Читать книгу Fugitive Anne, A Romance of the Unexplored Bush - Rosa Praed - Страница 6

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ALL had been done that could be done on board the Leichardt in order to make certain of Anne Bedo's fate. People felt that the search was perfunctory, yet it was faithfully, if unavailingly, carried through; Kombo, the black servant of the lost woman, being foremost in the quest.

Mr Bedo, after his first sullen stupefaction, roused himself to a fury of anxiety, and stormed at Captain Cass and all the ship's officers, because the Captain refused to man and send off a boat for the exploration of the coast behind them. It was useless, the Captain declared, and would be contrary to his duty to his employers and the Government, whose mail contract he was bound to consider before everything else. Mr Bedo swore in vain, and at last was left to solitary indulgence of his grief.

There was less commiseration with him in his loss than might have seemed natural, for the man--drunken, brutal, and always quarrelsome--had been endured rather than liked, and all the sympathy of passengers and crew went out to the unfortunate woman, who, it was believed, had done away with herself rather than submit to her husband's ill-treatment.

The men admired her beauty in spite of her silence and reserve, which they had at first called "stuckupness," not to be expected from little Anne Marley, whose mother had had to give up her station to pay the Bank's loan--little Anne, who had gone to Europe to make a name as a singer, and had woefully failed, and been obliged to marry rough Elias Bedo for the sake of a home. They had none of them believed in her voice, till one Sunday, when the Captain held service, she had poured out her glorious contralto in a hymn. Afterwards, they gave her no peace till every evening she sang to Eric Hansen's accompaniment on the old cracked piano in the saloon. Then, by the magic of her voice, she had carried each man back to scenes on shore--to opera-nights in Sydney and Melbourne, as she had sung airs from Verdi and Rossini and Bellini, and even from Gluck's "Orpheus"; then to nigger-minstrel entertainments, which the sailors loved best of all, when she had given them "'Way down upon the Swannee River," and "Hard Times come again no more," and "John Brown," and the rest of those quaint plantation melodies.

By-and-by, Elias Bedo betook himself to his cabin in company of a bottle of brandy; and when the steamer reached Cooktown that night, he was incapable of even speaking to the Police Magistrate. This official spent some time of the two or three hours during which the Leichardt discharged and took up lading, in consultation over the affair. It was midnight when the Leichardt entered the estuary of the Endeavour River, and passed into the shadow of Grassy Hill, which overlooks Cooktown harbour. The sky had clouded over; a drizzle threatened, and the moon was quite obscured. Only a few kerosene lamps illuminated the darkness of the sheds, and of that part of the wharf where cargo was being unloaded. A few steerage passengers, mainly Orientals, disembarked at this port, and here, Kombo, the black boy, left Mr Bedo's service, having at Thursday Island announced his intention of seeking his tribe in order to see what had become of his father and mother, and, as he put it, "all that fellow brudder and sister belonging to me."

Eric Hansen, on deck, saw him staggering along the plank with an enormous swag on his back, and a young Lascar hanging on behind him, but soon lost sight of the two behind the low sheds which lined the quay. Hansen was sorry that the black boy had gone, and wondered that he should care to go back to the Bush; but Kombo, though he was well tamed, having been taken young from his tribe, and though he had had three years' experience of domestic service with his mistress in England, gave an example of that savage leaven which somehow or other must assert itself in the Australian native. So Hansen knew that once Kombo had got past the hills behind Cooktown, he would cast off the garments of civilisation and relapse into his original condition of barbarism. The explorer had offered, if he would wait, to give him a place in his own pioneering expedition which was to start from a little further south; but Kombo, with "Mine very sorry, Massa, but mine like to stop one two moon before I go again long-a white man," had shaken his head and refused the offer. Hansen was disappointed, for he intended to study the northern natives as well as the northern fauna of Australia, and had been getting what information he could out of Kombo, whose tribe was one dwelling inland of Cooktown. It was in his talks with the black boy that he had come into more intimate companionship with Mrs Bedo--curiously intimate, considering a certain half savage, half timid reticence which she showed to almost all on board. She rarely spoke at meals except a word or two to the Captain, beside whom she sat. When the weather was fine and comparatively cool, she would spend much time in her cabin; but in the afternoons, she would usually sit on deck, and there, Kombo would bring her tea, and sometimes stay to have a little conversation with his mistress. Then it would seem to Hansen that she was like some wild, shy creature, brought in from her native forests, and permitted to hold occasional converse with a domesticated inhabitant of her own land. For it was only, he felt, as her face lighted up in talk with Kombo, that he saw the girl as she really was--as she might have been, freed from the galling yoke of an uncongenial marriage. On one of these occasions, when Kombo lingered after bringing her tea, Hansen, walking past, was struck by the animation with which she spoke to her black servant in his own language. The conversation, after the first minute or two, had not seemed to be of a private nature, and presently Hansen drew near, and begged for a translation of some of the words, over which Mrs Bedo was now laughing with unrestrained pleasure. It appeared that they related to certain adventures among the Blacks, which she and Kombo were recalling, in which the girl had played the part of some native deity.

Hansen then unfolded to her his own projects, and his desire to become more intimately acquainted with the language and customs of the Australian Aborigines.

He now learned that Mrs Bedo had been a Bush girl herself, and had lived a little lower down on this very coast till, when she was seventeen, the Bank had, as she expressed it, "come down upon the station," fore--closing a mortgage, and had turned them out. Her mother, who was in bad health and in danger of losing her sight, had gladly accepted the offer of a free passage from the Rockhampton branch of the Eastern and Australasian Steamship Company, and had, with her two daughters, gone to live in England. In those seventeen years of girlhood, Anne Bedo said she had learned the dialect of two native tribes, and now, she told him, was practising the language to see if she had forgotten it.

Hansen, as his mind went back to the occurrence, remembered with what a start she had answered his first question, and how eagerly she had asked him if he understood what she had been saying. He remembered, too, how sadly and earnestly she had been talking some little time before he had ventured to interrupt her, and he wondered whether she had been confiding her sorrows to this sympathetic black friend.

That episode took place after he had been on the boat about a week--he had joined it at Singapore--so that he had really known her for a very short time. Yet it seemed to him that those two or three weeks might have been years, so great was the interest with which she had inspired him. He felt that he understood her--her girlish innocence, her quenched gaiety, so ready to break out when the burden of her husband's presence was lifted--her misery, and her proud reserve--as he had never understood any other woman; and more than once it had occurred to him that were she free and he less wedded to natural science and a roving life, he would have chosen her beyond all other women he knew for his wife. But she was married, and he, even had she been free, was one not given to romantic dreams. So he had put away the vague fancy--not because of the wrong of it--for, indeed, he sometimes thought that the man who delivered her from so coarse a creature as Elias Bedo, would be doing an action worthy of commendation--but rather because he was the trusted servant of a scientific society, and had planned for himself an interesting two years' work, in which there was no place for sentiment concerning a woman.

He had found out her misery the day after joining the steamer, not through any confidence of hers, but by the accident that his cabin adjoined that one occupied by Mr Bedo and his wife. This was before Mrs Bedo, a few days after the landing of some other passengers at Singapore, had ventured to petition the Captain for a cabin to herself. Partitions on a steamer are thin, and ventilators admit sound as well as air. Hansen had heard Bedo swear at his wife, and reproach her for what he was pleased to term her imbecile obstinacy, in terms opprobious and embarrassing to the involuntary listener. He had heard also Mrs Bedo's sobs and pathetic remonstrances to the man she had so unwisely married. Hansen had the impulse to rush in and denounce the persecutor, but thought better of it; and after the second occurrence, went to the Captain and frankly stated his reason for desiring a change of quarters. Then he found that Mrs Bedo had been before him; and as the only desirable cabin had been allotted to her, Hansen withdrew his claim and remained where he was, suffering no further disquietude except from Bedo's drunken snores.

He thought of Anne Bedo all through that dreary day, during which the boat steamed down along the coast towards Cooktown. The notes of a song she had sung the last time he had heard her sing, haunted him through the hours--Che faro senza Eurydice--the most heart-thrilling wail of bereavement which ever musician penned or songstress breathed. He, too, felt almost as Orpheus might have felt in seeing his love lifeless, her soul dragged down to the pit. His own Eurydice, it seemed, had been torn from him by the cruel teeth of the monsters of the deep. He sat on deck, trying to read, and so occupy his thoughts, which, in spite of himself, would stray among visions of horror, and all the while, his eyes, unconsciously lifting, gazed out on the blue seas dotted with coral islands, or inland to the treacherous Australian coast. Where was she? He shuddered as he asked himself the question, recalling Captain Cass's words. Oh! that she had died without lengthened agony. Better, in truth, a shark for the slayer, than that she should become a prisoner among the Blacks.

A strange hush had fallen upon the vessel since Tragedy had brushed it with her wings. All that day the sailors went silently about their work; the meals were gravely served; none of the passengers seemed inclined to talk. During the long hours between the event of the morning, and the entrance into the mouth of the Endeavour River, which is the harbour of Cooktown, and, indeed, during many perplexed hours later, Eric Hansen brooded mournfully over his brief acquaintanceship with Anne Bedo.