The Rogue's March Part 3

Part III

MASTER AND MAN

CHAPTER XXX

“THE NOBLE UNKNOWN”

Tom crawled into the vehicle as though those heavy chains still dangled about his legs. Nothing was so strange as the sudden cessation of the horrid jingle which had marked and mocked every movement of his body for four whole months. He felt quite lost without it, and he clambered into the curricle without a word. Daintree cracked his whip, and that was the sole sound from either of them in the first half-hour of keen and starlit freedom.

“Feel cold, Erichsen?”

“No.”

“Because you can have my coat if you do. My things are thicker. Only say the word.”

He said nothing; such gratitude as he felt in his degraded heart was not yet so poignant as to need expression; it was a very vague, dull sense at present. But Daintree understood: he had simply to sit next that silent, aged, callous figure to understand all.

They drove on to Maitland, where they supped handsomely and lay all night. In the morning Tom was well ​and warmly clothed at the best store in the township. And that day the difference was that he kept turning to look over his shoulder, and this at shorter intervals as the day wore on.

“Is anything following us?” said Daintree once.

“Not yet,” said Tom.

“Not yet! Why, what do you expect?”

“What I deserve,” said Tom; and Daintree had the wisdom not to press him upon this or any other point. He knew what was alleged against Erichsen at Castle Sullivan. He had heard the story from the Principal Superintendent. He began to think there might be some truth in it after all.

Next morning he was sure. They had put up at an unusually comfortable roadside inn, where Tom had a very excellent room, yet he came down with wild, unrested eyes and twitching fingers.

“It’s no use!” he bitterly exclaimed.

“Haven’t you slept?”

“Not a wink. I heard them coming all-night long—heard them coming with the chains. Oh, take me back! They have made me the guilty man they said I was when I wasn’t. I deserve everything now!”

And a second day of terror he spent in the curricle, looking backward hour after hour; but when that also passed over, and still nothing happened, he began to think that either Butter was mistaken, or the major incredulous, or his enemies of another mind now that he was gone. At all events he took heart of grace, and at last thanked Daintree for what he was doing: without asking, however, why he was doing it.

On the third forenoon the spires and windmills of Sydney fringed the sky; then they mounted a hill, and ​there was the harbour sparkling above the roofs of the convict city.

“We had better drop the ‘Erichsen’ now,” said Daintree, as they drove up to the turnpike gate. “I suggest that ‘Thomas’ will suffice both for Christian name and surname. I think it would be preferable for the present. What say you?” Tom consented with perfect readiness and indifference; and he looked behind him for the last time, as much as to say what was the only thing on earth about which he was not as indifferent as the dead.

They drove down Brickfield Hill, over the spot where Nat Sullivan had tumbled off his horse, and past the notorious inn where he had lain; it flourished still. And still the doleful felon music filled the air, striking more staccato in this crisp weather than six months since in the heavy heat; but it struck to Tom’s heart no more. On the quay there was a crowd, and a fresh shipload of convicts disembarking, but Tom felt no pity for them either. And now, when his indignation was aroused, it was by the lounging laziness of a road-gang, whose overseers were smoking and chatting with the convicts, while the latter moved neither hand nor foot, and the sentries yawned at their posts.

“They want the major there,” said Tom grimly. “He’d have that peck of stones about their ears if they stood looking at it much longer!”

Daintree turned and regarded him with a particularly pleased and kindly smile; then Tom knew that he had just volunteered his first remark since leaving the stockade; and he thought he knew with what sympathetic patience his first voluntary remark had been waited for, though he only now suspected this from Daintree’s smile. His heart swelled a little. They put up at an ​inn, and he made himself more useful to his new master than he had been yet.

The bungalow was some few miles out, upon the delightful woody shores of Rose Bay; they drove on there in the afternoon; and the greenwood dipping beyond the post and rails of the Old Point Piper Road, the lush meadows dipping beyond that, and the azure arm of the harbour seen through the one and above the other, were all a very wonderful change after that terrible plateau of the past four months. Nor had they any feature in common with the detested region of Castle Sullivan. Tom had seen nothing like this up-country. To crown all, the bungalow lay bathed in the richest sunset when they reached it, and Rose Bay deserved that name indeed, for its sunlit waters appeared to be dimpled with wet rose-leaves from strand to strand. It was as though Nature herself were trying to soften that frozen heart and to welcome Tom Erichsen to this haven of peace.

An old man came out to see to the horses, a somewhat younger woman stood in the mellow light upon a wide verandah. Daintree greeted them with an air—almost the first he had permitted himself in Tom’s company. With another, however, he took Tom’s hand and expressed characteristically the hope that the threshold of his house would prove to be also that of a new life for Tom.

“You have left the past behind you, Thomas,” said he, “and all your enemies with it. Rest assured of that. If they follow you here they’ll have me to deal with—I can promise them they have laid their last finger on you. No, there’s a brighter future ahead of you, I trust; and always recollect—I am your friend.”

​“I suppose you are,” said poor Tom in reply; he could believe and feel but little even yet.

“You suppose I am?” cried Daintree, looking rather queerly at Tom. “You shall dine at my table,” he then exclaimed. “You shall have all your meals with me! Mrs. Fawcett, lay a place for Thomas—and show him his room.”

It was a little room, certainly, but an incredibly pleasant one; the window almost overhung the bay; and the bed was a white feast for bloodshot eyes.

“Dinner’s ready; don’t you spoil it, young man, by keeping master waiting,” said Mrs. Fawcett; and then over her shoulder as she went, “My word, but you’re a lucky one!”

Perhaps he required telling so; it was all so difficult to believe, so impossible to understand. But bewilderment had not yet given place to curiosity.

He was, however, beginning to realise that he had fallen from the cruellest into the kindest hands on earth, when, returning to the verandah, he encountered the kind man, with a gleaming eye and a set face quite inconsistent with that impression. A fox-terrier, indifferently bred, with one ear up and one down, but the most eager eyes, had wildly welcomed Daintree while Daintree was welcoming Tom; this little dog he was now dragging savagely along by its collar.

“Won’t come into my study!” explained Daintree, in a voice of amazing fury. “Once I thrashed him in there, so now he thinks he won’t come in; but he shall—he shall—he shall!” Dr. Sullivan himself, in dealing with a recalcitrant convict, could have employed no more ferocious tone.

The dog was dragged within a yard of the door it would ​not enter, then released, and it did not run away. Daintree now went within, and called and whistled to the dog; but there it stood, bristling all over, and yet wagging its tail with immense energy, as if to proclaim its anxiety to please in any other way, but enter that room it could not. Nor was it until Daintree rushed out in his rage that the little dog turned tail and ran away. And again he caught it, and again and again the same thing happened, the man vowing the dog should give in, the dog still wagging his tail and still disobeying; the dinner growing cold on the table; and Tom viewing the whole petty, pitiable exhibition with the most irritating pain and disenchantment. It made his heart sick to see this man of all men in such a passion about so small a thing; in a little he was all but foaming at the mouth; and at last, when he caught up a heavy ivory paper-knife and belaboured his dog with that, the spectacle hurt Tom more than any flogging he had witnessed in the iron-gang. It was not only that his feeling for men was numbed while his feeling for animals remained quick: here was the one man living whom he wished to honour and to admire, and the honour and the admiration were sickening at their birth.—

The beating did no good whatever; then Daintree turned on his heel with such a face that Tom took the dog in his arms. He heard a drawer unlocked in the room. When his master reappeared the paper-knife was no longer in his hand; a pistol was there instead.

“Where’s the dog?” he cried.

“Here,” said Tom, showing him.

“Put it down. I’m going to shoot him. I’ll have no stubborn beasts here!”

“Have you had this one long, sir?”

​“From a puppy,” said Daintree, cocking his pistol. “Come, put him down, or we’ll never get any dinner to-night.”

“No,” said Tom firmly. “You’ll be sorry for it afterwards; you will be vexed with me for standing by and letting you do such a thing in your heat.”

The other gasped, but never said a word.

“If the dog is no good to you, give him to me,” continued Tom. “Don’t shoot him, sir. Not that I believe you meant it!” And to show his belief he dropped the terrier; whereupon Daintree hesitated, but presently retreated to his room without a word.

The dog was spared. They sat down at last to cool dishes that should have been hot, and their mutual ardour had suffered with the viands. Daintree was very solemn and very stiff, his hapless companion quite certain that he had given mortal and everlasting offence. But the incident was never referred to again. And Tom soon forgot the solitary occasion upon which his champion displayed himself in so sinister a light.

Not that the other lights were all rose-coloured. The man had foibles innumerable, and in their way as extraordinary as his inexplicable kindness to Tom. This continued and increased, and yet there was a something ostentatious, vainglorious, egotistical, even in his kindest acts. Tom hated himself for seeing it, but there it was. It became the more noticeable as Tom himself grew more regenerate, and so made fewer demands upon the other’s consideration. And then the gloomy vanity of the man! His literary pretensions! His solemn belief in himself and all he did!

“Heaven knows he has done enough for me!” sighed Tom, quite ashamed. “I must try to see nothing else; ​but what I can’t help seeing shall never, never, never make any difference to my regard for him.”

Tom wanted to get to work at once, in the house, in the garden, anywhere and at anything, but the other would not hear of it for days. He was to rest and forget, and to enjoy his life. They made excursions together in the curricle or in Daintree’s boat. Tom would have been almost happy if he only could have given his kind companion the heart-whole admiration which the latter took for granted. And his inability in that respect was so real a grief to him, he could have wept at it and at the other’s kindness put together; but there was still not a tear in his heart; he often wondered, was there any heart left in his body? What he deemed his ingratitude seemed sometimes to prove that there was not.

There were qualities he could honestly admire in Daintree, but they were not those qualities upon whose possession Daintree most prided himself. He was a man of iron nerve and will. That was undoubted. One day, in a squall near the Heads, he handled the boat with magnificent coolness and skill, when Tom thought they must both have gone to the sharks: when they landed safe and sound, he inflicted so many of his poems upon Tom, whom the salt breezes had overcome with drowsiness, that the pantry and the knives to clean seemed preferable to such nightly ordeals. Tom asked to be put into livery and to work at once. He insisted upon it; and gained his point through the accidental touch of “livery.”

They drove into Sydney next day with specimens of the family crest, which Tom was to bear on every button. Daintree being a magistrate, a cockade was duly included in the order; and for a time the master was in ​high feather at the prospective display. But it recalled family troubles ere long; and all the way home he talked dismally of himself as an “exile like Byron—my literary second-self.” Somebody had once called him “own brother to Byron”; he never tired of quoting the phrase; he was destitute of humour, and made Tom blush for him, where he would have shaken with laughter at another.

His contrariety was unique. Not only was he a good magistrate spoilt, through neglecting the Bench for his desk, but an old athlete who bragged about the poetry he could not write instead of about the races he had really won. On the top of his bookshelf stood the row of tarnished silver cups, and his proud eye climbed no higher than the volume or two of mediocre verse underneath. He made little enough of his genuine triumphs, his real abilities; but he would talk with bated breath of a few stanzas which often rhymed as false as they rang. Once Tom cleaned the cups when Daintree was out, and he flew into something very like a rage when he came in and saw them; he was the most unaccountable of men.

“Still he is the kindest,” was Tom’s reflection on the top of that conclusion; and the same night he not only made another of his poor attempts at thanking Daintree for all that he was doing and had done; he at last put the question which seemed to mark a stride in his slow and up-hill return from brute to man. And yet, even now, it was no very sincere curiosity, but rather an uncomfortable feeling that he ought to seem curious, which prompted him to say:—

“I can’t understand your kindness to me! Why did you begin it; why do you go on? I wonder what made you take an interest in me at the start!”

​Wonder was the word, for wonder he did, but keenly inquisitive he was not; and the stride was shorter than it had looked.

“I believed in your innocence,” replied Daintree with deliberation. “That was all.”

“I can’t think why! You were the only one. Yet you knew nothing about me, it seems?” And still his tone was that of purely impersonal speculation.

Daintree took the cheroot from between his teeth.

“I knew something about Blaydes,” said he.

“Ah!”

“Not much; very little, in fact; but that little was pretty bad. I knew what an infernal blackguard he was, and I felt sure there must be more ruined men than one upon his track. You remember that point in the defence?”

Tom jumped up. “Don’t remind me of it,” he cried. “The very barrister disbelieved in me! And it doesn’t interest me now, it only hurts; don’t speak of it, if you please.”

“Oh, very well,” said Daintree; “only that point was suggested by me.”

“You?” exclaimed Tom in an altered voice. “Ah, but what don’t I owe to you? More than I can ever realise or believe; everything—everything—and yet I refuse to speak of it to you of all men! You see how ungrateful I am; you see what they’ve made of me among them! Oh, sir, forgive me; have patience with me, and I may be grateful yet. Give me time, and I shall thank you as I cannot now!”

“You shall not,” rejoined Daintree firmly; “you were quite right, and we’ll speak of all this no more. Good heavens!” he cried out, “how do you know my motives ​were so pure? What if it was a mere whim—and not altogether my own? At all events, I take no credit for it; and never you thank me again, do you hear? You’ll offend me if you do. You will indeed!”—

He spoke earnestly, nervously, and without a trace of affectation or egotism. Nor did Tom remember a single foible, as he looked in the handsome, dark, inscrutable face, and took his benefactor by both hands.

“God bless you!” he whispered. “Do you know what I used to call you in my heart when I had one? My Noble Unknown! Well, you are nobler even than I thought; do you know what you are doing? You’re giving me my heart back, little by little! I shall be grateful yet!”

He went to the door, but would stand there gazing at his friend. So long he stood, with burning eyes that seemed to ache for tears; but at length he was gone, and Daintree sat alone with a cold cheroot between his fingers.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE COURSE OF THE “ROSAMUND”

Once in livery, Tom sat no more at his master’s table; he had, however, to insist on waiting at it, instead, and to make himself the servant he had been hitherto in name only. Daintree would have let the old arrangement continue, but the new one was a boon to Tom. It gave him freedom and independence and occupation, and so helped him wonderfully upon the upward road.

One evening, when a ship had come in and Daintree

​had driven into Sydney for his letters, he returned in such extraordinary spirits that he could hardly touch his dinner; he must gloat over a crinkling sheet of paper, while the soup grew cold in the very spoon, and Tom could only suppose that his master’s family had come round at last. As a rule he talked incessantly to Tom while the latter waited, but this evening his letter absorbed his whole attention. At last, however, he looked up, and his saturnine countenance was redeemed and transfigured by a perfectly startling radiance and joy.

“Thomas,” he said, “you must marry a wife!”

The cheery tone was as new in him as the delighted look. Tom was so astonished, he had to think what the words meant before shaking his head.

“Why not, my good fellow?” cried Daintree.

“Why should you want me to?” retorted Tom.

“Because I am about to marry one myself!”

Had he said he was about to bury one, Tom could not have been more startled and amazed. Somehow he had never conceived of Daintree as a married man. That solitary spirit, centred and immersed in self, and consciously wallowing in its own solitude and gloom, had forbidden such a thought the more easily since Tom had himself abandoned every aspiration of the kind. A twinge of jealousy succeeded his first surprise; but in another moment his heart dilated with unselfish pleasure, and his congratulations were no less sincere than vociferous.

“If you knew her,” said Daintree, “you would congratulate me even more.” And he proceeded to praise his choice as he could have praised nothing that was not in some sense his; and yet his passion was convincing; his voice shook with it, as his face shone.

​“A Sydney lady?” Tom ventured to inquire.

“Good heavens, no! If she only were as near as that! She is on her way out to marry me; this letter was written a month before she sailed.”

“From England?”

“Yes.”

“You will see her in another month!”

“Perhaps before. You never know how long or how short the voyage will be. Mine was a hundred and thirty-six days, and that was long. I kept a chart of it—stop, I’m going to fetch it! Clear away, I’ve had dinner enough.”

He rushed from the table to return presently with a mariner’s chart of the world, upon which he had neatly marked out the daily courses of his recent voyage. It was a chain of many links from England to the Cape, and a chain of longer links from the Cape to Australia.

“Now then!” cried Daintree, arranging the chart under the lamp, and seating himself delightedly at the table. “Now we’ll see where they’ve got to. Halloa! Where’s my letter?”

It was on the floor, and Tom picked it up, averting his eyes so that he should see nothing while Daintree referred to the contents.

“Ha! Here we have it,” and the letter was thrust into his pocket. “They were to sail on the twenty-third of June. How many days ago is that? This is September the twelfth. Seven—thirty-one—thirty-one and twelve. How much is that?”

“Eighty-one,” said Tom.

“Only eighty-one! Then you’re right,” sighed Daintree, “and they won’t be here for another month. I was fifty-five days more.”

​“They may make a quicker voyage.”

“They may, but I never have. The one before was a hundred and forty days. They were both above the average, but not so very much.”

“Then all the more time to prepare in,” said Tom, entering thoroughly into the situation. “We must get the place to rights, you know, sir!”

“That’s true. It will help to pass the time.”

“Then we might pin up this chart.”

“What, and follow the course?”

“Suppose they came no quicker than you did, and put a drawing-pin in the place every day!”

Daintree was delighted; he shook Tom’s hand, and up went the chart, and in went the drawing-pin.

“You see,” he said, “they’ve not got to the Cape yet; they’re only just beginning to turn the corner and run their easting down.”

“That’s assuming they came no quicker than you,” said his consoler.

“Well, we will assume it. Still, when they’re a hundred days out we’ll have a flag ready, and you shall begin going every morning to the point to see whether there’s a ball at the south yard-arm. And after that will be the longest time of all!”

Meanwhile there was much to do, and Tom did most of it with enormous zest; he had never thought to be so happy again. His enthusiasm was the one return that he could make to Daintree, and he permitted it no bounds. It was Tom who stuck the drawing-pin through a cork ship of cunning build, full-rigged with needles for masts and paper sails. When Daintree saw it they christened her the Rosamund, after her real namesake, with a fitting libation; and from that day forth the cork vessel ​ploughed the white ocean of the chart, and was a good half-inch nearer Sydney every morning when the master of the house entered the breakfast-room.

“You sympathetic fellow!” he would say to Tom, and sympathy bred sympathy as it always will. “You must marry yourself, Thomas,” he would add. “And you and your wife must live with me and mine; and we’ll go into partnership together, up the country somewhere, and all four live happy ever after!”

To all of which the servant would shake his head, but continue to enter into the master’s happiness with unabated sympathy and enthusiasm. Nor was this a conscious merit in Tom; it made him think no better of himself. He knew how much was inspired by gratitude, and how much more by the selfish relief of sinking his own woes in the hopes and fears and raptures of his friend. He was not even aware of the essential fineness of a nature capable of this kind of comfort. Eternal dissatisfaction with his own feelings kept his opinion of himself at zero still. And if the new bond between Tom and his benefactor had done no more than provide them with common ground, on which they might meet and be at one in all sincerity, even so it would have done much for Tom’s peace of mind.

When Daintree spoke of his beloved, his dark face shone, the darker eyes softened, and the rich voice quivered with no common passion. It was possible to agree and to applaud without hypocrisy, which was not possible when the puny poet stood in the strong man’s shoes. Of his poetry enough has been said, but about his passion there was no mistake. The one was genuine; the other was not. It was a man’s passion, a selfish passion, but the sheer masterful strength of it was patent ​to Tom from the first. Sometimes it made him fear for the girl—and despair of himself. Gratitude apart, it was as though his spoilt and petty spirit was incapable of an honest, whole-hearted, ungrudging admiration and regard.

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.

“But why did it happen?” he asked indignantly. “What could you have done to deserve such treatment?”

She hesitated, and squeezed his arm.

“Nat Sullivan came—”

“Nat Sullivan!”

“An’ I was to swear whether or not you were one of the bushrangers; so you may think what I swore; an’ he said I was a liar, an’ I struck ’m in the face wid me open hand; an’ they shaved me for that!”

Tom felt miserable; she had suffered for him all along; how could he tell her he was deceiving her now, and had ​no intention of marrying her at all? Not one word of that had passed her modest lips, yet the pressure of her homely hand was eloquent with love and joy. What could he do? What could he say? For miles he never opened his lips: they were tight-shut when she glanced at him, and his face so wretched, that at last she could bear it no longer.

“What is it, dear?” she asked him tenderly. “Is it how ye can make such as me your wedded wife? Because ye needn’t, Tom dear, if ye think betther not. ’Twouldn’t take all that to make me happy!”

Then, in a burst, he told her of his master’s plan, and how he had entered into it against his own better judgment, because that master had plucked him from the jaws of death and from the gates of hell; and how, from the moment he saw Peggy, his only thought was to do for her what his master had done for him.

“My one idea,” he said, “was to get you out of that horrible place. I give you my word I never thought of anything else. But—”

Her sweet eyes had fallen. There were tears on her lashes. Claire was dead to him, so what else mattered? Better be true to the living than to the dead!

“——but I do now!” he cried through his teeth. “Yes, Peggy, I mean it now! I hate such trickery, I’ll have no hand in it. I applied for a wife, and by the Lord I’ll marry her too—if—why—”

She had withdrawn her arm, and was shaking her bent black head.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE SHIP COMES IN

September finished on its sweetest note: a mild breeze blowing off the South Pacific, a temperate sun in a spotless sky, a harbour fretted with waves like azure shells, and winding among shores still green and wholesome from a winter’s rains. It was a Sunday, too, and round the woody headlands, and across the dark-blue inlets, came the sound of bells for afternoon church. Tom lay on his back, his head beneath a Norfolk Island pine, his heels in the warm sand at the water’s edge. His eyes were closed; but he was listening to the bells.

He fancied the sound as fourteen thousand miles away: for so had he lain and listened amid the Suffolk rabbit-warrens on summer Sundays when his place was in the cool dark rectory pew. His spirit was in Suffolk now. Then the bells stopped. Then he lay very still; and when he turned he half expected his back to smart and his legs to jingle. Once more he was a felon in a felon’s country; it was that despite sun and waves and soft white sand; and felon was his name no less for this his unmerited ease. As he looked across the bay a black fin broke the blue and made an allegory with a single smudge: even as those sweet waters teemed with sharks, so the fair land that locked them was rank and rotten with intestine horror and cruelty and corruption.

Fourteen thousand miles! The distance was brought home to Tom by being printed on the chart, beneath an ideal course, in small type which the little Rosamund ​was sailing over at that moment. It set him thinking of Claire, but the thoughts had no form and little sting. Not even yet could he think or feel acutely: a bundle of dead nerves and clouded brains, he could but ache and work, or ache and bask as he was doing now.

An odd number of “The Pickwick Papers” had found its way to the bungalow, and now lay in the sand beside Tom; he had finished it, to his sorrow, before the bells began. Presently up came Daintree with the dog that still followed him to every haunt but his study. He carried his camp-stool and an armful of books; and Tom’s heart sank; their taste in literature differing terribly, though, of the two, only one held himself qualified to judge. The judge glanced at the green cover in the sand, much as he would have favoured a mountebank at a fair, with insolent nostrils and a pitying eye for those who smiled. He opened his Byron and read a canto of “Lara,” aloud and admirably, but Tom nearly fell asleep, and was accused of having no soul for poetry. “Or for anything else,” Tom reminded the reader, who shut the book with an offended snap, but opened another next minute.

“Perhaps,” said Daintree, “you prefer this sort of thing. I shouldn’t wonder!”

And he read:—

“Oh! that ’twere possible,
After long grief and pain;
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!

“When I was wont to meet her
In the silent woody places
Of the land that gave me birth,

​

We stood tranced in long embraces.
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter,
Than anything on earth.

“A shadow flits before me—
Not thou, but like to thee,
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.”

When Daintree began, Tom’s eyes had been swimming lazily about the bay; but the first quatrain brought them at a bound to the reader’s face, and now he was hanging upon every word. Line after line rang through him like a trumpet-call—waking old echoes—stirring and stabbing him—until the whole man tingled with the rushing of long-stagnant blood. And now came stanzas that went no deeper than the ear, while those three ran their course through every vein. Yet when he next caught up the thread it was his own soul still speaking—the very story was now his own.

“Alas! for her that met me,
That heard me softly call—
Came glimmering thro’ the laurels
At the quiet even fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.”

He had turned his head: a blue mist hid the world, but through it shone a poignant vision of Claire Harding—among the Winwood fir-trees—in the autumn evenings long ago. … And this is how the tears came back into Tom Erichsen’s eyes, to show him that his soul had lived through a night’s bushranging and four months of Major Honeybone’s iron-gang,

​Daintree looked on with a jealous scorn. That a few stray verses in the “Annual Register” should put fire and water in eyes which the combined Hours of Exile and of Idleness sometimes left in such a very different state! It was a galling thought, and it showed itself in such black looks that Tom was constrained to cut his first heartfelt outburst very short indeed. So he hastily added that the poem appealed to him particularly—he need not explain why.

“I see,” said Daintree. “Not altogether on its merits, eh? I’m glad to hear it;” and his face lightened a little.

“I don’t know,” said Tom humbly; “it was on its merits, I think. Surely it must appeal to every miserable man. Oh, it’s all, all there—in such words! Come, sir, don’t you think it fine yourself?”

“Fine,” said Daintree, “is a word which the critic does not employ unadvisedly. Your fine poem is not spasmodic: it takes a metre and sticks to it—as I do, for example, and as Byron did. You don’t catch me—or Byron—writing poems with no two stanzas alike in form! No, Thomas, the verdict is not ‘fine’; but that the lines have a certain merit I don’t deny.”

“Who wrote them?” asked Tom after a pause.

“His name is Tennyson,” replied the poet. “You have never heard it before, I daresay, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you were never to hear it again. There were fair things in his last book, but, upon the whole, I am afraid the production you so admire may be taken as representing his high-water mark—which is a sufficient commentary upon the rest. I understand, however, that he is a very young man, so we must give him a chance. When he is my age he may do very much ​better, if he perseveres, as I have done. Now, my notion of treating such a theme,” said Daintree, “you have heard before, but you shall hear it again.”

And with that he drew “Hours of Exile” from his pocket, and read with ineffable unction one of the longest sets of “Stanzas to Clarinda”; while the terrier gazed up at him with eyes of devoted sympathy and admiration; and Tom fed his upon feathery emerald branches and a turquoise sky, as he reluctantly decided that the kindest of men was in some respects the most egregious also. Suddenly—to his horror—the reading stopped. He had been caught not attending! He lowered his eyes, and they fell upon the snowy wings of a full-rigged ship just clearing the woody eastern point of the bay, and sailing slowly and majestically on.

Both men sprang to the water’s edge. Daintree’s book lay in the sand. The ship was now clear of the point—standing to the north of Shark Island, with the light sea-breeze upon her counter—a noble vessel of six hundred tons, flying the red ensign at her peak.

Not a word passed at the water’s edge; but it was Tom who led the rush to the bungalow, who fetched Daintree’s immense spy-glass, with the flags of all nations let into the leather, and who bared the lenses before putting it in his master’s shaking hands.

“How many days are they out?” asked Daintree, aiming wildly with the glass.

“Ninety-nine.”

“She could never do it!”

“It’s been done before.”

“Oh, no, no; this must be some other ship. Steady the glass for me. I can’t get focus. There—now! Yes! I can see her people, but I can’t read her name!”

​“Let me try, sir.”

“Here, then.”

Tom tried and gave it up.

“To Piper’s Point!” he cried. “She’ll pass there much closer!” And again he led the way, with Daintree thundering close behind, and the terrier barking happily at their heels.

Along the shore they raced, the little bay on their right, then across the promontory diagonally, and out at its western point, panting, trembling, streaming with perspiration, but in time: her bowsprit was sticking out behind the island, and they were there to see her nose follow, with the foam curling under it like a white moustache.

Tom had the telescope, focussed still, and he handed it to Daintree without a word; but the one concerned was trembling so violently, the ship jumped right and left, and Tom had to try again. He was steady enough. What was it to him? She was only half a mile off now, and the first thing he saw was a frock fluttering on the poop.

“Now I have it!” he muttered. “The sun’s on the letters: one, two, three—yes, there are eight! R—o—”

He lowered the glass and held out his hand.

“I congratulate you from my heart: the Rosamund it is, and I think that with the glass you may find the young lady herself upon the poop.”

It was Tom who led the cheers a moment later.

“I sha’n’t be there to meet them,” moaned Daintree as they were running back. “Ninety-nine days—ninety-nine days!”

“They’re not doing four knots; they’re shortening ​sail; you’ll see the Cove as soon as they do. Even if you don’t, they won’t land at once.”

“Suppose they did!”

“They won’t; we’ll put to in five minutes.”

Tom was the cheery one, the one with his wits about him; but then it was nothing to Tom. He would not go in with the curricle, though Daintree was as bent as a flurried man could be upon having the livery and the cockade in waiting on the quay. Tom, however, pointed out that the two ladies, their maid, and the driver were all the curricle could possibly hold; also that there was more to do at the bungalow than the other realised; but he promised to receive them in all his buttons, and in less than ten minutes the dazed man started both horses at a gallop down the Point Piper Road.

Tom heard him rattle out of earshot among the trees without audible mishap. He then ran back to the house, where Mrs. Fawcett was already beside herself in the kitchen; but Peggy had paused on the verandah with an anxious face.

“’Tis you should be wid ’m, Tom,” said she reproachfully.

“There wasn’t room, Peggy.”

“Room enough the one way. I take shame o’ ye for lettin’ the masther go alone in his haste.”

“Why?”

“’Tis thrown out an’ kilt he may be, on the way to meet his lady!”

“God forbid!” cried Tom—and the words came back to him next day.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE BRIDE-ELECT

Tom had done well to stay behind: there was so much to make ready that none of the others knew where to begin until he showed them. At his best in most emergencies, he was resolved to strain every nerve in this one, and so perhaps show some little gratitude at last. The opportunity was unique. Tom seized it with characteristic ardour.

He began by putting Mrs. Fawcett on her mettle; invented the dinner for her, and got old Fawcett out of his wife’s way by sending him to a neighbouring nursery for the asparagus and the green peas. Peggy he set to work to make the beds, while he himself gathered flowers for the table, flowers for the ladies’ rooms, flowers for the verandah upon which the bride must tread. The new flag, bought for this day, had never been unpacked. It was soon flying bravely from the flag-staff on the lawn. And by five o’clock Tom had his table exquisitely laid. But it was nearly seven before the curricle lamps shone through the open gate, and the horses swept up to the verandah, where Tom stood in ardent readiness.

He had spent the interim in arraying himself most carefully in all his menial finery—in shaving for the second time that day—in laying out his master’s evening clothes—in gathering the books which had been left upon the shore—in reading and re-reading the poem that expressed his case—in talking to Peggy, and in thinking of Claire.

​The whole situation put him sadly in mind of Claire; but he was not thinking of her as the horses trotted up—he had forgotten all about her when he heard her voice. Next moment the curricle bridged the stream of lamp-light issuing from the hall. And Tom stood among the roses he had strewn, silhouetted against the doorway, without moving hand or foot, or once lifting his unseen gaze from Claire Harding’s face.

What followed seemed to be happening to another man. Daintree cried to him, and he helped the ladies to get down—he touched her hand. Their eyes never met. Daintree jumped down and led Claire on his arm through the roses. Fawcett came up, the curricle was gone, and Tom stood alone in the drive, watching the ladies go upstairs within, followed by their maid and Daintree; and after that he stood watching the staircase until Daintree ran down it and had him by both hands.

“You dear good fellow—you have thought of everything!” he cried. “You couldn’t have done more if you’d been the happy man yourself; and I shall never forget it—especially the flowers!”

“Nor I,” cried Tom bitterly.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“You might have told me who it was, sir! I recognised Miss Harding at once; her family used to come to our village for the shooting, and her father was my father’s enemy. It’s hard for me to meet her like this after that! I’d have run away if I’d known!”

“Precisely why I didn’t tell you,” rejoined Daintree triumphantly. “Come, come, my good fellow, I know all about the relations between the two families, and you mustn’t flatter yourself that Miss Harding will ​remember you. You’ve altered considerably, for one thing; and I dropped your surname on purpose to spare you any such recognition. Miss Harding won’t know you from Adam.”

“I would rather not wait upon her, all the same.”

Daintree showed his teeth.

“Not wait upon the lady who is to be my wife and your mistress? You dare to say that to my face? Let me find you at your post when I come downstairs—or take care!”

And he stood a moment at the door, with the most significant and malignant expression; after which he went upstairs to dress, leaving Tom to regret, for the first time, his impulsive confession of complicity in the Castle Sullivan outrage, and to reflect upon the many sides of the man whom Claire Harding had come out from England to marry. Memories lashed him by the score. He had seen how the tyrant could treat his servants and his dog; he had pitied the bride in the abstract; and was it to be Claire Harding, and was he to stand there and see them married?

His head was in a whirl of conflicting emotions and anxieties. Still stunned by the mere shock of seeing her whom he had never thought to see again, in that outlandish place, and all but another man’s bride, he was faced by an immediate dilemma which called for instantaneous decision. If Claire were to recognise him at dinner, then she was pretty certain to betray a secret which Daintree, on the other hand, was almost as certain to guess if his servant absented himself after what had just passed. Well, Claire knew best why she had made a secret where none was necessary; but if more trouble was to come of it, let him be there to take her part. ​Let him be there for ever, to watch over her in those passionate hands! And Tom found himself mechanically lighting the candles on the dinner-table, and lowering the shades to lessen the chance of his face being seen.

While he was so engaged the inner door opened, and Tom and Claire stood face to face.

Her eyes were great with horror: she shut the door behind her, and then stood close against it, shrinking from him to whom she once had clung.

“I can’t bear it,” she gasped. “I must either speak to you or go mad! Yes, yes, I know we may be caught—I can’t help that! Tell me quickly: did you know who I was before I came?”

“No, indeed!”

“Is it by accident that you are his servant?”

“No; he sought me out. So you knew me again, Claire!”

“What did you say? Never call me that again. Of course I knew you! How could I forget you, after all you have made me suffer? If I only could!”

The cruelty of this speech struck him dumb: he drew himself up and grimly challenged her with his eye. Her sufferings, indeed! What had she suffered? She was on the point of marrying a rich man; no doubt it was distressing to her to encounter him again at that juncture; his lip curled at such distress.

She read his thoughts to the letter. “You think I have not suffered!” she cried in a low voice. “You little know; but this is the last straw—the punishment I so richly deserve! Mr. Daintree saved your life. You knew that, of course? But I don’t think you know why he did it: it was because I asked him—it was for my sake!”

​“You?” he said hoarsely. “I see now—I see! I might have guessed it long ago!”

“He wanted to do something for me,” she continued in a choking voice; “I let him do that. I deceived him—to save your life. I am here—because I deceived him!”

He thought he had seen everything; he had not, but he was beginning to, now. Good heavens! why was his heart beating so fast? It ought to bleed instead: here was the girl he loved, and upstairs was the man he had reason to love better still; and they were going to marry—like that. He tried to forget, to think only of what Claire had done for him.

“God bless you!” he murmured. “He has saved my life twice over, and much more than my life. And I owe it all to one brave girl who believed in me, and made him believe in me, when all the world—”

“Stop!” she cried. “I never believed in you at all.”

“What?”

“I was—sorry for you.”

“You believed me guilty—even when you tried to save my life?”

“Of manslaughter—yes!”

“Let us split no hairs! You think—I did it—still?”

“I can think nothing else.”

In the dead silence following these words the servant heard his master stamping into evening dress overhead; he felt his own crested buttons glittering in the candle-light that shone upon the table he had set so beautifully for the bride; and, as she tossed back the ringlets that he knew so well, and repeated with unflinching eyes what she had told him in so many candid words, all that had distracted him up to this moment ceased to do ​so any more. Her coming was nothing to him now. Her errand was nothing; she was welcome to marry the next day. But believe in his innocence she must and should: injustice from her was the last bitterness, the crowning wrong, the one intolerable misery which absorbed all that had gone before.

Something of this he showed her in his bitter, proud, inexorable look; then suddenly he retreated to the open French windows.

“You are going?” she cried. “I might have known; you were always—generous!”

“I am not now. I hear my master on the stairs.”

“You are not going altogether?”

“Certainly not at present.”

“When, when?” she cried below her breath.

“When you do me common justice.”

Daintree had gone into the wrong room. The girl ran recklessly to the window.

“Tom!”

“Miss Harding?”

“Will you swear—to me—that you are innocent?”

But Tom was gone. She heard him treading viciously in the dark verandah. A moment later Daintree found her deeply engrossed before the chart. She wanted to know what the ship meant; he told her in a tender whisper.

“What a beautiful idea!”

“Well, it wasn’t mine.”

“Whose was it?”

“My servant’s; he made her, and he moved her on each day. You would have said he was the lucky fellow himself!”

CHAPTER XXXV

A MEDDLER

The breeze had freshened: there were white wisps in the blue above, and tiny crests upon the blue below. It was early morning; and Tom, having waited admirably overnight, was setting the breakfast-table when his master came in glowing from the morning dip. As a rule they bathed together; this exception was their first. They had not spoken since the previous evening. But here was Daintree in a glow from more causes than salt water and fresh air; and a glance told the other that he was forgiven.

“Well, Thomas, will you listen to me another time? Neither lady has the slightest idea who you are!”

“I am thankful to hear you say so,” said Tom, laying the knives.

“Lady Starkie never set eyes on you before. I feel certain that Miss Harding doesn’t know you from Adam. Don’t you think it was rather vain of you to imagine that she would?”

“I was afraid of it, sir,” said Tom. “That was all.”

“And very natural too,” said his master kindly. “I quite enter into your embarrassment, and only fear I said more than I meant in the heat of the moment last night. You must forgive me, Thomas; it was unpleasant for you, I admit; but you won’t mind another day of it, will you? One more day will end it—for the present!”

The swarthy countenance was more radiant than ever. Tom was nonplussed.

​“Only one more day?”

“For the present,” repeated Daintree; “the ladies return to Sydney this afternoon. They go to the Pulteney. Shall I tell you why—shall I tell you why?”

And now one man was on fire, but the other felt a chill run down him as he nodded his head; he could not speak.

“Because it’s to be at once!” cried Daintree, beside himself with joy. “Because a special licence is to be had by paying for it—so why on earth should we wait for banns? My boy, we shall be married by the end of the week. Only think of it! I can’t believe it myself; it’s weeks sooner than I dared to hope. But women are all alike! The very best of ’em, Thomas, will take you by surprise if they can. What do you think? I’d tell this to no other living man: when I met her on board no day was too distant, and before we said good-night it couldn’t be too soon!”

The fine eyes glistened, the deep voice shook; there was no doubt about this man’s love. But Tom was thinking of his darker side, and it had never seemed so dark before, for never before had he allowed himself to dwell upon it without shame. Now this was a duty; the point of view was changed; and the regrettable in Tom’s benefactor became the intolerable in Claire’s husband. Could she be happy with so dangerous a combination of the spoilt child and the unscrupulous tyrant? Would she be safe? Tom sweated with the thought; it was horribly entangled with that of his debt to Daintree. Yet for all that was in his heart, the fitting and conventional speech passed his lips, and he found himself shaking the other by the hand.

“Congratulate me?” cried Daintree “I should think ​you did! You have only to see her to know how happy she will make me. She is a sweet, true, unselfish girl; she has beauty and goodness and strong common-sense; she can appreciate and admire and understand—she is the poet’s ideal! I have been longing for her all my life. And then her manner! She will be a leader of society when I come to my own. Yes, Thomas, you may well congratulate me: she is going to make me the very happiest of men! I can see her now—friend of the wits—patroness of all the arts—gracious queen of an ideal salon—when the exile returns to his own!”

And doubtless he could also see himself—as Tom could see him—swelling with happiness and pride and satisfaction. Her happiness he appeared to take for granted; it might be unfair to say that he never thought of it at all; but he very seldom spoke of it, even to Claire.

Tom was in and out at breakfast; he contrived to be out as much as possible. Her face tortured him: he saw marks like bruises beneath the lustrous eyes that never looked his way. He noted the nervous effort of her conversation while he was present. But after breakfast, when he must have met her face to face on the verandah, she turned her back upon him in a manner not only pointed but barbed. And for a while his compassion deserted him altogether.

Claire was indeed not herself; her indisposition became more and more transparent, and when she ultimately confessed to a perfectly sleepless night, Daintree put it down to her great happiness, and was the first to insist that she should “run away and rest” till luncheon. Lady Starkie, on the other hand, made herself extremely comfortable, quite doting on the harbour and Rose Bay, while she declared that she had seldom felt ​better in her life. Nevertheless, when her host began reading her his poems, a faintness overcame the lady before he had got very far. It was quite inexplicable, and most disappointing; but she feared that both Claire and herself were still suffering from the effects of the atrocious table on board that horrible ship. So Lady Starkie followed Claire upstairs—with the poems—which she took care to leave there when she came down again.

It was a little hard on Daintree; but he was now much too happy to be readily depressed or vexed. His rampant spirits sought relief in activity, and he galloped off to Sydney to secure rooms at the Pulteney Hotel.

Tom was meantime behind the scenes. So was Peggy O’Brien. And already those keen Irish eyes had seen more than he thought, for hopeless love had fitted them with strong lenses, even as his triumphant suit had blinded her master to every passion but his own. The girl had long divined that some other woman stood between herself and Tom. And there were more reasons than might appear for her instantly pouncing upon Miss Harding as the one.

Peggy was sure that Tom and Daintree must have known each other in England; or why were they more like brothers than master and man? Tom would not tell her, and the Fawcetts could not. So Peggy set them down as two old friends; and what if the friends had loved the same woman? The idea occurred to her when she saw Tom manipulating the cork ship and so zealously preparing for the bride. It was then an idea only; it became a suspicion on the evening of the bride’s arrival; and Claire was not the only young woman who lay awake all that night.

​The other had been transported for a comparatively venial offence, and had come through the thick of her ordeal a better woman than most; she is not put forward as an average specimen of her sex and kind in that Colony and at that time. The Irishwomen were almost invariably the best of a deplorable lot, and Peggy was certainly not the worst of the Irishwomen. But there was evil in her, and passion was to bring it out, as it had already brought out the good. A callous man she could bear with and wait for so long as he was callous and cold to all. But to see and hear him sighing for another woman—and that other woman there on the spot—was to lash a patient and single-hearted devotion into tumults of jealousy and bitter rage.

The thing galled her while it was still a suspicion. It maddened her when she knew it for a fact. And that was when, in the same half-minute, she met Claire on the stairs, in tears, and saw Tom in his pantry with his head clasped tight between his hands. Peggy stole away without a word, and there was mischief in every noiseless step she took.

Her first thought was to tell Daintree. It she dismissed on consideration, and tried making friends with the ladies’ maid, in order to acquire information. This young woman, however, could only talk of the fourth officer aboard the Rosamund, and it took Peggy half an hour to discover that she had never even seen Miss Harding before the voyage. So she knew nothing; and half the morning was gone; but Peggy was all the more determined to learn everything before the visitors left.

The master’s departure on horseback at last inspired the way. Tom in the pantry was still listening to the clattering hoofs when Peggy opened the door.

​“Oh, Tom, the masther would like ye to clane out the boat for’m when ye can find the time.”

“Did he say so, Peggy?”

“Sure, he tould me not to tell ye, wid all the extra work ye’ve got; but he only wished it could be done.”

“Then I’ll set to work this minute.”

“An’ ye won’t be tellin’ ’m I tould ye?”

“No, I’ll take all the credit if you like,” said Tom, in a voice and with a face which he took no pains to discipline for Peggy’s benefit. Both supported her theory and hardened her in her plot. And as he reached the boat-shed she was knocking at Miss Harding’s door.

“Askin’ yer pardon, miss, I think I know what would be betther for you than lyin’ down up here!”

“What is that?”

“Lyin’ in a hammock by the say.”

“It sounds pleasant. Thank you very much; but I think I’ll stay where I am.”

“Sure, ye’d find one in the boat-shed, an’ it’s all the good the air would do ye!”

“You are very kind,” said Claire wearily; “but who would put the hammock up?”

“Masther’s gone to Sydney,” said Peggy reflectively, “and he won’t have me meddlin’ wid such things. Wait till I tell ye, miss! Go this minute, an’ you’ll find Thomas in the boat-shed clanin’ the boat; he’ll have ’t up in a twinkle!”

“Well, I’ll see.”

Claire had coloured.

“Will I tell ’m, miss?”

“No! I’ll see. I think I would rather be where I am.”

​Peggy withdrew. In three minutes she heard the young lady coming downstairs; in two more she was herself outside the shed, crouching between timber and shrubs and sand and sky.

CHAPTER XXXVI

SIDE-LIGHTS

“You won’t condescend?” said a scornful voice.

“Since you have made up your mind, why should I?”

“It is only your word that I ask: your solemn word to me that you are innocent.”

“If you don’t believe in me, what’s the use of giving you my solemn word? I can’t prove it, and never could; the evidence was too strong.”

“It would have been stronger still—”

The voice stopped short.

“Well?”

“If I had told them all you said to me—that very night—that very hour!”

The voice was no longer scornful. Even to Peggy it seemed to falter and to tremble with the pent-up agony of years. But Tom’s tone did not change.

“I know that,” he said bitterly. “I have always known that you had more reason than anybody in the world to think me guilty. Yet I would rather you had thought me innocent and let me die than saved my life to show me what you still think after all these months. My cup has been pretty full, but that’s the bitterest drop!”

​“And still you won’t deny it,” persisted the girl. “I am ready to take your word—yet you will not give it.”

“What’s the use?” he asked. “What difference could it make—even supposing you believed me?”

“All the difference to me,” was the quick but low reply; “it would alter everything —everything. Can’t you see that it must?”

“No; it is too late to alter anything at all.”

Yet his voice shook in its turn.

“Too late? Too late?” cried the girl wildly. “Nothing is too late—if you are innocent. Speak, Tom! Why don’t you speak? Oh, Tom, it would alter all our lives … yet you will not speak!”

“Because I cannot!” he cried out. “Because I—I am not an innocent man. I am not—I am not—I am not! And now leave me; leave me, I say, for God’s sake! Never you pity me again!”

Almost from a shout his voice died down to a whisper; the last words were hardly audible outside. But they were followed by a silence so heavy that Peggy O’Brien heard herself breathing, and thought she must be heard within. And then came the sound of light, unsteady steps retreating; and nothing more; not another sound within.

The silence appalled Peggy. At last, when she could no longer bear it, she crept over the soft sand to the mouth of the shed, and peered round the corner. He was standing within as the other woman had left him—he had never stirred. His open hands were still extended in some unfinished gesture. A glimmer of sunshine glanced off the waters and pointed the cruel contrast between the lined face and the yellow hair thrown proudly back from it: the one so aged, the other ​so boyish. And his eyes—they seemed still to be pouring tenderness and strength upon the other woman—they never saw this one at all.

She stole away, loving him more than ever—but must not the other one too? She had seen the same look—had won it—but his crime made a difference to her. To Peggy it made none: she neither knew nor cared what it was, and there lay her slight advantage. It was too slight. She loved him, but so must the other. Her love lay near to hate; she would see if she could not push the other woman’s nearer yet.

She reached the house, and nobody was in the way. Lady Starkie was writing letters in the breakfast-room. Peggy was soon listening at the other woman’s door—listening to her sobs. She compressed her lips and nodded to herself with splendid confidence. At length there fell a silence, in which Peggy knocked and entered.

“I beg pardon, miss, but was Thomas not in the boat-shed? It’s sorry I am if I sent ye on a fool’s errand—savin’ your presence, miss!”

“No; he was there.”

“An’ did he refuse ye?”

“No—I—changed my mind.”

“Glory be to God, miss. ’Tis meself would let ’m know ’t if he gave any of his sauce to the masther’s lady. I’d have no more to do wid ’m at all!”

Claire turned pale.

“You would have no more to do with him?” said she very slowly. “I don’t understand you.”

“Sure, an’ how would you? He wouldn’t be afther tellin’ a lady like you.”

“Telling me what, my good girl?” She was trembling now.

​“He came to the factory last week, miss; ye’ll niver guess why—to choose a wife!”

“A wife!”

“An’ it’s me he chose … you ask the masther when he comes back!”

The master came back in time for lunch. He found Claire on the verandah, with a white face and an angry eye, loudly declaring she felt another being.

Tom heard and saw her, and waited infamously for the first time. He could not understand it at all. She had left the boat-shed with a very different mien. What could she have found out since then? That he had purposely misled her for her own good? That was impossible. Yet he knew so well from her proud, averted face that Claire had discovered something fresh against him. Whatever that discovery might be, however, it was destined not to be her last that day.

They were still at luncheon when Peggy burst into the room.

“Nat Sullivan an’ the thraps!” she gasped. “It’s afther Tom they are, an’ I tould ’m he absconded last night. Oh, sir, say that same, for Ginger’s there too, an’ there’s the blood in their eyes!”

Here was a bombshell, from the least expected quarter, at the least expected time. Tom felt the blood rush to his face—draining his heart—but he stood his ground until Daintree ordered him out of the way of the windows. Claire sat motionless. Lady Starkie was less calm. But Daintree rose up from the table, with perfect but ostentatious sangfroid, and he patted Peggy on the back as a party of horsemen rode in front of the verandah.

“Quite right, my girl!” cried he. “They shall not ​lay a finger on him, never you fear. He has me at his back, and so have you.” With that he strutted through the French windows, flourishing his napkin and quite delighted at the prospect of a little simultaneous display of power, generosity and laudable cunning, before so select an audience.

“Sorry to trouble you, sir,” said a voice, “but I believe you have an assigned convict here of the name of Thomas Erichsen?”

“What name?” cried Lady Starkie.

“Hush, aunt!” whispered Claire.

“I have not,” said Daintree.

“You have not?” roared Nat Sullivan himself.

“I have not,” repeated Daintree blandly. “I had—but he has absconded from my service.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Any notion where he went?”

“Not the least.”

“And you don’t much care, eh?”

“Not a bit. May I ask a question in my turn?”

“Surely, sir.”

“Do you want him for the Castle Sullivan business?”

“We do.”

“I thought so. I’ve heard the idea. But who will you get to swear to him as having been there?”

“This man here,” said Nat. And Tom, in the background, listened curiously; he was cool enough now, and his air shameless; it was assumed for Claire’s benefit.

“I’m not so sure,” said the voice of Ginger, in a rather dejected tone.

“You were sure enough in your cups!”

“That’s another thing.”

​“Well,” said the constable, “he’s left this, anyhow. No use our wasting any more time here, Mr. Sullivan. Good morning, sir. I’m afraid he’s given us the slip again.”

“But not for long,” cried Nat. “I mean to catch him and to hang him yet!”

They had ridden away. Daintree had re-entered the room, puffed up and smiling. Tom also had a kind of smile, and Peggy was gazing at him with shining eyes, when Claire rose from the table and swept out of the room without a word.

Daintree looked at Lady Starkie in dismay, and hastily ordered the servants to withdraw. Her ladyship rose also.

“Can you wonder at it?” she cried.

“At what?”

“Your bride disliking to be waited on by convicts. And—and—did I understand that young man’s name was Erichsen?”

“Yes.”

“The murderer of Captain Blaydes?”

“No.”

“Who then?”

“His reputed murderer. He is an innocent man. You know I thought so at the time; you know, I believe, how I backed my opinion to the tune of several hundreds? I’m backing it still, Lady Starkie, I’m backing it still—that’s all.” It was not. He went on to tell of all that Erichsen had gone through, to his knowledge, in the settlement; how he was trying, in his small way, to make up to the poor fellow for the shocking injustice of his fate; and yet how even now the unlucky wretch went in danger of his neck, as Lady ​Starkie had seen for herself, and all for siding with some bushrangers under circumstances of extraordinary compulsion and provocation combined. Of all this James Daintree spoke so feelingly, and with such an obviously earnest purpose, that Lady Starkie was quite moved, and undertook to use her influence with Claire in the matter of the convict servants.

But it was of no avail.

Daintree drove the ladies into Sydney, and drove back alone late at night. Tom awaited him, and as they walked from the stables to the house, the master’s arm ran affectionately through that of the man.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “it grieves me more than I can say, but I cannot go against my young wife where there is apparent right upon her side. She will have no convicts in her house. You and I will be compelled to part.”

“It was bound to come,” was Tom’s reply. “I am only thankful it didn’t come before you gave me back a little of what I have lost. I shall be grateful to you till my dying hour!”

“Oh, but I’ve not done with you yet! I must have you out of this country by hook or crook—that I’m bent upon. That brute Sullivan is actually at the Pulteney. It seems his overseer never meant to split on you, for some reason; but he did so when drunk, and now the other holds him to it. Until we spirit you out of the country you’ll never be safe.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Tom. “I would rather stay where I am and take my chance.”

He was thinking of Daintree and his wife; even through his gratitude he was thinking of that darker side.

CHAPTER XXXVII

FARM COVE

That was a long week at the bungalow; it was to culminate at St. Philip’s Church in Sydney on the Saturday morning. The license was bought; the bridegroom carried the ring in his pocket; everything was ready but a best man. And here another peculiarity stood out: there was no best man to be had. As in London so in New South Wales: this baronet’s son and heir, this man of blood and means and literary feats, was unbeloved in spite of all. Claire and her aunt had been absolutely the only guests at the bungalow in all Tom’s time there. Nor was it because Daintree had never made a friend in the settlement; it was because he had never kept one in any quarter of the globe.

Meanwhile the ladies came to Rose Bay no more. The happy man went to them instead, and would stop till midnight, to gallop home by starlight and pour out his happiness to Tom until the harbour turned from jet to polished steel; and twice the steel was silver, and once the silver was flaming gold before the poet would hold his peace. It was a long week, but the nights went quicker than the days. Daintree had never been a better companion than in those long, confidential, starlit talks. They were not exclusively on the one subject. Tom learnt at last how the murder had affected the party at Avenue Lodge, and one whole night and day he never closed an eye for thinking of two men in two new and startling lights. They were the living man Harding, and the dead man Blaydes; the first ​haunted Tom the longer; why had he insisted on dragging Daintree to the trial?

The days were lengthened by Peggy in the kitchen with her kind, uninjured looks, and the unfailing, friendly, amiable word that made him feel the meanest of men. The girl could be an angel when she had him, with all his coldness, to herself. He never suspected what she had been from the Sunday night to the Monday afternoon. And now they were both under notice to leave.

“If only you two would make up your minds to marry!” said Daintree to Tom. “I have you both on my mind; but I could provide for the two of you at one stroke as a married couple. It has long been my wish to start a model farm up country, and you and Peggy would certainly make model managers! Nor is my wife likely to retain all the prejudices of Miss Harding; in fact, I still entertain hopes of our all being stanch friends all our lives.” But Tom shook his head even more decidedly than he had shaken it while the little Rosamund was pricking her way across the chart.

On the Friday—the same breeze holding good all the week—Daintree decided to sail round to Sydney instead of driving. He had a solid cheque to cash for the wedding-trip, and the Point Piper Road was no route for a pocketful of money and a life at its very highest value. Tom asked if Nat Sullivan was still in Sydney, and was told that he had drunk himself prostrate at the Pulteney, whereupon Tom volunteered for the voyage, and so escaped Peggy for one afternoon. To make safety doubly safe, however, they ran into Farm Cove, and Tom and the dog were to wait in the Domain while Daintree went to the bank and called at the hotel.

​It was then three o’clock, and Daintree was to be at least two hours gone; but he returned in less than one, bringing Claire with him for a sail. Tom’s surprise at seeing her was less than that of the girl at sight of him; the indignation was altogether on her side, and sufficiently perceptible, in spite of all Claire’s efforts to conceal an inappropriate displeasure. Daintree did not see it—but what they all three missed was the furtive figure which emerged from the trees as the boat put off.

Claire was given the tiller and told simply to obey orders, Daintree took the sheet, and Tom was put into the bows to be out of the way. The sail made a convenient screen; it also prevented Tom from knowing in the least what happened. As a matter of fact, they were just taking the wind—which was by this time fresher than ever—when Daintree’s attention was diverted by an apparition at the water’s edge. It was the man who had followed him through the Domain, and so rapt was the gaze with which Daintree beheld him that he forgot to let the sheet go at the critical instant. Smack came the wind against a sail like the side of a house. “Let go! Let go!” screamed Tom. It was too late. She was gunwale under, the sail lay a moment on the water, drinking it like blotting-paper. Then the saturated canvas sank, and the boat tossed keel upwards within fifty yards of the shore.

Claire sank clear of the wreck, and had the presence of mind to strike out before coming to the surface. And even as the sun lashed her wet eyes, strong hands slid under her arms, and she was being pushed face forward to the shore. The trees were waving in the sun; it was no distance; and Daintree’s dog was swimming happily on ahead. Suddenly, with a piercing yelp, the dog dis​appeared; at the same moment Daintree began splashing vigorously; and when the smooth sand came under Claire’s feet, but a few yards farther on, her knees were too weak to support her weight.

“The happiest moment of my life,” said a deep voice in her ear. “I have saved—”

She turned, and there was Daintree, up to his waist in water, with the drops raining from his face and whiskers, and shaded eyes sweeping the blue. The boat was coming in keel upwards with the tide. The dog and Tom had vanished off the face of the waters.

Daintree dashed in again, and met the wreck as her mast struck bottom. Tom was still struggling underneath her, caught fast in the cordage; his struggles ceased as he was wrenched free; when Daintree got him to land, his mouth and ears were in a froth, and Claire stood by like a woman turned to stone.

A small crowd collected slowly; it did not contain the man who had caused the mischief; the trees had swallowed him once more.

The crowd surrounded Tom and Daintree, who had stripped his servant to the waist, and was sawing the air with the drenched white arms and the helpless, sunburnt hands. Claire stood on the fringe of the crowd, without a clear thought in her head, but in her hand a packet that had fallen at her feet when Tom’s shirt and vest were torn off and hurled aside. The packet was sewn up in dripping oiled silk, as transparent as glass; through it she could read a name she but dimly realised to be her own; and the voices of those jostling her seemed a long way off.

“He’s dead—he’s done for,” said one.

“Give him time, you fool!”

​“Fool yourself! His time’s up.”

“What’ll you bet?”

“A shilling.”

“Done with you.”

Daintree and a boatman were working on and on and on with the white arms that had dried already in the wind and sun. Neither said a word; the next minute must settle it one way or the other.

“Ah!” exclaimed the last speaker.

“What was it?” faltered Claire.

“His eyelids trembled.”

“It was the death-shiver.”

“They’re trembling still!”

“They aren’t!”

“They are; hand over that shilling.”

“He is alive!” said Daintree, looking up. “Has nobody run for brandy?”

Nobody had.

And it was wanted now for two people.

Claire Harding had swooned away.

Daintree had his hands full with the pair of them, but in a little they were both conscious, and able to drive away with him in a hired chaise. They drove to the hotel, forgetting the risk. On the way Tom stretched forth a feeble hand.

“How many more times are you going to save my life?” he asked.

“You saved mine too,” said Claire sadly.

“It is the happiest day of my own,” replied Daintree, without noticing her tone.—“Non cuivis homini—what other bridegroom would have had such luck?”

“Or pluck!” cried Tom.

​“I trust I am not lacking in that quality either,” rejoined the other. “It was nervous work after the way my poor wee dog went. Did you see that, Claire? Poor thing, it was a shark!”

“Yes.” She shuddered.

“But if he will but splash a bit, your man of courage is all right. Do you mind if we drive round by the Herald office? They publish on Monday, but it’s just as well to be in time.”

So the conceit of him overlapped even his heroism. And Claire and Tom sat shivering in their wet clothes, while Daintree in his was several minutes inspiring and all but dictating the paragraph which duly appeared in the Sydney Herald. But during those minutes the pair in the chaise never exchanged a word; and afterwards—in the hotel—not one word.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

TWO FAREWELLS

Daintree was driven home before dusk, for his pocket-book was bloated with moist bank-notes, besides which, Lady Starkie positively refused to have him about the hotel that evening. It was against the rules for bridegrooms as laid down by her ladyship, who dined very solemnly with her niece alone, and got to bed at a reasonable hour for the first time that week. Claire then had their sitting-room to herself, and she drew out the oiled-silk packet which had fallen into her hands that afternoon. It was thin and oblong, like the letter it ​plainly contained. Under the lamp Claire’s name and the address of her old home were still legible beneath the silk, though they no longer stood out as when the skin was wet. And on the reverse side was written very small—

“For pity’s sake forward this.”

When? After his death? Fate had forwarded it before—should she read it or should she not? It was addressed to her, it was hers; should she read, or destroy, or return this letter to its writer—to the criminal who had confessed to her his crime? Some minutes after Claire Harding asked herself this question, she turned up the lamp, and cut the oiled silk open with a pair of scissors. She now saw that the letter had been written some time; yet it was with a strange thrill, a wonderment beginning at the heart, that she read the heading within. It was Newgate, and the date May 29 1837—the blackest day of all her life—the eve of that on which they would have hanged him.

Agitated as she was, however, by these dreadful memories, and touched by the mere fact of his having written to her on that awful Monday, it was the first sentence of his letter that ran into her heart like molten lead. He called himself an innocent man! From the brink of the grave came that lie, that blasphemy, which he had lived to confess to her with his crime! She read on mechanically. And all at once her pain ceased; she was lost and absorbed in the plain, straightforward, circumstantial story into which he plunged without preliminary. He told her everything from the moment they parted at the garden gate. Nothing was left out, nothing extenuated, nothing enlarged or even commented upon by the writer. ​Her heart was beating wildly long before she reached the end of this plain statement She had forgotten all about his confession. This rang true—this rang true.

“Sweetheart,” he went on, “—for I must call you so once more—I cannot tell you how I feel, for I vary from hour to hour. Now and then I feel the murderer they say I am, now and then an abject coward (without the pluck to show it), now and then a sort of Christian martyr! But with God’s help I hope to finish up a man. Do not grieve for the ugly way of it: there’s no disgrace in that, since it’s a mistake, and if there is a God never fear but He will make it up to me one day. Oh, but it is sweet to talk to you again! I used to tell you everything, and so I must until the end. Ah! if only I had been worthy of you I shouldn’t be here! I am punished; when I think of your white soul, and of mine that couldn’t even be its mirror, then I sometimes think that my punishment is not too great. Those are my Christian moods! They don’t live long. The turnkeys are looking through my grating now; they are telling each other what I am at, and coming back and back again to have a peep. My Christianity isn’t proof against that. I say nothing, but I could do the thing I’m going to die for—God help me, I may do it yet! You see how I change! There is only one thing in which I can never change—my grateful love and reverence for the great girl-soul that forgave me and would have given me another chance if this had not happened. Sweetheart, my love for you has grown in prison, it has been my only comfort in this vile place, and it will go with me where I go tomorrow—it will stay with my poor soul through all eternity. Only do not grieve for me, Claire, for I never was worthy of your sweet love. ​I would not leave this behind for you, I would not have you reminded of me for a single day, but for one selfish thing. Sweetheart, it is to make you believe in me. You have not done so yet—why should you? Nobody knows what you know and have so nobly hidden; but for all I said to you, I am innocent; he was alive when I left him; I did give him the receipt, and we shook hands at the end. That is God’s truth. I tell it you with the last words my hand will ever write. I meant to write to the kind fanatic who paid for my defence, and is working still (they tell me) for a reprieve. But now I cannot. If you could find him out, and thank him for me, I should be grateful; but my last words in this life must be to you. God bless you, dear, and give you somebody much better than I ever could have been. Only do know that I never did this thing; and when you realise that, think no more of me, my dear love, but pray tomorrow for the soul of your unworthy boy...”

His signature followed—better written than the rest—a touching effort to “finish up a man.” All the last pages were blurred with the condemned man’s tears; and now, after seventeen months, her tears were raining, raining, on the same paper, on the same words, that bore the blots of his.

This postscript remained—

“Reprieved at the last moment! I shall not send this now—but I hope that it may reach you when I am gone.”

Claire went to the window, and the rings rattled along the rod as she flung the curtains back. The sky swam with stars, her heart yearned for Heaven, and to the ​sweet stars her voice went up in broken and involuntary utterance of her soul’s pain.

“Oh, Tom,” it cried, “if you had died then it would be better now! I should be dead too. We should both be at peace. Oh, Tom, we might be together now!”

The hotel garden lay very still below. It was the back of the house, and now the hour was late. Suddenly there was a movement on the gravel underneath.

“Claire —is it your voice?”

His whispered—it was Tom.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Come up. I want to speak to you.”

“Now?”

“Yes! how is it you are still in the town?”

“I lost something. I have been hunting for it on the beach. I came back to have another look here.”

“I have it. Come straight up to the room you were in this afternoon.”

He appeared to hesitate.

“You —you are not alone?”

But Claire had left the window, and was waiting impatiently at the open door. How long he kept her! It seemed an age before his halting step was heard upon the stairs, while she, on fire to crave his forgiveness, and mindful of nothing else, could not imagine what held him back. Even when he came his eye was timid and his feet slow to cross the threshold: in fact, the inveterate conventionality of the male was not a little fluttered at her receiving him alone, at this hour of the night, and that night her marriage eve. Yet his qualms were entirely on her account. Nor could they quench the inextinguishable love-light in his honest eyes.

As for Claire, however, she forgot everything but the ​cruel wrong she had done the man before her, the sufferings cut so deep upon his bronzed face, and her own new and blinding realisation of his innocence and heroism. For a space she could but stand and gaze upon him with burning eye-balls; then, with the noble unconsciousness of a woman stirred to the soul, she took him by both hands, and drew him into the room, and besought his forgiveness upon her knees, but with his hands still clasped in hers.

Tom released his hands, shut the door nervously, and then almost brusquely asked her what he had to forgive.

“I thought you guilty,” she sobbed. “I said so—and you were innocent all the time! Oh, thank God—”

“Wait,” he interrupted. “How do you know that?”

“What you lost I found. I have it here. Oh, Tom, I have read every word! Oh, why did you not send it at the time? You were innocent—innocent! Can you ever forgive me?”

“Get up,” he said. “You have forgotten something.”

“Nothing,” she answered. “Your marriage has no more to do with it than mine.”

“My marriage! With whom, pray?”

“The wife you applied for—at some factory!”

She could not help her tone: it stung Tom into telling her the facts, and so inadvertently exposing Daintree’s chicanery. He instantly defended it as the accepted course.

“But that’s not what I meant at all,” he added hurriedly. “You must have forgotten what I told you the other day in the boat-shed!”

Claire had indeed forgotten that. The great truth had swallowed up the little lie, but true and false were now as plain to her as day and night. Moreover, she saw the meaning of the false.

​“My hero!” she whispered. “You thought it best that I should never know. And so you said you were not an innocent man.”

“Nor was I,” he faltered. “You soon saw that for yourself. They may hang me yet!”

“And you wouldn’t have me think of you any more,” continued Claire, a spasm of pain crossing her face at his words. “But I will—I will! I’ll think of you till I die: my own hero!”

He fidgeted horribly, looking towards the door. She would compromise herself—she would do herself harm. That was still his first thought; she saw it, and it floated her to the crest of that emotional wave in whose trough he trembled.

“I believed you guilty—may God forgive me!” she cried. “But—shall I tell you something?”

“Well?”

“I loved you all the same!”

“I won’t believe it,” he said at last.

“I did—I know it now.”

“Then forget it!” he cried hoarsely. “For God’s sake, remember nobody but the man you are to marry t-omorrow morning. What? Claire?” He started from her; she had shaken her head. She shook it more passionately for that; but she did not speak. So he began—hardly knowing what he said—but pleading for his best friend—pleading for her honour—pleading for sacred duty as his male eye saw it. She was going to marry a generous and brave man, to whom he owed, not only his life twice over, but any good that was left in him. Yet neither was the other a faultless man, though so generous and so brave, and his one great anchor to good sense and good living was his love for Claire. ​Tom spoke plainly, even eloquently, as he went on. He would have gone on longer, but there was no need. Claire sat meekly weeping; he bent over her—his face wrung with anguish now that hers was hidden—and so took her hand in his for the last time.

“God bless you always,” he whispered in a broken voice; “and make you good to him—and make him good to you!”

She clung passionately to his hand; she held it to her bosom, and looked piteously up into his face. The tears sparkled in her eyes and on her cheeks. Her sweet lips quivered; it was more than man could bear. He fell upon his knees, he threw his arms about her, and for a very little space these two torn hearts beat and sobbed as one.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE MAN IN THE MASK

Themaster was busy at his desk, but there was no rhyming dictionary at his elbow, and the book of synonyms was suffocating under a pile of papers that were stuffed into a drawer as Tom entered guiltily. The clock—an athletic trophy in the form of a kettle-drum—was then striking midnight, and Daintree wheeled round in his chair with the eleventh stroke. The eye nearest the lamp looked wild, but it was his wedding-day, and plainly he was in tremendous spirits.

“Shut the window,” said he. “I have two things to tell you which I don’t want the girl to hear; if her windows are open she might.”

 ​Peggy happened to be listening at the door.

“In the first place,” proceeded Daintree, “tell me frankly and finally whether you mean to marry the girl or not. Yes or no?”

“No, sir; it is impossible.”

“You shall do just exactly what you like. At the same time, she tells me you did ask her!”

“I did. I wronged her in doing so, but she had the sense to refuse me, and I’m not going to wrong her worse by asking her again.”

“That settles it. I’ve found a captain who’s willing to smuggle you over to America for a consideration. All details to be arranged before I leave Sydney to-morrow. Will you go?”

“Will I not! Thank God for the chance!”

“Then that settles that—for the present. You shall be spirited aboard to-morrow night, and by Monday morning you shall have seen the last of New South Wales for ever.”

Peggy crept away from the door. Her mind was made up.

“The other thing’s a trifle,” said Daintree. “A pretty place this New South Wales! I go to the bank and cash a cheque, come in and shove the notes into one of these drawers, and a man breaks into the house and all but into my desk while I am sitting in the next room at my dinner! Look at this—” and he pointed out the marks of a jemmy on the polished mahogany. The circumstance did not appear to excite him in the least. He smiled loftily on Tom’s concern, and at once exaggerated an attitude which had been perfectly genuine before.

“Ah, Thomas,” he remarked, “even you don’t know ​your Sydney yet, or you would be like me, and think nothing of such trifles. I was eating my dinner, as I say, when I heard him at his work; unfortunately I let him hear me; still, I chased him out of that and some way down the road, and could have caught him if I hadn’t preferred to come back and finish my dinner. I played a better knife and fork for the exercise.”

“And you gave chase unarmed?” said Tom.

“To be sure, except with these arms,” responded Daintree with equal truth and bravado, as he tapped an enviable biceps. “Your man of muscle has no business with any other, if he but knew how to use his hands as I do. It would have gone hard with our friend, I promise you, if I had laid hold of him!”

“I wish you had,” said Tom. “The blackguard must have dogged you from the bank, and hung about the Pulteney both times you were there.” Tom paused. His heart was back at the hotel, and his gratitude to the man was once more repelling his jealousy and distrust of the bridegroom, when a second thought sprang from his words. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I wonder whether it was the fellow who turned up on the beach almost at the instant we went down!”

“What!” cried Daintree. “Did you see him?”

“Yes, I caught a glimpse of somebody as we heeled over. Depend upon it that’s our man!”

Daintree turned nasty in a moment.

“Why depend upon it?” he snapped. “Did you see the man’s face? Would you know him again? Oh, you wouldn’t; then let me recommend you not to make a fool of yourself, my good fellow. Nobody but a fool would connect the two men.”

His ill-temper was inexplicable; yet to treat an attempt ​upon his property as a joke, and an inoffensive theory of the attempt as something of an insult, was but in accord with the capricious character of the man. And, indeed, Tom would have gone to bed like a lamb, and thought no more about the matter; but yet another caprice detained him. Daintree would not hear of his going; it was their last night together; they most sit up and talk, and he apologised for what he had said. So they sat up once more, but the conversation languished for the first time on these occasions. Something had unnerved and depressed Tom’s master; he was never himself until the last night of his single life was at an end, and in the first light of dawn a full-rigged ship sailed in just as the Rosamund had done on the previous Sunday afternoon..

“Letters!” he cried. “Letters for my wedding-day! Who knows but what I may get the best of news to crown my joys? What if my wife were never to be Mrs. Daintree at all? Yonder ship may dub me baronet; open a bottle, Thomas, and we will drink to all she brings me!”

Then at last they lay down; but sleep came neither to the happy man nor to his miserable valet; and by ten o’clock the one was helping the other into his wedding garments. A few minutes before the hour the coach arrived which was to take the bridegroom in state to church; a few minutes after, a man was observed rowing in the bay, and Daintree insisted on taking a look at him through his spy-glass. Evidently the rower saw him, for he shot out of sight behind a headland, but not before Daintree had brought his telescope to bear upon the rower; and now the glass joggled between fingers which seemed smitten with an ague; and was lowered from a white face that glistened in the sun.

​“That was the man,” whispered Daintree; “and he’s after me still! I—I didn’t mind last night—I suppose it takes less to turn one queer on one’s wedding morning.” He was struggling in vain against some growing terror. “Brandy, man, brandy!” he gasped, and subsided in a chair.

Tom rushed downstairs for the decanter, and returning found the terrified man fumbling with his pocket-pistol. He tossed off the spirit and handed the pistol to Tom.

“There,” said he, “better withdraw and reload to make sure. Stop, give it back!” He snatched the pistol and fired excitedly through the open window. “That’ll show him I’m armed,” he cried; “now load up again!”

“You are not going armed—”

“With that fiend at my heels? You must take me for a fool!”

“You would be married with a loaded pistol in your pocket, when you yourself said the only arms—”

“Obey me, sirrah!” thundered Daintree. “Do you know that I could hang you like a dog? Yet you dare to argue with me on my wedding morning!”

He seemed beside himself with excitement. Tom went out without a word, and on his return handed back the pocket-pistol with the same air of tacit disapproval. Daintree cocked it and felt the trigger.

“I’ve a good mind to fire through the window again,” he snarled, “to see if you have loaded it; but I’ll trust you, Thomas; you’re the one man in this world I do trust. And now put on your hat and come in with me to Sydney!”

Tom drew back. This was not in the programme; on the contrary, he was to stay and mind the house.

​“Damn the house!” cried Daintree. “The girl can look after the house; your place is at your master’s side, or else you are the foulest ingrate in New South Wales! But you are; I have always known you were; you have only waited for this hour to turn and rend me!”

“You are wrong,” said Tom grimly. “I do not leave your side again.” For the man must be mad: and Tom no longer shirked the ceremony, but for one instant had a mad design himself; the next, his right hand was warmly held.

“Thank God!” cried Daintree in a breaking voice. “I knew you didn’t mean it; no more did I mean anything I said; forgive me, Thomas, and don’t desert me at the last!”

And Tom’s heart sank as it once more softened to the man who was not mad but only unstrung; and again he longed to eschew the church; but he kept his word, and fortune was yet to prove his friend. A mile they had driven when a loud cry broke from Daintree. In his agitation he had forgotten the ring. He burst into tears at the discovery.

“Never mind—never mind!” cried Tom in his oldest rôle. “We can turn back—what, isn’t there time? No, I know it would never do to keep her waiting! Then look here, I’ll run back and gallop in again on your horse; I’ll be there almost as soon as you; and the ring isn’t wanted till quite the end.”

Daintree thanked him through his tears—the first Tom had ever seen in those fiery eyes —and he sped back strangely touched, but strangely comforted too. At least he loved her! The man might be egotistical and vain and overbearing, all three to the verge of lunacy, but that he was marrying for sheer love was even ​more palpable than it had been before. Tears in those eyes! Tears at the thought of losing her for one more day! Then God grant that with Claire at least he might be unselfish, meek and gentle, though an egotist, a coxcomb and a tyrant to all the world beside!

So praying as he ran—forgetful of his own debt to Daintree—for the moment self-forgetting altogether—Tom was at the bungalow gate in time that would not have shamed the bridegroom in his athletic youth. And in the very gateway he stopped dead. He had caught a glimpse of ragged coat-tails disappearing through the study windows; a crazy skiff lay hauled up on the strand.

Tom kicked off his shoes. He made no sound on the verandah, but he wasted some seconds, and heard two drawers burst open as he crept nearer and nearer. He was totally unarmed; his one chance lay in taking the thief by surprise.

The verandah on this side was in deep shadow all the morning. In the cool dusk of the study a masked man was rifling drawer after drawer and tossing the contents right and left. The floor was strewn with papers as Tom leapt across it and hurled himself upon the thief. They crashed to the ground together: the man’s head caught the corner of the bookshelf, and he lay supine, with a mouthful of crumbling teeth grinning horribly below the mask.

His nerveless fingers still clutched a packet of bluish letters half-torn from their wrapper. Tom took them from him, and rose up panting. A moment later they might have heard his shout at Piper’s Point.

All but one letter had slipped from his trembling hand: on the back of that letter a few lines had been scrawled with a lead-pencil.

​It was the Receipt!

Pencilled by Blaydes on the back of a letter, signed by Tom in the moonlit Hampstead fields, and taken by the murderer from his victim’s person, it was neither more nor less than the missing document whose production would have acquitted Erichsen at the Old Bailey. And now after eighteen months, and here on these outlandish shores, it had cast up at his very feet; he held it—held his freedom—in his own trembling hands.

The words spun like midges as the paper rustled and shook. He had to set it on the chimney-piece to read it through:—

“Received from J. Montgomery Blaydes (late Captain, Coldstream Guards) his watch and chain, etc., in settlement of all claims, and in consideration of which I undertake to return pawn-ticket for same to said J. M. Blaydes, Ivy Cottage, West End, within three days from this date.—(Signed) T. Erichsen, April 27th, 1837.”

Words and chirography were as familiar as though he had studied them the night before; the very flourishes were old friends; and the glimmer of a mild London moon seemed still to lurk in the shiny blue paper.

He forgot the wedding-ring, forgot the wedding: he was an innocent man: he could prove it now before all the world, by this incomparable testimony, this inanimate witness that could not lie. That was Tom’s first reflection. His first emotion was a rush of thankfulness, ineffable and unmixed. Curiosity succeeded: how came the receipt here? But as he wondered, as his thoughts flew from the broken-headed robber to his friend Daintree, it was not the bridegroom that they pursued to the ​church, but Tom’s benefactor that they followed back to Avenue Lodge. Did Daintree know who had committed the murder, and was that the secret of his belief in Tom? Inconceivable; but the document? Tom turned it over in his hand, and the address on the missive came uppermost. It began—Nicholas Harding, Esquire, M.P.

This name plunged Tom in a vortex of new suspicions; it neither recalled the bride as such, nor the marriage, nor the ring. Yet the clock stared him in the face, the short hand almost on the eleven, the long hand rapidly overtaking the short. It was ticking loud enough for dead of night; he both saw the time and heard it flying. But he had forgotten his errand: he could prove his innocence at last. Suddenly there was a groan, then a movement behind him, and as he wheeled round the man in the mask sat up.

“Ha!” said Tom. “So it was you who followed my master from the bank, and tried to break into his desk last night! You’ve succeeded a bit too late. My master’s got his money in his pocket—and he isn’t here!”

With these words Tom remembered where his master was, but only for an instant: small eyes were glinting through the mask, and the crumbling teeth showed again in a contemptuous grin.

“I ain’t after ’is money,” said a harsh high voice.

“What then?”

“What you’ve got in your ’and.”

“This!” cried Tom. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Wyeth. I’m a lag, same as you.”

“Let me see your face.”

Again that grin below the mask, ere it was whipped off, and Tom’s eyes lit upon a horrible face horribly disfigured. It was perfectly flat; disease had razed the ​nose to below the level of the sunken cheeks; and the beady eyes seemed more prominent by contrast, as they glittered upon Tom’s visible abhorrence. In an instant, however, the abhorrence changed to recognition, and a great light blinded Tom.

“My God!” he gasped. “The man that did it!”

“Did what?”

“What I’m here for—the murder of Captain Blaydes! It was you who killed him—it was you! I saw you close to the spot that night. Never shall I forget you—and this is the receipt I gave him! I took it just now from your hand!”

“An’ where do yer think I took it from?”

“The dead man’s pocket”

“That there desk!”

In the cool dark study there followed no immediate sound save the importunate ticking of the kettle-drum clock—beating a roll-call to deaf ears. At last Tom said, “Tell me—tell me!” And his voice was very weak; he was leaning heavily on the chimney-piece, and now his elbow hid the time.

Wyeth removed a hand from the back of his head, looked at the blood upon it, and grimly showed it to Tom.

“You’ve been rough with me, you ’ave, when you should ha’ taken me to your ’art; but I will tell you, ’cos I ain’t that much to lose, an’ it may mean my ticket if you stand by me like a true man. Say you’ll do that an’ I’ll tell you every blessed thing!”

“I will stand by you through thick and thin,” said Tom.

The other eyed him for several seconds.

“I do believe you will,” said he. “It’s a bargain ​between true man and true man! Well, then, that night—”

“Stop!” said Tom. “We will have another pair of ears.” He went to the door and called loudly for Peggy. No answer; his voice reverberated through an empty house. He had seen the Fawcetts start for Sydney an hour ago (even now he did not realise why); but Peggy had wilfully deserted; and he was alone on the premises with this hideous ruffian.

“Go on,” said he. “What about that night? I met you not three hundred yards from the stile where the body was found; and you were going that way!”

“I was,” said Wyeth, “an’ when I come near, what d’ye think I heard? A couple of swells having a row; in ’alf a shake it come to blows, an’ I counted five before there was a bit of a thud, and the one who’d been calling out ‘My Gawd—my Gawd!’ ’e shut up, but the other went on saying ‘You devil!’—through ‘is teeth—jes’ like that—until I come up. I keeps quiet and sees one swell take a lot o’ papers outer the other swell’s pocket, when in I steps. You should ha’ seen the one as was pocketin’ the papers! Up he jumps, with a thick stick dripping at the end, and before you can say Jack Robinson ’e ’as me on the conk, an’ that’s the end o’ me!”

“Did you ever see him again?” Tom’s voice rang strange with horror and weariness; he did not want his freedom; he was sick of the life that Daintree had given him back, of the world to which Daintree had restored him. His benefactor! The man filled his mind in that first light only—and in this last!

“Yes, I see him at your trial,” said Wyeth; “but I’m coming to that. Meanwhile I’m only silly, and what do ​I find when I come to? A dead man, a bloody stick, an’ me lyin’ alongside! Nice, wasn’t it? The moon was on ’im, an’ he made me feel nice, I can tell yer. But I soon see it wasn’t robbery; there was that there diamond pin. I boned it, an’ there was some loose silver in his pockets, an’ that come in ’andy too. I took to my ’eels an’ did a slant the way I come, an’ I never see that swell no more till your trial. I thought ’e might be there, an’ ’e was; so the first day I lied in wait for ’im, but the Charles knoo me an’ I got frightened an’ went an’ lost ’im. The next night I lost ’im again—an accident ’appened—an’ I come out ’ere, I dessay in the ship arter you. An’ yesterday I see ’is lordship comin’ outer the Noo South Wales Bank, as bold as brarse! He never seed me till you got afloat, an’ that’s what upset you all. Arter that I dogged ’im, but dursn’t say a word till I found a card or two to shove up my sleeve. So, thinks I, the man who steals papers may steal ’em to keep; we’ll ’ave a look! An’ so it was; an’ now them papers is yours, an’ you’re as good as a free man. You’ll put in a word for that ticket when you git your own free parding? You won’t go an’ round on a pore chap Gawd Almighty ’as rounded on?” And a hand went in front of the ghastly face, with a gesture which would have added pity to repulsion in a harder heart than Tom’s.

“Heaven forbid!” said Tom, from his knees. “You shall have your ticket if this can get it you and I can help.” He was gathering all the smooth blue letters together again, and thinking of an account which Daintree had given him in that very room, that very week, of his own proceedings on the night of the murder. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, jumped on a chair, and ​examined the silver cups on the top of the bookshelf, one by one. There were seven; all were for winning the mile; it was his old distance from Avenue Lodge to the hollow tree in the fields, between the Finchley Road and Haverstock Hill. Tom remembered his master’s anger, inexplicable no longer, on the day he cleaned the cups. He jumped down and was looking at the inscription on the clock when it struck eleven in his face.

Tom clapped his hand to his head.

“We shall be too late!”

“Too late wot for?”

“She will be married to a murderer. And I forgot that. God forgive me! God forgive me!” He reeled into the verandah. “No—no—there is one chance. The ring—the ring! This way for your life!”

CHAPTER XL

MADNESS AND CRIME

The pair dashed to the stables: by seven minutes past eleven the curricle cleared the gate-posts, with Tom driving furiously and Wyeth seated grimly at his side. At twenty past they turned into Macquarie Street, were rattling up Hunter Street next minute, then into George Street—the whip whistling—a wheel on the curb at every corner—pedestrians flying and constables challenging—and so up Charlotte Place to the church. The clock on the round castellated tower made it 11.24: time yet if they had waited for the ring. But there were no carriages outside, and Tom’s heart stopped as he saw a woman emerge and lock the church door behind her.

​“Is the marriage over?” he screamed.

“There’s no marriage this morning. It’s put off!”

“For the ring?”

“No, for the bride; she never came!”

“Never came?”

But the woman had been robbed of her fees, and the loss involved that of her temper. “Better go to the Pulteney Hotel if you want to know more,” said she, and four wheels would have locked in the mad whirl with which Tom turned curricle and horses.

Over the bridge to O’Connell Street; a vehicle was ahead of them at the Pulteney, a waiter spoke to the occupants, and it drove off without one of them getting out. Meanwhile Tom had seen the Fawcetts in the gaping crowd outside; had left them on guard over the curricle and Wyeth, and himself rushed into the hotel.

“There’s no wedding; the guests are being sent away,” said a waiter, standing in his path.

“Where’s Mr. Daintree?”

“In the ball-room, but there’s a gentleman—”

Tom hurled him on one side, and was in the ball-room himself next instant. It was a spacious saloon, the best in Sydney at that time, and the first thing Tom saw was the long table with the vista of silver and glass leading to a snow-clad mountain of a wedding-cake at the far end. The chairs were empty, the table untouched, and only two men were in the room: the bridegroom in his marriage garments, and a person of equal stature, in top-boots and a pea-jacket, whose face Tom could not see. Next moment Nicholas Harding turned his head. It was to him Daintree had drunk in the grey dawn that seemed a year ago.

The ruddy hair was shot with silver, the massive face ​refined by suffering; he had aged ten years in eighteen months.

Tom went straight to his old enemy, turning his back on his old friend.

“You came out to stop this marriage, sir?”

“I did—it was the only way.”

“I congratulate you on arriving in time. You would have had a murderer for your son-in-law!”

Daintree gave a cry; Tom had turned upon him with flashing eyes.

“How do you know?” cried Harding in amazement.

“I will tell you. This man has been my best friend. He paid for my defence, and he took me away from the iron-gang. Do you know why?”

“I know one reason.”

“So do I, but there was another. He’s been hedging matters with his God. He murdered Blaydes himself.”

“Blaydes!”

And Mr. Harding flung up his hands, while Daintree sank into a chair, as yellow as a guinea, but with hot eye-balls fixed searchingly upon Tom.

“Your proofs!” said he hoarsely. “Your proofs in support of this—monstrous—charge!”

“I have clear proof in my pocket,” said Tom to Mr. Harding, as he buttoned up his coat. “I have the receipt I gave Blaydes for his watch and chain!”

Daintree sprang up: he was trembling from head to foot, but his fists and his teeth were clenched.

“Thief!” he hissed. “You have broken open my desk! I saved you from the gallows. You think you’ll hound me there in return—you fool, when you know what I know! What you have stolen is no proof at all. ​Ingrate! serpent! it will only tighten the rope round your own ungrateful neck!”

He turned on his heel, and wrote something on a card. He rang a bell, met the waiter at the door and handed him what he had written.

“That may be so,” said Tom to Nicholas Harding. “I may swing yet—but, thank God! not for Blaydes!”

“It is really the receipt?”

“Undoubtedly: written by Blaydes and signed by me: it will clear me of that crime, if it doesn’t convict him. I don’t want to convict him.”

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“It would be useless. There’s madness in his blood, as well as crime! But is that your only evidence?”

“No, I have a witness outside who all but saw him do it. He did see him taking the papers from the dead man’s pocket.”

“Papers!” cried Mr. Harding. His high colour fled and came again. “They belonged to me: give them to me, Erichsen, for God’s sake!”

“Then keep your eye on him, and you shall have all but the one I may want. I saw they were letters to you.” And in an instant they were in Nicholas Harding’s pocket, all but the one with the receipt upon the back; and he also buttoned up his coat.

Meanwhile, Daintree was at the other end of the long room, guarding the door; and now they saw him fling it open with an evil smile. Next moment a strange gang entered: two constables, Ginger, Nat Sullivan—and Peggy O’Brien.

Peggy’s presence is only too easily explained: when her own ears heard Tom consent to leave the country, ​she shut her teeth and swore that he should not. In New South Wales he should remain, though back he went to the chain-gang, but she trusted to her own testimony to save his neck. So she slipped out of the bungalow while the master was being dressed, followed the Fawcetts into Sydney, and went straight to the Pulteney Hotel to tell Nat Sullivan the truth about Tom. She found that worthy in his usual state when in town. Ginger complained that there was no doing anything with him. And so powerfully did the blear-eyed, thick-lipped sot repel Peggy, now she saw him again, and in this condition, that she had told him nothing when Daintree’s message was brought to Nat’s rooms.

Nat read it in his shirt-sleeves, and staggered off to achieve a measure of outward decency, leaving Peggy in a strange turmoil. She could have betrayed Tom herself—so she still thought—but the idea of the master turning traitor in this way was to her intolerable. She had heard the marriage was put off, she divined some all-sufficient cause, and with the ebbing of her last hopes of Tom, her first generous good-will to him returned. She looked at Ginger and found Ginger looking at her. At Castle Sullivan he had been a furtive admirer; he was an open one now Nat was in the next room.

“Well, Ginger, an’ what is it y’ intind to say?”

“I shall have to swear to him, though I’d never have let this out in my sober senses. He saved my life. I meant to save his.”

“An’ you will do that same: say you made a mistake—it’s his life ye’ll be swearin’ away!”

“But it’s true, Peggy!”

“An’ it’s meself ’ll be thruer still, Ginger darlin’, if ​you will but say the word an’ do by Tom as he did by you!”

She had not thought of it before: it was a sudden inspiration of the quick Irish brain, a sudden impulse of the warm Irish heart. When Nat came in, with wet hair plastered over his thick skull, the coal-black head and the fiery beard were far enough apart. But it had not been so during every minute of his absence. And a pretty fiasco awaited him in the ball-room.

Led up to Erichsen, the overseer shook his head.

“No,” said he, “the bushranger was inches taller. I can’t swear to him after all.”

“Not swear to him?” roared Mr Nat. “Why, you took your oath he was the man!”

“Not swear to him?” said Daintree, stepping forward. “Happily, my good fellow—”

But Tom’s eye was on him, and the police were in the room.

“Try the girl,” said one constable.

“Ginger is right,” said Peggy promptly. “It’s a taller man he was entirely.”

“But you’re looking at his feet!”

Peggy raised her eyes, and calmly and coldly they met Tom’s for the last time.

“No,” said she; “this is not the man at all.”

“The —— liars!” Nat Sullivan screamed. “They’ve made up their minds to lie; and you two fools stand there and listen!” He stormed and wept; grew violently abusive, and was put out by the constables before they left themselves. In the scuffle and confusion Ginger found an opportunity both to grip Tom’s hand and to whisper that one good turn deserved another. But Peggy O’Brien turned her back without word or look. ​Warm heart and nimble brain had done Tom Erichsen their last service; had undone their first and only injury; and this was the end between these two.

When the three men had the great room once more to themselves, Tom turned quietly to Daintree, who was now perfectly livid with rage and chagrin, and simply inquired whether he still denied his own crime.

“Deny it!” cried Daintree. “It is too preposterous to be worth denying. Show me what you have stolen; let us see this precious proof!”

“I have a live witness, too, if you force me to call him in.”

Tom went to a window and had thrown up a sash before the other two joined him. Outside was the curricle and Wyeth seated at Fawcett’s side.

“Stop—stop—don’t call to him!” whispered Daintree, in a choking voice.

“Do you deny it now?”

“Yes—no—listen to me!”

“Which do you mean?”

“I—killed him.”

“Good God!” cried Nicholas Harding.

Tom shut down the sash.

“Yes, I killed him,” cried Daintree, recovering his spirits; “and I’d do it again this minute. Why? You shall hear—and then Claire shall hear—for I mean to see her; it will take all Sydney to keep us apart. That night she refused me—God alone knows why—she loves me now and will stick to me in spite of you all—but she refused me then. I stayed for an hour where she left me. Then I got out by the back way and wandered through the fields—just as I was—thinking of her! At ​last—I hardly knew where I was or what I was doing—I heard voices—his was one. Yours was the other, Erichsen—I didn’t know it then—and you were just leaving. I heard him say he was thinking of being married. I joined him when you had gone, and asked who the happy lady might be. What do you think he said? What do you think? What do you think?”

“Claire?” said Nicholas Harding.

“Yes —Claire!” screamed Daintree. “That incarnate devil—and my angel! He said he loved her—that smooth hound—and she had hinted she did care for somebody. God knows what more he said! You would consent—he had you in his power. Either he said that or I saw it. At any rate he taunted me—maddened me—and when I looked about for something to strike him with, there was the very thing at my feet. I killed him! I meant to kill him! I have never for one moment regretted killing him! What do you suppose was the first thing I found in his pocket? No, Harding, I’m not thinking of you, my honest friend! It was a letter that showed the kind of cur he had been. I let Claire see it. I thought of a way. I showed her that dead devil in his true colours—I cured her of her folly——and I thanked God I’d put him out of her way and mine! Regret it? Repent it? Never for an instant—never to this hour!”

And the man trembled no more, save with his savage passion. His eyes flashed, his face shone, and never had he looked finer or handsomer than now, as he drew himself up in his wedding-garments and impiously gloried in his crime. The deep chest swelled beneath the pale buff kerseymere waistcoat. The stubborn chin rose proudly above spotless Prussian collar and dazzling ​white satin cravat. Bearing and countenance alike were those of a conscious hero rather than of a criminal self-convicted and self-confessed.

“You let an innocent man suffer for your crime!” said Nicholas Harding, with a shiver.

“Did I? And do you suppose I would have let him hang? I was under the impression that I saved his neck. I would have saved it with my own had that been necessary. Only yesterday I risked my life to save his. Who took him away from the iron-gang? I had to commit a forgery and risk my liberty to do it, by God! Who would have treated him like a brother from that day? It was his own doing, mark you, that made him a menial! And he would hang me, would he, for ridding the earth of the crying rascal who picked his own pocket like a common thief? He shakes his head, but I know him better. And that’s his gratitude—after all I’ve done! Something like yours, you Harding! I save your daughter from a poisonous scoundrel, so I am not to marry her for my pains. A just pair—convict bushranger and fraudulent M.P.!—a precious pair to join forces against an honest man! Do your worst: I shall marry her against you both—I shal—I shall—I shall!”

Tom knew this voice: he wondered he had not heard the madness in it from the first.

“Never!” cried Harding. “I would rather see her in her coffin.”

“You soon will if you prevent it!”

“You would murder her too? I quite believe it—if you got the chance!”

“You fool!” said Daintree, with a superior sneer. “Can’t you see that it would kill her not to marry me?”

​Mr. Harding shook his head.

“She loves me as I love her!”

“She does not love you at all.”

At these words a feeling of pity crept over Tom: they rang so true, and they told so palpably upon that distorted heart which could bear up better against a charge of murder.

“Does she not?” cried Daintree. “We shall see!” And he darted from them with an altered face, was first out of the room, first up the stairs and first into the ladies’ sitting-room; but Tom’s foot was in the door before he could bang it behind him; and Tom and Mr. Harding burst their way in together.

On the threshold they stopped with one accord. Daintree had not turned to confront them; he had flung himself at the feet of Claire, who was seated on a sofa by her aunt’s side. Tom noticed that both ladies (in grim contrast to the wretched bridegroom) wore the dresses in which he had seen them the day before; and that Lady Starkie held Claire’s hand.

“They say you do not love me,” whispered Daintree, in a voice that broke with very tenderness, and yet retained a confident ring. “I love you better than my own life and all the world. Tell them nothing can part us—nothing they can say—nothing I have done. Tell them you love me as I love you!”

Tom’s eyes were fast to a sweet face white with terror: it flushed and fell, and then the nut-brown head was all he saw.

“Ah, yes!” said that madly tender voice. “You may blush to see your lover so humbled on his wedding morning; but it was not your fault; you love me as you have always loved me, and as I love you. Tell them ​that! Tell them you would marry me if I had to go to prison tomorrow!”

The brown curls moved slowly from side to side.

“What! There is truth then in what they say?”

“Forgive me—forgive me!” were Claire’s only words.

“So it is true!”

His tone would have been a marvel of restraint in any man; in this one it was a miracle. Still on his knees he besought her, as a last favour, to tell him whom she did love. Her eye flew to Tom’s: the cunning of the criminal lunatic shone through the tears in his. “So it is Erichsen—not Blaydes,” he said, getting up and standing harmlessly in their midst; next instant he had whipped out his pistol and fired it point-blank at Tom’s heart. The report was appalling; a white cloud filled the room; as it thinned away, there was Tom still standing, with the one calm face present. The charge had contained no ball. Next instant the pistol itself was hurled at his head, and Daintree was upon Tom with tooth and nail—cursing, raving, moaning—fighting Tom and Nicholas Harding both—fighting the constables and waiters who poured in like water—and still wailing, raving, cursing as he fought.

It was a horrible sound—human no longer—though the fist of the sportsman still flew hard and true from the shoulder—though the tears of the lover were still wet upon the madman’s face. It was, nevertheless, but the husk of a man that was at last overpowered and carried to a distant bedroom. That complex heart still squirted liquid fire through every vein; but the brain was not; inherent mania had claimed its own.

CHAPTER XLI

"FOR LONDON DIRECT"

The Sydney papers of the year 1838 contain no reference to the extraordinary scenes enacted at the Pulteney Hotel on the first Saturday of the month of October. They do not report the removal of a magistrate of the Colony to its best and most private madhouse—some from a sense of journalistic charity—others for reasons which the late Nicholas Harding’s bankers might even now disclose. The curious, however, may still look up the advertisement which Lady Starkie read aloud from the Herald within an hour of the events described. It blew a trumpet for—

THE FINE FAST-SAILING SHIP
FLORENTIA
FOR LONDON DIRECT

and the call found a grateful echo in two young hearts, now so light, and now so heavy, that it was an act of mercy to stir them in this way. The Florentia was described as even then loading at the quay; it seemed as though they might all sail away from that beautiful and accursed land within a week. As a matter of history, however, the Florentia did not complete her cargo until the New Year; no other homeward-bound ship was ready before her; and much happened on shore meanwhile.

Tom Erichsen, having voluntarily confessed the part he had borne in the Castle Sullivan outrage, fell ill as ​a man can be just as the road to joy and freedom lay smooth and clear before him: he was in a raging delirium when the free pardon arrived from Governor Gipps, together with an order for the convict’s absolute release. It seemed he was about to be released indeed. Long weeks he lingered, battling indomitably; and what hand coaxed him back to light and life, and whose prayers availed, but the loving hand and the passionate prayers of the girl who only lived now to make him forget the past? Meanwhile her father was not idle. Nicholas Harding was useless in a sick-room, and his money could not save Tom’s life. But there were other things that it could do, combined with the natural energy and the practical ability which were also his. Turn again to those old Sydney papers. They will not tell you who instigated the inquiry, found the witnesses, paid their expenses and indeed threw his money right and left in the good cause. But they do recount the ruin of the most glaring and atrocious slave-drivers the Colony contained; they do report the several litigations by which that most desirable end was achieved; nor, to their eternal credit, does a single sheet take the side of the Sullivans of Castle Sullivan. The name still lingers in Colonial annals; it is still strong in all humane and honest nostrils; but of Dr. Sullivan and his ruffianly son all traces have been lost.

Not the least telling witness against them was one who certainly could not be accused of extravagant sympathy with the felonry. Major Honeybone enjoyed himself enormously in Sydney, both at the courthouse and elsewhere; he and Nicholas Harding became perfect cronies during the weary days of Tom’s convalescence.

“Gadzooks, sir, he gave me more trouble than any ​three men in the gang,” the major would say; “but I knew him for a gentleman at bottom, and I might have known him for an innocent man. They take it worst, gadzooks! Stockades like mine must be a living hell to ’em, though I say it! I’d like to shake his hand and tell him I’m sorry for this and that.”

But Major Honeybone was not permitted to see the invalid; and indeed he quitted Sydney rather precipitately in the end. The plucky veteran had asked a question of Lady Starkie, as her ladyship long afterwards confided to Claire, with an obviously pleasurable indignation, on the Florentina's poop.

Nor was it until the long and soothing homeward voyage was half over that the convalescent was vouchsafed an answer to certain questions which he had tired of asking in his illness. What had brought Nicholas Harding to New South Wales? He must have sailed but a few days after Claire. What had he found out in those few days, since the discovery of Daintree’s crime still came as a surprise to him? Tom never forgot the night when at last he was told; the trade-wind sang steadily through the rigging; every sail was set and drawing; the motion was an imperceptible rhythm; and a monstrous moon made a shimmering path from the horizon to the vessel’s side.

“You never saw the woman who took Claire’s jewellery?” said Nicholas Harding. “It is to her we owe it that my girl is not a madman’s wife! The woman was naturally a spy; she had spied upon her mistress, but on Daintree also; and to Claire she had cause to be grateful, as Claire will tell you if you ask her. The very night after she sailed in the Rosamund this woman came to my house. She had fallen very low; death ​seemed to me to have set its seal upon her; but she had information which she would only sell, until I told her where Claire had gone, and whom she was to marry. Then and there it all came out. I must say there was no huckstering then! The wretched woman seemed genuinely distressed. She told me”—Harding wiped his mouth, and his voice trembled—” she told me my daughter was gone to be a murderer’s wife!”

“Yet you did not know of it?”

“I did not know about Blaydes. That made the second!”

“His second murder?” gasped Tom.

“Or manslaughter—call it what you will. The first was the worst: it was— fratricide! There were two brothers; James was the younger. Out shooting, one day, when they were both mere lads, he shot a dog dead in his passion. The brother abused him; in an instant he also was shot through the heart. It was brought in an accident, but the family knew what it was. They drummed him out, they refused to see his face again; he was as much transported as any felon in New South Wales, with as good a cause. We never knew why his family would have nothing to do with him: why, for instance, the very flowers he laid upon his mother’s grave were summarily returned to him. It seemed inhuman, but I think it was very human now! God help me, I thought it was only the ordinary wild-oats, made too much of. But I was at fault, grievously at fault! Bitterly I regret it; bitterly I shall rue it till my dying day!”

Nicholas Harding was deeply moved; he was indeed a different man. In a hoarse voice he described the horrors of the interminable outward voyage, the per​petual dread of being too late, the nightly nightmare of Claire married to a criminal lunatic, if not dead already by his hand.

“Crime and madness,” said he, “are in their blood. I found that out too. The mother was a saint, but I discovered she had died in an asylum; the father is sane, but you know his reputation. He had denied me an interview before. I forced myself upon him now. And he admitted the perfect truth of the story I had heard. You ask how that woman came to know of it? Well, so did I. As I told you, she had sunk as low as possible; it seems she made a practice of asking her companions whether they knew aught of the Daintrees, because she suspected our guest of some shameful secret (but never of killing Blaydes), and she had always the thought of repaying Claire the good turn of which Claire must tell you. Well, at last—call it chance or fate, or what you will—but at last she hit upon a trail that led to the truth. She discovered an old gamekeeper who had actually seen the deed, and been pensioned to keep it secret, but blabbed it in his dotage. And then she came to Avenue Lodge.”

Once his tongue was loosed, and it was seen that the subject excited the convalescent much less than had been feared, Mr. Harding would speak of it with apparent freedom. Yet the case had aspects which he sedulously shunned. And towards the end of the voyage he became visibly troubled and depressed; but at last one chilly northern night, when the Western Islands had been left astern, he took Tom by the arm, and his hand trembled.

“Erichsen,” said he, “I was once your enemy. I am now your friend; in the near future I am to be something more; and I cannot face it a humbug and a hypo​crite. You remember those letters you gave me back without a question? I have waited for that question all these months. That you have never asked it, that alone shows what you are! It makes it the harder to have to tell you the kind of man I was. But I have made up my mind that you shall know.”

And he confessed that he had been guilty enough of the bribery all but brought home to him, and yet not more guilty than a hundred others, many of them in higher places, as he said with perfect truth but little bitterness. The voyage out had purged him of self-esteem and arrogance; the homeward voyage was rearing better qualities in their place.

“Yes, it was a true bill!” he sighed. “True also that my money had silenced the witness who refused to speak—true that I made it worth his while to go to prison. But letters had passed between us. Blaydes got hold of them. He was on his way to me with those letters in his pocket—to sell them to me for a fancy price—when he met his death. Do you recollect the first lawyer who came to see you about the defence?” Tom started, but said he did remember.

“He came from me. And he not only assumed your guilt—as I fear we had all assumed it—but he wanted to know where you had put what you had taken out of the dead man’s pockets. You were only to tell him that to secure the best defence money could obtain; instead of telling him you threw him out of your cell. You were quite right! I was well served. After two years, Erichsen, I tell you that I am sorry—sorry!”

Tom implored him to say no more. There was more, however, that must be said.

“Before your trial,” continued Harding, “I was almost ​mad with anxiety. Every hour I expected those letters to be found. Daintree knew well enough what was the matter; the letters were in his own possession; but he obtained my confidence, wormed it out of me one night, and from that hour my soul was not my own. He began by dragging me to your trial—”

“He told me you dragged him there!”

“It was the other way about. I am ashamed to say it, but it was the other way about! I want to hang myself when I think of that time! I remember him taunting me by saying I ought to sympathise with you, because I deserved to stand in the dock myself. He who had done the murder for which he saw you condemned! I feel sure he only kept the receipt in order, if necessary, to use the letter that was written on the other side.”

“No, no,” said Tom. “I prefer to believe he was always thinking of some way of proving my innocence, by means of the receipt, without incriminating himself. It would have been in keeping with his character. He had a kind heart in many things, and I wish we were leaving him in his quiet grave instead of in an asylum. I cannot help feeling grateful to him even now. He gave me back my manhood and my liberty, even if it was he who first took them away; above all, he gave me back Claire!”

There was one addition to the homeward-bound party who must not be forgotten: this was a man-servant with a withered arm, who grew grey and ultimately died in Thomas Erichsen’s service. His was the second death among those passengers of the Florentia whose fate concerns this chronicle. Lady Starkie was the first to go. ​Nicholas Harding followed in the same year as his namesake of All the Russias. The next and last—it seems but the other day—was Claire, his daughter, a loving and beloved wife, and a mother whose children miss and mourn her daily, though most of them have children of their own. Peace to her white hairs and true and tender heart! It is beating somewhere for them still.

But a little while ago, this story might have left them still together—the bent old man with the thoughtful eye and the many wrinkles—the white-haired, sweet-faced, motherly woman. Yet then their story had not been told, for there is that in it which Thomas Erichsen never would tell his wife. He never told how they tried to cut his heart out with the lash; he never told her how nearly they succeeded. And still, when he thinks of that, is he grateful to the long-dead maniac to whom he owed so various a debt.

It is the old man’s pleasure to hear and read of the noble Colony sprung miraculously from the cruel dust and ashes of sixty years ago; he has never revisited it. In the Old Country he has lived and he will die. Less fortunate than Claire, his lot is that harder one of the last to go. But his life has been always brave, and he neither fears nor courts his death.

THE END

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