But when this was over he took that hand in his; and so they sat, as it seemed for hours, in a thin rain of filtered moonshine. Still his eyes were steadily downcast the whole time — thus they missed the happy tears in hers.
At last he spoke, and it was terrible, for she could not understand a word; then he coughed and tried again, and said, “God bless you, Peggy — only there isn’t one in New South Wales!” And that left them both silent, and the girl grieving openly, for almost as long again.
Then he said quite quietly: —
“You know I’ve been in the condemned cell, Peggy. But it was nothing to this. My God, it was nothing to this!”
Peggy pressed his hand.
“The condemned cell at Newgate,” he went on. “I was there up to the very last night, and heard the people taking their places to see me swing. Well, that night was nothing to this. And if they had hanged me in the morning it would have been nothing — nothing — it would have been nothing—”
The hoarse voice broke, sob after sob shook the tortured body, and the girl glowed with shame to find herself the useless witness of an agony so supreme. But his tears dried hers and bound their fount; it froze her heart to hear and see him. She was afraid to speak to him, to touch his hand. She withdrew a little, and her bare foot pressed a cold oasis on the warm ground; she stooped and picked up a coin.
“Ha!” cried Tom.
His voice was very bitter now, but under control in a moment.
“Where did it come from?” asked Peggy with the coin to a shining crevice.
“I am ashamed to tell you;” and he ground his teeth; “but you will never guess. From a greater brute than either of the Sullivans. He came to look at me just afterwards. I was steaming like a horse in this blanket, and he came and gloated over me, and flung me a farthing — a farthing! — the very beast who ordered me the lashes and pretended to be so kind.”
“Afarth’n’!”
“Yes. God help him if ever I get his yellow throat between these ten fingers!” and they were clutching murderously in the air, and there was murder in every vibration of the husky voice.
“Sure, an’ it isn’t a farth’n’ it is at all.”
“What is it, then?”
“A sov’rin!”
And the soft Irish brogue was rich with honest satisfaction. She showed him the coin in triumph. He regarded it with a leaden eye.
“A sov’rin!” repeated Peggy, with enthusiasm. “Stick it in your pockut, an’ be grateful iver afther to Peggy’s bare fut!”
He shook his head.
“You won’t?”
Another shake.
“’Tis sinful pride I call it,” remonstrated the girl. “The kind man meant well—”
“The kind man!”
“An’ isn’t he?”
“I owe him a bit already,” replied Tom. “Let me settle that first.”
“But this he meant well, man; this is no farth’n’—”
“So much the worse. He thought to heal the wounds I owe him with a sovereign, did he? His conscience and my wounds! May they lie open, and sting and throb and tickle all at once, as they’re doing now, till I have my fingers at his throat!” The girl looked so frightened that he gulped at his passion, and said, “You keep it yourself, Peggy, like a good girl; you deserve a purse of them for all you’ve done for me this night. Why, what now?”
He sat alone in the lock-up; the girl had stolen swiftly out. In the unconscious egotism of his grief and shame, this simply puzzled him. So he sat in the moonbeams, blinking at the moon, until she returned and once more closed the door.
“All’s safe,” she told him cheerfully. “I heard the thraps snorin’ in their slape.”
“Had you heard something else?”
“I had not.”
“Then what was wrong?”
“Is it why I went out?” said Peggy, fixing him with an eye that was cheerful too. “To dhrop that sov’rin to the very bottom of their well; an’ it’s we will dhrop it, too, if you plase.”
Tom held out his hand.
“I’ve offended you, Peggy. God knows I didn’t mean to; but I’m capable of all that’s brutal to-night; you see what they’ve made of me already! Forgive me, Peggy. I’ll never forgive them. I’ll be even with every one of them, curse them! curse them! and then I’ll swing as I should have done a year ago. I’m sorry I didn’t keep that pound — to give it him back for his coffin!”
It was terrible to hear him; his voice was very low, and full of fresh tears that made it all sound worse. Peggy asked him what he meant to do.
He meant to die, but not of the lash — the rope; he meant to hang as he should have hung the year before. If only he had! If only he had! But at last he recognised the fate reserved for him by a Providence he blasphemed, so now he would meet it half-way. He was sorry he had not done so long ago. He was sorry he had not driven a knife through Nat in the very beginning; but it was never too late to kill and die; it was only too late to die with a whole skin; and again his sobs and blasphemies were horrible to hear. Yet Peggy listened patiently, and gradually soothed him with a tender, tolerant, womanly word here and there; so that at last he looked at her through his tears (for he was utterly unmanned) and asked her, out of pure curiosity, what he had done to make such an enemy of Mr. Nat.
Peggy resumed her cheerful manner.
“An’ don’t ye know?” said she, masking a trembling lip with a smile. “Is it no notion ye have at all?”
“None whatever.”
“Arrah, Tom, ’tis in love ye are entirely!”
At these words, which took him cruelly by surprise, he gave her a kind of wounded glare that was their confirmation, whereupon she forced a giggle, and asked him whom he supposed Nat had suspected him of being in love with.
Tom wearily gave it up.
“Be thinkin’ a minute,” said Peggy self-consciously.
“Not you, was it?”
Peggy nodded.
“But what nonsense!” he exclaimed.
“An’ it was all that,” said Peggy.
“I mean we never saw each other. And was that all he had against me?”
“No; there was a little more than that.”
She hesitated.
“What?” he asked.
“More of his nonsense then, for he thought I was as bad as you.”
“Idiot!”
“Idjut indeed,” said Peggy sadly.
“When we hadn’t exchanged a dozen words!”
Not a dozen? Not many dozens, perhaps; for up to to-night Peggy had them every one by heart. She was not so sure that she would be able to remember all they were saying now; she was not so sure that she should want to. But she steeled herself to answer cheerfully. And he guessed nothing then, for to speak of love was still to think of Claire; and to think of Claire was to pray that never, in this life or another, might she know or dream what had befallen him that day. But even with the prayer in his heart he remembered there was no God to hear it; and was retracing his steps in this blind alley of despair, when Peggy took his hand and flashed a suggestion before his mind.
Why should he go back to the farm at all — to be bullied and beaten to death or desperation in a cruel and unequal war? He told her in reply what he calmly proposed to do, and her blood ran cold to hear him; then common-sense came to her aid, and she showed him the folly (rather than the wickedness) of his diabolical plans. He listened sullenly, but said he could not answer for himself after this, and pretended to take less than he really did to the suggestion that he should run away there and then; according to Peggy, there was not another minute to lose.
Tom wanted to know where he was to run to, but he began feeling about for his shirt. Peggy found it for him, and noticed, with a pang of instinctive jealousy, as the blanket fell apart in his movements, a mysterious something that he wore next his breast like a scapula. It was sewn up in oiled silk, which glistened in the feeble light; and in the bitter intuition that this precious posses
sion was a packet of true love’s letters, she made him ask his questions twice.
Peggy then told him he must run due east for the sea, for it was but thirty miles from there; and she had a good mind to run with him, since they were going to turn her into Government without fail. This she said with a laugh, but he made no answer. His face was drawn with pain at every movement; it reminded Peggy of some scraps of cotton-wool that she had brought for him to put next his lacerated skin; and a grateful look he gave her was her comfort and her hope, as she left him to fight his own battle with his shirt, and set herself to pulling down the brushwood fence. A breach was easily and not noisily made; and both moon and stars were still crisp in the sky when Tom painfully followed the girl’s lead, and the two plunged together into the open bush.
“Djue east,” repeated Peggy, stopping in the first thicket. “D’ye know the Southren Cross now? I’m afther misrememberin’ it meself.”
“Up yonder, Peggy. Those five.”
“An’ as like a cross as a han’-saw! But as ye know ‘t ye can steer djue east by’t, an’ djue east lies the say. If you’re wantin’ wather on the way, let the Southren Cross shine in your face an’ that’ll bring ye to the river. I heard ‘em say so as I waited table.”
“I know, Peggy, I know. And when I get to the sea — if ever I do — well, at least my bones can sleep in it, instead of in this pestilent land!”
He stood eying her, eager to be gone, and yet reluctant to show ungrateful haste.
“An’ why would they?” cried Peggy. “It’s manny a convict has escaped on raf’s before ye, so why wouldn’t you? Only fetch up wid the say an’ there’s hope!”
“Then, Peggy, there’s no time to lose.” And his hand was out in an instant.
“Ah then, Tom, an’ must I be lavin’ ye?”
Her voice was altered.
“This is not the way to Castle Sullivan, Peggy; it’s the very opposite direction; and I’ve got you into trouble enough, goodness knows.”
Her lips parted as though more arguments were on her tongue; but it was upon his white face the moon was shining, and his eagerness to go, and go alone, was now transparent.
“They have made you crule, Tom,” said Peggy, with a sudden sad dignity. “Good-bye. Go your ways. God bless you!”
“Cruel to you?” he said densely.
“Yes, crule to me! To me that brought ye mate and dhrink; to me that’d—”
“But what can I do?” he asked her in the same dull tone. “I am grateful to you with all the heart they’ve left me; but they tried their best to cut it out, and I believe they have. Make allowances for me, Peggy, and only tell me what I can do!”
“Take me wid ye, Tom,” she whispered.
“To the sea?”
“An’ further!”
“My dear, how can I? If they follow me alone I can fight them alone until I drop and die. With you I couldn’t.”
“An’ wouldn’t we dhrop and die together?”
And now there were tears in her voice that held his own tongue bound; and now a light in her eyes that shot a ray through his brain at last. He understood, and waited for his heart to bleed for her. When it would not, a great groan came from his soul.
“I can’t help it, Peggy,” he mumbled, in his shame; “it’s as you say! They’ve cut my heart out — cut it clean out, they have! — and a cruel brute is all I can ever be now. Forgive me, my girl — and let me go. Never think twice about me. I’m not worth it — a brute like me! Peggy — Peggy—”
He had tried, in his weakness, to put his arms about her, upon an impulse of pure sorrow and gratitude, that flickered within him like the last ember in a fire. And the convict girl had turned so fiercely that her black hair swept and stung his face, as she broke away from him once and for all. He saw her bare feet flashing in the moonlight; they fell too softly for his ears. But he heard her sobbing as she ran. And he pitied himself the more passionately for the little he found it in him to pity her.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LITTLE GREY MAN
To abscond from assigned service was to break yet another law of the land of bondage. And though he little knew it (but cared less), Tom Erichsen was now liable to further transportation — even to Norfolk Island — and that for life.
Six months in a chain-gang was, however, a likelier term; he might even get off with another fifty lashes, and doubtless would, if he fell alive into the ruthless hands through which he had slipped at last. He set his teeth at the thought. It should never be. They might take his body — there would be one or two more to go with it when they did.
The stars were still sharp in the sky. They remained so for some hours longer, when a breath of wind blew them out like candles, and day broke, or rather burst like a shell.
Meanwhile Tom had struck a creek, waded a mile in it to destroy the scent — waded within a stone’s-throw of Jarman’s hut — turned tail in a panic — and waded back, and miles further, in the opposite direction. In the creek also he slaked his thirst and laved his wounds. He had turned his back on it when the sun rose. And towards the rising sun he ran and ran until there was a great belt of blue beneath it in the sky; then hid for the day in a tiny clump of trees in the midst of an open plain.
Here he slept for hours, yet dreamt but one dream — of baying dogs and cantering hoofs. When he awoke the first sound was actually audible, but far away and growing fainter. It passed altogether, and he fell asleep again. Awaking a second time, he found the stars back in the sky, but as yet no moon. And Tom was deadly faint for lack of food.
Also, his wounds were so stiff that he could scarcely stir, every movement caused him pain; yet he struggled up, and tottered east, with those five fixed stars shining feebly upon his wan right cheek and haggard profile.
How long this continued Tom could never tell. It might have been hours later, or only minutes that seemed like hours, when the climax came. All he ever knew was that his head was by this time very light; and that the moon was no higher than the trees when it shone upon the stray wether bleating piteously in his path, which was to stand out terribly in his mind ever after. Yet up to that moment a forty hours’ fast had been broken but once — with sandwiches. It was either this or lingering death.
The moon won clear of the trees; it shone into the glutted eyes and on the blood-caked mouth and fingers of as desperate and abandoned a young convict as the settlement contained.
He pushed on now with a new and dreadful energy. He thought he smelt the sea. The country, however, was still well timbered; and instinctively, rather than with conscious precaution, the fugitive made his line where the trees were thickest. He was now steering jealously by the moon, with his head thrown further back the higher it sailed; thus it was that a little later he tripped and staggered without seeing what it was that had caught his foot; but it felt peculiar, and after a moment he turned round, stood still, and went back.
It was the dead body of a man.
The body had not a rag upon it.
Tom knelt to examine it by the moonlight, and a cold thrill ran down him which he resented when he had time to think; it showed there was something human in him yet.
The body was that of a very swarthy man, with wonderful white teeth upon which the moon shone and glistened in the ghastliest manner; and pierced ears from which the ear-rings had been brutally torn; and a chapfallen blue chin. Tom thought the man had not been many hours dead; what puzzled him was the apparent absence of a mortal wound where the other evidences of foul play were so glaring. When found, however, the wound itself puzzled him much more; it was at the back of the sunburnt neck, and might have been a bullet-wound, but Tom had never seen one before; nor would he have expected a bullet to drill a hole so clean and round.
He now behaved as though he had been tripping over murdered men all his life. He had not only recovered his composure, he was able to glory in it as a sign that his heart was dead after all, and so past bleeding for anything or anybody any more. At this moment h
e raised his eyes, and his new-found composure was at an end.
A light flashed through the trees into his eyes: a tongue of flame from some camp-fire.
Tom listened. No voices reached his ears save those of the nocturnal bush. The fire was farther off than he had thought.
He got up, and first walked, then crept, towards the light. The colony was infested with bands of bushrangers. What if here were one, and this corpse their handiwork? Now Tom thought of it, one particular and most notorious band had been depredating this very part of the country ever since the New Year. He had heard envious reports of the villains in the convicts’ huts at Castle Sullivan, and especially had he heard of their terrible Italian chief, said to be an outlawed brigand come to seek fresh fortunes in New South Wales. Of the merciless ferocity of this free alien the most horrifying stories were afloat. Yet the worst of these but feebly expressed one who shot men from behind, stripped their corpses, and tore the very rings from their ears.
Tom crept near the fire in a personal fright curiously exhilarating in its intensity. He might almost have been a free man once more — worth robbing — worth murdering for his money. The novel sensation brought back a momentary whiff of unconscious self-respect. It was just the little thought of having a life worth taking once more; of being anything to anybody but a beaten dog; and it came and went and was forgotten in the same moment.
The next, he was gazing on a curious scene; and his fears were also at an end.
In the light of the camp-fire four men were sitting solemnly at whist; and three faces more innocently intent (for the fourth was turned the other way) Tom had never seen in his life. On his left sat a long-limbed stripling whom the others addressed as Slipper while they shuffled and cut and criticised his play; it was clear that Slipper was a novice, though an anxious student of the game. His partner was a wall-eyed man without a smile; neither did Tom hear a word from the one whose black hair and sullen shoulders were towards him, but opposite whom (facing Tom) sat the visible life and soul of the party.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 96