flowers, and formingnatural arches and bowers more beautiful than ever fashioned by man.Parrots and other birds of bright plumage were flying about among thetrees--among them guacamayas, or great macaws, large, clothed in red,yellow, and green, and when on the wing displaying a splendid plumage.But there were also vultures and scorpions, and, running across the roadto the beach and up the trees, innumerable iguanas. Great cocoanut andplantain trees jutted out and massed themselves to the right and to theleft. A mountain torrent, sweeping swiftly over a moss-grown rockyledge, seethed for a few moments in white foam, and then gurgled awaydown the bright shingles into the sea.
The man sat there stonily, voiceless, motionless, his chin fallen uponhis chest, his hands clasped in front of him. Dressed in grey shirt andtrousers that were ragged and covered with dust and dried clay, hisappearance was scarcely prepossessing. On the back of his shirt waspainted in large black numerals "3098," and his ankles were fettered bytwo oblong iron links. He was a convict.
Under the broad-brimmed, battered straw hat that protected his head fromthe tropical glare was a ruddy, auburn-bearded face, with sad blue eyeswhich at times turned anxiously up and down the beach path--thesun-tanned face of Hugh Trethowen.
His pickaxe lay on the ground before him, for he was resting after hislong day's toil in the mine.
Toil! He shuddered when he thought of the weary monotony of his life.Down in the dark, dismal working he was compelled to hew and delve fortwelve hours each day, and to satisfactorily perform the task set him byhis warder before he was allowed his ration of food. Half an hour'srelaxation when leaving the mine was all that the discipline allowed,after which the convicts were compelled to return to the prison to theirevening meal, and afterwards to work at various trades for two hourslonger before they were sent to their cells. The French Republic showsno leniency towards prisoners condemned to _travaux forces_, andtransported to the penal settlement in New Caledonia, consequently thelatter live under a regime that is terribly harsh and oft-timesabsolutely inhuman.
Instead of chattering with the _forcats_, assassins, robbers, andscoundrels of all denominations and varieties of crime who were hisfellow-prisoners, Hugh, in the brief half-hour's respite, usually camedaily to the same spot, to reflect upon his position, and try to devisesome means of escape.
His conviction and transportation had been so rapid that only a confusedrecollection of it existed in his memory. He remembered the AssizeCourt--how the sun insolently, ironically, cast his joyous, sparklingbeams into the gloomy, densely packed apartment. The hall, dismal andsmoke-begrimed, is anything but imposing at best, but it was filled withthe foetid exhalations from the crowd that had long taken up everyvacant space. The gendarmes at his side looked at one another andsmiled. The evidence was given--what it was he did not thoroughlyunderstand--yet he, an upright man, resolute, honest to the very soul,and good-natured to simplicity, found himself accused of complicity inthe murder of a man he had never heard of. Despondent at Valerie'sdesertion, he took no steps to defend himself; he was heedless ofeverything.
Then the verdict was pronounced, and the sentence--fifteen years' penalservitude!
He heard it, but in his apathetic frame of mind he was unaffected by it.He smiled as he recognised how mean was this noted Criminal Court ofthe Seine, with its paltry chandelier, the smoky ceiling, and thebattered crucifix that hung over the bench on which the judges sat intheir scarlet robes. Suddenly he thought of Valerie. Surely she wouldknow through the newspapers that his trial was fixed for that day? Whydid she not come forward and assist him in proving his innocence.
He strained his eyes among the sea of faces that were turned towards himwith the same inquisitive look. She was not there.
"Prisoner, have you anything to say?" asked the presiding judge, when hedelivered sentence.
The question fell upon Hugh's ears and roused him. The thought thatValerie had made no sign since his arrest, although he had written toher, again recurred to him. The die was cast. What probability, whathope, was there of liberty? For the twentieth time, perhaps, this cruelagony, this doubt as to Valerie's faithfulness, returned to him. Shewas absent; she had forsaken him.
"Will you answer me, prisoner? Have you anything to say?" repeated thejudge sternly.
"I wish to say nothing, except that I am entirely innocent."
Then they hurried him back to his cell.
He had a hazy recollection of a brief incarceration in the Toulonconvict prison, after which came the long voyage to La Nouvelle, and thesettlement into the dull, hopeless existence he was now leading--a lifeso terrible that more than once he longed for death instead.
Sitting there that evening, he was thinking of his wife, refusing eventhen to believe that she had willingly held aloof from him. He feltconfident that by some unfortunate freak of fate she had been unaware ofhis arrest, and might still be searching for him in vain. Perhaps theletters he wrote to her to the hotel and to Coombe might never have beenposted. If they had not, there was now no chance of sending a messagehome, for one of the rules observed most strictly in the penal colony isthat letters from convicts to their friends are forbidden. Theunfortunate ones are completely isolated from the world. The familiesof French prisoners sent out to the Pacific Islands can obtain news ofthem at the Bureau of Prisons in Paris, but nowhere else. When convictsare handed over to the governor of the colony, their names are notgiven; they are known henceforth by numbers only.
Convict number 3098 knew that it was useless to hope any longer, yet itwas almost incredible, he told himself, that he, an innocent man and anEnglish subject, should be sent there to a living tomb for an offencethat he did not commit--for the murder of a person whose name he hadnever before heard.
"I wonder where Valerie is now?" he said aloud, giving vent to along-drawn sigh. "I wonder whether she ever thinks about me? Perhapsshe does; perhaps she is wearing her heart out scouring everycontinental city in a futile endeavour to find me; perhaps--perhapsshe'll think I'm dead, and after a year or two of mourning marry someone else."
He uttered the words in a low voice, more marked by suffering than byresignation. He preferred the companionship of his own thoughts, sad asthey were; his mind always turned to Valerie, to the sad ruin of all hishopes.
"And Jack Egerton," he continued, resting his chin upon his hands; "hemust know, too, that I have disappeared. Will he seek me? Yet, what'sthe use of hoping--trusting in the impossible--no one would dream offinding me in a French convict prison. No," he added bitterly, "I mustabandon hope, which at best is but a phantom pursued by eager fools. Imust cast aside all thought of returning to civilisation, to home--toValerie. I've seen her--seen her for the last time! No, it can't bethat we shall ever meet--that I shall ever set eyes again upon the womanwho is more to me than life itself!"
He paused. In his ears there seemed to ring a little peal of Valerie'ssilvery laughter, which mocked the chill, dead despair that had burieditself so deeply in his heart.
The tears sprang to his eyes, but he wiped them away with a brusquemovement, and looked about abstractedly. The sun had set behind thecrags, and had been succeeded by the soft tropical twilight. A faintbreeze was abroad. The sough of the leaves above was lost in thegurgling of the mountain torrent as it rushed over its rocky bed. Thepalms, played upon by the wind, made a sound of their own. It wassilence in the midst of sound, and sound in the midst of silence--majestic, contradictory, although natural.
"And I shall never see her again!" he murmured. "I shall remain hereworking and living from day to day, a blank, aimless existence until Idie. I've heard it said that Fate puts her mark on those she intends tostrike, and the truth of that I've never recognised until now. Iremember what a strange apprehensive feeling came over me on the nightwe left London for Paris--a kind of foreboding that misfortune was uponme, a strange presage of evil. Again, that warning of Dolly's wascurious. I wonder what was contained in that newspaper report that sheso particularly desired me to see? I'm su
re Dolly loved me. If I hadmarried her, perhaps, after all, I should have been happier. It wasinflicting an absolute cruelty upon her when I cast her aside andmarried Valerie. Yet she bore it silently, without complaint, althoughI'm confident it almost broke her heart, poor girl!"
Sighing heavily, he passed his grimy, blistered hand wearily across hisforehead.
"To think that I'm dead to them; that we shall never again meet! Itseems impossible, although it's the plain, undisguised truth. Thatcanting old priest told me yesterday that God would extend His mercy tothose of us who sought it. Bah! I don't believe it. If thecircumstances of our lives were controlled by the Almighty, He wouldnever allow an innocent man like myself to suffer such punishmentunjustly. No," he declared in a wild outburst of despair, "the beliefthat God is Master of the world is an exploded
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