Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “The first blush iver seen at Castle Sullivan!” cried she. “An’ is it the new groom ye are? Shake hands, then, and make frinds wid the cook. It’s Peggy O’Brine me name is; so now tell me yours, and all yer histh’ry, while I get ye as good a male as ye can hould.”

  So he told her his name, but nothing more, and she looked at him closely as she laid the cloth. “Sure, it’s a special he is!” she murmured. “Poor man, I might have seen it wid half an eye.” And she sighed and clicked her tongue as she put meat and bread upon the board; then looked at him wistfully and long with her clear, bright eyes; for he had rested his elbows on the table, and had hidden his face, touched to the heart by the womanly kindness of her voice. He had heard nothing like it since that fatal night in April, now eight long months ago; nor, when he looked up, had he seen anything, from that night to this, like the womanly compassion in those Irish eyes.

  She cut him some mutton and a slice of bread; she put the knife and fork in his hands; but he made no use of them.

  “Ah, now, pluck up!” she coaxed. “Pluck up an’ ate.”

  He made an effort, but could not finish what was on his plate.

  “Your kindness has taken away my appetite, Peggy,” he said with a smile, as he pushed back his chair. “It’s the first I’ve had, from a woman at all events, for many’s the long month!”

  With that he rose to go, but she got between him and the door.

  “Glory be to God an’ it sha’n’t be the last!” said she, her bosom heaving and a tear in her eye. “Peggy’s your frind, remimber that, sorr; an’ it’s the cook can be the usefullest frind to the assigned servants. If ye’d only say out what it is that’s throublin’ ye so this minute!”

  “Coming up here as a convict; that’s all, Peggy.”

  “There’s hundhreds more in thim huts forninst us!”

  “That’s no comfort, I’m afraid. You see I am very selfish, I think only of myself.”

  “But they’re all convicts here. Ivery mother’s son but the ould cove and Mr. Nat!”

  “What, the overseer too?”

  “Ginger? It’s Ginger we call’m, an’ a dacent man at most times is Ginger, tho’ you needn’t be tellin”m I said so. But faith! he’s no betther than the rest of us; if he isn’t a convict now he’s a tickut-of-lave, an’ it’s ivery wan of us’ll be that, sorr, if we live long enough.”

  “Yes? Don’t ‘sir’ me, Peggy. Call me Tom. I’m not even like Ginger, you know. I’m a convict of the deepest and the newest dye!”

  “An’ what am I?”

  “Not you, too, Peggy?”

  “Me, too, Tom; an’ it’s siven year I’m here for. So don’t you make such a song of it, me dear, or it’s me ye’ll be puttin’ to the blush!”

  Indeed he had done so already. And, to believe Peggy, the second blush ever seen at Castle Sullivan was still mantling her pleasant face when spurs jingled again in the scullery, and Mr. Nat stood on the inner threshold. Some moments he stood there without a word, a furious glitter in his cold blue eye — his lewd mouth showing through his beard like a gash. Peggy shrank back. Tom was wondering if the brute had ever struck her, when he was addressed in a voice that shook with ill-governed ferocity.

  “What are you doing here, Erichsen?” were the words.

  “I have just had my supper. I was told to have it here.”

  “Oh, you’ve had it, have you? Then why the devil haven’t you cleared out?” roared young Sullivan, losing all control. “I tell you what, Peggy, this man’s a coldblooded murderer. That’s what he is, and that’s what he’s here for. Why they didn’t hang him, God knows; but they didn’t, so we’ve got the benefit instead. Let me never catch him in here again. He’d cut your throat as soon as look at you. Clear out, you gallows-bird, and show your nose inside the palisade again if you dare!”

  Tom replied only with his eye, and only scorn was in its steady gaze. When the other ceased, he waited a little to ascertain if that were all; then he turned upon his heel, opened the door, walked out and shut it very quietly behind him.

  There were high voices in the kitchen as he went his way. And Tom himself was less cool when he reached his room, where, indeed, he lay awake half the night still wondering whether Nat Sullivan had ever struck Peggy O’Brien, and whether Peggy would admit it if he had. But in the end he slept soundly on the clean straw with which he first took care to line his bunk.

  Soundly but not long: for in the middle of the night, as it seemed to Tom, the clanging of a great bell brought him to his feet in a state of high alarm. He slid into his trousers and rushed out. It was that black hour before dawn, and at first in the failing starlight he could see nobody; then he descried a figure in a long coat parading to and fro before the huts; but the bell was silent, though still swaying from the twisted arm of a gigantic gum-tree, when Tom ran up and inquired of this man what it meant. He found he was speaking to the night-watchman, who said his business was to ring the bell, first an hour before sunrise, then half an hour later, and lastly when the sun appeared.

  “So you’re to be groom?” added the watchman. “I wouldn’t swop my job for yours.”

  “No?” said Tom.

  “Not me! ‘Cause why? I’m on all night, but off all day, so I see less of the coves than any other blessed man on the place. Now you’ll see more of ‘em; and Lord help you if you trot out a lame nag or a piece of harness the old cove can’t see his ugly mug in! I wouldn’t be in your shirt for something; it’ll be stickin’ to your back by this day week!”

  Tom was returning to his room, when a sash was softly raised in the main building, and there was Peggy at an outer window, in an inky shower-bath of pitch-black hair. She beckoned him with her finger, but transferred it swiftly to her lips.

  “You did well! you did well!” she whispered. “I was in the holy terror lest you answered Mr. Nat; if you’d done that—”

  She shuddered and shut her lips.

  “Well, what if I had?” said Tom, beginning to feel sorry he had not.

  “Niver ask me!” she returned. “Only bear in mind that what they’ll call ‘insolence’ is a crime out here. Give ‘em cheek, an’ it’s twenty-five or fifty — an’ now I’ve tould ye. ’Tis well ye should know. There’s some poor feller from here gets it ivery Monday as iver is. But you mustn’t; so niver cheek ‘em, me dear, and niver come near me kitchen anny more. Sure it’d be the dith of a young gintleman like you!”

  “Would it?” said Tom. “Well, never you fear, Peggy! “I’m not such a fool as all that, and I’ll give them no reason, you may depend.”

  “They may be afther makin’ one, Tom dear; faith an’ they’d have one ready-made if they cot ye here! There’s the second bell. For God’s sake be off — an’ remimber Peggy’s words.”

  “I’ll go when I’m ready, Peggy; not until; and don’t shut down that window, or you’ll take off my fingers. Your hand again! It’s to you I shall owe my whole skin!”

  He gave her his hand; she took it between both of hers, and pressed it with a fervour that should have given him another warning on the spot. But her kind voice only put him in mind of Claire so far away: nor did he hear it again for some few days. Now and then she would wave to him from the kitchen window; but it was always to wave him back. More often he waved to her from the stable door; but she invariably shook her black head at him with the greatest vigour.

  Meanwhile her words came true.

  Mr. Nat had conceived a palpable spite against the new groom; and from things the latter heard in the convicts’ hut, where he went for his meals, he might have understood the reason; these same things making him the less eager to see very much more of Peggy the cook. Still he gave her a wave whenever he espied her in the distance, for he owed the girl much already: he was daily profiting by her good advice, since no day passed without its measure of wilful provocation from the ruffianly Nat. But Tom was not to be provoked by sneer or taunt or oath; moreover, he made an excellent groom, and being seen no more about the ho
use, gave no further occasion to the enemy, who dropped his overt persecutions, but detested Tom the more for his unexceptionable conduct.

  This feeling was intensified by the effect of that conduct in a certain quarter. Tom became quite a favourite with the despotic old army surgeon; and Mr. Nat went in constant dread of his “sunstrokes” in Sydney and on the road coming to his father’s ears. It was this dread that decided him to let Tom alone, and to bide his own time for revenge: for besides being privy to the son’s irregularities, and dangerously established in the father’s favour, the new groom had indeed done Mr. Nat an injury of which he himself was all unconscious. Days grew into weeks meanwhile; the old year burnt into the new; and one week-day was still much like another on this primitive Australian farm. When the third bell rang at sunrise, every hut disgorged its surcharge of convicts, and Ginger called them over like so many schoolboys in front of the palisade. Then the shepherds to their pastures, the ploughmen to the arable land, the bullock-drivers to their teams, and Tom to his stables for the livelong day. Such as could come were summoned to breakfast at eight, and to dinner at one, by the great bell clanging in its eucalyptian belfry; and all hands were recalled by it between eight and nine at night.

  Sunday was a nominal day of rest which included two long compulsory services in the courtyard beneath a savage sun. Dr. Sullivan read the prayers with the voice of an executioner, his bamboo cane on the desk in front of him, for use as a baton or as an instrument of correction for the man who dared to smile or to whisper within his reach. The terrible old man would also take this weekly opportunity of animadverting on the lost souls and abandoned character of his convicts in general, with particular allusions to those whose enormities had earned them the lash during the preceding week. He never failed to assure future offenders that they would be punished without mercy in their turn, and would slash the desk with his cane to emphasise his words. So religion and ferocity ran hand in hand at Castle Sullivan; nor was hypocrisy very far behind. Mr. Nat led the hymns in a devout, sustained, stentorian bellow, while a maiden sister, the only lady of the establishment, whose voice the convicts never heard, and whose face they seldom saw but on these occasions, supplied a perfunctory accompaniment on the pianoforte.

  Amid the branches of the red gums without, flocks of parrots would chatter mockingly, their vivid reds and yellows lighting up the sombre hues of those perennial leaves, that whispered none the less enticingly of cool siestas in the shade. Yet Sunday after Sunday these tyrannical observances were maintained and enforced; and the evangelical doctor loved to boast of the device whereby he had enforced them in the beginning. On the first Sunday nine-tenths of his men had announced themselves Roman Catholics. So he had drawn up these gentry in line outside the palisade, and there kept them standing out of earshot, but in the full glare of the sun, during the entire service. And on the Sunday following there was not a Roman Catholic among them.

  What remained of their ruined day the convicts spent in breaking as many as possible of those Commandments which Dr. Sullivan had been dinning in their ears. Larceny, however, was the crime most in favour at the farm, whose boundaries were seldom exempt from that foul parasite of the convict, the squatter of the early days. He must not be confounded with the squatter of subsequent civilisation. The former was usually a ticket-of-leave man, who built himself a hut in an unoccupied spot, with a preference for the near neighbourhood of a plentiful contingent of assigned convicts. The squatter would supply the convicts with rum. The convict would pay the squatter with the only currency within his reach, namely that of stolen property. The squatter was sly publican and sly pawnbroker in one, and a pretty specimen of his class had his wigwam and his black gin on a creek not a hundred miles from Castle Sullivan.

  Hither was Tom taken by one of his fellows on an early Sunday evening; half-a-dozen others were there before them; not one of these were sober when they arrived. And the strong fumes tempted Tom; smouldering misery was in flames at this chance of quenching it for the nonce. He might have followed suit had not his companion produced a screw-hammer in payment for the liquor. Tom glanced at the implement, and then at his mate.

  “You’re never going to pay with that, Mac?”

  “An’ what for no?”

  “There’s the farm brand staring you in the face! It isn’t yours.”

  “What’s aboot it? If a man mayn’t bilk the coves, wha may he bilk? They gie us nae wages for our worrk, so we maun help oursels!”

  And as this was the principle of all present, and indeed of the average convict throughout the Colony, honest Tom had no choice but to turn on his heel and walk away amid the execrations of his fellows. But not a hand was raised against him; he had still the eye and the bearing that discourage a blow. Even the elder Sullivan had given up tapping and rapping him with that bamboo wand which was for ever quickening felon fingers and sowing black murder in felon hearts.

  But the incident of the screw-hammer made an unpopular man of Tom among his fellows; and worse was to come of it. The theft was brought home to the man Macbeth, and the very next night Tom met him with a white, pinched face, and his coat on back to front.

  “Why, Mac!” cried Tom. “What now?”

  The foulest maledictions were his only answer: a white lip quivering with the words.

  “What on earth have I done?”

  “You ken weel. This, then!”

  He turned his back, and Tom started back with horror. The shirt beneath the open coat was sopping red.

  In vain Tom protested that he had never told a soul about the hammer. Nobody would believe him. His indignation and his sympathy were treated with scorn as so much hypocrisy. His name was execrated in the convict huts; and so much of the convict spirit survived in Ginger that he was with the men in this, and never spoke to Tom now. The overseer besides shared Nat Sullivan’s grievance against Tom: a furtive admiration for the girl O’Brien was one of his softer traits; and she was the same to neither of them now.

  At the end of a month the groom’s truest friend was the terrific old doctor himself. Peggy was his friend indeed; but though her grey eyes watched him wistfully enough from the window, he seldom heard her full, rich brogue. Nor was it consideration for the girl that made Tom deny himself that small consolation; young Sullivan had forbidden him the house, and was sufficiently his enemy as it was. Indeed, the groom discovered he was becoming a bone of contention between father and son.

  The son wanted to have him turned out of the stables and put to felling timber; the father would not hear of it.

  The father granted him the usual good-conduct indulgences of tea, sugar and tobacco, in addition to the regulation rations; the son laid himself out to catch Tom smoking at night, and at once put a stop to the tobacco.

  Then came the very hottest day of the summer, for which the son had waited. He had brought from Sydney on the pack-horse a quantity of new harness, saddles, bridles and the like, and he made the groom devote the very hottest day to seasoning the brand-new leather with castor-oil, to be rubbed into every inch of it, in the stifling heat of the little saddle-room. When Tom was finishing, nauseated with the smell, swollen with mosquito-bites, and in streams of perspiration from head to foot, Mr. Nat came in and patiently nagged at him. But even this did not compass the destruction of Tom’s skin: he perceived the design and defeated it with imperturbable civility.

  Mr. Nat was driven into deeper plots: he had never been bested by a convict yet. And now at last Tom read revenge in the jaundiced blue eyes; but revenge for what? He felt more mystified than afraid. All he had to do was to keep his temper; but what had he done? To nobody on the farm had he breathed a word about aught that happened in Sydney or on the road. He never ventured within the palisade. What then was his offence?

  One night as he lay puzzling his head about it, and yet half asleep, a sound startled him.

  It came from the saddle-room next door. Tom sat up in his bunk.

  The sound was very thin and wholly metallic, as
the scraping of a dinner-knife between the prongs of a fork; suddenly a bolt shot back with a little slam.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE LAST STRAW

  TOM sat still in his bunk.

  “A licht! A licht!” whispered a voice that he knew.

  “He’ll hear ye, Mac; he’s only next door.”

  “What’s about it? I’ll slit his juggler if he daurs to interfere. Heard ye that?”

  “I did. That’s better!”

  The crafty groom was snoring where he sat, with one eye at a cranny in the rude partition between his lair and the saddle-room. In the latter there was as yet no light.

  “An’ that’s better still,” muttered Macbeth, as one was struck. “Slit his juggler?” he repeated with a chuckle. “I wadna think twice o’t, the mosing blackguard! Now whaur’s thae saddles, for my hands is free?” And his teeth snapped on something that gleamed between them in the light.

  “Wait a bit. I smell the oil. Aha! here’s one.”

  “An’ here’s the ither. Dinna heed the bridles. Awa’ we go afore Jarman turns in.”

  Jarman was the squatter on the creek; the hour was still short of midnight; and Tom, who had bounded lightly to the floor, now stood irresolute. In the end he let the rascals go. Their footsteps had already left the saddle-room; the groom listened and lost them in the night; then he felt about for his clothes.

  He was thankful he had not waylaid the thieves at the saddle-room door; the field would have been too unequal, the consequences perhaps too serious for one and all. And he foresaw the neatest triumph now. Jarman’s name had given him a foregone victory, for now he knew the way to Jarman’s ramshackle hut, and the saddles should be back upon their pegs before morning: so full was Tom of confidence as he dressed himself in the dark. But the thought of betraying his comrades in captivity was as far from his heart as that of allowing his master’s saddles to be quietly stolen before his eyes. Stolen they might be, but only for the moment; he would call in Macbeth and his mate to see how nice they looked in the morning.