Читать книгу The Hillyars and the Burtons - Henry Kingsley - Страница 10

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THE Secretary rode steadily on across the broad sands by the silent sea, thinking of Gerty Neville, of how hot it was, of George Hillyar, of the convict he had left behind, of all sorts of things, until Cape Wilberforce was so near that it changed from a dull blue to a light brown, with gleams of green; and was no more a thing of air, but a real promontory, with broad hanging lawns of heath, and deep shadowed recesses among the cliffs. Then he knew that the forty-mile beach was nearly past, and that he was within ten miles of his journey's end and dinner. He whistled a tune, and began looking at the low wall of evergreen shrubs to his right.

At last, dray-tracks in the sand, and a road leading up from the shore through the tea-scrub, into which he passed inland. Hotter than ever here. Piles of drifted sand, scored over in every direction with the tracks of lizards of every sort and size; some of which slid away, with a muscular kind of waddle, into dark places; while others, refusing to move, opened their mouths at him, or let down bags under their chins, to frighten him. A weird sort of a place this, very snaky in appearance; not by any means the sort of place to lie down and go to sleep in on a hot night in March or September, when the wicked devils are abroad at night. Did any one of my readers ever lie down, dog-tired, on Kanonook Island, and hear the wretches sliding through the sand all night, with every now and then a subdued "Hish, hish, hish?" As the American gentleman says in "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Darn all manner of vermin!"

At nightfall, he came to a little cattle-station, where he slept. It was owned by a little gray-headed Irish gentleman, who played the bassoon, and who had not one grievance, but fifty; who had been an ill-used man ever since he was born,--nay, even like Tristram Shandy, before. He had been unfortunate, had this Irish gentleman, in love, in literature, in commerce, and in politics; in his domestic relations, in his digestion; in Ireland, in India, in the Cape, and in New Zealand; still more unfortunate, according to his own showing, in Cooksland. He told all his grievances to the Secretary, proving clearly, as unsuccessful Irish gentlemen always can do, that it was not his own fault, but that things in general had combined against him. Then he asked for a place in the Customs for his second son. Lastly, he essayed to give him a tune on his bassoon; but the mason-flies had built their nests in it, and he had to clean them out with the worm-end of a ramrod; and so there was another grievance, as bad as any of the others. The Secretary had to go to bed without his music, and, indeed, had been above an hour asleep before the Irish gentleman succeeded in clearing the instrument. Then, after several trials, he managed to get a good bray out of it, got out his music-books, and set to work in good earnest, within four feet of the Secretary's head, and nothing but a thin board between them.

The country mended as he passed inland. He crossed a broad half-salt creek, within a hundred yards of the shore, where the great bream basked in dozens; and then he was among stunted gum-trees, looking not so very much unlike oaks, and deep braken fern. After this he came to a broad plain of yellow grass, which rolled up and up before him into a down; and, when he came, after a dozen miles, to the top of this, he looked into a broad bare valley, through which wound a large creek, fringed by a few tall white-stemmed trees, of great girth.

Beneath him were three long, low gray buildings of wood, placed so as to form three sides of a square, fronting the creek; and behind, stretching up the other side of the valley, was a large paddock, containing seven or eight fine horses. This was the police-station, at which Lieutenant Hillyar had been quartered for some time,--partly, it was said, in punishment for some escapade, and partly because two desperate escaped convicts from Van Diemen's Land were suspected to be in the neighborhood. Here George Hillyar had been thrown into the society of the Barkers, at whose house he had met Gerty Neville.

The Secretary reined his horse up in the centre of the little quadrangle, and roared out, Hallo! Whereupon a horse neighed in the paddock but no other effect was produced.

He then tried a loud Cooe! This time the cat jumped up from where she lay in the sun, and ran indoors, and the horses in the paddock began galloping.

"Hallo! Hi! Here! Stable guard! Where the deuse have you all got to? Hallo!"

It was evident that there was not a soul about the place. The Secretary was very angry. "I'll report him; as sure as he's born, I'll report him. It is too bad. It is beyond anything I ever heard of,--to leave his station without a single man."

The Secretary got off his horse, and entered the principal room. He looked round in astonishment, and gave a long whistle. His bushman's eye told him, in one instant, that there had been an alarm or emergency of some kind, immediately after daybreak, while the men were still in bed. The mattresses and clothes were not rolled neatly up as usual, but the blankets were lying in confusion, just as the men had left them, when they had jumped out to dress. The carbines and swords were gone from the rack. He ran hurriedly out, and swung himself on to his horse, exclaiming, just as he would have done four-and-twenty years before at Harrow.

"Well! Here is a jolly row."

It was a bare mile to the Barkers' Station. In a few minutes he came thundering into their courtyard, and saw a pretty little woman, dressed in white, standing in front of the door, with a pink parasol over her head, holding by the hand a child, with nothing on but its night-shirt.

"My dear creature," cried the Secretary, "what the dickens is the matter?"

"Five bushrangers," cried Mrs. Barker. "They appeared suddenly last night, and stuck up the O'Malleys' station. There is nobody killed. There was no one in the house but Lesbia Burke,--who is inside now,--old Miles O'Malley, and the housekeeper. They got safe away when they saw them coming. They spared the men's huts, but have burnt the house down."

"Bad cess to them," said a harsh, though not unpleasant voice, behind her; and out came a tall, rather gray-headed woman, in age about fifty, but with remains of what must have been remarkable beauty. "Bad cess to them, I say, Mr. Oxton dear. Tis the third home I have been burnt out of in twenty years. Is there sorra a statesman among ye all can give a poor old Phoenix beauty a house where she may die in peace? Is this your model colony, Secretary? Was it for this that I keened over the cold hearthstone at Garoopna, when we sold it to the Brentwoods, before brave Sam Buckley came a-wooing there, to win the beauty of the world? Take me back to Gippsland some of ye, and let me hear old Snowy growling through his boulders again, through the quiet summer's night; or take me back to Old Ireland, and let me sit sewing by the Castle window again, watching the islands floating on Corrib, or the mist driving up from the Atlantic before the west wind. Is this your model colony? Is there to be no pillow secure for the head of the jaded, despised old Dublin flirt, who has dressed, and dizened, and painted, and offered herself, till she became a scorn and a by--word? A curse on all your colonies! Old Ireland is worth more than all of them. A curse on them!"

"My dear Miss Burke! My dear Lesbia!" pleaded the Secretary.

"Don't talk to me. Hav'n't I been burnt out three times, by blacks and by whites? Hav'n't I had to fight for my life like a man? Don't I bear the marks of it? There is no rest for me. I know the noise of it too well; I heard it last night. Darkness, silence, sleep, and dreams of rest. Then the hoofs on the gravel, and the beating at the door. Then the awakening, and the terror, and the shots, stabs, blows, and curses. Then murder in the drawing-room, worse in the hall. Blood on the hearthstone, and fire on the roof-tree. Don't I know it all, James Oxton?"

"Dear Lesbia," said the good-natured Secretary, "old friend, do be more calm."

"Calm, James Oxton, and another home gone? Tell me, have you ever had your house burnt down? Do Agnes or Gerty know what it is to have their homes destroyed, and all their little luxuries broken and dispersed, their flowers trampled, and their birds killed? Do they know this?"

"Why, no," said the Secretary.

"And, if it were to happen to them, how would you feel?"

"Well, pretty much as you do, I suppose. Yes, I don't know but what I should get cross."

"Then, vengeance, good Secretary, vengeance! Honor and high rewards to the vermin-hunters; halters and death for the vermin."

And so Miss Burke went in, her magnificently-shaped head seeming to float in the air as she went, and her glorious figure showing some new curve of the infinitely variable curves of female beauty at every step. And it was high time she should go in; for the kind, good, honest soul was getting too much excited, and was talking more than was good for her. She had her faults, and was, as you see above, very much given to a Celtie--Danish-Milesian-Norman way of expressing herself, which is apt to be classified, on this side of St. George's Channel, as Irish rant. But her rant had a good deal of reason in it,--which some Irish rant has not,--and, moreover, was delivered with such magnificent accessories of voice and person, that James Oxton himself had been heard to declare that he would at any time walk twenty miles to see Lesbia Burke in a tantrum. Even, also, if you are heathen enough to believe that the whole art of rhetoric merely consists in plausibly overstating your case, with more or less dishonesty, as the occasion demands, or your conscience will allow, yet still you must admit that her rhetoric was successful,--for this reason: it produced on the Colonial Secretary exactly the effect she wished: it made him horribly angry. Those taunts of hers about his model colony were terribly hard hitting. Had not his Excellency's speech at the opening of the Houses contained--nay, mainly consisted of--a somewhat offensive comparison between Cooksland and the other five colonies of the Australian group; in which the perfect security of life and property at home was contrasted with the fearful bush-ranger-outrages in New South Wales. And now their turn had come,--Cooksland's turn,--the turn of James Oxton, who had made Cooksland, and who was Cooksland. And to meet the storm there were only four troopers and cadets in command of Lieutenant Hillyar, the greatest fool in the service.

"Oh, if that fellow will only bear himself like a man this one day!" said the Secretary, as he rode swiftly along. "Oh for Wyatt, or Malone, or Maclean, or Dixon, for one short hour! Oh, to get the thing snuffed out suddenly and sharply, and be able to say, 'That is the way we manage matters.'"

One, two, three--four--five--six, seven, eight shots in the distance, sounding dully through the dense forest. Then silence, then two more shots; and muttering, half as a prayer, half as an exclamation, "God save us!" he dashed through the crowded timber as fast as his noble horse would carry him.

He was cutting off an angle in the road, and, soon after he joined it again, he came on the place where the shots had been fired. There were two men--neither of them police--wounded on the grass, and at first he hoped they were two of the bush-rangers; but, unluckily, they turned out to be two of Barker's stockmen. Two lads, who attended to them, told him that the bush-rangers had turned on the party here, and shown fight; that no one had been wounded but these two; that in retreating they had separated, three having gone to the right, and two to the left; that Lieutenant Hillyar had ordered Mr. Barker's men, and three troopers, to go to the right; while he, attended only by Cadet Simpson, had followed the two who were gone to the left, with the expressed intention of riding them down, as they were the best mounted of the five robbers.

"I hope," thought the Secretary, "that he will not make a fool of himself. The fellow is showing pluck and resolution, though,--a deal of pluck and resolution. He means to make a spoon or spoil a horn to-day."

So, armed only with a hunting-whip, he put his horse at a canter, and hurried on to overtake Hillyar. Soon after he heard several shots ahead, and began to think he might as well have had something better in his hand than a hunting-whip. Then he met a riderless horse, going large and wild, neighing and turning his head from side to side, and carrying, alas! a government saddle. Then he came on poor Simpson, lying by the side of the road, looking very ghastly and wild, evidently severely wounded.

Mr. Oxton jumped off, and cried, "Give me your carbine, my poor lad. Where's Hillyar?"

"Gone after the other two," said Simpson, feebly.

"Two to one now, eh?" said Mr. Oxton. "This gets exciting."

So he rode away, with the carbine on his knee; but he never had occasion to use it. Before he had ridden far he came on the body of one of the convicts, lying in a heap by the road-side; and, a very short time afterwards, he met a young gentleman, in an undress light-dragoon uniform, who was riding slowly towards him, leading, handcuffed to his saddle, one of the most fiendish-looking ruffians that eye ever beheld.

"Well done, Hillyar! Bravely done, sir!" cried Mr. Oxton. "I am under personal obligations to you. The colony is under personal obligations to you, sir. You are a fine fellow, sir!"

"Recommend me to these new American revolvers, Mr. Secretary," replied the young man. "These fellows had comparatively no chance at me with their old pistols, though this fellow has unluckily hit poor Simpson. When we came to close quarters I shot one fellow, but this one, preferring hanging (queer taste), surrendered, and here he is."

This Lieutenant Hillyar, of whom we have heard so much and seen so little, was certainly a very handsome young fellow. Mr. Oxton was obliged to confess that. He was tall and well-made, and his features were not rendered less attractive by the extreme paleness of his complexion, though one who knew the world as well as the Secretary could see that the deep lines in his face told of desperate hard living; and yet now (whether it was that the Secretary was anxious to make the best of him, or that George Hillyar was anxious to make the best of himself), his appearance was certainly not that of a dissipated person. He looked high-bred and handsome, and lolled on his horse with an air of easy langor, not actually unbecoming in a man who had just done an act of such unequivocal valor.

"Revolvers or not, sir," said Mr. Oxton, "there is no doubt about your courage and determination. I wonder if the other party will have fared as well as you."

"Undoubtedly," said Hillyar; "the other three fellows were utterly outnumbered. I assure you I took great pains about this business. I was determined it should succeed. You see, I have, unfortunately, a rather biting tongue, and have made myself many enemies; and I have been an objectless man hitherto, and perhaps have lived a little too hard. Now, however, that I have something to live for, I shall change all that. I wish the colony to hear a different sort of report about me; and more than that, I wish to rise in the esteem of the Honorable James Oxton, Chief Secretary for the Colony of Cooksland, and I have begun already."

"You have, sir," said the Secretary, frankly. "Much remains; however, we will talk more of this another time. See, here lies poor Simpson; let us attend to him. Poor fellow!"