Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Then that’s settled. We shan’t fall out about it. Thy horny hand once more!”

  “I don’t want no barney, you know,” said the voice of Howie the humble.

  “Nor I; but, by heaven, I mean her to pay for it! Now you go inside, and I’ll fetch along the piebald moke myself.”

  Irralie sprang to her feet and looked at Fullarton in sudden terror; and Fullarton laid his hand firmly on her shoulder, while Dawson, now sitting on his heels in front of the fire, had one eye for them and one for the doorway of cold pink sky. As Howie filled it with his powerful frame, the deaf man seized a log and hurled it at his body, then leapt upon him like a cat, dug his fingers inside the tight white collar, and cracked the great skull like an egg against the door-jamb. The thing was done in an instant, and the two men on the ground in a heap, with Howie insensible on top. The thud of their fall had been the only sound.

  “Pull him off, sir!” gasped Dawson. “He’s paid me out!”

  Fullarton tugged at the great limbs one after the other — at his own riding - boots pinching the ruffian’s feet — until Dawson was free to rise but did not move.

  “His shooter, sir, his shooter!”

  Fullarton found it — loaded in every chamber — and signed to the deaf man to get up. He shook his head.

  “My leg’s broke, sir! He’s paid me out. “His left foot lay as if it did not belong to him. Fullarton knelt and examined.

  “It’s true,” said he. “We must shift him too. Lend a hand, Irralie.” As the girl did so a smile broke over the deaf man’s face.

  “I didn’t know whether I’d do it till I did it,” said he; “but I didn’t want no bribes! It’s all I can do for you. You must fix up Stingaree. Pot him as he comes in; it’s our only chance.”

  Fullarton unwound the bandages from his wounded hand, stretched his fingers, and gripped and cocked Howie’s revolver. His dark eyes danced.

  “I mean to do so,” said he. “Irralie, keep out of the way — turn your head and shut your ears!”

  The girl obeyed — trembling as she had not trembled all the night. It was the worst of all, this waiting. Fullarton stood at one side of the door with the revolver. Howie had never moved.

  Then the horse’s hoofs and a man’s feet were heard approaching through the sand, preceded by a whistle, high and clear and wonderfully sweet. He was whistling Mendelssohn again! Suddenly, as if a yard from the door, it broke off; the man’s walk became a run; he was in the hut, with swinging eye-glass and whiskers flying, and had shouted, “Quick! they are on us!” before Fullarton cut him short.

  “Up with your hands,” said he. “It’s your turn now!”

  And when George Young and Mr. Villiers had reined up at the Seven-mile, they found Irralie like a ghost outside in her ball-dress; and, standing in the doorway, with his back to them, and a cocked revolver showing over his shoulder, a well-built figure in black trousers and white shirt-sleeves.

  “Excuse me,” said Fullarton; “but I daren’t take my eye off him. Creep in under my left arm. The beggar stuck me up on Saturday afternoon, but I swore I wouldn’t tell you till I got even with him; and, by the powers, I’ve kept my word!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  P. S.

  At the age of sixty-eight, the late Lord Fullarton, who had been no traveller in his youth, set out to winter in Australia against all advice; and returned to tell of his experiences for another decade.

  He landed in Melbourne one October, and sailed from Sydney in the following March, but saw no other cities; spending the whole of his time (with the exception of short visits to such near neighbors as, for example, the Quandong people) upon his son’s Riverina station of Arran Downs. And he found Greville (who was on the tug to meet him in Hobson’s Bay) rather stout, very brown, bearded to the chest, but most altered by an extraordinary access of energy and enthusiasm; and very full indeed of the merits and character of his own son, then six months old.

  Grandchildren were no novelty to Lord Fullarton, whose saintliest son was not a celibate; and the nature of the wife, whom Greville had picked up in the bush, provoked a more apprehensive curiosity than that of the child. This lasted until the exact moment when Irralie was seen rushing from the veranda with both hands outstretched, unable to say a word, but with her eyes divinely glistening with love and welcome. And of those same orbs Lord Fullarton talked so freely, when he did get home, that there were small jealousies in the family; too small to speak about, however, and indulged in only by the husbands of the other wives, not the wives themselves.

  “Never saw such eyes in my life!” said he. “The moment I looked in them my mind was at rest; and I wasn’t mistaken. She is a girl with a true religious feeling; uncultivated, no doubt, but deep, and sincere, and strong. The only pity is that they haven’t a church within a hundred miles of them. But I was glad to find that Greville was keeping up the excellent custom of a Sunday evening service, started by that good man, Irralie’s father — who is, without a doubt, one of the Villierses, though it had never occurred to him till I made the welcome discovery. He is now managing an even larger station for the same company which used to own Arran Downs; we paid them a visit, and they keep up the evening service; but, to my horror, they neither stood to praise nor knelt to pray; and when we turned to the east they thought something was the matter. Irralie was so tractable in such things. We had two services every Sunday while I was there, and early celebration once a month. I only wish they could continue it! I wanted to send them out a chaplain; some young fellow with weak lungs might be very glad, and would tutor the boy in due course. It is certainly the grandest climate in the world; hot, but deliciously dry, and the night-air exactly like champagne!”

  One thought Lord Fullarton had a way of expressing aloud, and quite apart from any context, especially in his last illness. “And so fond of her husband!” he would end long silences by exclaiming. “I never saw anything like it in my life!”

  “You mean Irralie, of course?”

  “Well, my dear, I did; and you’ll understand it when they come over. I was thinking of the day after I got there. They had been telling me the rights of that extraordinary affair which got into the papers, you remember, immediately after Grevilie’s arrival. They don’t know yet who the wretched man really was; but he’s in Darlinghurst Gaol, at Sydney, for the term of his life; and I felt I should like to visit him when I was there, but the authorities dissuaded me. Well, they had shown me the pianos he played on, and Greville had explained (what I never could quite understand) why it was he didn’t himself say what had happened to him when he first arrived. The whole affair hinged on that, if you remember; but I quite understood when he told me what was the general attitude toward young fellows from home, or ‘new chums,’ as they call them in the bush. They are always ready to make fools of them, as Greville found out on his way up-country; and he felt his life wouldn’t be worth living there if he arrived upon the scene with such an ignominious tale. So he kept it to himself. And the very next day after my arrival, Irralie took me out in a buggy and showed me just where everything happened.

  “She showed me the clump of trees and the exact spot where she and Greville first met, and the gate where she escaped from the bushranger, and the place in the fence where the wretched man recaptured her. On the farther side of that same paddock (as they call it) is the Seven-mile hut where the tables were eventually turned. But we didn’t go quite as far on that occasion; and when we got back, Irralie showed me a most impressive thing — a clearing in a pine plantation, and the grave of a poor young fellow who was shot by another outlaw some years before. His family had actually had a broken column sent up from Melbourne and erected to his memory in that desolate spot. I was only sorry it was not a cross.

  “But it was Greville who took me into the iron-store in which they shut him up, and from which Irralie helped him to escape. He showed me the sheet of corrugated iron she unfastened to get him out. They keep it in their room to this day.”

&n
bsp; Lord Fullarton had made friends with many of the men, who, it is to be feared, did not always receive his ministrations in the spirit his simple mind supposed. He described his son, however, very justly, as being “particularly fortunate in his overseer; an earnest-minded young man with whom I had many conversations on spiritual matters. He has been on the station for years, and is not likely to leave (I should say), judging by his really beautiful devotion to Greville and Irralie alike, to say nothing of the boy.” And another character who impressed him was “a decent, rugged soul, who does all the odd jobs about the homestead, and is Irralie’s factotum; unluckily, the poor fellow is quite deaf, but I both spoke and read into his ear-trumpet, and he faithfully promised to be confirmed.”

  The great wish of his last months was to live long enough to see his son and Irralie when they brought the boy over to send him to his first school. And this wish crystallized in the desire to look once more in Irralie’s eyes.

  “They are like her own native skies,” said the late lord, simply. “I never saw them wet, nor yet cloudy, but twice while I was there. The first time was when I arrived, and the second when I bade her good-by.”

  But there came a third.

  THE END

  THE ROGUE’S MARCH

  A ROMANCE

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PART I. THE OLD COUNTRY

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER ΧII

  CHAPTER ΧIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  PART II. THE LAND OF BONDAGE

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  PART III. MASTER AND MAN

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  CHAPTER XL

  CHAPTER XLI

  PREFACE

  A FEW friends, who were kind enough to follow “The Rogue’s March” from week to week in its serial course, would have me add foot-notes on the ground that this story, though by no means founded upon facts, is nevertheless largely built up of them. I have, however, my own prejudice against foot-notes to fiction — and I understand that Notes at the end are never read. I may therefore state at the outset that the Newgate scenes are as near the truth as I have been able to make them, with the aid of sundry Parliamentary papers, supplemented by the very kindly assistance of (I believe) the first living authority on the subject. And a certain “broadsheet” is still in existence as described and quoted, with its vile verses, and its illiterate but circumstantial account of the execution of a man who was not executed.

  As to the Transportation details, they have been gleaned partly from the Blue-book published in 1837, partly from the New South Wales Calendar and the Sydney newspapers of those days, and partly from an admirable work by Mr. Charles White, of Bathurst, N.S.W. To this gentleman’s “Convict Life” (which should be published in the old country too) I owe the experiences of the First Fleeter, with other items which I think must bear the stamp of flagrant fact.

  E. W. H.

  AUGUST, 1896.

  PART I. THE OLD COUNTRY

  CHAPTER I

  “SUDDEN DEATH”

  IN the year 1837, and on a warm, moist April morning, there knocked at a modest lodging-house in Rolls Buildings, Fetter Lane, a recent lodger who could no longer afford even the attic’s trifling rent. So now he made his bed in the parks of the metropolis, or in the damp green fields outside. And for all he professed to care, the damp was welcome to kill him, if only it would kill outright.

  The man was very fair and spare, but of a medium height. His hands and feet were notably small, the wrists and arms a little deceptive. These looked lean, but were made of muscle, and quickened with hot, keen blood.

  He was very young; but though, as a fact, not five-and-twenty, the thin, sardonic, reckless face looked half as old again. An abiding bitterness had curled the full nostrils, deepening the lines thence to the sensitive red lips, and drawing the latter too habitually apart upon set teeth or a sneer. Nor was the bitterness of the kind sown in proud hearts by capricious circumstance and crushing but not dishonourable defeat. It was rather the Dead Sea fruit of wilful riot and a contemptible, impenitent remorse. And yet in the full brown eye and lifted chin, as in the ill-clad, well-carried figure, there was a lingering something that was gallant and fine and debonair; as if the makings of angel or of devil still lurked beneath that crumpled kerseymere waistcoat and those faded blue swallow-tails.

  To this lost youth the door in Rolls Buildings was opened by a grey-haired woman who nodded knowingly in response to an inquiry for letters, and handed one over with an invitation to enter and read it within. But the kindly words fell on inattentive ears. Looking fondly and yet fearfully at the superscription — to Thomas Erichsen, Esquire, and the rest — the needy owner of that name suddenly pocketed his letter with unbroken seals. He was turning as abruptly away when the blank face of his former landlady led him to pause a moment.

  “No; bless you, no! it’s not from him,” said Erichsen, grimly. “This is from a friend I met yesterday, who would insist on having my address. What was I to do? I thought you wouldn’t mind, so I gave my last.”

  “Mind! It is your address, and might be your ‘ome if you wasn’t that ‘igh and ‘aughty. Dear, dear, dear! so you’ve not heard from that villain yet?”

  “Not a line.”

  “Nor of him?”

  “Not a word. Give me time. If I don’t root him out by this day month — well, then he’s fled the country — like a sensible man.”

  “But what if you do?” demanded the landlady, who was herself directly interested in the event.

  “What if I do, Mrs. Adcock? Well, I shall probably half murder him, to begin with; he has wholly ruined me. Yes, it will be my money — and your money — or his life! He knows it, too, if he’s got my letters. Feel the weight of that!”

  And he put in her hands a heavy ash stick, green and sinewy, with the knob still creamy from the knife.

  “Lord save us!” cried the woman. “Is this the rod in pickle for him?”

  “That’s the rod in pickle. Nice and heavy, isn’t it?”

  “Too ‘eavy, Mr. Erichsen! Too ‘eavy by ‘alf. I’d show no mercy to thieves and swindlers, but I should be very careful what I did with that. I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands, if I were you!”

  “You wouldn’t?” cried he. “Not if you’d been cleaned out as I have, by as blackguardly a dodge? By the Lord that made him, I’d break every bone in his infernal body; and will, too, if I find him and he won’t pay up. I’ll pay him! I grant you it was my own cursed fault in the beginning; but what about that last thirty pounds? Who got that? Why am I rotting and starving here? Who threw me on the mercy of kind good folks like you — yes, and made a sponge of me in my turn? Whose doing is it that I’ve got to pawn the clothes off my back, or beg my meals; to tramp the streets all day, to lie all night in the fields—”

  “Your own!” exclaimed the woman, coming hastily down from the step upon which she had been standing all this time. “It’s your own fault, is that, however! You know well it isn’t mine. Our attic has been empty ever since you went; you’re welcome to it
until it’s wanted again, if only you’ll come back. Nay, sir, I do assure you I’d rather have you for nothing than most of them that pays. Come back to-night, or I’m sure I sha’n’t sleep a wink for thinking of you; come in now, and I’ll get you some nice ‘ot breakfast. You look as if you hadn’t ‘ad any yet, I’m sure you do. So in you come!”

  Erichsen held out his hand.

  “No, no,” said he. “I owe you quite enough already, Mrs. Adcock; besides, I’m as strong as a horse, and doing much better than you think. But the world is full of kindness, after all! and God bless you for yours!”

  And his dark eyes, that but now had flashed and burnt with bitter fires — that were the more striking always for a shock of almost flaxen hair — stood full of tears. He could say no more, but only wring the dry, chapped hand in his. Then he was gone; and might have been seen, a little later, hurrying with bent head towards Temple Bar; or, later yet, spread at full length in that green asylum of his homeless days, the southwest corner of St. James’s Park. —

  And here he read the letter from his friend. It began on one side of the large white paper, and ended on the next. The girlish handwriting was pitifully tremulous, but yet instinct with a self-reliance then uncommon in young English ladies. The letter ran: —

  “AVENUE LODGE,

  “REGENT’S PARK.

  “April 26th.

  “DARLING, — What does it mean? I was picturing you in Calcutta when I saw you this afternoon in Piccadilly l I had been thinking about you just then — I always am — and there you were l Oh, my darling, what can it mean? Tell me quickly, or I shall go mad with anxiety, as I nearly did on the spot this afternoon. Come here, as you love me, and tell me all l “Darling, what can it be that has kept you here, and so silent all this time; or did you go out and come straight back? No, there has not been time. The Jumna sailed on the last day of September, and I have prayed for her safety all these months. I was so sure my love was on board!