. Meekin, measuring with his eye the distance between the prisoner and himself, as one might measure the chain of some ferocious dog. “How are you this morning, Dawes?”
Dawes, scowling in a parenthesis between the cracking of two stones, was understood to say that he was very well.
“I am afraid, Dawes,” said Mr. Meekin reproachfully, “that you have done yourself no good by your outburst in court on Monday. I understand that public opinion is quite incensed against you.”
Dawes, slowly arranging one large fragment of bluestone in a comfortable basin of smaller fragments, made no reply.
“I am afraid you lack patience, Dawes. You do not repent of your offences against the law, I fear.”
The only answer vouchsafed by the ironed man—if answer it could be called—was a savage blow, which split the stone into sudden fragments, and made the clergyman skip a step backward.
“You are a hardened ruffian, sir! Do you not hear me speak to you?”
“I hear you,” said Dawes, picking up another stone.
“Then listen respectfully, sir,” said Meekin, roseate with celestial anger. “You have all day to break those stones.”
“Yes, I have all day,” returned Rufus Dawes, with a dogged look upward, “and all next day, for that matter. Ugh!” and again the hammer descended.
“I came to console you, man—to console you,” says Meekin, indignant at the contempt with which his well-meant overtures had been received. “I wanted to give you some good advice!”
The self-important annoyance of the tone seemed to appeal to whatever vestige of appreciation for the humorous, chains and degradation had suffered to linger in the convict's brain, for a faint smile crossed his features.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “Pray, go on.”
“I was going to say, my good fellow, that you have done yourself a great deal of injury by your ill-advised accusation of Captain Frere, and the use you made of Miss Vickers's name.”
A frown, as of pain, contracted the prisoner's brows, and he seemed with difficulty to put a restraint upon his speech. “Is there to be no inquiry, Mr. Meekin?” he asked, at length. “What I stated was the truth—the truth, so help me God!”
“No blasphemy, sir,” said Meekin, solemnly. “No blasphemy, wretched man. Do not add to the sin of lying the greater sin of taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain. He will not hold him guiltless, Dawes. He will not hold him guiltless, remember. No, there is to be no inquiry.”
“Are they not going to ask her for her story?” asked Dawes, with a pitiful change of manner. “They told me that she was to be asked. Surely they will ask her.”
“I am not, perhaps, at liberty,” said Meekin, placidly unconscious of the agony of despair and rage that made the voice of the strong man before him quiver, “to state the intentions of the authorities, but I can tell you that Miss Vickers will not be asked anything about you. You are to go back to Port Arthur on the 24th, and to remain there.”
A groan burst from Rufus Dawes; a groan so full of torture that even the comfortable Meekin was thrilled by it.
“It is the Law, you know, my good man. I can't help it,” he said. “You shouldn't break the Law, you know.”
“Curse the Law!” cries Dawes. “It's a Bloody Law; it's—there, I beg your pardon,” and he fell to cracking his stones again, with a laugh that was more terrible in its bitter hopelessness of winning attention or sympathy, than any outburst of passion could have been.
“Come,” says Meekin, feeling uneasily constrained to bring forth some of his London-learnt platitudes. “You can't complain. You have broken the Law, and you must suffer. Civilized Society says you sha'n't do certain things, and if you do them you must suffer the penalty Civilized Society imposes. You are not wanting in intelligence, Dawes, more's the pity—and you can't deny the justice of that.”
Rufus Dawes, as if disdaining to answer in words, cast his eyes round the yard with a glance that seemed to ask grimly if Civilized Society was progressing quite in accordance with justice, when its civilization created such places as that stone-walled, carbine-guarded prison-shed, and filled it with such creatures as those forty human beasts, doomed to spend the best years of their manhood cracking pebbles in it.
“You don't deny that?” asked the smug parson, “do you, Dawes?”
“It's not my place to argue with you, sir,” said Dawes, in a tone of indifference, born of lengthened suffering, so nicely balanced between contempt and respect, that the inexperienced Meekin could not tell whether he had made a convert or subjected himself to an impertinence; “but I'm a prisoner for life, and don't look at it in the same way that you do.”
This view of the question did not seem to have occurred to Mr. Meekin, for his mild cheek flushed. Certainly, the fact of being a prisoner for life did make some difference. The sound of the noonday bell, however, warned him to cease argument, and to take his consolations out of the way of the mustering prisoners.
With a great clanking and clashing of irons, the forty rose and stood each by his stone-heap. The third constable came round, rapping the leg-irons of each man with easy nonchalance, and roughly pulling up the coarse trousers (made with buttoned flaps at the sides, like Mexican calzoneros, in order to give free play to the ankle fetters), so that he might assure himself that no tricks had been played since his last visit. As each man passed this ordeal he saluted, and clanked, with wide-spread legs, to the place in the double line. Mr. Meekin, though not a patron of field sports, found something in the scene that reminded him of a blacksmith picking up horses' feet to examine the soundness of their shoes.
“Upon my word,” he said to himself, with a momentary pang of genuine compassion, “it is a dreadful way to treat human beings. I don't wonder at that wretched creature groaning under it. But, bless me, it is near one o'clock, and I promised to lunch with Major Vickers at two. How time flies, to be sure!”
That afternoon, while Mr. Meekin was digesting his lunch, and chatting airily with Sylvia, Rufus Dawes began to brood over a desperate scheme. The intelligence that the investigation he had hoped for was not to be granted to him had rendered doubly bitter those galling fetters of self restraint which he had laid upon himself. For five years of desolation he had waited and hoped for a chance which might bring him to Hobart Town, and enable him to denounce the treachery of Maurice Frere. He had, by an almost miraculous accident, obtained that chance of open speech, and, having obtained it, he found that he was not allowed to speak. All the hopes he had formed were dashed to earth. All the calmness with which he had forced himself to bear his fate was now turned into bitterest rage and fury. Instead of one enemy he had twenty. All—judge, jury, gaoler, and parson—were banded together to work him evil and deny him right. The whole world was his foe: there was no honesty or truth in any living creature—save one.
During the dull misery of his convict life at Port Arthur one bright memory shone upon him like a star. In the depth of his degradation, at the height of his despair, he cherished one pure and ennobling thought—the thought of the child whom he had saved, and who loved him. When, on board the whaler that had rescued him from the burning boat, he had felt that the sailors, believing in Frere's bluff lies, shrunk from the moody felon, he had gained strength to be silent by thinking of the suffering child. When poor Mrs. Vickers died, making no sign, and thus the chief witness to his heroism perished before his eyes, the thought that the child was left had restrained his selfish regrets. When Frere, handing him over to the authorities as an absconder, ingeniously twisted the details of the boat-building to his own glorification, the knowledge that Sylvia would assign to these pretensions their true value had given him courage to keep silence. So strong was his belief in her gratitude, that he scorned to beg for the pardon he had taught himself to believe that she would ask for him. So utter was his contempt for the coward and boaster who, dressed in brief authority, bore insidious false witness against him, that, when he heard his sentence of life banishment, he disdained to make known the true part he had played in the matter, preferring to wait for the more exquisite revenge, the more complete justification which would follow upon the recovery of the child from her illness. But when, at Port Arthur, day after day passed over, and brought no word of pity or justification, he began, with a sickening feeling of despair, to comprehend that something strange had happened. He was told by newcomers that the child of the Commandant lay still and near to death. Then he heard that she and her father had left the colony, and that all prospect of her righting him by her evidence was at an end. This news gave him a terrible pang; and at first he was inclined to break out into upbraidings of her selfishness. But, with that depth of love which was in him, albeit crusted over and concealed by the sullenness of speech and manner which his sufferings had produced, he found excuses for her even then. She was ill. She was in the hands of friends who loved her, and disregarded him; perhaps, even her entreaties and explanations were put aside as childish babblings. She would free him if she had the power. Then he wrote “Statements”, agonized to see the Commandant, pestered the gaolers and warders with the story of his wrongs, and inundated the Government with letters, which, containing, as they did always, denunciations of Maurice Frere, were never suffered to reach their destination. The authorities, willing at the first to look kindly upon him in consideration of his strange experience, grew weary of this perpetual iteration of what they believed to be malicious falsehoods, and ordered him heavier tasks and more continuous labour. They mistook his gloom for treachery, his impatient outbursts of passion at his fate for ferocity, his silent endurance for dangerous cunning. As he had been at Macquarie Harbour, so did he become at Port Arthur—a marked man. Despairing of winning his coveted liberty by fair means, and horrified at the hideous prospect of a life in chains, he twice attempted to escape, but escape was even more hopeless than it had been at Hell's Gates. The peninsula of Port Arthur was admirably guarded, signal stations drew a chain round the prison, an armed boat's crew watched each bay, and across the narrow isthmus which connected it with the mainland was a cordon of watch-dogs, in addition to the soldier guard. He was retaken, of course, flogged, and weighted with heavier irons. The second time, they sent him to the Coal Mines, where the prisoners lived underground, worked half-naked, and dragged their inspecting gaolers in wagons upon iron tramways, when such great people condescended to visit them. The day on which he started for this place he heard that Sylvia was dead, and his last hope went from him.
Then began with him a new religion. He worshipped the dead. For the living, he had but hatred and evil words; for the dead, he had love and tender thoughts. Instead of the phantoms of his vanished youth which were wont to visit him, he saw now but one vision—the vision of the child who had loved him. Instead of conjuring up for himself pictures of that home circle in which he had once moved, and those creatures who in the past years had thought him worthy of esteem and affection, he placed before himself but one idea, one embodiment of happiness, one being who was without sin and without stain, among all the monsters of that pit into which he had fallen. Around the figure of the innocent child who had lain in his breast, and laughed at him with her red young mouth, he grouped every image of happiness and love. Having banished from his thoughts all hope of resuming his name and place, he pictured to himself some quiet nook at the world's end—a deep-gardened house in a German country town, or remote cottage by the English seashore, where he and his dream-child might have lived together, happier in a purer affection than the love of man for woman. He bethought him how he could have taught her out of the strange store of learning which his roving life had won for him, how he could have confided to her his real name, and perhaps purchased for her wealth and honour by reason of it. Yet, he thought, she would not care for wealth and honour; she would prefer a quiet life—a life of unassuming usefulness, a life devoted to good deeds, to charity and love. He could see her—in his visions—reading by a cheery fireside, wandering in summer woods, or lingering by the marge of the slumbering mid-day sea. He could feel—in his dreams—her soft arms about his neck, her innocent kisses on his lips; he could hear her light laugh, and see her sunny ringlets float, back-blown, as she ran to meet him. Conscious that she was dead, and that he did to her gentle memory no disrespect by linking her fortunes to those of a wretch who had seen so much of evil as himself, he loved to think of her as still living, and to plot out for her and for himself impossible plans for future happiness. In the noisome darkness of the mine, in the glaring light of the noonday—dragging at his loaded wagon, he could see her ever with him, her calm eyes gazing lovingly on his, as they had gazed in the boat so long ago. She never seemed to grow older, she never seemed to wish to leave him. It was only when his misery became too great for him to bear, and he cursed and blasphemed, mingling for a time in the hideous mirth of his companions, that the little figure fled away. Thus dreaming, he had shaped out for himself a sorrowful comfort, and in his dream-world found a compensation for the terrible affliction of living. Indifference to his present sufferings took possession of him; only at the bottom of this indifference lurked a fixed hatred of the man who had brought these sufferings upon him, and a determination to demand at the first opportunity a reconsideration of that man's claims to be esteemed a hero. It was in this mood that he had intended to make the revelation which he had made in Court, but the intelligence that Sylvia lived unmanned him, and his prepared speech had been usurped by a passionate torrent of complaint and invective, which convinced no one, and gave Frere the very argument he needed. It was decided that the prisoner Dawes was a malicious and artful scoundrel, whose only object was to gain a brief respite of the punishment which he had so justly earned. Against this injustice he had resolved to rebel. It was monstrous, he thought, that they should refuse to hear the witness who was so ready to speak in his favour, infamous that they should send him back to his doom without allowing her to say a word in his defence. But he would defeat that scheme. He had planned a method of escape, and he would break from his bonds, fling himself at her feet, and pray her to speak the truth for him, and so save him. Strong in his faith in her, and with his love for her brightened by the love he had borne to her dream-image, he felt sure of her power to rescue him now, as he had rescued her before. “If she knew I was alive, she would come to me,” he said. “I am sure she would. Perhaps they told her that I was dead.”
Meditating that night in the solitude of his cell—his evil character had gained him the poor luxury of loneliness—he almost wept to think of the cruel deception that had doubtless been practised on her. “They have told her that I was dead, in order that she might learn to forget me; but she could not do that. I have thought of her so often during these weary years that she must sometimes have thought of me. Five years! She must be a woman now. My little child a woman! Yet she is sure to be childlike, sweet, and gentle. How she will grieve when she hears of my sufferings. Oh! my darling, my darling, you are not dead!” And then, looking hastily about him in the darkness, as though fearful even there of being seen, he pulled from out his breast a little packet, and felt it lovingly with his coarse, toil-worn fingers, reverently raising it to his lips, and dreaming over it, with a smile on his face, as though it were a sacred talisman that should open to him the doors of freedom.