“Gabbett!”
The intelligent Troke, considerately alive to the wishes of his superior officers, dragged the mass into a sitting posture.
Gabbett—for it was he—passed one great hand over his face, and leaning exactly in the position in which Troke placed him, scowled, bewildered, at his visitors.
“Well, Gabbett,” says Vickers, “you’ve come back again, you see. When will you learn sense, eh? Where are your mates?”
The giant did not reply.
“Do you hear me? Where are your mates?”
“Where are your mates?” repeated Troke.
“Dead,” says Gabbett.
“All three of them?”
“Ay.”
“And how did you get back?”
Gabbett, in eloquent silence, held out a bleeding foot.
“We found him on the point, sir,” said Troke, jauntily explaining, “and brought him across in the boat. He had a basin of gruel, but he didn’t seem hungry.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you eat your gruel?”
Gabbett curled his great lips.
“I have eaten it. Ain’t yer got nuffin’ better nor that to flog a man on? Ugh! yer a mean lot! Wot’s it to be this time, Major? Fifty?”
And laughing, he rolled down again on the logs.
“A nice specimen!” said Vickers, with a hopeless smile. “What can one do with such a fellow?”
“I’d flog his soul out of his body,” said Frere, “if he spoke to me like that!”
Troke and the others, hearing the statement, conceived an instant respect for the new-comer. He looked as if he would keep his word.
The giant raised his great head and looked at the speaker, but did not recognize him. He saw only a strange face—a visitor perhaps. “You may flog, and welcome, master,” said he, “if you’ll give me a fig o’ tibbacky.” Frere laughed. The brutal indifference of the rejoinder suited his humour, and, with a glance at Vickers, he took a small piece of cavendish from the pocket of his pea-jacket, and gave it to the recaptured convict. Gabbett snatched it as a cur snatches at a bone, and thrust it whole into his mouth.
“How many mates had he?” asked Maurice, watching the champing jaws as one looks at a strange animal, and asking the question as though a “mate” was something a convict was born with—like a mole, for instance.
“Three, sir.”
“Three, eh? Well, give him thirty lashes, Vickers.”
“And if I ha’ had three more,” growled Gabbett, mumbling at his tobacco, “you wouldn’t ha’ had the chance.”
“What does he say?”
But Troke had not heard, and the “good-conduct” man, shrinking as it seemed, slightly from the prisoner, said he had not heard either. The wretch himself, munching hard at his tobacco, relapsed into his restless silence, and was as though he had never spoken.
As he sat there gloomily chewing, he was a spectacle to shudder at. Not so much on account of his natural hideousness, increased a thousand-fold by the tattered and filthy rags which barely covered him. Not so much on account of his unshaven jaws, his hare-lip, his torn and bleeding feet, his haggard cheeks, and his huge, wasted frame. Not only because, looking at the animal, as he crouched, with one foot curled round the other, and one hairy arm pendant between his knees, he was so horribly unhuman, that one shuddered to think that tender women and fair children must, of necessity, confess to fellowship of kind with such a monster. But also because, in his slavering mouth, his slowly grinding jaws, his restless fingers, and his bloodshot, wandering eyes, there lurked a hint of some terror more awful than the terror of starvation—a memory of a tragedy played out in the gloomy depths of that forest which had vomited him forth again; and the shadow of this unknown horror, clinging to him, repelled and disgusted, as though he bore about with him the reek of the shambles.
“Come,” said Vickers, “Let us go back. I shall have to flog him again, I suppose. Oh, this place! No wonder they call it ‘Hell’s Gates’.”
“You are too soft-hearted, my dear sir,” said Frere, half-way up the palisaded path. “We must treat brutes like brutes.”
Major Vickers, inured as he was to such sentiments, sighed. “It is not for me to find fault with the system,” he said, hesitating, in his reverence for “discipline”, to utter all the thought; “but I have sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the chain and the cat.”
“Your old ideas!” laughed his companion. “Remember, they nearly cost us our lives on the Malabar. No, no. I’ve seen something of convicts—though, to be sure, my fellows were not so bad as yours—and there’s only one way. Keep ’em down, sir. Make ’em feel what they are. They’re there to work, sir. If they won’t work, flog ’em until they will. If they work well—why a taste of the cat now and then keeps ’em in mind of what they may expect if they get lazy.” They had reached the verandah now. The rising moon shone softly on the bay beneath them, and touched with her white light the summit of the Grummet Rock.
“That is the general opinion, I know,” returned Vickers. “But consider the life they lead. Good God!” he added, with sudden vehemence, as Frere paused to look at the bay. “I’m not a cruel man, and never, I believe, inflicted an unmerited punishment, but since I have been here ten prisoners have drowned themselves from yonder rock, rather than live on in their misery. Only three weeks ago, two men, with a wood-cutting party in the hills, having had some words with the overseer, shook hands with the gang, and then, hand in hand, flung themselves over the cliff. It’s horrible to think of!”
“They shouldn’t get sent here,” said practical Frere. “They knew what they had to expect. Serve ’em right.”
“But imagine an innocent man condemned to this place!”
“I can’t,” said Frere, with a laugh. “Innocent man be hanged! They’re all innocent, if you’d believe their own stories. Hallo! what’s that red light there?”
“Dawes’s fire, on Grummet Rock,” says Vickers, going in; “the man I told you about. Come in and have some brandy-and-water, and we’ll shut the door in place.”
CHAPTER V
SYLVIA
“WELL,” said Frere, as they went in, “you’ll be out of it soon. You can get all ready to start by the end of the month, and I’ll bring on Mrs. Vickers afterwards.”
“What is that you say about me?” asked the sprightly Mrs. Vickers from within. “You wicked men, leaving me alone all this time!”
“Mr. Frere has kindly offered to bring you and Sylvia after us in the Osprey. I shall, of course, have to take the Ladybird.”
“You are most kind, Mr. Frere, really you are,” says Mrs. Vickers, a recollection of her flirtation with a certain young lieutenant, six years before, tinging her cheeks. “It is really most considerate of you. Won’t it be nice, Sylvia, to go with Mr. Frere and mamma to Hobart Town?”
“Mr. Frere,” says Sylvia, coming from out a corner of the room, “I am very sorry for what I said just now. Will you forgive me?”
She asked the question in such a prim, old-fashioned way, standing in front of him, with her golden locks streaming over her shoulders, and her hands clasped on her black silk apron (Julia Vickers had her own notions about dressing her daughter), that Frere was again inclined to laugh.
“Of course I’ll forgive you, my dear,” he said. “You didn’t mean it, I know.”
“Oh, but I did mean it, and that’s why I’m sorry. I am a very naughty girl sometimes, though you wouldn’t think so” (this with a charming consciousness of her own beauty), “especially with Roman history. I don’t think the Romans were half as brave as the Carthaginians; do you, Mr. Frere?”
Maurice, somewhat staggered by this question, could only ask, “Why not?”
“Well, I don’t like them half so well myself,” says Sylvia, with feminine disdain of reasons. “They always had so many soldiers, though the others were so cruel when they conquered.”
“Were
they?” says Frere.
“Were they! Goodness gracious, yes! Didn’t they cut poor Regulus’s eyelids off, and roll him down hill in a barrel full of nails? What do you call that, I should like to know?” and Mr. Frere, shaking his red head with vast assumption of classical learning, could not but concede that that was not kind on the part of the Carthaginians.
“You are a great scholar, Miss Sylvia,” he remarked, with a consciousness that this self-possessed girl was rapidly taking him out of his depth.
“Are you fond of reading?”
“Very.”
“And what books do you read?”
“Oh, lots! ‘Paul and Virginia”, and ‘Paradise Lost’, and ‘Shakespeare’s Plays’, and ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and ‘Blair’s Sermons’, and ‘The Tasmanian Almanack’, and ‘The Book of Beauty’, and ‘Tom Jones’.”
“A somewhat miscellaneous collection, I fear,” said Mrs. Vickers, with a sickly smile—she, like Gallio, cared for none of these things—“but our little library is necessarily limited, and I am not a great reader. John, my dear, Mr. Frere would like another glass of brandy-and-water. Oh, don’t apologize; I am a soldier’s wife, you know. Sylvia, my love, say good-night to Mr. Frere, and retire.”
“Good-night, Miss Sylvia. Will you give me a kiss?”
“No!”
“Sylvia, don’t be rude!”
“I’m not rude,” cries Sylvia, indignant at the way in which her literary confidence had been received. “He’s rude! I won’t kiss you. Kiss you indeed! My goodness gracious!”
“Won’t you, you little beauty?” cried Frere, suddenly leaning forward, and putting his arm round the child. “Then I must kiss you!”
To his astonishment, Sylvia, finding herself thus seized and kissed despite herself, flushed scarlet, and, lifting up her tiny fist, struck him on the cheek with all her force.
The blow was so sudden, and the momentary pain so sharp, that Maurice nearly slipped into his native coarseness, and rapped out an oath.
“My dear Sylvia!” cried Vickers, in tones of grave reproof.
But Frere laughed, caught both the child’s hands in one of his own, and kissed her again and again, despite her struggles. “There!” he said, with a sort of triumph in his tone. “You got nothing by that, you see.”
Vickers rose, with annoyance visible on his face, to draw the child away; and as he did so, she, gasping for breath, and sobbing with rage, wrenched her wrist free, and in a storm of childish passion struck her tormentor again and again. “Man!” she cried, with flaming eyes, “Let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
“I am very sorry for this, Frere,” said Vickers, when the door was closed again. “I hope she did not hurt you.”
“Not she! I like her spirit. Ha, ha! That’s the way with women all the world over. Nothing like showing them that they’ve got a master.”
Vickers hastened to turn the conversation, and, amid recollections of old days, and speculations as to future prospects, the little incident was forgotten. But when, an hour later, Mr. Frere traversed the passage that led to his bedroom, he found himself confronted by a little figure wrapped in a shawl. It was his childish enemy.
“I’ve waited for you, Mr. Frere,” said she, “to beg pardon. I ought not to have struck you; I am a wicked girl. Don’t say no, because I am; and if I don’t grow better I shall never go to Heaven.” Thus addressing him, the child produced a piece of paper, folded like a letter, from beneath the shawl, and handed it to him.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Go back to bed, my dear; you’ll catch cold.”
“It’s a written apology; and I sha’n’t catch cold, because I’ve got my stockings on. If you don’t accept it,” she added, with an arching of the brows, “it is not my fault. I have struck you, but I apologize. Being a woman, I can’t offer you satisfaction in the usual way.”
Mr. Frere stifled the impulse to laugh, and made his courteous adversary a low bow.
“I accept your apology, Miss Sylvia,” said he.
“Then,” returned Miss Sylvia, in a lofty manner, “there is nothing more to be said, and I have the honour to bid you goodnight, sir.”
The little maiden drew her shawl close around her with immense dignity, and marched down the passage as calmly as though she had been Amadis of Gaul himself.
Frere, gaining his room choking with laughter, opened the folded paper by the light of the tallow candle, and read, in a quaint, childish hand—
SIR,—I have struck you. I apologize in writing.
Your humble servant to command,
SYLVIA VICKERS.
“I wonder what book she took that out of?” he said. “’Pon my word she must be a little cracked. Gad, it’s a queer life for a child in this place, and no mistake.”
CHAPTER VI
A LEAP IN THE DARK
TWO or three mornings after the arrival of the Ladybird, the solitary prisoner of the Grummet Rock noticed mysterious movements along the shore of the island settlement. The prison boats, which had put off every morning at sunrise to the foot of the timbered ranges on the other side of the harbour, had not appeared for some days. The building of a pier, or breakwater, running from the western point of the settlement, was discontinued; and all hands appeared to be occupied with the newly-built Osprey, which was lying on the slips. Parties of soldiers also daily left the Ladybird, and assisted at the mysterious work in progress. Rufus Dawes, walking his little round each day, in vain wondered what this unusual commotion portended. Unfortunately, no one came to enlighten his ignorance.
A fortnight after this, about the 15th of December, he observed another curious fact. All the boats on the island put off one morning to the opposite side of the harbour, and in the course of the day a great smoke arose along the side of the hills. The next day the same was repeated; and on the fourth day the boats returned, towing behind them a huge raft. This raft, made fast to the side of the Ladybird, proved to be composed of planks, beams, and joists, all of which were duly hoisted up, and stowed in the hold of the brig.
This set Rufus Dawes thinking. Could it possibly be that the timber-cutting was to be abandoned, and that the Government had hit upon some other method of utilizing its convict labour? He had hewn timber and built boats, and tanned hides and made shoes. Was it possible that some new trade was to be initiated? Before he had settled this point to his satisfaction, he was startled by another boat expedition. Three boats’ crews went down the bay, and returned, after a day’s absence, with an addition to their number in the shape of four strangers and a quantity of stores and farming implements. Rufus Dawes, catching sight of these last, came to the conclusion that the boats had been to Philip’s Island, where the “garden” was established, and had taken off the gardeners and garden produce. Rufus Dawes decided that the Ladybird had brought a new commandant—his sight, trained by his half-savage life, had already distinguished Mr. Maurice Frere—and that these mysteries were “improvements” under the new rule. When he arrived at this point of reasoning, another conjecture, assuming his first to have been correct, followed as a natural consequence. Lieutenant Frere would be a more severe commandant than Major Vickers. Now, severity had already reached its height, so far as he was concerned; so the unhappy man took a final resolution—he would kill himself.
Before we exclaim against the sin of such a determination, let us endeavour to set before us what the sinner had suffered during the past six years.
We have already a notion of what life on a convict ship means; and we have seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had passed before he set foot on the barren shore of Hell’s Gates. But to appreciate in its intensity the agony he suffered since that time, we must multiply the infamy of the ’tween decks of the Malabar a hundredfold. In that prison was at least some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were not utterly lost to shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamous the companionship, terrible the memory of past happiness—there was yet ignorance of the future, there was
yet hope. But at Macquarie Harbour was poured out the very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst had come, and the worst must for ever remain. The pit of torment was so deep that one could not even see Heaven. There was no hope there so long as life remained. Death alone kept the keys of that island prison.
Is it possible to imagine, even for a moment, what an innocent man, gifted with ambition, endowed with power to love and to respect, must have suffered during one week of such punishment? We ordinary men, leading ordinary lives—walking, riding, laughing, marrying and giving in marriage—can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideas we may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evil company inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained and degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to our daily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whom all that savours of decency and manliness is held in an open scorn, we should die, perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know, how unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beings as those who dragged the tree-trunks to the banks of the Gordon, and toiled, blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandpit of Sarah Island. No human creature could describe to what depth of personal abasement and self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him. Even if he had the power to write, he dared not. As one whom in a desert, seeking for a face, should come to a pool of blood, and seeing his own reflection, fly—so would such a one hasten from the contemplation of his own degrading agony. Imagine such torment endured for six years!
Ignorant that the sights and sounds about him were symptoms of the final abandonment of the settlement, and that the Ladybird was sent down to bring away the prisoners, Rufus Dawes decided upon getting rid of that burden of life which pressed upon him so heavily. For six years he had hewn wood and drawn water; for six years he had hoped against hope; for six years he had lived in the valley of the shadow of Death. He dared not recapitulate to himself what he had suffered. Indeed, his senses were deadened and dulled by torture. He cared to remember only one thing—that he was a Prisoner for Life. In vain had been his first dream of freedom. He had done his best, by good conduct, to win release; but the villainy of Vetch and Rex had deprived him of the fruit of his labour. Instead of gaining credit by his exposure of the plot on board the Malabar, he was himself deemed guilty, and condemned, despite his asseverations of innocence. The knowledge of his “treachery”—for so it was deemed among his associates—while it gained for him no credit with the authorities, procured for him the detestation and ill-will of the monsters among whom he found himself. On his arrival at Hell’s Gates he was a marked man—a Pariah among those beings who were Pariahs to all the world beside.
For the Term of His Natural Life Page 13