Читать книгу Castle Vane - J H M Abbott - Страница 7

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IN the year 1840, there were living in Sydney and New South Wales many quite respectable, and a good many quite disreputable, free citizens of the State, who had not always been free citizens. Some of them, a few, were men and women who had not deserved at all, or, at the most, only half deserved the loss of liberty and endurance of an ultra-slavery which had been their sad lot. Some of them, the fierce fires through which they had passed had purged of all dross. On some of them their sufferings had impressed the significance of the Eleventh Commandment—"Thou shalt not be found out"—without cleansing them in any way. And some of them had been utterly ruined, body and mind, by the terrible system which, claiming to be reformative, was only vindictive, aggravating, and soul-destroying. Taken together, the Emancipists comprised as strange and diverse a class of human beings, as had ever been in the world. They were good, and half good, and bad and superlatively bad. But there were few amongst them who combined each of these qualities in his own being.

Jacob Losky did. He was good and moderately good, bad and incredibly bad, in turn and simultaneously. It was as impossible to define his character exactly as it would be to count the sands of the sea-shore. He was a wicked and dangerous man, and a good and benevolent one, in the same minute of the same hour. He could coolly carry out a terrible crime at the same time that he was making some self-sacrificing effort for the betterment of a fellow-creature. For many things he deserved to be hanged; for many others he almost merited canonization. He had every good quality, and every bad quality, and they did not always manifest themselves in turn. He was such a man as the world is mercifully spared for age-long intervals. When the Creator was constructing him, it almost seemed as if He must have done so in some spirit of sarcastic rebuke to man—as though He should have said:—"Who are you, to judge your fellows by your own standards of right and wrong? Judge Me this one."

Jacob Losky never was judged quite adequately by his fellows. But it was not the fault of his fellows that they were not divine and omniscient.

By extraction, Losky was a Russian Jew—by birth a Londoner of the second generation. He had begun life as a call-boy at Drury Lane Theatre, had become a dresser, had even acted minor parts, and at twenty-six years of age was secretary to the great Mr. Barry O'Shaughnessy, the Irish tragedian, who, until the memorable occasion of his falling foul of the Prince Regent, over a lady of the theatre, had enjoyed a somewhat remarkable vogue in the English dramatic world. A year or so before the downfall of the O'Shaughnessy, the clever young secretary had, for the only recorded time in his life, broken the abovementioned Eleventh Commandment. He had forged the signature of his employer, and, by one chance in a hundred, which it is needless to explain here, the forgery had been detected.

Jacob Losky was sentenced to death, but—by the active effort of the eminent actor, and the intervention of the First Gentleman in Europe, still delighting in the society of the witty Irishman—had escaped the gallows, and been transported for life to His Majesty's penal settlement of New South Wales. He arrived in Sydney not very long after Captain William Bligh, late of H.M.S. Bounty, had assumed the government of the young colony.

From the first, the clever young Jew had done well in the new world in which he found himself. In twelve months he had received his ticket-of-leave as a reward for his share in bringing to justice three robbers of the Government stores. And almost one of the last acts of Captain Bligh, before his deposition, had been to grant him a conditional pardon, on account of his single-handed apprehension of a notorious escapee, who had terrorized the district of the Green Hills—as Windsor was then styled—in a fashion both gallant and diplomatic. Through the troublous interregnum that succeeded the Bligh rebellion, he had managed to keep in favour with the usurping officers of the New South Wales Corps, and was easily able to demonstrate to Governor Macquarie, upon his arrival, that he had been entirely loyal to Governor Bligh in his misfortunes. In the meantime, he had prospered not a little.

Macquarie found in the handsome young Jew just the type of man which he deemed it his duty to encourage by every means in his power—the criminal who was to be redeemed. The good Governor looked upon the colony as being designed before everything else, as a place in which the outcasts of society were to be given a chance, and every assistance in rehabilitating themselves. This was the reason of its foundation, he maintained, and in making good and useful citizens of those who had temporarily fallen from grace its chief function lay.

The progress of Jacob Losky was an interesting and fascinating study to him. He encouraged it in every possible way—now by a judicious grant of land, now by the sanctioning of some trading venture, and now by a gift of breeding stock. And always he was careful to emphasise, in his personal dealings with such Emancipists as Losky, that their past counted for nothing, that socially they were as good as anyone in the colony, and that they might ever regard him as their friend and sympathiser whilst they continued in such courses as made for their own good and the advancement of the settlement.

By the end of Macquarie's reign Jacob Losky was so entirely established that no one even thought of him as ever being anything other than the estimable citizen he undoubtedly was. And in the eighteen years that followed, and that brings his history down to the time of our story, he had established himself so firmly that his good character was easily sufficient to cover and conceal any of the doings that his bad one was responsible for.

He had married at eighteen, and left his wife and infant son with her people in England when he came to the colony. The son had inherited all the bad side of his father's composition, and had died outside Newgate, to the tolling of St. Sepulchre's bell, in his twenty-fifth year, as an unrepentant highwayman. He had left behind him a wife, and a daughter three or four years old. Her mother dying soon after, Jacob Losky had sent home for his granddaughter, and had brought her up himself in Sydney. She was Rachel Losky.

Such, briefly, is an outline of the career of the founder of the Free Company, up to the time when this story begins.

Jacob Losky was a rich man. No enterprise in which he had been concerned had ever been anything but a success. He had farms on the Hawkesbury, a cattle station out in the new country of the Liverpool Plains, a coal-mine near Newcastle, and a couple of schooners which traded up and down the coast, and sometimes further oversea, to New Zealand and the South Sea Islands. The book-shop in George Street, opposite to the barrack gates, was a hobby—one that paid its way, but still only a hobby.

He had many irons in the fire, and some of the fires in which they glowed were fed with very questionable fuel. Some of the enterprises were honest and open, and some were, not too openly, dishonest. He would dabble in almost anything that did not seem to him to be foolishly risky of his own personal liberty. All was fish that came to his net, and his net was a wide one with narrow meshes. Nearly every condition of life in the new country seemed to him to be worthy of exploitation. And so, regarding the great bushranging industry which flourished so openly in the first half of the last century in New South Wales, he saw that it was a form of activity which, properly organized, might be well rewarded.

He therefore founded and organized the Free Company. The Free Company was a band of cattle stealers, bushrangers, and outlaws, that was almost wholly recruited from the ranks of the convict class. The active toilers who collected the spoil were desperate men with a price upon their heads. Jacob Losky was the agent and manager, who planned most of the larger enterprises, and saw to the disposal of the booty and the realization of the profits. Between him and them were a host of go-betweens—ships' captains, corrupt officials, and storekeepers and publicans in the country districts. He had planned an elaborate system of intelligence throughout the regions in which the Company operated, mainly in the districts of the Hunter River and the plains of the north-west. News of the Company's transactions came to him through a score of channels. Wonderful codes existed by whose use perfectly innocent people would be made to carry information from place to place in entire innocence. Elaborate get-away arrangements—of such a kind as was exemplified in the trap-door and tunnel at his headquarters—had been perfected in many places. A cave in a Blue Mountain gully, a little mangrove-hidden creek in the Hawkesbury, a drinking-shop near the waterside, a sailors' boarding-house in Sydney or Newcastle—in such had he established secret meeting places, and outlets of escape for those of the Company upon whom the law pressed too hard. In no aspect of the lawless organization which he controlled did he take greater delight and interest than in that of making good the escape of its members from the tight corners in which they found themselves from time to time. He was an expert in dramatic disappearances.

The Free Company only had an existence of less than three years, from, say, the beginning of '39 to the middle of '41. But in that time its revenues must have been enormous. New South Wales was literally overrun with bushrangers. They varied in calibre, from the scum of Van Diemen's Land and Port Arthur to the petty thieves of a few ewes and lambs, or the occasional robbery of a farmer returning from market. Whether individually controlled directly by Jacob Losky or not, it was almost certain that the Company would be called upon to act the profitable part of receiver of their stolen goods. There was no safer method for big or little robber to dispose of his booty than through its agency.

And now, having outlined the inception and the scope of the extraordinary organization with which this story has to do, we will proceed with our narrative of the adventures of Richard Delane, lately of H.M. 146th Regiment of Foot.