Two or three mornings after the arrival of the Ladybird, the solitaryprisoner of the Grummet Rock noticed mysterious movements along theshore of the island settlement. The prison boats, which had put offevery morning at sunrise to the foot of the timbered ranges on the otherside of the harbour, had not appeared for some days. The building of apier, or breakwater, running from the western point of the settlement,was discontinued; and all hands appeared to be occupied with thenewly-built Osprey, which was lying on the slips. Parties of soldiersalso daily left the Ladybird, and assisted at the mysterious workin progress. Rufus Dawes, walking his little round each day, in vainwondered what this unusual commotion portended. Unfortunately, no onecame to enlighten his ignorance.
A fortnight after this, about the 15th of December, he observed anothercurious fact. All the boats on the island put off one morning to theopposite side of the harbour, and in the course of the day a great smokearose 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 hugeraft. This raft, made fast to the side of the Ladybird, proved to becomposed of planks, beams, and joists, all of which were duly hoistedup, and stowed in the hold of the brig.
This set Rufus Dawes thinking. Could it possibly be that thetimber-cutting was to be abandoned, and that the Government had hit uponsome other method of utilizing its convict labour? He had hewn timberand built boats, and tanned hides and made shoes. Was it possible thatsome new trade was to be initiated? Before he had settled this pointto his satisfaction, he was startled by another boat expedition. Threeboats' 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 aquantity of stores and farming implements. Rufus Dawes, catchingsight of these last, came to the conclusion that the boats had been toPhilip's Island, where the "garden" was established, and had taken offthe gardeners and garden produce. Rufus Dawes decided that the Ladybirdhad brought a new commandant--his sight, trained by his half-savagelife, had already distinguished Mr. Maurice Frere--and that thesemysteries were "improvements" under the new rule. When he arrived atthis point of reasoning, another conjecture, assuming his first to havebeen correct, followed as a natural consequence. Lieutenant Frerewould be a more severe commandant than Major Vickers. Now, severity hadalready reached its height, so far as he was concerned; so the unhappyman took a final resolution--he would kill himself. Before we exclaimagainst the sin of such a determination, let us endeavour to set beforeus what the sinner had suffered during the past six years.
We have already a notion of what life on a convict ship means; and wehave seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had passed before he setfoot on the barren shore of Hell's Gates. But to appreciate in itsintensity the agony he suffered since that time, we must multiply theinfamy of the 'tween decks of the Malabar a hundred fold. In that prisonwas at least some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were notutterly lost to shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamousthe companionship, terrible the memory of past happiness--there was yetignorance of the future, there was yet hope. But at Macquarie Harbourwas poured out the very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst hadcome, and the worst must for ever remain. The pit of torment was so deepthat one could not even see Heaven. There was no hope there so long aslife 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, musthave suffered during one week of such punishment? We ordinary men,leading ordinary lives--walking, riding, laughing, marrying and givingin marriage--can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideaswe may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evilcompany inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained anddegraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to ourdaily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whomall that savours of decency and manliness is held in an open scorn, weshould die, perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know,how unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beingsas those who dragged the tree-trunks to the banks of the Gordon, andtoiled, blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandpit of SarahIsland. No human creature could describe to what depth of personalabasement 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 adesert, seeking for a face, should come to a pool of blood, andseeing his own reflection, fly--so would such a one hasten from thecontemplation of his own degrading agony. Imagine such torment enduredfor six years!
Ignorant that the sights and sounds about him were symptoms of the finalabandonment of the settlement, and that the Ladybird was sent down tobring away the prisoners, Rufus Dawes decided upon getting rid of thatburden of life which pressed upon him so heavily. For six years he hadhewn wood and drawn water; for six years he had hoped against hope; forsix years he had lived in the valley of the shadow of Death. He darednot recapitulate to himself what he had suffered. Indeed, his senseswere deadened and dulled by torture. He cared to remember only onething--that he was a Prisoner for Life. In vain had been his first dreamof 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 hislabour. Instead of gaining credit by his exposure of the plot on boardthe Malabar, he was himself deemed guilty, and condemned, despite hisasseverations of innocence. The knowledge of his "treachery"--for so itwas deemed among his associates--while it gained for him no credit withthe authorities, procured for him the detestation and ill-will of themonsters among whom he found himself. On his arrival at Hell's Gates hewas a marked man--a Pariah among those beings who were Pariahs to allthe world beside. Thrice his life was attempted; but he was not thenquite tired of living, and he defended it. This defence was construed byan overseer into a brawl, and the irons from which he had been relievedwere replaced. His strength--brute attribute that alone could availhim--made him respected after this, and he was left at peace. At firstthis treatment was congenial to his temperament; but by and by it becameannoying, then painful, then almost unendurable. Tugging at his oar,digging up to his waist in slime, or bending beneath his burden of pinewood, he looked greedily for some excuse to be addressed. He would takedouble weight when forming part of the human caterpillar along whoseback lay a pine tree, for a word of fellowship. He would work doubletides to gain a kindly sentence from a comrade. In his utter desolationhe agonized for the friendship of robbers and murderers. Then thereaction came, and he hated the very sound of their voices. He neverspoke, and refused to answer when spoken to. He would even takehis scanty supper alone, did his chain so permit him. He gained thereputation of a sullen, dangerous, half-crazy ruffian. Captain Barton,the superintendent, took pity on him, and made him his gardener. Heaccepted the pity for a week or so, and then Barton, coming down onemorning, found the few shrubs pulled up by the roots, the flower-bedstrampled into barrenness, and his gardener sitting on the ground amongthe fragments of his gardening tools. For this act of wanton mischief hewas flogged. At the triangles his behaviour was considered curious.He wept and prayed to be released, fell on his knees to Barton, andimplored pardon. Barton would not listen, and at the first blow theprisoner was silent. From that time he became more sullen than ever,only at times he was observed, when alone, to fling himself on theground and cry like a child. It was generally thought that his brain wasaffected.
When Vickers came, Dawes sought an interview, and begged to be sent backto Hobart Town. This was refused, of course, but he was put to work onthe Osprey. After working there for some time, and being released fromhis irons, he concealed himself on the slip, and in the evening swamacross the harbour. He was pursued, retaken, and flogged. Then he ranthe dismal round of punishment. He burnt lime, dragged timber, andtugged at the oar. The heaviest and most degrading tasks were alwayshis. Shunned and hated by his companions, feared by the convictoverseers, and regarded with unfriendly eyes by th
e authorities, RufusDawes was at the very bottom of that abyss of woe into which he hadvoluntarily cast himself. Goaded to desperation by his own thoughts, hehad joined with Gabbett and the unlucky three in their desperateattempt to escape; but, as Vickers stated, he had been capturedalmost instantly. He was lamed by the heavy irons he wore, andthough Gabbett--with a strange eagerness for which after eventsaccounted--insisted that he could make good his flight, the unhappy manfell in the first hundred yards of the terrible race, and was seized bytwo volunteers before he could rise again. His capture helped to securethe brief freedom of his comrades; for Mr. Troke, content with oneprisoner, checked a pursuit which the nature of the ground rendereddangerous, and triumphantly brought Dawes back to the settlement as hispeace-offering for the negligence which had resulted in the loss of theother four. For this madness the refractory convict had been condemnedto the solitude of the Grummet Rock.
In that dismal hermitage, his mind, preying on itself, had becomedisordered. He saw visions and dreamt dreams. He would lie for hoursmotionless, staring at the sun or the sea. He held converse withimaginary beings. He enacted the scene with his mother over again. Heharangued the rocks, and called upon the stones about him to witness hisinnocence and his sacrifice. He was visited by the phantoms of his earlyfriends, and sometimes thought his present life a dream. Whenever heawoke, however, he was commanded by a voice within himself to leap intothe surges which washed the walls of his prison, and to dream these saddreams no more.
In the midst of this lethargy of body and brain, the unusual occurrencesalong the shore of the settlement roused in him a still fiercer hatredof life. He saw in them something incomprehensible and terrible, andread in them threats of an increase of misery. Had he known that theLadybird was preparing for sea, and that it had been already decided tofetch him from the Rock and iron him with the rest for safe passage toHobart Town, he might have paused; but he knew nothing, save that theburden of life was insupportable, and that the time had come for him tobe rid of it.
In the meantime, the settlement was in a fever of excitement. In lessthan three weeks from the announcement made by Vickers, all had been gotready. The Commandant had finally arranged with Frere as to his courseof action. He would himself accompany the Ladybird with the main body.His wife and daughter were to remain until the sailing of the Osprey,which Mr. Frere--charged with the task of final destruction--was tobring up as soon as possible. "I will leave you a corporal's guard, andten prisoners as a crew," Vickers said. "You can work her easilywith that number." To which Frere, smiling at Mrs. Vickers in aself-satisfied way, had replied that he could do with five prisoners ifnecessary, for he knew how to get double work out of the lazy dogs.
Among the incidents which took place during the breaking up was onewhich it is necessary to chronicle. Near Philip's Island, on the northside of the harbour, is situated Coal Head, where a party had beenlately at work. This party, hastily withdrawn by Vickers to assist inthe business of devastation, had left behind it some tools and timber,and at the eleventh hour a boat's crew was sent to bring away thedebris. The tools were duly collected, and the pine logs--worthtwenty-five shillings apiece in Hobart Town--duly rafted and chained.The timber was secured, and the convicts, towing it after them,pulled for the ship just as the sun sank. In the general relaxation ofdiscipline and haste, the raft had not been made with as much careas usual, and the strong current against which the boat was labouringassisted the negligence of the convicts. The logs began to loosen, andalthough the onward motion of the boat kept the chain taut, when therowers slackened their exertions the mass parted, and Mr. Troke, hookinghimself on to the side of the Ladybird, saw a huge log slip out fromits fellows and disappear into the darkness. Gazing after it withan indignant and disgusted stare, as though it had been a refractoryprisoner who merited two days' "solitary", he thought he heard a cryfrom the direction in which it had been borne. He would have pausedto listen, but all his attention was needed to save the timber, and toprevent the boat from being swamped by the struggling mass at her stern.
The cry had proceeded from Rufus Dawes. From his solitary rock he hadwatched the boat pass him and make for the Ladybird in the channel,and he had decided--with that curious childishness into which the mindrelapses on such supreme occasions--that the moment when the gatheringgloom swallowed her up, should be the moment when he would plunge intothe surge below him. The heavily-labouring boat grew dimmer and dimmer,as each tug of the oars took her farther from him. Presently, only thefigure of Mr. Troke in the stern sheets was visible; then that alsodisappeared, and as the nose of the timber raft rose on the swell of thenext wave, Rufus Dawes flung himself into the sea.
He was heavily ironed, and he sank like a stone. He had resolved not toattempt to swim, and for the first moment kept his arms raised above hishead, in order to sink the quicker. But, as the short, sharp agony ofsuffocation caught him, and the shock of the icy water dispelled themental intoxication under which he was labouring, he desperately struckout, and, despite the weight of his irons, gained the surface for aninstant. As he did so, all bewildered, and with the one savage instinctof self-preservation predominant over all other thoughts, he becameconscious of a huge black mass surging upon him out of the darkness.An instant's buffet with the current, an ineffectual attempt to divebeneath it, a horrible sense that the weight at his feet was dragginghim down,--and the huge log, loosened from the raft, was upon him,crushing him beneath its rough and ragged sides. All thoughts ofself-murder vanished with the presence of actual peril, and utteringthat despairing cry which had been faintly heard by Troke, he flung uphis arms to clutch the monster that was pushing him down to death. Thelog passed completely over him, thrusting him beneath the water, but hishand, scraping along the splintered side, came in contact with the loopof hide rope that yet hung round the mass, and clutched it with thetenacity of a death grip. In another instant he got his head abovewater, and making good his hold, twisted himself, by a violent effort,across the log.
For a moment he saw the lights from the stern windows of the anchoredvessels low in the distance, Grummet Rock disappeared on his left, then,exhausted, breathless, and bruised, he closed his eyes, and the driftinglog bore him swiftly and silently away into the darkness.
* * * * *
At daylight the next morning, Mr. Troke, landing on the prison rockfound it deserted. The prisoner's cap was lying on the edge of thelittle cliff, but the prisoner himself had disappeared. Pulling back tothe Ladybird, the intelligent Troke pondered on the circumstance, and indelivering his report to Vickers mentioned the strange cry he had heardthe night before. "It's my belief, sir, that he was trying to swim thebay," he said. "He must ha' gone to the bottom anyhow, for he couldn'tswim five yards with them irons."
Vickers, busily engaged in getting under weigh, accepted this verynatural supposition without question. The prisoner had met his deatheither by his own act, or by accident. It was either a suicide or anattempt to escape, and the former conduct of Rufus Dawes rendered thelatter explanation a more probable one. In any case, he was dead. As Mr.Troke rightly surmised, no man could swim the bay in irons; and whenthe Ladybird, an hour later, passed the Grummet Rock, all on board herbelieved that the corpse of its late occupant was lying beneath thewaves that seethed at its base.
CHAPTER VII. THE LAST OF MACQUARIE HARBOUR.
For the Term of His Natural Life Page 19