“Ah, very kind of you, I’m sure,” remarked the major; but he was thinking of something else. “I can’t imagine what can have brought you to such a God-forsaken spot as this!” he cried out.
“Because it is forsaken,” murmured the widow.
“But alone!”
“I wish to be alone.”
The major picked up his hat.
“Madam,” said he, “I would not for the world prolong an unwelcome intrusion; yet if you knew this settlement as I know it you would understand the anxiety of an old stager like myself to render you all the assistance, and I may say the protection, in my power. It may seem officious to you now, but you will understand it, my dear madam, when you’ve been out here as long as I have.” And with that the major held out his hand; but Mrs. Astley laid hers upon his arm.
“I understand it already,” she replied, sweetly; “it is you who misunderstand me. I do appreciate your kindness in coming to see me like this; you will know it, too, the first difficulty I am in; for I shall not hesitate to take you at your generous word. And I shall always be glad to receive you, sir, when you will do me the honour of calling. Only I have suffered deeply. I am here to avoid society, not to seek it, and — but surely, Major Blacker, you can sympathise with me there?”
“I can indeed,” cried the honest major. “It was the death of my own dear wife that drove me to New South Wales.”
The fact, however (and it was one), was scarcely stated with the pathos it deserved; the gallant speaker being occupied, indeed, in noting the few lines and the many beauties of the comely face so compassionately raised to his.
“Then our case is the same, and we must be friends,” said the widow very gently, as she rose. And she accompanied her visitor to the gate, keeping him waiting, however, on the way, while she found the early numbers of her book.
“Read them,” she said, “and you will come for more. Oh, how I envy you having to begin at the very beginning, and not knowing one word of what is to come! I shall hear you laughing across the bay! Oh, yes, I will come and see your house one day; but I can come no further as I am, and here is the gate.”
“One moment, ma’am,” said the major, glancing at a man who was at work in the front garden, and lowering his voice. “A convict?”
“Yes.”
“A gentleman convict, as they say, by the cut of him,” muttered the major; “and that’s the very worst sort. Look you, madam, if that fellow gives you the slightest trouble, you let me know.”
“What could you do?”
“Get him fifty lashes!” replied the major vindictively. “I should have mentioned that I happen to be a magistrate of the colony. You may bring your man before me in my own house any day you like, and for the first piece of impudence he shall have his fifty. I also happen to possess some private influence with the Governor. I need hardly say that it would be my privilege to use it in your interest, could you but show me the way.”
“You have influence with the Governor?” cried the widow, with an animation which she had not hitherto displayed, and which vastly enhanced her charms. “Then get my poor gardener, not fifty lashes, but his ticket-of-leave!”
The other gazed upon her with kindling admiration, and a pleasant, smiling tolerance.
“A philanthropist!” said he. “An enthusiast in philanthropy! Only wait, my dear lady, until you’ve been out here a little longer. Why, I shall have the fellow before me in a week!”
And taking off his hat as he spoke, the major jerked his bald head in the direction of the convict gardener, and departed chuckling; but turned more thoughtful on the way, and reached home walking slowly, his yellow face ploughed with thought. Major Blacker was sixty years of age, but he never considered himself an old man, and now of a sudden he felt full ten years younger. He consulted his glass when he got in; the climate had dried him up a little; but there were black hairs in his whiskers yet, and a youthful glitter in his mirrored eyes which he hoped had not been wanting in the late interview. Major Blacker had lived; and now the desire was come to him to live a little more. Turning from the mirror to his bedroom window he beheld the smoke of the widow’s cottage making a grey lane through the sunset; in between and down below the fretted floor of the bay was rosy indeed from shore to shore; overhead an incredible blue was fast changing to richest purple. And to such accompaniments of the eye, and in blood as cold as you please, the major’s mind was made up.
Two days later — in a community which counted three men to the woman, there was no time to be lost — in two days, therefore, Major Blacker presented himself once more at the widow’s cottage. He had devoured his Pickwick to the last line of the second number, and the book armed him both with a topic of familiar conversation and an excuse for a second visit so precipitate. He needed numbers three and four; but the widow was from home; the assigned servant had taken her out in a boat.
The assigned servant! the gardener! in that harbour full of sharks! The major strode through the cottage, was shown the boat rounding Shark Island homeward bound, and elected to await the lady’s landing in her own garden. He must speak seriously to Mrs. Astley. It was bad enough for an unprotected woman to live alone in that lonely place with a convict man-servant and a maid who was doubtless a convict also. But to trust herself upon the water with the male criminal and none beside! It was worse than madness. The poor lady was in need of a friend to warn her of her danger, and she should find that friend in Thomas Blacker.
The major stood twirling his moustaches by the water’s edge until the boat’s keel slid into the sand. His eye was on the convict, a tall, bearded, round-shouldered man, who hung his head (as well he might, thought the major) before that ferocious orb. It was the visitor who helped Mrs. Astley to alight on dry land, and there and then broke out, without a word of apology for his presence in her garden. Did she know what she was doing — trusting herself in that cockleshell with a transported ruffian — a desperado who would murder her in a minute if it seemed worth his while? Had no one told her the harbour was full of sharks? But the land sharks in Sydney itself, the felons and malefactors stalking at large there in the light of day, were as bad and worse; yet she could trust herself willingly to one of these!
Mrs. Astley had changed colour at his words.
“Hush!” she cried at last. “He will hear you.”
“He!” exclaimed the martinet. “What do I care what he hears? Let him listen and take heed.”
“But I care,” insisted the lady in an imploring voice. “I take an interest in the poor fellow. I am sorry for him. He has been telling me all about his trouble.”
“Trouble!” sneered the major. “That’s what they all call it. What’s his name?”
“Whybrow.”
“Not Whybrow the forger?”
“Yes.”
“Then all I can say, my dear lady,” cried the major in his most pompous manner, “is that I sincerely hope you have brought no plate or valuables to this accursed country; if you have I beg of you to let me take them to my bank to-morrow. Whybrow might hesitate to cut your throat — I doubt if he has the pluck for one thing — but he’ll rob you as sure as you stand there. I remember his case very well. A more accomplished villain has never been transported. He’d rob a church, so you may be quite sure he’ll rob you; it’s only a question of time and opportunity.”
Mrs. Astley turned on her heel, took a few quick steps towards the house, turned again and rejoined her neighbour.
“Has he ever got into trouble out here?” she demanded. “Has he once been up before you or any one of your brother magistrates? Is there anything at all against him but the single offence for which he was transported?”
“Not that I know of,” admitted the other with a shrug; “but he’s a clever man, he would naturally behave pretty well.”
“So well that you didn’t even know he was in the settlement; yet you are ready, for that one crime in the past, to credit him with any villainy present or to come! Oh, can you wonder tha
t men grow worse out here, if that is all you expect of them? If you treat your convicts like dogs, whip them like dogs, and never credit them with a single remnant of their native manhood, how can you expect ever to make them into the men they were? Yet what is this country for, if not to give the wicked and the weak another chance, a fresh start? Oh, I have no patience with your view, sir, that once a villain is always one; I have heard it on all sides of me since I landed; but I tell you it is abominable — hateful — inhuman — immoral!”
Major Blacker bowed his head. His eyes could not conceal their admiration; the fire in hers was a revelation to him; he had sought a woman and found a queen, and the falseness (to his mind) of her premiss took not a whit from his delight.
“Madam,” said he, pointing with his cane to the subject of this argument, who had drawn up the boat and was carrying in the oars; “madam, I am only sorry for one thing. I am only sorry I am not yonder gardener, with you for my champion and defender! I withdraw every word I have said. Assigned to you, I can well believe that the greatest rogue in the settlement would soon become an honest man!”
“It depends so entirely on us,” cried the widow, never heeding the compliments in her enthusiasm. “Oh, I think we have so much to answer for! In his last place he was treated horribly; it was up the country; no, I must not mention names, only I know from Whybrow that the chain-gang was rest and peace after what he had gone through at that man’s hands. It was from a chain-gang he came to me. He has been nearly three years in the colony. He was transported for seven. Oh, don’t you think it would be possible to get him his ticket this summer?”
The major felt a warm hand upon his arm; the major saw eyes of liquid blue, lit with enthusiasm, and gazing appealingly into his own. They had reached the cottage, and were standing in a tiny morning-room filled with flowers and heavy with their scent. The major felt younger than ever.
“I could try,” he said, “but I fear it wouldn’t be much good. Four years’ servitude is the limit. I’m afraid we shouldn’t have much chance.”
“Try!” said the widow. “It would be an act of humanity, and one for which I should feel personally grateful all my life.”
The major tried, and won the gratitude without achieving the result desired. Perhaps he did not try quite so hard as he pretended, and perhaps in time the widow detected in him a lukewarmness for the cause upon which she had set her unreasonable heart; at all events the major failed to make the quick advance he had counted upon in Mrs. Astley’s affections. At the end of the summer their friendship was still nothing more, and the convict gardener still a convict gardener. As neighbours, the pair would read together the Pickwick numbers as they came and play an occasional game of cribbage in the major’s verandah; but as sure as that veteran uttered a sentimental word touching his lonely condition or hers (and the one involved the other), so surely would the widow rise and beg him to escort her home. Nor did the view from the Old Point Piper Road soften her at all with its sparkling moonlit brilliance. Yet it was here, early in the following summer, that the gallant old fellow, after an extra half-bottle with his dinner, at last declared himself.
Mrs. Astley heard him with an expressionless face turned towards the harbour; but ere he finished, the moonlight that strewed those waters with shimmering gems had found two also in her eyes.
“I cannot,” she cried. “I loved my husband — I love him still — I shall never marry again!”
“But so did I love my sainted wife,” protested the major; “yet I would marry to-morrow. I consider it no disrespect to the dead; on the contrary, it is the highest compliment we can pay them, as showing so happy an experience of wedlock that we would fain repeat it. Not that I have thought so always,” he added hastily, to quell a look which made him uncomfortable.
“I don’t believe you think so now,” replied the candid widow. “You not only mean less than you say; you feel less; and must forgive me, for you may not know it yourself, but a woman is never deceived. Think it over and you will agree with me; but never, never let us speak of this again. It hurts me to hurt you — and I like you so much as a friend!”
As for Thomas Blacker, the first plunge had completely sobered him, and he bitterly repented that indiscretion of the table which had led him into a declaration as premature as it had been also unpremeditated. As a soldier, however, he took no kindlier to retreat for the mere fact of deploring his advance; retreat, indeed, was out of the question: and the major’s further protestations were pitched in a key calculated to acquit him of a charge which rankled, being true.
“Your answer I accept, and can bear,” he retorted with dignity, “but not your misjudgment of my feelings. That would be cruel — if you were capable of cruelty. Permit me at least to say that it shows an ignorance of my real nature which cuts me to the quick. I have expressed myself but poorly if you can still doubt my readiness to devote my life to you — ay, or to lay it down if need be for your sake! There is nothing I would not do for you. The lightest service I should esteem my privilege.”
The widow laughed, but not unkindly; on the contrary, her hand slid through the major’s arm with her words, as if to sheath their edge.
“There was one thing you once promised to do for me,” she said. “It is not done yet!”
“I know what you mean,” he groaned with an inward oath. “Your assigned gardener!”
“Exactly.”
“I tried my best.”
“Could you not try again?”
“If I did,” said the major hoarsely, “would it make any difference to the answer you would give me if I said again what I have said to-night? I tell you candidly I begin to feel jealous of that convict. I shall be glad to see his back.”
The woman gave a little nervous laugh, but no answer.
“Would it make any difference?” he repeated.
“I cannot bargain like that,” sighed the widow, turning away.
“And you are right!” exclaimed the other, hotly flushing. “I unsay that; I’m ashamed of it. But I’ll get that ticket-of-leave this summer, or I’ll never look you in the face again!”
And this time Thomas Blacker went to work in earnest; but then a year had passed since his former half-hearted attempt of foregone futility; and the forlorn hope of that season was the easy goal of this. The major, without doubt, stood well at Government House; he was secretly engaged upon plans for the fortifications of the harbour, and had the ear of his Excellency in magisterial matters as well. What he had mentioned only tentatively and not altogether seriously the year before, he now urged as a peculiarly deserving case. And in no more than a day or two he had the pleasure of calling at the cottage, with a paper for the widow to sign, and of meeting the gardener on the path as he was coming away.
“I suppose you know what I have here, my man?” cried the major, tapping a breast inflated with conscious benevolence.
“The mistress has mentioned it,” replied the man, trembling in an instant. “I am deeply grateful, sir, to you. I little thought to get it yet.”
“Nor have you, sir, nor have you,” said the major briskly. “Your ticket’s no ticket till it’s signed by the Governor and safe in your hands. However,” he added, with a touch of the self-importance he enjoyed, “I have promised your mistress to use my influence in your behalf, so by the end of the week you may very possibly hear from me again.”
And as if to finish the thing off with a flourish Thomas Blacker was finally even better than his word, for, as far from the end of the week as the Wednesday evening, he dined in Sydney and rode out by moonlight and the Point Piper Road with Whybrow’s ticket signed and sealed in his pocket. Once more the major had dined well, but this time not unwisely; yet his heart was troubled with a trouble which had never entered his calculations hitherto. His brother was dead; his brother’s estates were now his own. The incoming mail had brought the news, and with it a round of applause and congratulations from connections and friends who for years had ignored his existence. The major w
as in a private quandary of the spirit; he was quite unable to make up his mind. Should he go home a married man, or should he see his time-serving friends to the deuce and never go home at all? The tropic moon and the heavenly harbour inclined him to the latter, certain phrases in his home-letters to the former course; but what about his wife? She was qualified to adorn any society in which the major had ever moved, but — there were buts. The major was gallant enough to try to ignore them, but there they were. At home he was not sure that he should want to be married at all; here it was a different thing; and here, no doubt, he would end his days after all. There were worse places. These moonlight nights made the place a paradise of soft airs and rustling leaves, and miles and miles of a jewelled carpet beneath the white-starred ceiling of the Southern sky. Yes, it was a spot to live and die in, and be thankful; and yes! he would marry the widow, if the widow would marry him. And after the other night ——
The major had reached the cottage gate. Here he dismounted, tethering his horse within. There were voices and lights, both low, in the cottage; the French windows were wide open to the night; and an ignoble instinct, begotten of a swift suspicion that was more truly an inspiration, caused the major to advance upon the grass. So he crept nearer — nearer yet — within earshot. And the first words he heard confirmed him in his deceit. By heaven! there should be trick for trick!
“Darling,” said the widow’s voice — the sweet voice that had beguiled him— “it will be the end of the week to-morrow — well, then, next day; and after that we will hide it no more. Let us brazen it out! I am always ready; and you, you will have the right to take care of me as you should: you will have your ticket-of-leave.”
“Never!” muttered the major between his teeth, and he crushed up the paper he held ready in his hand. He forgot his doubts upon the moonlit road. The injured man was all the man now. He crept still nearer and saw that for which he was now so fully prepared: the widow reposing in the convict’s arms.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 419
