Читать книгу The Confessions of a Currency Girl - Carlton Dawe - Страница 5

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AND now I think I may as well abandon even the pretence of mystery which may have shrouded these opening pages, for ours is, or hopes to be, a plain-sailing narrative; our aim the relation of simple facts in proper sequence.

The covert sneers which we had borne so long in ignorance, the pitying looks, the whispered conversations broken off as we approached, the thousand and one slights which I see so plainly now, though happily ignorant of them then, were not without their cause, or bred of spite alone, for we were currency people—convicts! Or, at least, when I say we were convicts, I mean that father had been transported to New South Wales, and that as the just laws of heaven and earth declare that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, we were of the race of Ishmael. For a long time I did not quite know what it meant, and it was not till I was fifteen or sixteen that I thoroughly understood my position. Not conscious of being inferior to those about me, I could not understand the difference between the convict and the free. Try as I might, I could not see where my inferiority lay; nor was I the less surely convinced that there was no boy in the district the equal of Will. And if father was sent to New South Wales he was a gentleman with it all, and any man might have done as he did. Not that he was without blame, but it seems hard that he should have paid so dearly for a moment of justifiable passion, been branded with the indelible brand, stained he and his from generation unto generation.

It all came out one day. I was then in my sixteenth year, and Will, who was nearly three years older, was then a great big fellow, promising exceptional development in the next few years. There had been a row that morning out in the sheds between him and one of our men, over some young cattle which the latter was branding. I don’t know exactly how it came about, but Will said the fellow was unnecessarily brutal to the poor beasts, and when he remonstrated with him the man threw down the brand, made use of some very violent language, and told him to do it himself. Now Will was never one to be trifled with. Though even-tempered enough if you did not purposely cross him, he had yet all father’s fierceness of disposition with little of his restraint; beside which, he was a very powerful young fellow, as healthy and hard as a gum-tree; one who would as soon fight as not, and who would put up his hands quicker than he would take them down. He therefore ordered the man to pick up the branding-iron and go on with his work.

“I’ll see you d——d first,” said the man.

Will took a step nearer him, an angry light in his eye.

“Do what you’re told,” he said.

“Not for you,” snarled the man, “nor no other d——d convict.”

Will’s fist shot out and the man went over with a crash. Then followed a bit of rough and tumble; but the man was no match for Will, who soon gave him all he wanted and then drove him from the yard, threatening him with a like chastisement if he ever showed his face there again.

This was the story Will told as we all sat at tea that evening. Father paled visibly at the mention of that dreadful word “convict,” and I saw mother put out her hand and draw Harold a wee bit closer to her.

“And now,” said old Will at the conclusion of his narrative, his eyes fixed on father’s face, his own face very troubled and serious, “I want to know what it means, dad. I may not be a man in years, but I am both big enough and old enough to understand things now.”

“Well?” said father, though just a little nervously I thought.

“I want to know,” continued Will, “if there is any truth in this convict business, because if there isn’t, I’ll break the neck of the next man who taunts me with it. You don’t know what I’ve put up with, dad, in one way and another. As a boy I have often been ashamed to hold my head up; as a young man I have suffered more deeply still. Not that they say anything outright—they know better than that—” he added grimly, “but people can look what they think as well as speak it.”

“They think,” echoed father hotly. “Why, boy, they are not fit to wipe your boots.”

“Perhaps not,” answered his son queerly, “but that is not what I want to know.”

Here mother interposed with some remark about keeping oneself to oneself, to which father did not reply, but rising from his chair began to pace rapidly up and down the room, every now and again stopping and staring out through the window. At last he stood stock still and faced us, and we all drew our breath hard, knowing that something unusual was coming.

“It is time you knew, Will,” he said, looking desperately serious even for him, “and I think, dear,” he added, turning to mother, “that the other children are old enough too.”

Mother shook her head with a frightened look and tried to speak, but the effort only ended in a low sob. Harold crept over to her and hid his face in her breast, and I felt as though I should like to do the same, but the spell being on me I could not then have moved for the world. Will dropped the pear he was peeling and looked up into his father’s face in his own resolute way.

“You are good children all,” father began, “and as such are worthy of the highest honour. Think, then, how it must pain me to be able only to dower you with a heritage of shame.”

“Then it is true?” gasped Will incredulously. “You are a ——.” He stopped, flushed, and then held down his head.

“A convict?” asked father, with a queer smile. “Yes. But listen to me, Will, and you, too, children, and remember what I say, for this subject must never be broached again. Perhaps I ought not to broach it now, but I think I owe it to you, children, and, moreover, I wish only to justify myself to you.”

After speaking thus, he strode nervously up and down the room for a minute or two, then coming back to his chair, and seating himself deliberately in it, he unfolded, with a few swift touches, the secret pages of his past.

“It is neither my wish nor intention to dwell on what I was, for the remembrance of what I was and what I ought to be would but intensify my wretchedness. Yet you must know this, children, for it may give you some small comfort when the clods with whom you are surrounded affect to despise you, that your grandfather was the twelfth baronet of our house, and that in your veins flows blood as good—if we may reckon its goodness by antiquity—as any in England. This seems a vain and pitiful boast now, but I have not forgotten that I was proud of it once, nor do I pretend to forget that it will add to your prestige in the eyes of the world.”

“You never mentioned this before,” said Will.

“No, because—because when my disgrace came on me I bore another name, and as in my trouble my family forsook me, I took a solemn oath that no word of them or theirs should ever pass my lips; and only now, when I see that by speaking I may lighten your load a little, do I venture to break it.”

Will bowed his head without speaking, while father, after passing his handkerchief several times across his forehead, continued,—

“Being the third and youngest son of a not over-wealthy father, at no time might my prospects have been considered too encouraging, but I must confess with shame that I was the principal instrument to my own destruction. One folly led to another, follies whose recapitulation would prove of little profit, till at last, driven desperate by my own straitened circumstances, and the relentless enmity of my people, I took the Queen’s shilling, not as Francis Lawrence Hastings, but simply as Frank Lawrence. You see, I had pride enough to shield them even when my heart was hot with anger.

“Well, things went on smoothly enough, if one may call the life of a private soldier smooth, till a certain Captain Hawkes, a gentleman whom I had known in other days, joined our regiment.” Here I saw mother hide her quivering lips in Harold’s hair. “This man,” continued father, “a pompous upstart, had been an unsuccessful suitor for the affections of your mother, and, rightly or wrongly, he deemed me the cause of his failure. For a long time, however, I escaped recognition by him, but at last the time did come—though, for his own ends, he never acknowledged the recognition—and then my martyrdom began.

“I will not weary you, or anger myself, by recounting the numerous insults to which I was subjected by that man, the countless petty indignities which were thrust upon me, and all, too, with his tongue in his cheek, as it were, for never once did he admit to having pierced my identity. But at last the climax came. One day on parade he called me that which no man of spirit could bear unmoved, because it is an insult to his mother’s memory. My blood, never too well under control, boiled up and I answered him back. White with anger he rode up to me, and, before I had any suspicion of his intention, cut me across the face with his whip. In a moment I was a raging madman. The memory of all the wrongs I had suffered at this man’s hand inspired me with frenzy. I stepped out from the line, and, swinging my rifle, brought it across his head and knocked him senseless from the saddle.

“For a long time he hovered between life and death, but he did not die, and so I escaped the death penalty. As Frank Lawrence—for until I was convicted did he guard my secret—I was tried for attempted murder, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years’ transportation. Of my life here I need not speak. You know all that is necessary to know. In the due course of time she who had been faithful to me through all my follies and my bitter banishment came out to join me. Your mother, children, was that woman, the sweetest, noblest creature that God ever gave to man.” And speaking thus, he arose, and went over to her, and put his arms about her neck and kissed her; and she, poor soul, began to sob loudly, and Harold and I joined in, and I am not certain that father’s eyes were not likewise running over with tears, only my own were so dim that I could not see clearly.

Will had abandoned his pear, the poor boy’s heart being too full of grief to eat, and after a great struggle to keep down the emotion which was bubbling to his lips, he said, “I am glad you have told me, father. I only wish I had known before. I was afraid you had done something wrong.”

“Wrong!” echoed father with a curious laugh. “They don’t usually give a man ten years for doing something good. But I understand you, Will. I was never a rogue.”

“Thank God,” said his son, and rising left the room.

So this was the secret of father’s life. This accounted for the innumerable strange, sometimes pitying, looks which greeted me on every hand, the whispered broken sentences which so often reached my ears—“currency people,” “sent out, you know,” “what a pity,” etc. So I was really a convict’s daughter; I possessed the overwhelming convict taint. Henceforth I was to be the scorn of all the more favoured mortals; no matter what I might be, or what I might do, that one word “convict” would overshadow all; for to us Australians—I was going to say free Australians—there is no taint so terrible as that of transportation, no crime so black as that of belonging to that unhappy class, and though things are changing a bit now, the old prejudices die hard. They tell me that the racial hatred in the United States of America borders on the intense. It must be something like our terror and hatred of the convict. Father a convict! It seemed impossible. He, with his gentle ways, his noble face, his ever kindly eyes. He, a convict—one of those creatures whom I, and most like me, had always regarded as a set of monsters little inferior in iniquity to the denizens of the pit. Yet from his own lips had come the words : there was no gainsaying them. We, like the Jew of old, were cursed, and would wander on and on seeking peace and never finding it.

That evening as Will and I were seated in the old summer-house at the bottom of the garden, talking over the new terror which had fallen upon us, we heard the click, click of Harold’s crutches coming down the path, and, lest he should discover our weakness, I hurriedly dried my eyes, while old Will stood up to pluck a rose, whistling dolefully as he did so. In a moment the boy had hobbled to the entrance where he stood looking at us, a strange light beaming in his big eyes. Then he came into the house and sat himself beside me.

“Sis,” he said tenderly, laying his hand on mine, “you are crying?”

“What nonsense!” I answered, trying to look indignant, though my spirit sank and my eyes grew dimmer as I watched him.

“Of course it is,” he said with a strange laugh, “ask old Will there, who looks as bad as you.”

“Well,” said Will, owning up like the man that he was, “I confess that it has knocked me a bit silly, old boy. I couldn’t, couldn’t think that father had ever done anything wrong.”

“Wrong!” echoed Harold excitedly, his pale face flushing hotly, “do you call it wrong to do as father did? I don’t then. If I had been in his place I would have killed that dog of an officer.” And he brought his crutch down upon the floor with a tremendous bang.

“Well, you can’t say the old man never tried his best,” said Will with a grim smile. “Not that I blame him—don’t think that. I’d have done the same in his case—perhaps more—but it won’t make any difference to us, will it?”

“But why should it make any difference to us?” asked Harold.

“Ah!” said Will with a sigh, “you have not gone about as I have; you don’t know what they think of convicts.”

“But I have read enough of them,” was the reply, “and very foolish characters they seemed; as absurdly ferocious as the wicked giant in a fairy tale. Why, I have laughed over them by the hour. Surely no one in his senses would believe in such a class?”

“If they do not,” answered Will, “they will pretend they do, if only to annoy the likes of us.”

Harold began to look serious.

“Do you really think,” he asked, “that they will look down on us because father defended himself like a man?”

“They won’t stay to think of that. We are currency people, Harry. They’ll never get beyond that, my boy.”

“But we need not necessarily be bad on that account.”

“You do not understand this generous, Christian world,” said old Will, and I never recollect his voice sounding more bitter. “It is not content with the torturing of the parent. Its Bible teaches it that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, and it takes good care not to forget the teaching.”

“But we have done nothing wrong,” said Harold. “It is not fair that we should suffer.”

“Fair!” echoed Will, with a growl of disgust. “You don’t want much, do you?”

“Only justice, Will.”

“Then you may get it in the next world, Harry, old boy, but never in this. A queer go, isn’t it? What do you think of it?”

“I hardly know,” replied Harold in a low voice, “but I think you must be mistaken, Will, because such selfishness and injustice cannot be universal.”

“Oh, isn’t it, though?” was the dogged reply.

“I would rather believe not,” said the boy, “indeed I would. How can they think ill of us when we have done nothing to merit their censure? To me it seems like going against reason.”

“And is,” says Will, “and against justice too; but it goes on all the same.”

“I can even understand them looking askance at father,” continued the boy, as if oblivious of Will’s remark, “because, rightly or wrongly, he has been criminally punished by the laws of his country, but what have we done that we too should be looked upon as outcasts?”

“We are his children, Harry, and a bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit.”

“But is he a bad tree, Will?”

“According to law.”

“But not to knowledge or reason. And is his fruit bad? I think not. You are a good fellow, Will; who can deny that?—and I am sure there is not a better girl in the colony than Flos. As for me,” he added, in a choking voice, “surely no one could be envious of me? God has punished me enough already.”

“Too much, poor little Harry. Never mind, old fellow,” continued Will, putting one arm lovingly round the boy’s neck, “you’ll have a glorious revenge yet. Wait, wait till the world is echoing your name, and greeting you as the first great Australian poet.”

“I’m afraid it is only a dream, Will,” said the poor boy, who for a moment had flushed at his brother’s words. “How can a wretched little cripple, a currency boy to boot, ever hope to make a great and honourable name?”

“Why not, if he has the brain?”

“Ah!” sighed Harold, “if he has the brain.”

“Which you have, dear,” I said. “Remember, you are only a boy yet. You cannot do great things till you are a man.”

“Then I shall never do them,” he said. There was something so profoundly touching in his voice that I felt my heart rise almost to bursting. I had to turn aside to let the tears fall unobserved.

“What are you crying for?” he asked, slipping his thin white hand into mine. “I don’t mean that I shan’t live, Sis, though I sometimes think that it would be better for me if I were to die. It would be kinder, anyway, for I don’t think that I shall ever be proud again.”

“Nonsense,” said Will roughly, though he too held his face away, and stood looking out across the rapidly darkening plains, “why shouldn’t you? Haven’t you got brains, and isn’t that the grandest thing a man can possibly have? None of your common cleverness either, but the real thing, Harry. Why, in a few years all Australia will be singing your praises. Who will care a rap then whether you are a currency boy or a prince’s son? Work, hope, and never let yourself be daunted. It is a fight between you and the world. If you won’t give way, it will.”

“But you are very strong,” said Harold. “What am I?”

“If it were a mere matter of physical strength,” said Will, “I should have my doubts, but happily it is not. Once get the ear of the public, and though you were a chimney sweep they would applaud you. The few will always decry—for nothing enrages the unsuccessful like the success of others—but the many will uphold; that is how men have lived down the opposition of powerful cliques. Go on, Harold, think and work; write and write again, and if you win, your prize will be the greatest earth can give.”

Dear old Will! I never thought he had it in him, but he had read a good deal, and I shrewdly suspect that he had listened well to father and Mr. Langton, who talked very deeply at times. Anyway, he soothed poor Harold’s sorrows and filled him again with hope, and when we all three returned to the house, some half-hour later, we seemed to have already left half our trouble behind.