Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

Evening came, and Mr. Nat still lay snoring with his swollen lips wide apart. Tom had not left him yet, being partly occupied with his own thoughts and partly taken up with the various sounds of the inn. Some of these sounds were sinister, as when stealthy steps came along the passage, and an unseen hand tried the bedroom door, which Tom had locked. He did not care to leave the room, not knowing what the other might have in his pockets; but at last he did so, after turning the key behind him and putting it in his pocket.

  He went first to the stables, where he was surprised to find the horses saddled and bridled in their stalls. He had unsaddled them himself after engaging the room for Mr. Nat. There was nobody about, however, to afford an explanation, and it occurred to Tom that the sooner they did get away the better. So he left the horses as they were, but looked into the tap-room on his way upstairs, when all he heard and saw confirmed his impression not only of that particular inn but of the widespread corruption of the convict town. A cattle-stealer was drinking with a constable, and openly boasting before the latter of his exploits; as Tom listened, however, he heard something else that interested him more. It was the sound of hoofs in the yard behind the inn. He darted out and met a man riding his master’s horse and coolly leading the other two.

  “What are you doing with those horses?”

  “What’s that to you? Hands off, or I’ll brain ye!”

  “They’re my master’s. Come out of that saddle. Ah! you would, would you?”

  And Tom, receiving the loaded whip on his forearm, sprang at the rider’s neck and brought him heavily to earth among a dozen hoofs. Then he caught and tethered all three animals, and returned to his man as the latter was sitting up and rubbing his eyes in the moonlight. He was a little horsy bowlegs, and Tom dragged him all o the way into the tap-room in the sitting posture, only relinquishing him at the constable’s feet.

  “Here’s something for you!” he cried. “Caught him in the act of riding off with my master’s horses!”

  “Why, it’s my ostler!” roared the landlord.

  “I was only fetching of ‘em round to the door, ‘cos I thought they was goin’!” whined bowlegs.

  “It’s you that’ll get run in, I’m thinking,” remarked the constable severely to Tom.

  “Fetching them round!” cried the latter. “Then why didn’t you say so, and what made you strike at me when I said they were my master’s horses? Oh, I see the kind of place I’m in!” And he rushed upstairs to the room, and nearly trod on something crouching at the door, that fled with a flutter, while a little instrument fell from the key-hole and rang upon the floor. Tom picked it up, unlocked the door, and strode in.

  Mr. Nat took some waking, but started up at length with clenched fists and an oath.

  “We’re in a den of thieves!” whispered Tom. “Don’t you remember me? Your new groom! We must get out of this as quick as we can!”

  “Why, where are we?”

  “At an inn: the ‘Bull and Tumbledown.’”

  Mr. Nat whistled, and flung his legs over the side of the bed.

  “One of the worst houses in Sydney,” said he. “Ring the bell, if there is one.”

  There was one, and a woman-servant answered its summons.

  “Send up the landlord,” said Sullivan, “and tell him to bring plenty of change. Now, landlord,” he continued when that worthy appeared with a lighted candle, “give me change out of that, and don’t you force me to give you any out of this!”

  He presented a sovereign in his left hand, a pistol in his right; but it was the great besotted face at which Tom stood gazing. Besotted it still was, and brutal and low, but one virtue shone out of it in the candle-light. There was plenty of cool courage in the bloodshot blue eyes, and an indomitable determination about the pendulous lower lip.

  “Sir!” whispered the landlord, falling back. “There’s a constable in the house. I shall fetch him up. Such an outrage upon a law-abiding citizen—”

  “Law-abiding grandmother!” cried Mr. Nat. “I know all about you and your inn; who doesn’t? I never would have set foot inside such a den if it hadn’t been your infernal Sydney sun that bowled me over. You may know my name. I’m Nat Sullivan, of Castle Sullivan, near the Hunter River, and I never was bested by a convict yet, no, nor an emancipist either, my fine fellow! There, keep the rest; but you lead the way straight downstairs and out to my horses, or you may have something else to keep besides.”

  In another minute they were in their saddles, and as they rode away Tom put a skeleton key in his master’s hand, saying he had picked it up outside the bedroom door.

  “And you give it to me!” cried Mr. Nat. “You don’t keep it to use yourself? Well, well, you’ve not made a bad beginning, Erichsen. You looked after me when I was bowled over, and you saved my horses when most of you chaps would have been the first to take ‘em. That landlord’s an old lag himself. I know how to treat the breed. I never was bested by one of you yet, so put that in your pipe and smoke it. But you’re a wonder, you are! Seen the inside of a Sydney pub and come out sober! Well, there’s one like that to every hundred inhabitants, to say nothing of the sly grogshops. It’s a warm place, Sydney, I can tell you. But the Sydney sun, that’s hotter still!”

  It was under a brilliant moon, however, that Tom had his last glimpse of the town for several months to come. Nor did he ever see its sad sights again with the same startled eyes, nor hear its sad sounds with the same thrill of horror. It was a different nature — it was another man — that came back to Sydney after many weeks.

  The exodus in the meanwhile proved a pleasanter experience than had at first appeared possible. The small adventure at the “Bull and Tumbledown” had established some degree of mutual regard between Mr. Nat and his new groom. Their ride up-country spread over the better part of a week, during which time the master suffered more than once as he had been suffering when the man first met him. But in the intervals he treated Tom with a certain stupid good humour, which, however, never for a moment concealed the capacity for an equally stupid cruelty, and the nearest approach to a quarrel on the way was occasioned by the brutal beating of the pack-horse, in which Tom interfered. They were good friends, however, on the whole, and once or twice Mr. Nat made quite an interesting guide. In Parramatta he pointed out a large building, like a poor-house, and offered to wait outside while Tom went in to choose a wife.

  “A wife!” said Tom with a shudder. “What is the place?”

  “They call it a factory. It is for the women what Hyde Park Barracks are to you fellows. They go there till they’re assigned, and afterwards when they’re turned into Government. Cut in and take your choice! I’m not joking. I’ve chosen ‘em for our men before to-day, and you’re the sort that deserves one. Get a lightweight, and we’ll take her up on the pack-horse!”

  Tom shook his head, and thought of Claire until they stopped at an inn where a new surprise awaited him. The resplendent landlord started when he saw Tom, and tilted a white top-hat over his eyes, but not before the latter had recognised a fellow-convict per Seahorse. They had parted in the barrack-yard, where Tom had seen the other carried off by a gorgeous female in a nankeen pelisse and bright green veil, to whom he had been assigned. Tom now caught a glimpse of the nankeen pelisse in the bar-parlour, and as they rode away he asked Mr. Nat whether convicts were ever assigned to their wives.

  “They have been, often enough,” was the reply; “but it’s being put a stop to now. Why, some of the best shops in Sydney are carried on by convicts assigned to their wives, and on capital which was originally the proceeds of the robbery the husband was lagged for! The wife brings it out and is here to meet him when he lands! At least that used to be the dodge; but Bourke tried hard to put his foot on it, and if you hear of a case just let me know.” —

  So Tom said no more.

  But the most interesting roadside character was encountered at a contractor’s store much farther on the way, where Mr. Sullivan nudged Tom and made him take note of a portly man in a ma
gnificent waistcoat, who sang a song in the most charming baritone while the travellers were having their supper.

  “Do you know who that was?” said Tom’s master when they were once more on their way. “That was Hunt, the accomplice of Thurtell, who murdered a man called Weare. You remember it, do you? Well, that’s the man, and he just bears out what I say: we don’t care a kick what a convict has done in the old country so long as he don’t go doing it again out here. But there, I keep forgetting you’re one yourself; somehow or other you’re not like the rest; and you take my advice, and go on like you’ve begun.” As he paused, the voice of Hunt was wafted to their ears in a new song, that died very sweetly on the soft night air.

  The latter stages of the journey were marked by looks of recognition wherever young Sullivan baited his horses, but by never a single look of welcome; and an ominous climax was reached when the little cavalcade passed a stockade and a chain-gang within twenty miles of their destination. —

  Here was a long line of heavily ironed men, some eighty in all, strung together like beads on a rosary, and at work with pick and shovel beneath the burning sun and the eyes and muskets of the military. As the riders approached word seemed to go along the line, and face after face was raised with a curse and a howl as the horses passed. Such faces as they were! Tom had not seen the like in Newgate, nor aboard the Seahorse, nor yet, in such a number, in Sydney itself. Those, on the whole, were only on the lower slopes of degradation; but these had reached its lowest depths, and Tom rode by them with an aching heart and averted eyes.

  His attention, indeed, became concentrated upon his companion, who had checked his horse instead of urging it forward, and was walking instead of galloping this horrible gauntlet. Tom could see but one sunburnt cheek and one cold blue eye; but the first kept its colour, the second never flinched, and the gross lip, that jutted out between beard and moustache, never quivered once all the way. Nor until he was well past the gang did Mr. Nat put spurs to his horse; but when he did, it was not to draw rein until they reached the next roadside inn; and there he vanished, to reappear next day with running eyes and shaking hands.

  “I wouldn’t be assigned to him for something!” said the barman, with whom Tom made friends. “You might as well go to Norfolk Island straight as to Castle Sullivan. Tell you what, mate, I’d give him the go-by to-night, for you’ll never have a better chance. And see here, I’ll come with you, for I’m dead-sick of my job!”

  Tom shook his head.

  “No, no, my friend; he may be all you say, but he’s treated me well enough so far, and I mean to stick to him.”

  “Oh, the young cove’s not the worst. It’s the old cove I was thinking of.”

  “What old cove?”

  “Dr. Sullivan, this one’s father.”

  He had a father, then? Mr. Nat had never mentioned him. And the old man was worse to do with than the son?

  Tom put these questions to himself, and then another to his friend the barman, after shortly telling the latter about the behaviour of the iron-gang. “Why was all that?” said Tom.

  “Why? Because half them crawlers have worked for the Sullivans in their time. They get you flogged, and flogged, and flogged, till all the work’s flogged out of you: then they get you six months in the crawlers, and like as not that’s the end of you.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody put a bullet through them both?”

  “Because the coves have got the pluck. That’s their secret. They don’t know what fear is. So there’s seventy strong men up there, and over a hundred in harvest-time, and the whole boiling afraid of them two!”

  Tom said no more, neither did he have much to say to Mr. Nat next day in their saddles; neither did Mr. Nat have anything at all to say to him before nightfall, so severe had been his latest “touch of the sun.” But towards evening they left the road; and as the moon was rising in a velvet sky, lights also broke upon them through some trees. Dogs innumerable began to bark. And as young Sullivan stooped to open a gate, he pointed across it to the lights, and said that there was Castle Sullivan at last.

  “And hark you here,” he added, savagely, seizing Tom’s bridle on the other side, as though every redeeming trait was now left behind upon the neutral ground that they had traversed together; “hark you to this, and recollect it well! You’ve been right enough on the way, and you’ve the makings of a decent groom. But you won’t find me as easy up here as I could afford to be down the road; and one word about that sunstroke—”

  He glared at Erichsen, then let the bridle go without finishing his threat; and without another syllable they rode through the trees towards the lights.

  CHAPTER XXII

  CASTLE SULLIVAN

  THE new groom rubbed his eyes in the moonlight. He could have laughed aloud. English castles he had seen, Irish castles he had heard about, but what was this? A jumble of slab-huts upon the right, and facing these a wooden, one-storied, rectilinear eyesore: three sides house, the fourth a formidable palisade, and in their midst an arid courtyard overlooked by French windows and glass doors. No creeper clung to the whitened walls. No shrub softened the rigid angles of the yard, and the verandah was too shallow for real shade. Yet the site had been chosen on a ridge of red gums that had been left unfelled beyond the palisade, and rustled restfully above the slab-huts opposite, rendering the latter the more inviting quarter of the two.

  The riders dismounted at a gate in the palisade, and as young Sullivan led the way into the courtyard, a tall bent figure, in a frogged coat and a plaited straw hat, stepped down from the verandah, and then stood still.

  “What’s this?” cried an arrogant and aged voice. “Only one, eh? What have you done with the other two?”

  “Couldn’t get them, sir,” responded Mr. Nat in a tone quite new to Tom. It was a very model of filial respect and dutiful subservience.

  “‘Couldn’t get them, sir!’ Why, what d’ye mean?” the old man thundered. “We applied for two labourers and a groom. Why couldn’t you get them?”

  “The fact is, I did,” stammered Nat; “only two out of the three were hopeless cases, in the last stages of — of—”

  “Phthisis?” cried Dr. Sullivan, who was an old army surgeon, and the bugbear of sick convict and malingerers alike. “Not phthisis, eh?”

  “That was it, sir! The very word the doctor used when I made him overhaul them. He said it was no use my taking them, as they’d certainly die on our hands.”

  “Humph! he may have been right; but I’d trust a convict to sham death itself — with anybody but me!” said the old gentleman, looking hard at Tom. “I wish I’d seen them myself; however, I’ll take his word and yours, and complain to the Assignment Board—”

  “I’ve done all that, sir,” hurriedly interrupted the son. “I stayed the week out doing nothing but complain. They’ll remember me, I promise you! It’ll never happen again to us. Then at the end of the week I couldn’t resist another Sunday, and you wouldn’t grudge it me, father, if you’d heard the sermons I heard in St. Philip’s Church, morning and evening! I must tell you about it later on.”

  “You must — you must. No; I don’t grudge you that, my boy, heaven knows!” said the old man, mollified in a moment. He took a bamboo cane from under his arm, and rapped Tom smartly across the shoulders. “And what of this rascal?” he added. “What’s he good for?”

  “Groom.”

  “Can the ruffian ride?”

  “Not so badly.”

  “Understands horses, does he, and has behaved himself on the way?”

  “Yes, on the whole, very well.”

  “Then let him take them round to the stables, and come back here for his supper. He may have it in the kitchen to-night; only recollect, you convict, that if you misbehave either there or anywhere else on Castle Sullivan, you’ll smart for it pretty quick and pretty heavy. Recollect that. You’re here as a convicted felon, not a free man, and I don’t care what you’ve done to get here; whatever it was, the punishment for it is scan
dalously light; but the punishment for anything you do amiss on my estate shall be all the heavier on that account. So now you know. And don’t you say you hadn’t a fair warning at the start.”

  With this Dr. Sullivan shook his cane in the new groom’s face, and called his overseer, for whom he had directions to which Tom did not listen; he was more interested in a lighted door on the right, where stood a female on the threshold of what he conceived to be the kitchen, and whither Mr. Nat himself had thrown furtive glances. But now father and son went indoors arm-in-arm; the overseer came up, a gruff man with flaming whiskers; and Tom caught him also looking wistfully towards the lighted door, before he was bidden to “come this way.”

  So he followed the fiery whiskers to the stables, a long log building some little distance beyond the house; and here Tom was so smart in unsaddling, and so quick to find chaff-bin and oat-sack and saddle-room, that his surly companion was moved to rude advances.

  “You’re pretty handy,” he growled. “Been a groom before?” —

  “Only since we left Sydney.”

  “Well, you’re in luck, too; the groom here has a room to himself, next the saddle-room; come and I’ll show it you.”

  The room in question was very small and squalid, with a fixed bunk and a foul paillasse; but Tom thought it would be delightful with nice clean straw; and to be alone at nights was to compass an unexpected and unspeakable luxury. Ginger-whiskers pointed out the other convicts’ quarters on their way back to the house. They were the slab-huts opposite the palisade. Two were large, the others all small; that was the overseer’s hut with the big chimney and the little verandah.

  “And who’s the overseer?” inquired Tom. “Mr. Nat?”

  “No, I am; and hark’ee, my beauty, here we are at the kitchen, and you’re a well-set-up youngster, ain’t you? But no games with the girl, or there’ll be trouble! In you go; you’ll thank me for the warning when you’ve seen a bit.”

  Tom thanked him then and there, and was in the kitchen next moment. It was empty, but from the adjoining scullery there came a sound of scuffling, followed by a crash which arrested Tom’s steps. Spurs then jingled out of the scullery by an outer door; and in the inner one stood a fine young woman, with black hair dishevelled, and a broken piece of crockery in either hand. — i “An’ me to pay for it!” Tom had heard her mutter; but in the doorway she stood without a word, her steel-grey eyes upon him till he coloured, when she flung the broken pieces on the dresser and clapped her hands.