Читать книгу Half Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine - Price Warung - Страница 14

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The old order of things partially resumed its sway on the steamer Lizzie and her consort, the barge Wombat, with the beginning of the Kingsleys' fifth season. A white-man crew superseded the spawn of the lazar-house. But Jim Morris, late of the Riverina, was skipper, while Mate Nell retained her post. The rivers did not object to that arrangement when they were told that Capt'n Dick had been smitten by a mortal sickness and would never finger wheel-spokes again. Upon the news, the great heart of the river manhood gave one sharp, short beat of gladness, and then another of shame at itself, and then went on pulsing regularly in sympathy with the little woman.

The rivers did not know how awful was the doom that had overtaken their erstwhile enemy. Nebulous popular belief shaped itself at last into the notion that Dick's masterful brain was thrown out of gear by a sunstroke; and it was good for Mate Nell that nothing of the ghastly truth penetrated to the quick intelligence of the boatmen. Deck-hands would have fled the Lizzie as a thing accursed, and stevedores would have refused to handle freight. For the river-men would have concluded--and justly--that had Capt'n Dick kept himself from contact with the leprous brood the hideous canker would not have rotted his splendid virility. When a white man clutched poles, and ropes, and fenders after Chinese paws had slimed them over, what could he expect but that some of the slime would stick?

That is what they would have said had they known. Fortunately, they knew next to nothing. Fate was so far merciful.

Only of all Riverina did Jim Killen, the puntman, know. A worthless son of Jim's had died in Wentworth Hospital while the Lizzie lay at the wharf at the junction township. Nell had nursed the scamp in his last hours with sisterly tenderness. Thereupon Jim had vowed that what he could do for the mate he would do.

"The mate, she loosed my Ned's warp-lines gently, an' he hadn't to let go with a thud," he had said when he spoke of the incident.

Up to the coming upon them of Kingsley's doom Killen had done no more than throw an occasional ten-pound note into the captain's way, by dropping the Lizzie through the pontoons after hours, so that the boat might have first chance with the disengaged crane. But in the hour of her extremity Mate Nell thought of the puntman. Dick craved to return to the riverside; he would live in a bark humpy or a tent, he said--anywhere, in anything, so long as it was in sight of a river, and within the sound of a steamer's whistle and exhaust, and where he could sometimes see his wife. And Nell took the puntman into her confidence.

He helped her.

"So Capt'n Dick is goin' with the stream, is he?" he said. "I never liked that Chow bus'ness, but I'll help you for Ned's sake, Mrs. Kingsley. You let Ned's warps drop quietly into the current, ma'am, an' the Capt'n shan't go with a rush, if I can help it."

He built a rough humpy on a thickly-wooded twenty-acre block he had purchased on the Moama side, and there Dick was brought by night-stages from Melbourne. In the late autumn this happened, in the early winter the rivers were "up."

The season promised to be a long one. The Hay, Balranald, and Wentworth wharves still were burdened with back-block wool left over from last season. Every station on the river and out back was crying out for produce, and stores and sawn timber and the late wool would give return cargoes till the new clip was hurried down. These bright prospects made Dick desperate. He moaned in his gunyah tomb and fretted his heart away quicker than the scaly patches ate into his flesh. The next seven months should have given him fortune, and instead he was being offered death!

Every sound of Nature or of man pained him with a sharper than physical pain. The steam-saws at Macintosh's mills on the opposite bank tore him with their teeth; and again and again he suffered the throes of dissolution as he pictured himself being crushed between the gigantic logs that fed their steel saws. That was all he was fit for--to throw himself beneath the logs. Other men could carve the timber into shiny, golden sovereigns, each of which would melt into some joy or buy some happiness--but for him, the only timber he needed was six pine planks for a shell!

Then the laughing-jackass would stop in his work of snake-hunting to cast a sneer at him from the crown of unstripped gums, and the young cicadae would join the taunting chorus from the teeming grass. And he would deride himself for being their revengeful sport.

Then the rippling stream, on which he dared not look in the day-time save between the interstices of thick foliage, stung him with its jesting whispers. It asked him why he did not drag money from its bosom, and when he did not answer, itself answered for him. It flaunted an iridescent bubble on its surface that momentarily mirrored his dreadful features.

So with everything. The monotone of the curlew was the wail of his despair; the steam-whistle spoke to him defiantly and dared him ever to disturb the forest glades with its shriek again; the fluff of the wattle showered upon him the jingle of the gold whose hue it had stolen. The distant hoarseness of the men as they called the soundings and the screech of plumaged parrots made him shiver, for they reminded him of Ah Ling--and he knew now the significance of the tiny spot on Ah Ling's neck! And the sky, whether it glared in brassy brilliancy or opened its storm--fountains, tortured him, for the one aspect told him that the hot sun would draw down the mountain-snows, and the other bade him reflect how the swollen tributaries would pour their wealth into the main streams and give the boats another month of activity, when every hour would be worth a yellow coin. Life mocked him at every turn.

So, in effect, he said on the slate, which, his sole means of communication with the living world in his wife's absence with the boat, he was accustomed to leave on the border of his woody prison; and Jim Killen, reading the chalked words with laborious eyes, muttered, "He's a--goin' looney." And when, on the September night in which we saw Jim first, he waited at the head of the cutting after throwing the bridge across the stream for Mrs. Kingsley, in order to escort her through the darkness to the leper's home, he recalled the words so that he might break to her the frenzy of her husband.

"What news, Mr. Killen?" she said, shaking his hand.

"Bad, I'm afraid, ma'am. He's losing his lines in a way I don't like. He's a--goin' looney."

"Oh, God!" She could say no more, but fell trembling; a wattle that, shaken by the pressure, dropped a golden shower on her head.

"Oh, God! That is too much!"

"He put on the slate two days ago, as near as I can remember, these words--'I have cursed God, and yet He lets me live. The very snakes laugh at me when I want them to bite me. I took a tiger-snake to bed with me last night, and I am alive still. Say the word, Nell, and I shall kill myself. I won't do it till then because I promised you. But say the word, darling.'"

"Oh, Mr. Killen, oh, Jim, what shall I do?" wept Mate Nell.

Jim knit his brows painfully.

"You won't be vexed, ma'am?" he muttered at last.

"Vexed, Jim, my friend! How could I be vexed?"

"Well, I'd say the word, ma'am. It 'ud be most merciful to you, an' him, an' the little daughter!"

"Never, Jim, never! Better be a leper's wife than the widow of a suicide!"

"It'll be that in any case, ma'am. But if you won't say the word, you'll jest have to stop with him."

"He won't allow me!" moaned Mate Nell. "I did not want to start this season--I wished to stop with him. But he said we would be robbed if I did not go, and no one could watch the rivers as I would!"

To watch the rivers was necessary to play the game of speculation successfully. An exact calculation which would get a boat and barge loaded with produce down the "summer-level" Murray in time to meet the first freshets of the Murrumbidgee or Darling, might win a couple of thousand pounds, while an error of a few hours would entail the loss of hundreds. And it took the owner's eye always to note the fall and rise of the stream, so Dick thought.

They moved on--the man wondering how it was all going to end; the woman stupefied and as in a dream, the dilated pupils of her eyes alone showing that she was awake to the horror that awaited her.