Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “You want to try Norfolk Island,” said the major, “but you sha’n’t.”

  Tom shook his head with an ugly sneer.

  “The gallows, then,” said the major, “is your game; but you’re not going to get there either. I can show you as good sport as you’ll show me, and we’ll see who wins the game!”

  It was nothing else to the combative major. He was growing younger for the exercise; he began to get about again on his legs. His only regret was for a palpably fine young fellow gone so utterly to the bad; for the rest, he found poor Tom as stimulating for some weeks as Nat Sullivan had proved on the occasion described. Nat, by the way, had returned to Castle Sullivan, ignobly crestfallen, but not so intoxicated as to ride by the stockade again in daylight. The major’s superiors had confirmed that officer’s opinion, and Peggy O’Brien, examined on her oath in Parramatta factory, had perjured herself for Tom in the most illusive and convincing manner. The Principal Superintendent had made a note of the affair; but there was no case, as Nat was pretty plainly told, and Major Honeybone heard no more of him for some time.

  As a matter of fact, the bones of the Italian had also been discovered; but, as there were no clothes upon them, and the native dogs had left little else, they were never identified. So Tom was safer, for the moment, than he supposed. Meanwhile he had become a sort of hero among his degraded fellows; not the most popular sort, however, for enthusiasm is difficult in heavy fetters. Besides, he never tried to be popular.

  He might have been, after knocking down the scourger. The man was a convict himself, who received Is. 9d a day for his unnatural services. It was the butcher over again, only this caitiff had eighty others always there to loathe him, and every hand could have shaken Tom’s for that well-aimed blow. But the very next day they discovered he would as soon turn on them as on their common enemy.

  The incident brought to light an interesting fact, and it happened on Tom’s third Sunday in the stockade. About half the gang were incarcerated in the common mess-shed, idling, yarning, cursing and proceeding as fast as possible with that mutual corruption which was the chief fruit of this particular branch of secondary punishment. Tom was of the number, a conspicuous unit. It was the dawn of his prominence. He was in one of those good tempers alluded to already. Everybody was listening; those who could laugh still laughed now; and if he had a guardian angel, surely, surely, she must have been weeping then, more bitterly than when he fought for the bushrangers at Castle Sullivan and put a bullet through a troopers arm.

  Suddenly something, an association, a reminiscence, a forgotten picture, made him want to weep himself; he was past that, however, and went back into the sulks instead. A new diversion being required, one was provided by the discovery of a young convict, a mere lad, writing a letter in a dark corner on the floor. On being detected, the lad first blushed, and then offered to read them what he had written; whereupon he opened his lips and a ribald stream poured forth, but meandered, slackened, faltered and was soon cut short.

  “He’s making it up as he goes along,” cried several. “He never wrote that at all.”

  “We’ll see what he did write,” said one who was at hand, cuffing the lad, and snatching the unfinished letter.

  With a cry and an uncouth chime from his irons, the young convict attempted to retain his property. It tore in his hand, and a dozen more held him down while the possessor dragged his chains on to one of the long, rude tables, and stood up to read the letter in a silence broken only by the protests of the wretched writer.

  “‘My ever dear mother and father,’” the brute brawled out, “‘I received your kind and welcome letter on the 31st of January, and happy was I to read the delightful letter which I received from you that day.’ Ahem! can’t he pitch it in? ‘O, how ‘appy I am to ‘ear that you are so comfortable and well. O, my dear mother and father, I ‘ope my brothers and sisters will mind what you say to them better than ever I done, for you see what it is to be ‘eadstrong.’ ‘Eadstrong, eh? Stop a bit; now we’re coming to it! ‘O, my dears, I ‘ope you will make yourselves as comfortable as you can, for perhaps I never may see you again in this world; but I ‘ope I shall in the next, where I ‘ope to be a comfort to you all, so God bless you all, my dears, for ever—’”

  He got no further; nor had many attended to the last sentences. The lad’s unavailing protests had ended in veritable wailing and gnashing of teeth; it was this that had aroused Tom from his lethargy, and he also was now upon the table, clanking down the length of it to where the reader stood.

  One or two mistook his intentions. “That’s it — you read it,” said they; but the most of them read Tom’s face.

  “Give me that letter,” he said sternly, halting before the man.

  “Give who it?” roared the other. “Oh, it’s you, eh?” he added, and seemed in doubt.

  “Lads,” cried Tom, seizing his opportunity, “this is going a step too far, don’t you think? We all of us had friends once — in another world as it seems to me — but if any of us like to remember we had them, surely it’s that man’s business and not ours? He’s a better man than most of us, and his letter’s the last thing that we should meddle with. We wouldn’t have done it once, and we won’t now.” His temperate tone surprised himself; but it merely showed how every sensibility had lost its edge. Two months ago he would have argued such a point with his ready hands.

  Meanwhile the reader had decided not to fight, being an insufficient number of inches bigger and broader than Tom, and having still in his ears the thud with which the scourger fell. But neither was he going to give in like a man, because men were scarce in those heavy irons. Accordingly he retained the letter a little longer, before handing it to Tom with a mocking bow.

  “We won’t, won’t we?” he sneered. “Well, as it ‘appens, we won’t, for more of that rot I couldn’t read if I was paid. But you look out, my special! If you’ve come ‘ere to give yourself airs, we’ll soon learn ye. It’s lucky for you I’m in such a good temper, or you’d have gone off this table a bit different, you blighted young upstart!”

  Tom had in fact taken his chains in his hands and jumped off: it was when he was on the ground, with his back turned, that the direct abuse was hurled. Others sided with the speaker and added their maledictions to his; yet the group about Butter (for so the poor lad was called) dispersed at Tom’s approach, and he returned the letter to its writer with a look that might have made his guardian angel dry her tears, for after many days there was kindness in his eyes once more.

  “Here, Butter,” he said; “take it — and for God’s sake not a word! You’re a better man than I am, or you wouldn’t have written at all. There — shut up. Gratitude, forsooth! If you must show some, don’t set me thinking.”

  But the lad’s emotions were aroused too thoroughly to be soon allayed. They had the corner now to themselves, and he was crying like a girl. Tom envied him his tears.

  “Read it through,” sobbed the young fellow, forcing the torn letter upon his champion; and to please him Tom perused it from beginning to end.

  A while ago it would have made him laugh and cry; now he read it unmoved, save by his own indifference. It contained a touching lie, describing the writer as being still very happy with the master who months since had sent him to the iron-gang. The rest was a wondrous jumble... “and I inform you that snaiks is very bad in this country. We ofttimes see from 14 to 15 feet long. Parrots is as thick as crows in your country, kangaroos too, and it is night here when it is day there, but Arthur Smith, I do not know where he is. Mutton is 4d lb f beef—” But he had written no further, and Tom said, “Thank you, Butter; it should make them happy,” as he returned the letter. He felt that he ought to be touched, and he was not. His heart seemed turned to stone, when suddenly he felt it quicken.

  The lad had simply said, “My name isn’t Butter; it’s Butterfield.”

  “A Yorkshireman? You talk like one!” cried Tom, with a most painful flash of memory. Once more he was a lucky
, hopeful, penitent sinner, in a sweet-smelling waggon, on a night in spring; with Blaydes’s watch ticking no warning in his pocket, and with a vivid mental picture of Blaydes himself smiling wistfully across the stile, beside which he was even then lying dead.

  “Ay,” said young Butterfield, “poor old Yarkshire! I doubt I’ll never see it again. My folks have left there an’ all.”

  Tom had more flashes. He was getting used to them now.

  “Where did they move to?”

  “A little place they call Hendon; an’ it was me that drove ‘em there by getting into trouble! Oh, it was me disgraced them all, and drove them away!”

  Tom let him talk, but said little more in return. It was Jonathan Butterfield’s son. How it brought all that back to him! True, it was not a year ago, but it seemed a lifetime. It was terrible to think of the little time and the stupendous change. Tom Erichsen saw himself as he had been and as he was, and the mental vision hurt him more than the material one which the stockade barber had shown him in a glass. He could not tell Butterfield that he had known his father. Nothing was to be gained by telling him; it would lead to his telling more, and how could he speak of things of which the mere thought was become torture so refined and so exquisite?

  His eighteen inches were a very rack that night. He was thinking of Claire for the first time in many weeks. She would hold him guilty still. How could she do otherwise? His sweet friend held him guilty when he was innocent, and his enemy the major held him innocent when guilty. Oh, the irony, the biting irony, that had made a worse man of him when he was bad enough already! All the foul night he lay tossing in his noisy chains; his wild eyes were never closed. Yet once the thought stole over him, had he been worthy of Claire when she loved him, would all this ever have been? And after that he lay quieter — his heart knew why.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  LIGHT AT LAST

  THE red-hot summer cooled gradually into lukewarm winter, with chilly nights, but the same fierce glare all day; and several men had had their chains struck off, and four had died in them, since Tom first felt the weight of his. But the vacant spaces on the shelves were never vacant very long. Those eighty suits of fetters were in continual use. And still the dual work went on, of chiselling the great road to a given level, and of degrading each newcomer to that of the worst man there before him; for there was no levelling-up in these iron-gangs, wherein mutual converse bred mutual debasement, until best and worst found common ground on the very bedrock of human infamy.

  Tom for one, however, still stood out among the worst; and there was another newcomer whom the gang had nothing to teach, either of misery or of wickedness; indeed he laughed at the one and greatly increased the other.

  This was an ancient felon known only as the First Fleeter: a wizened page of dreadful history, with not a tooth in his head, and but the one redeeming trait of incessant cheerfulness. He had arrived with the first fleet in 1788. He had sinned and suffered through those unspeakable early years, until the sense of suffering became as dead as the moral sense, and not a vestige of either remained to him now. But he would recount his crimes with grinning gums, and gloat over unforgotten agonies until there was a writhing man on every ledge but his own. He lay above Tom, who would listen to him by the hour.

  According to his own account there was literally nothing this old man had not done or been done to in the early days; he was cannibal, murderer and worse, and his only regrets were for neglected chances of additional crimes. But his spirits never deserted him, and for a cruel man he was singularly good-natured. He had weak and cunning eyes, a perfectly bald head, displaying every criminal cavity and protuberance, and a million wrinkles which, like his mumbling gums, were never still. Yet it was better to hear his wicked laughter than the clanking irons of men who neither slept nor spoke; and the evils endured by the majors iron-gang, which the First Fleeter pooh-poohed with a quaint superiority, did seem less intolerable after one of his yarns.

  “Bad rations?” he would croak, when the salt meat was rancid or the fresh meat strong. “Tell ‘ee, there’s none on you knows what bad rations is. You should ha’ been at Toongabbie forty year ago; we never had no rations at all, except when a ship come into harbour. Toongabbie would ha’ learned ye! Many’s the time I’ve dragged timber all day, twenty or thirty on us yoked to the one tree like bullocks, and dined off of pounded grass and soup from a native dog. And glad to get it, tell ‘ee; we wasn’t pampered and spoilt like you blokes — not at Toongabbie!”

  Or perhaps some wretch was groaning from the scourger’s lash. The First Fleeter waxed especially eloquent on all such occasions.

  “Call that a flogging?” he would quaver from his ledge. “One little fifty? If we’d had you at Toongabbie you’d know what fledging was. Five, six, an’ even eight bloomin’ hundred I’ve given an’ took. What do you think of that? There was no flies about them floggings, I tell ‘ee; no, an’ there was no flies about the hangings either. I’ve seen a man took an’ strung up on the spot for prigging a handful of weevilly biscuits, I have. An’ all the time we was dyin’ by dozens of the bad food an’ the ‘ard graft in the ‘ot sun. Lord, how we did die! There was a big hole dug; we collected ‘em every day an’ pitched ‘em in. I mind seeing one man pitched in before the breath was out of ‘im. ‘I ain’t dead,’ he says. ‘You will be by sundown,’ says the overseer, ‘an’ do you think we want you about the place till to-morrow, you selfish man?’ There wasn’t no flies about that overseer, either; it was him as killed three men in a fortnight, by overwork at the saw. They just dropped dead at their work. ‘Take it away,’ is all he says, ‘put it in the ground’; an’ you never heard nothing more. No, no,” the old monster would conclude, with his senile chuckle; “there wasn’t no flies about them old days in Toongabbie, I can tell ‘ee. I’d give a bit to have ‘ad some o’ this feather-bed gang there; them as thinks they know what ‘ardship is!”

  The First Fleeter became less loquacious after a time, however, and much less severe upon the luxury of the major’s iron-gang. Honeybone’s shrewd eye was on him, and that of the First Fleeter began to droop and ruminate with a cunning preoccupation that made him quite silent on his ledge. At length, however, he took to leaning over and mumbling to Tom in the stillest hours. And when Tom listened, the old wretch mumbled to others, including Macbeth, who had soon followed his enemy from Castle Sullivan, and been well-nigh as refractory in the stockade. The Scot was in another den at nights, but the First Fleeter made and used his opportunities with characteristic craft. So now there was a new poison in the air, and the virus had come all the way from Toongabbie in the early days.

  One of the last to be inoculated, and yet the one who perhaps took most kindly to the process, was a certain sleek, bullet-headed youth, who came to the stockade on a day in mid-winter. In the evening, as Tom was sitting at the mess-table, with bloodshot eyes downcast as usual, he heard his name in a voice he seemed to know.

  “Well, Erichsen,” it said, “it’s a small world, ain’t it?”

  Tom looked up, and saw the bullet-head nodding at him across the table; but so bloated and debauched was the low face that he was some moments in recognising his old companion of the condemned cell in Newgate.

  “Don’t look at a pal like that,” continued Creasey, with a smirk; “you’ve altered worse nor me. No ill-feeling, I say? I was that glad—”

  “Silence!” cried the non-commissioned officer on duty. “No talking at your meals, young man, unless you want what-for!”

  As for Tom, he had nothing for the newcomer but a surly contempt which he took no trouble to conceal. Creasey, on the other hand, was studiously civil to him on grasping Tom’s reputation in the stockade; and secret circumstances threw them not a little together.

  “That’s a biter,” young Butterfield contrived to say to Tom, in a day or two; “where did he know you before?”

  “Newgate.”

  “He hates you.”

  “Let him.”

  “I’m
jealous he’ll squeak!”

  “He might if he dare.”

  “How do you know he dursn’t?”

  “Too many in it; he’d be torn to little bits. See here, Butter!”

  “Yes, Erichsen?”

  “You’re to keep out of it.”

  “Not unless you do,” said the lad firmly.

  “Me! I’m in it up to the neck — and all the better — but you’re different. You’re younger, your time’s all but up, you’ve never had the lash, there’s a chance for you; so give me your word.”

  The lad hesitated.

  “For my sake!”

  The lad gave in, but consoled himself by making up to Creasey, who slept in his hut, and was already deeply implicated in that which the other thus forswore.

  All was in readiness; the excitement throughout the gang was intense though invisible; and Erichsen, Macbeth, and Creasey were even readier than their fellows (as behoved good ringleaders), when the unforeseen happened at the critical moment. The general failed them on the field of battle. The First Fleeter fell ill and was removed.

  It had been coming on for weeks: the old man, who had made light of the iron-gang, was the first to succumb to its hourly hardships. He was older than he had thought; he had it still in him to blacken and corrode every heart in the gang with his own abundant poison, and that he did, but that was all. His irons became very silent all night long. One morning he tumbled at his work; the next, he was sent over to Maitland, unfettered and in a cart. The gang were at work at the time, and the last Tom saw of the First Fleeter, as he waved his cap in the cart, was his bald bad head and his unconquerable smile. Tom wondered whether the last had not in some degree balanced the first, and been doing a little good for a long time in a land that needed light hearts almost as much as pure ones. Still more he wondered how they would manage without him now.

  Before nightfall, however, this departure was succeeded by an arrival as unforeseen. It was that of a curricle containing a solitary individual, who drove both up and down the line of ironed men, with the sunset-light first on one side of his swarthy, black-whiskered face, and then on the other. He was obviously and openly searching for some one among the eighty prisoners, and his failure to find his man was announced by a frown that had in it more of pain and apprehension than of mere annoyance. Meanwhile the major, who was still a comparatively active man, was bearing down upon the intruder with the help of his furled umbrella; and the gentleman in the curricle was very soon asked what the mischief he wanted there.