Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  In all their talks the only name Tom heard was Clarinda: it was characteristic of his state that he never inquired the other. His sympathy and his interest were confined to his friend; real curiosity he had none. He asked no questions, but a crooked answer was ready for him if he had.

  “You must let me tell her all I owe to you,” Tom said once. “It will be a pleasure to her and a relief to me.”

  “Perhaps you owe as much to herself!”

  It had slipped out, but Tom was not at all excited.

  “You mean that she believed in me too?” he asked with a mild sort of incredulity; and he saw from the other’s face that she had not. “Upon my soul,” he thought, “I begin to disbelieve in myself; especially since I’ve done as bad out here — and perhaps not heard the last of it yet!”

  Daintree wondered why he shuddered in the sun. It was because his one true and fierce emotion was the base fear of further tortures. He despised himself for that most of all.

  Meanwhile the cork ship with the paper sails was creeping slowly but surely across the great white South Atlantic of the chart; and the wall on which it hung had been re-papered; and the whole bungalow smelt of paint. It was a fair-sized house of two stories, with a verandah encircling the one and a balcony the other. Very pretty it looked in its new coat of paint for the summer, a white coat with yellow trimmings, which stood out delightfully on the blue water’s edge. The garden lawn merged into a narrow strand that slid straight under the wavelets themselves. As summer set in the trees behind the house broke out in every gay and gorgeous colour; it was the plumage of the parrots, that now came and perched in flocks among the branches.

  Tom gave up his room, as two ladies and a maid were expected. It was re-papered for the maid. A room was found for Tom in the pretty little stables amid the trees, where he helped Fawcett with the horses and the curricle, which was in Sydney on some errand every day. Generally the master went alone; once he took Tom with him; it was on the occasion of his cashing a cheque to meet the running expenses of these elaborate preparations.

  They were on their way home at dusk, when Daintree pulled up on the outskirts of the town and hailed a disconsolate, soldierly figure with one arm in a sling.

  “Why, Harry?” cried Daintree. “That’s never you?”

  “I wish it wasn’t, sir.”

  “You’ve left the force?”

  “These six months; it was my arm; look there, sir!” An emaciated hand came through the sling; the thumb and forefinger were uninjured; but half the middle finger, and both the other two, were like dead, distorted branches on a living tree.

  “What did it?”

  “A bullet; caught me on the funny-bone and paralysed half my hand. My right hand, too. It’s set me on the shelf at thirty-three!”

  “An accident, Harry?”

  Tom held his breath.

  “Quite,” said Harry bitterly; “it was meant for my heart! You would hear of the bushrangers at Dr. Sullivan’s last summer — that’s when it was. And the one that did it was the only one to get away!”

  Tom’s clothes were sticking to him, freezing to him. “Drive on!” he whispered. “For God’s sake, sir, drive on!”

  Daintree expressed sympathy with the man, and whipped up his horses.

  “Not so fast!” cried Tom. “You offered me wages; advance me five pounds of what you got from the bank!” His face was white with horror: his tone so piteous and so eager that Daintree pulled up, took five sovereigns from a bag, and dropped them one by one into the trembling hand. Tom sprang out and ran back to the disabled man.

  “From my master!” he gasped, and thrust the money into his left hand — and darted back without daring to look in his face. The astonished trooper had not time to say a word.

  “God bless you for that money!” faltered Tom, in terrible agitation as they drove on. “I gave it to him from you. I want no wages. Give them all to him!” The other remained silent.

  “You don’t ask why!”

  “I think I know.”

  “It was I who smashed his arm and spoilt his life!”

  “I suspected it.”

  “When?”

  “On the road down, when you kept looking behind and thinking they were after you.”

  “Ah, no!” cried Tom, almost beside himself with grief and shame, “that was for something else. See what a villain I have been! You should have left me one. I could have stood it if you’d left me what I was! Oh, what am I to do? — I in luxury, and that man shattered and ruined by my hand! I can’t bear it. I must confess. And I an innocent man in the beginning! Oh, that was bad enough, to be condemned for what you never did; but it’s as bad to know you’re guilty and to go scot-free!”

  The other said nothing, but listened attentively as Tom now unbosomed himself of the whole truth of his adventure with the bushrangers; whereupon Daintree justified his offence with such warmth of conviction that Tom was a little soothed. But his lavish friend went further: he undertook that the disabled man should want for nothing; but first they must find out what his circumstances really were.

  They found out within an hour, and from the man himself. He had followed them on foot to render thanks; he even wanted to return the money. Not only was the department treating him handsomely; the surgeons had hopes of his arm; and he was ashamed of the way in which he must have exaggerated matters in the street. So Tom was assured when the man was gone; he kept out of the way while he was there.

  The assurance consoled him — a little. He never forgot that half-withered hand. He dreamt of it at night, it haunted him by day; and all the while that withered hand was surely though invisibly restoring the shattered temple of this soul. It did for Tom what mere kindness had failed to do: for now a horror of his acts replaced the dread of their consequences. Those ignoble terrors passed quite away. It never even occurred to Tom that he had lightly confessed what no living witness could have proved.

  He had been with Daintree now some eight or nine weeks; there were deep lines in his face, but his eyes were no longer inflamed and ferocious, and he was beginning to hold them up again as of old. The debonair glance had not come back — it was gone for ever. And his back was still marked (the master saw it when they bathed), and his walk was still shambling. Yet day by day peace was creeping into his heart; day by day he liked Daintree better; and day by day the little cork Rosamund left the Cape farther astern and came nearer and nearer Sydney Heads.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  A MARRIAGE MARKET

  ONE morning, when Tom was busy in his pantry, a tearful voice advised him that he was wanted in the study at once. The woman vanished as he turned; the kitchen door slammed upon her sobs; and in the study Tom found his master in a towering rage.

  “You profess some gratitude towards me, I believe?” said Daintree, with a biting ceremony of voice and manner. “Not more than I feel — not half as much!”

  “Then you are the exception, and now’s your chance of showing what you say you feel. I’m going to ask a favour of you, Thomas.”

  “You shouldn’t put it so, sir. I love to serve you.”

  “Then go to Parramatta factory and choose a wife!” Tom twitched all over, and stood very still without a word. The other covered him with an ugly eye.

  “So even your gratitude has its limits!” he sneered. “Another time I should protest a little less, if I were you!”

  “You ask the one impossible thing,” replied Tom, with a groan.

  “Pardon me; I did not ask it,” rejoined Daintree, whose blacker moods inspired him with a perfect genius for picking quarrels. “Though you have not honoured me with your confidence, it may relieve you to hear that I haven’t the least desire to tamper with your loyalty to some lady unknown. I ask you to choose a wife — not to marry her.”

  “I don’t understand you, sir,” said Tom respectfully.

  “You will if you condescend to listen. The woman Fawcett says we shall require another servant here. I don’t believe a word of it;
the ladies are bringing their own maid with them; but this idle, impudent, ungrateful woman holds a pistol to my head and threatens to desert me at this juncture if I don’t get her a girl. I’ve had her here bullying me for the last half-hour, and this is the hole that I’m in: either the Fawcetts leave me this day month — when I shall want them most — or I must apply for a convict woman, and God knows what kind they’ll send me! Now, if you applied for a wife you’d have your pick and choose a decent one; and, as I say, there’s no earthly reason why you should ever marry her.”

  “Surely it would be unfair not to,” objected Tom, who would have used a stronger adjective to anybody else.

  “Unfair on the girl? Not at all; you simply let her off a blind bargain, and she gains good wages and a comfortable home. The girl comes out of it deuced well; the officials are none the wiser and none the worse; while I have the advantage of your selection instead of theirs.”

  “I might make a bad choice—”

  “Oh, if you want to keep out of it,” cried Daintree, “keep out of it, and refuse me the first favour I’ve ever asked you to do me. I shall know better than to ask another; only, in future, let me hear less of your gratitude till you’ve some to show.”

  Tom consented without further words. He disliked the plan as cordially as he resented the outrageous tone adopted by Daintree; but he would submit to both sooner than deny the man to whom he owed more than he could even yet realise. And, after all, a certain irritability on Daintree’s part was only natural in his present anxiety and suspense; while it was now sufficiently clear that the little conspiracy would indeed do no harm to anybody. On the other hand, the arch-conspirator was himself a magistrate; and there was something startling in the crafty and cold-blooded way in which he set about circumventing those very regulations which it was his duty and his practice to enforce. To Tom this was yet another of those gratuitous revelations which both hurt and shamed him, even as he feared that they would hurt and shame the poor bride before long.

  Meanwhile the necessary letters, in which the convict applied for a wife and the master undertook to support her, were written, the one with secret abhorrence, the other with a sinister gusto. Next day Tom received his order to the matron of the factory to supply him with a wife; and started, in the early morning following, on an errand which his whole soul repudiated.

  All the way there he had an uneasy feeling that he was about to commit himself beyond his bargain, that Daintree was disingenuous even with him. How could he trust a man who gloried in a trick? He bore a letter to the matron from that cunning hand. It was sealed, and filled him with suspicion until an enclosure rustled as the matron thrust it into her pocket.

  “You are to take her back with you,” said the woman, having read her letter, “and to be married from your master’s house. Very good; I don’t object, I’m sure. But you’re just too late for first choice; this young man was five minutes before you.”

  First choice! The whole business sickened Tom before it began. He had found the matron in the charming garden of the factory; as yet he had seen nothing of the other side; but the matron now led him and the earlier applicant (an ill-favoured, freckled fellow who took care to keep in front of Tom) through a passage and out into a spacious courtyard. It was a dazzling forenoon; a slanting sun raked the yard from end to end. One extremity, indeed, was in hard, black shadow; and here some scores of women and infants were huddled together, in a group that cried for a yet thicker veil.

  Sad as it was, however, to see the coarse and brazen women with their sickly, wrinkled, base-born children, the children they had been sent back there to bear, it was sadder still to hear the shrill oaths of the mothers mingling with as many innocent cries. A hateful volley greeted the appearance of the two men, to one of whom his worst experience seemed a bagatelle of horror beside this repulsive scene. Here was neither discipline nor fear, but lost faces and shameless tongues openly trading on their immunity from the lash. And yet women were wheeling barrows in the distance; women were breaking stones within the walls; and in that ghastly group were mothers as bald as their babes — their shaven heads corresponding with fifty stripes upon a male. Tom had writhed and sunk and hardened among the men; whip-cord and iron stirred his blood no more, but it ran cold enough in the factory yard at Parramatta.

  “What ails you?” cried the matron, seeing him shudder and hang back. “Why, bless the man, does he think he’s got to choose from that lot? No, no, it’s only the first class we let marry, and that’s the third. Hi! there,” she sang out to an assistant; “turn out the women of the first class!”

  And in another minute, with shuffling shoes, fluttering gowns and cackling tongues, over a hundred girls swarmed out of the building amid the jeers of those already in the yard. The matron and her assistant then formed them into two long lines; and so they stood, like competing cattle in a show. And Tom stood by, hanging his head, and blushing for them and for himself.

  “Your turn first,” said the matron to the other applicant. “Just step down the lines and take your pick.”

  The fellow did so with alacrity, and Tom saw him peering and leering at the girls, and actually shaking his red head in their faces, until he came to one that took his fancy. Her he beckoned from the rank — a bold, bright hussy — and they whispered, but only for a moment. And this time it was the woman who shook her head.

  “Too many freckles for me,” she called out saucily. “I’ll hang on for the other one!”

  So the convict went on; and tested another, in order to reject her and be even with them; while in those two long ranks, one hung back here and there to ten who put themselves forward, like boys who know the answer in a class.

  Tom had forgotten Daintree, and plucked the matron by the sleeve; he had told her it was no use, he could never go through that, when the woman showed she was not listening to a word. He followed her fixed gaze; and there was the freckled convict importuning an upstanding young woman, who tossed her black mop, and would have nothing to say to him.

  “Well, look at that!” exclaimed the matron. “There’s a girl who hasn’t been in the first class a week, and she gets an offer and turns up her nose at it. May she never get another!”

  Tom had looked; and it was Peggy O’Brien, with her hair cut short like a boy’s.

  It appeared that the man would not take his answer, he was at her still, and Tom advanced between the lines. “One at a time — it’s not your turn!” cried out the matron; but at that moment a deep flush dyed Peggy’s face, her neighbours laughed derisively, and Tom rushed in amid the protests of the matron and a ribald outcry from the mothers in the shade.

  “It’s Tom!” gasped Peggy.

  “What’s he saying?” cried Tom.

  “Never you mind,” said the man. “First come, first served; you wait till I’ve done!”

  Tom ignored him and looked to Peggy.

  “He won’t take ‘no,’” she said; “an’ I’d have no thruck wid’m to save me immorthal soul!”

  “Will you with me, Peggy? Will you with me?”

  The girl went white to the lips; he took her hand, and eyed his fellow, whose freckles jumped out through his pallor, and whose hands were fists that dared not strike. Tom would have reasoned with the man, only the latter was now set upon by a bevy of obstreperous Amazons not lightly to be shaken off.

  There was none among them would have looked at Tom with such a fine fellow standing by; nor was there a man in all his senses who would take up with Peggy, if he but knew what they could tell him. So (in effect) cried the girls who fell upon the one man left, and fought for him, and scratched for him, and mauled him in their efforts to hug him to their hearts; for the spice of excitement introduced by Tom had turned their light heads; and it was from a pandemonium of his own making that he had meanwhile led Peggy apart.

  “You’ll come with me, won’t you, Peggy?”

  “Yes, Tom, if you want me.” And a humid light was in the sweet Irish eyes.

  �
��Then come to the matron, and I’ll have you out of this hole in half a jiffy!”

  But the matron was otherwise engaged; and when a degree of order had been restored, and the competition for the remaining male had been decided by his capitulation to an Amazon of vast physique; and when the brawlers had been banished indoors with threats of shaved heads and solitary cells, then the good lady would have given much to pack Tom off wifeless for his pains. Not so much, however, as had lain between the leaves of Daintree’s letter. So by noon Peggy O’Brien was a comparatively free woman. Alas! she was an unutterably happy one.

  Her arm stole within Tom’s as he drove: he had neither the courage nor the heart to tell her the truth outright. It was a cruel position for them both; he glanced with horror at her radiant face; and again he noticed her hair.

  “Where’s it all gone to, Peggy?” he asked, pointing to the short strong locks. “What have you done with it?”

  They had reached the outskirts of Parramatta; new buildings were springing up in every direction, and Peggy jerked her head towards some scaffoldings.

  “Is it where me hair’s gone?” she said with a laugh. “Mebbe there’s some of’t there!”

  “Where, Peggy?”

  “In them new buildin’s, like as not. An’ didn’t ye hear they strengthen the morthar wid the hair of the women’s heads. ’Tis thrue, then, in Parramatta. An’ ’tis mighty kind they think themselves to give us the razor instid o’ the cat — but where’s their bricks an’ morthar if they bet us?”

  “They used that glorious hair for bricks and mortar!”

  His praise of it was dearer far than her possession; she coloured with pride and happiness as she told him it happened long ago, when first she came there.