Читать книгу The Hillyars and the Burtons - Henry Kingsley - Страница 7

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IT was a hard hit in a tender place for the Colonial Secretary. He had started in life as the younger son of a Worcestershire squire, and had fought his way, inch by inch, up to fame, honor, and wealth. He was shrewd, careful enough of the main chance, and very ambitious; but, besides this, he was a good-hearted, affectionate fellow; and one of his objects of ambition had been to have a quiet and refined home, wherein he might end his days in honor, presided over by a wife who was in every way worthy of him. Perhaps he had been too much engaged in money-making, perhaps he had plunged too fiercely into politics, perhaps he had never found a woman who exactly suited him; but so it was,--he had postponed his domestic scheme to his other schemes, until he was two-and-forty, and might have postponed it longer, had he not met Agnes Neville, at a geological pic-nic, in the crater of Necnicabarla. Here was everything to be wished for: beauty, high breeding, sweet temper, and the highest connection. Four of her beautiful sisters had married before her, every one of them to one of the best-bred and richest squatters in that wealthy colony. Mrs. Morton of Jip Jip; Mrs. Hill of Macandemdah; the Honorable Mrs. Packenham of Langi Cal Cal; and lastly, the beautiful and witty Mrs. Somerton of Lal Lal and Pywheitjork.* He fell in love with Miss Neville at once; their marriage was delayed, principally on account of troublesome political reasons, for six months, and in that time he had got to love, like a brother, her little sister, Gerty Neville, and the last and most beautiful of the six beautiful sisters. Even before he was married, he and Agnes had laid out all sorts of plans for her future settlement. He had even a scheme for taking her to Paris, getting her properly dressed there, and pitching her into the London season, under the auspices of his mother, as a gauntlet to English beauty.

It was a hard hit for him. He had always been so especially hard on a certain kind of young English gentleman, who has sailed too close to the wind at home, and who comes to the colony to be whitewashed. He had fulminated against that sort of thing so strongly. From his place in the House he had denounced it time after time. That his colony, his own colony, which he had helped to make, was to become a sewer or sink for all the rubbish of the Old Country! How he had protested against and denounced that principle, whether applied to male or female emigrants; and now Gerty was proposing to marry a man, whom he was very much inclined to quote as one of the most offensive examples of it.

And another provoking part of the business was, that he would have little or no sympathy. The colony would say that the youngest Miss Neville had made a great catch, and married better than any of her sisters. The fellow would be a baronet with £10,000 a year. There was a certain consolation in that,--a considerable deal of consolation; if it had not been that the Secretary loved her, that might have made him tolerably contented with her lot. But he loved her; and the man, were he fifty baronets, was a low fellow of loose character; and it was very hot; and so the Secretary was discontented.

Very hot. The tide out, leaving a band of burning sand, a quarter of a mile broad, between sea and shore. Where he had struck the sea first, at Wooriallock Point, the current, pouring seaward off the spit of sand, had knocked up a trifling surf, which chafed and leaped in tiny waves, and looked crisp, and cool, and aerated. But, now he was in the lone bight of the bay, the sea was perfectly smooth and oily, deadly silent and calm, under the blazing sun. The water did not break upon the sand, but only now and then sneaked up a few feet with a lazy whisper. Before him, for twelve miles or more, were the long, level yellow sands, without one single break as far as the eye could reach; on his right the glassy sea, gleaming under the background of a heavy, slow-sailing thunder-cloud; and on his left the low wall of dark evergreen shrubs, which grew densely to the looser and drier sands that lay piled in wind-heaps beyond the reach of the surf.

Once his horse shied; it was at a black snake, which had crept down to bathe, and which raised its horrible wicked head from out its coils and hissed at him as he went by. Another time he heard a strange rippling noise, coming from the glassy, surfless sea on his right. It was made by a shark, which, coming swiftly, to all appearance, from under the dark thunder-cloud, headed shoreward, making the spray fly in a tiny fountain from his back-fin, which was visible above the surface. As he came on, the smaller fish, snappers and such like, hurled themselves out of water in hundreds, making the sea alive for one instant; but after that the shark, and the invisible fish he was in pursuit of, sped seaward again; the ripple they had made died out on the face of the water, and the water in the bay was calm, still, and desolate once more.

Intolerably lonely. He pushed his horse into a canter, to make a breeze for himself which the heavens denied him. Still only the long weary stretch of sand, the sea on the right, and the low evergreens on the left.

But now far, far ahead, a solitary dot upon the edge of the gleaming water, which, as the good horse threw the ground behind him, grew larger and larger. Yes, it was a man who toiled steadily on in the same direction the Secretary was going,--a man who had his trousers off, and was walking bare-legged on the edge of the sea to cool his fect; a man who looked round from time to time, as if to see who was the horseman behind him.

The Secretary reined up beside him with a cheery "Good day," and the man respectfully returned the salutation. The Secretary recognized his man in an instant, but held his tongue.

He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man, who might have been forty or might have been sixty; as with most other convicts, his age was a profound mystery. You could see that he had been originally what some people, hasty observers, would call a good-looking young man, and was even now what those same hasty observers would call a good-looking middle-aged man. His hair was gray, and he had that wonderfully clear dark-brown complexion which one sees so continually among old convicts who have been much in the bush. His forehead was high and bald, and his nose was very long, delicate, and aquiline,--so much was in his favor; but then,--why, all the lower part of his face, upper lip, mouth, lower lip and all, were pinched up in a heap under the long nose. When I read "Little Dorrit," I was pleased to find that Mr. Dickens was describing in the person of M. Rigaud one of our commonest types of convict face, but Frenchified and wearing a mustache, and was pleased also to see that, with his wonderfully close observation, he had not committed the mistake of making his man a brave and violent villain, but merely a cunning one.

The Secretary looked down on the bald head and the Satanic eyebrows, which ran down from high above the level of the man's ears and nearly met above his great transparent hook-nose, and said to himself, "Well, you are a more ill-looking scoundrel than I thought you the other day, though you did look a tolerable rogue then."

The man saw that the Secretary had recognized him, and the Secretary saw that he saw it; but they both ignored the fact. It was so lonely on these long sands, that the Secretary looked on this particular scoundrel as if he were a rather interesting book which he had picked up, and which would beguile the way.

"Hot day, my man."

"Very hot, your honor; but if that thunder-cloud will work up to us from the west, we shall have the south wind up in the tail of it, as cold as ice. Your honor will excuse my walking like this. I looked round and saw you had no ladies with you."

Not at all an unpleasant or coarse voice. A rather pleasing voice, belonging to a person who had mixed with well-bred people at some time or another.

"By Jove," said the Secretary, "don't apologize my man. I rather envy you. But look out for the snakes. I have seen two on the edge of the salt water; you must be careful with your bare feet."

"I saw the two you speak of, sir, a hundred yards off. I have a singularly quick eye. It is possible, your honor, that if I had been transported a dozen years earlier I might have made a good bushman. I was too effeminately bred also, Mr. Secretary. I was spoilt too young by your class, Mr. Secretary, or I might have developed into a bolder and more terrible rogue than I am."

"What a clever dog it is!" thought the Secretary. "Knowing that he can't take me in, and yet trying to do it through a mere instinct of deceit, which has become part of his nature. And his instinct shows him that this careless frankness was the most likely dodge to me, who know everything, and more. By gad, it is a wonderful rogue!"

He thought this, but he said: "Fiddlededee about terrible rogues. You are clear now; why don't you mend your ways, man? Confound it, why don't you mend your ways?"

"I am going to," said the other. "Not, Mr. Colonial Secretary, because I am a bit a less rogue than before, but because it will pay. Catch me tripping again, Mr. Oxton, and hang me."

"I say," said the Secretary; "you mus'n't commit yourself, you know."

"Commit myself!" said the man, with a sneer; "commit myself to you! Haven't I been confidential with you? Don't I know that every word I have said to you in confidence is sacred? Don't I know that what you choose to call your honor will prevent your using one word of any private conversation against me? Haven't I been brought up among such as you? Haven't I been debauched and ruined by such as you? Commit myself! I know and despise your class too well to commit myself. You daren't use one word I have said against me. Such as I have the pull of you there. You daren't, for your honor's sake."

And, as he turned his angry face upon the Secretary, he looked so much more fiendish than the snake, and so much more savage than the shark, that the Secretary rode on, saying, "Well, my man, I am sorry I said anything to offend you"; and, as he rode on, leaving the solitary figure toiling on behind him, he thought somewhat like this:

"Curious cattle, these convicts! Even the most refined of them get at times defiant and insolent, in their way. What a terrible rogue this fellow is! He saw I recognized him from the first. I hate a convict who turns Queen's evidence. I wonder where he is going. I wish I could turn him over the border. I hate having convicts loose in my little colony. It is an infernal nuisance being so close to a penal settlement; but there is no help for it. I wonder where that rogue is making for; I wish he would make for Sydney. Where can he be going?"

One cannot help wondering what the Secretary would have said had he known, as we do, that this desperate rogue was bound on exactly the same errand as himself. That is to say, to foregather with Mr. George Hillyar, the man who was to bé a baronet, and have £10,000 a year, and who, God help us, was to marry Gerty Neville.

"Let me see," said the Secretary. "That fellow's real name came out on his trial. What was it? Those things are worth remembering. Samuel Barker,--no; it wasn't Barker, because that's the name of the Cape Wilberforce people. Rippon, that was the name; no, it wasn't. What is his name? Ah! Rippon and--Rippon and Burton. Ah! for the man's name was Samuel Burton." * One would not dare to invent these names. They are all real.