FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE

By Marcus Clarke

DEDICATION TO SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY

My Dear Sir Charles, I take leave to dedicate this work to you, not merely
because your nineteen years of political and literary life in Australia
render it very fitting that any work written by a resident in the
colonies, and having to do with the history of past colonial days, should
bear your name upon its dedicatory page; but because the publication of my
book is due to your advice and encouragement.

The convict of fiction has been hitherto shown only at the beginning or at
the end of his career. Either his exile has been the mysterious end to his
misdeeds, or he has appeared upon the scene to claim interest by reason of
an equally unintelligible love of crime acquired during his experience in
a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn the interior of a house of
correction in England, and Victor Hugo has shown how a French convict
fares after the fulfilment of his sentence. But no writer—so far as
I am aware—has attempted to depict the dismal condition of a felon
during his term of transportation.

I have endeavoured in “His Natural Life” to set forth the working and the
results of an English system of transportation carefully considered and
carried out under official supervision; and to illustrate in the manner
best calculated, as I think, to attract general attention, the
inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be herded
together in places remote from the wholesome influence of public opinion,
and to be submitted to a discipline which must necessarily depend for its
just administration upon the personal character and temper of their
gaolers.

Your critical faculty will doubtless find, in the construction and
artistic working of this book, many faults. I do not think, however, that
you will discover any exaggerations. Some of the events narrated are
doubtless tragic and terrible; but I hold it needful to my purpose to
record them, for they are events which have actually occurred, and which,
if the blunders which produced them be repeated, must infallibly occur
again. It is true that the British Government have ceased to deport the
criminals of England, but the method of punishment, of which that
deportation was a part, is still in existence. Port Blair is a Port Arthur
filled with Indian-men instead of Englishmen; and, within the last year,
France has established, at New Caledonia, a penal settlement which will,
in the natural course of things, repeat in its annals the history of
Macquarie Harbour and of Norfolk Island.

With this brief preface I beg you to accept this work. I would that its
merits were equal either to your kindness or to my regard.

I am,

My dear Sir Charles,

Faithfully yours,

MARCUS CLARKE THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, MELBOURNE

CONTENTS

HIS NATURAL LIFE.

PROLOGUE.

BOOK I.   THE SEA. 1827

CHAPTER I.   THE
PRISON SHIP

CHAPTER II.   SARAH
PURFOY

CHAPTER III.   THE
MONOTONY BREAKS

CHAPTER IV.   THE
HOSPITAL

CHAPTER V.   THE
BARRACOON

CHAPTER VI.   THE
FATE OF THE “HYDASPES”

CHAPTER VII.
  TYPHUS FEVER

CHAPTER
VIII.   A DANGEROUS CRISIS

CHAPTER IX.   WOMAN’S WEAPONS

CHAPTER X.   EIGHT BELLS

CHAPTER XI.   DISCOVERIES AND
CONFESSIONS

CHAPTER XII.   A
NEWSPAPER PARAGRAPH

BOOK
II.   MACQUARIE HARBOUR. 1833

CHAPTER I.   THE TOPOGRAPHY OF VAN
DIEMEN’S LAND

CHAPTER II.   THE
SOLITARY OF “HELL’S GATES”

CHAPTER
III.   A SOCIAL EVENING

CHAPTER IV.   THE BOLTER

CHAPTER V.   SYLVIA

CHAPTER VI.   A LEAP IN THE DARK

CHAPTER VII.   THE LAST OF MACQUARIE
HARBOUR

CHAPTER VIII.   THE
POWER OF THE WILDERNESS

CHAPTER IX.
  THE SEIZURE OF THE “OSPREY”

CHAPTER X.   JOHN REX’S REVENGE

CHAPTER XI.   LEFT AT
“HELL’S GATES.”

CHAPTER XII.   “MR.”
DAWES

CHAPTER XIII.   WHAT
THE SEAWEED SUGGESTED

CHAPTER XIV.
  A WONDERFUL DAY’S WORK

CHAPTER XV.   THE CORACLE

CHAPTER XVI.   THE WRITING ON THE
SAND

CHAPTER XVII.   AT
SEA

BOOK III.   PORT
ARTHUR. 1838

CHAPTER I.   A
LABOURER IN THE VINEYARD

CHAPTER II.
  SARAH PURFOY’S REQUEST

CHAPTER III.   THE STORY OF TWO BIRDS OF PREY

CHAPTER IV.   “THE NOTORIOUS
DAWES.”

CHAPTER V.   MAURICE
FRERE’S GOOD ANGEL

CHAPTER VI.   MR.
MEEKIN ADMINISTERS CONSOLATION

CHAPTER VII.   RUFUS DAWES’S IDYLL

CHAPTER VIII.   AN ESCAPE

CHAPTER IX.   JOHN REX’S LETTER
HOME

CHAPTER X.   WHAT
BECAME OF THE MUTINEERS OF THE “OSPREY”

CHAPTER XI.   A RELIC OF MACQUARIE
HARBOUR

CHAPTER XII.   AT
PORT ARTHUR

CHAPTER XIII.   THE
COMMANDANT’S BUTLER

CHAPTER XIV.
  Mr. NORTH’S DISPOSITION

CHAPTER XV.   ONE HUNDRED LASHES

CHAPTER XVI.   KICKING
AGAINST THE PRICKS

CHAPTER XVII.
  CAPTAIN AND MRS. FRERE

CHAPTER XVIII.   IN THE HOSPITAL

CHAPTER XIX.   THE CONSOLATIONS OF
RELIGION

CHAPTER XX.   “A
NATURAL PENITENTIARY.”

CHAPTER XXI.
  A VISIT OF INSPECTION

CHAPTER XXII.   GATHERING IN THE THREADS

CHAPTER XXIII.   RUNNING THE
GAUNTLET

CHAPTER XXIV.   IN
THE NIGHT

CHAPTER XXV.   THE
FLIGHT

CHAPTER XXVI.   THE
WORK OF THE SEA

CHAPTER XXVII.   THE
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

BOOK IV.   NORFOLK ISLAND. 1846

CHAPTER I.   EXTRACTED FROM THE
DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH

CHAPTER II.   THE LOST HEIR

CHAPTER III.   EXTRACTED FROM THE
DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH

CHAPTER IV.   EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES
NORTH

CHAPTER V.   MR.
RICHARD DEVINE SURPRISED

CHAPTER VI.
  IN WHICH THE CHAPLAIN IS TAKEN ILL

CHAPTER VII.   BREAKING A MAN’S
SPIRIT

CHAPTER VIII.   EXTRACTED
FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH

CHAPTER IX.   THE LONGEST STRAW

CHAPTER X.   A MEETING

CHAPTER XI.   EXTRACTED FROM THE
DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH

CHAPTER XII.   THE STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF Mr. NORTH

CHAPTER XIII.   MR. NORTH SPEAKS

CHAPTER XIV.   GETTING
READY FOR SEA

CHAPTER XV.   THE
DISCOVERY

CHAPTER XVI.   FIFTEEN
HOURS

CHAPTER XVII.   THE
REDEMPTION

CHAPTER XVIII.  
  THE CYCLONE

EPILOGUE.

APPENDIX.

HIS NATURAL LIFE.

PROLOGUE.

On the evening of May 3, 1827, the garden of a large red-brick
bow-windowed mansion called North End House, which, enclosed in spacious
grounds, stands on the eastern height of Hampstead Heath, between Finchley
Road and the Chestnut Avenue, was the scene of a domestic tragedy.

Three persons were the actors in it. One was an old man, whose white hair
and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty years of age. He
stood erect with his back to the wall, which separates the garden from the
Heath, in the attitude of one surprised into sudden passion, and held
uplifted the heavy ebony cane upon which he was ordinarily accustomed to
lean. He was confronted by a man of two-and-twenty, unusually tall and
athletic of figure, dresses in rough seafaring clothes, and who held in
his arms, protecting her, a lady of middle age. The face of the young man
wore an expression of horror-stricken astonishment, and the slight frame
of the grey-haired woman was convulsed with sobs.

These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only son
Richard, who had returned from abroad that morning.

“So, madam,” said Sir Richard, in the high-strung accents which in crises
of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained of us, “you
have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years you have cheated
and mocked me. For twenty years—in company with a scoundrel whose
name is a byword for all that is profligate and base—you have
laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because I
dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame, and
glory in the confession!”

“Mother, dear mother!” cried the young man, in a paroxysm of grief, “say
that you did not mean those words; you said them but in anger! See, I am
calm now, and he may strike me if he will.”

Lady Devine shuddered, creeping close, as though to hide herself in the
broad bosom of her son.

The old man continued: “I married you, Ellinor Wade, for your beauty; you
married me for my fortune. I was a plebeian, a ship’s carpenter; you were
well born, your father was a man of fashion, a gambler, the friend of
rakes and prodigals. I was rich. I had been knighted. I was in favour at
Court. He wanted money, and he sold you. I paid the price he asked, but
there was nothing of your cousin, my Lord Bellasis and Wotton, in the
bond.”

“Spare me, sir, spare me!” said Lady Ellinor faintly.

“Spare you! Ay, you have spared me, have you not? Look ye,” he cried, in
sudden fury, “I am not to be fooled so easily. Your family are proud.
Colonel Wade has other daughters. Your lover, my Lord Bellasis, even now,
thinks to retrieve his broken fortunes by marriage. You have confessed
your shame. To-morrow your father, your sisters, all the world, shall know
the story you have told me!”

“By Heaven, sir, you will not do this!” burst out the young man.

“Silence, bastard!” cried Sir Richard. “Ay, bite your lips; the word is of
your precious mother’s making!”

Lady Devine slipped through her son’s arms and fell on her knees at her
husband’s feet.

“Do not do this, Richard. I have been faithful to you for two-and-twenty
years. I have borne all the slights and insults you have heaped upon me.
The shameful secret of my early love broke from me when in your rage, you
threatened him. Let me go away; kill me; but do not shame me.”

Sir Richard, who had turned to walk away, stopped suddenly, and his great
white eyebrows came together in his red face with a savage scowl. He
laughed, and in that laugh his fury seemed to congeal into a cold and
cruel hate.

“You would preserve your good name then. You would conceal this disgrace
from the world. You shall have your wish—upon one condition.”

“What is it, sir?” she asked, rising, but trembling with terror, as she
stood with drooping arms and widely opened eyes.

The old man looked at her for an instant, and then said slowly, “That this
impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name, has wrongfully squandered
my money, and unlawfully eaten my bread, shall pack! That he abandon for
ever the name he has usurped, keep himself from my sight, and never set
foot again in house of mine.”

“You would not part me from my only son!” cried the wretched woman.

“Take him with you to his father then.”

Richard Devine gently loosed the arms that again clung around his neck,
kissed the pale face, and turned his own—scarcely less pale—towards
the old man.

“I owe you no duty,” he said. “You have always hated and reviled me. When
by your violence you drove me from your house, you set spies to watch me
in the life I had chosen. I have nothing in common with you. I have long
felt it. Now when I learn for the first time whose son I really am, I
rejoice to think that I have less to thank you for than I once believed. I
accept the terms you offer. I will go. Nay, mother, think of your good
name.”

Sir Richard Devine laughed again. “I am glad to see you are so well
disposed. Listen now. To-night I send for Quaid to alter my will. My
sister’s son, Maurice Frere, shall be my heir in your stead. I give you
nothing. You leave this house in an hour. You change your name; you never
by word or deed make claim on me or mine. No matter what strait or poverty
you plead—if even your life should hang upon the issue—the
instant I hear that there exists on earth one who calls himself Richard
Devine, that instant shall your mother’s shame become a public scandal.
You know me. I keep my word. I return in an hour, madam; let me find him
gone.”

He passed them, upright, as if upborne by passion, strode down the garden
with the vigour that anger lends, and took the road to London.

“Richard!” cried the poor mother. “Forgive me, my son! I have ruined you.”

Richard Devine tossed his black hair from his brow in sudden passion of
love and grief.

“Mother, dear mother, do not weep,” he said. “I am not worthy of your
tears. Forgive! It is I—impetuous and ungrateful during all your
years of sorrow—who most need forgiveness. Let me share your burden
that I may lighten it. He is just. It is fitting that I go. I can earn a
name—a name that I need not blush to bear nor you to hear. I am
strong. I can work. The world is wide. Farewell! my own mother!”

“Not yet, not yet! Ah! see he has taken the Belsize Road. Oh, Richard,
pray Heaven they may not meet.”

“Tush! They will not meet! You are pale, you faint!”

“A terror of I know not what coming evil overpowers me. I tremble for the
future. Oh, Richard, Richard! Forgive me! Pray for me.”

“Hush, dearest! Come, let me lead you in. I will write. I will send you
news of me once at least, ere I depart. So—you are calmer, mother!”

Sir Richard Devine, knight, shipbuilder, naval contractor, and
millionaire, was the son of a Harwich boat carpenter. Early left an orphan
with a sister to support, he soon reduced his sole aim in life to the
accumulation of money. In the Harwich boat-shed, nearly fifty years
before, he had contracted—in defiance of prophesied failure—to
build the Hastings sloop of war for His Majesty King George the Third’s
Lords of the Admiralty. This contract was the thin end of that wedge which
eventually split the mighty oak block of Government patronage into
three-deckers and ships of the line; which did good service under Pellew,
Parker, Nelson, Hood; which exfoliated and ramified into huge dockyards at
Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its buds and flowers,
countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. The sole aim of the
coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money. He
had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered, had licked the dust
off great men’s shoes, and danced attendance in great men’s ante-chambers.
Nothing was too low, nothing too high for him. A shrewd man of business, a
thorough master of his trade, troubled with no scruples of honour or of
delicacy, he made money rapidly, and saved it when made. The first hint
that the public received of his wealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one
of the shipwrights to the Government, and a comparatively young man of
forty-four or thereabouts, subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty
Loan raised to prosecute the French war. In 1805, after doing good, and it
was hinted not unprofitable, service in the trial of Lord Melville, the
Treasurer of the Navy, he married his sister to a wealthy Bristol
merchant, one Anthony Frere, and married himself to Ellinor Wade, the
eldest daughter of Colonel Wotton Wade, a boon companion of the Regent,
and uncle by marriage of a remarkable scamp and dandy, Lord Bellasis. At
that time, what with lucky speculations in the Funds—assisted, it
was whispered, by secret intelligence from France during the stormy years
of ’13, ’14, and ’15—and the legitimate profit on his Government
contracts, he had accumulated a princely fortune, and could afford to live
in princely magnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony
and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken
off, and the only show he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on his
knighthood, the rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, and
ostensibly retiring from active business.

His retirement was not a happy one. He was a stern father and a severe
master. His servants hated, and his wife feared him. His only son Richard
appeared to inherit his father’s strong will and imperious manner. Under
careful supervision and a just rule he might have been guided to good; but
left to his own devices outside, and galled by the iron yoke of parental
discipline at home, he became reckless and prodigal. The mother—poor,
timid Ellinor, who had been rudely torn from the love of her youth, her
cousin, Lord Bellasis—tried to restrain him, but the head-strong
boy, though owning for his mother that strong love which is often a part
of such violent natures, proved intractable, and after three years of
parental feud, he went off to the Continent, to pursue there the same
reckless life which in London had offended Sir Richard. Sir Richard, upon
this, sent for Maurice Frere, his sister’s son—the abolition of the
slave trade had ruined the Bristol House of Frere—and bought for him
a commission in a marching regiment, hinting darkly of special favours to
come. His open preference for his nephew had galled to the quick his
sensitive wife, who contrasted with some heart-pangs the gallant
prodigality of her father with the niggardly economy of her husband.
Between the houses of parvenu Devine and long-descended Wotton Wade there
had long been little love. Sir Richard felt that the colonel despised him
for a city knight, and had heard that over claret and cards Lord Bellasis
and his friends had often lamented the hard fortune which gave the beauty,
Ellinor, to so sordid a bridegroom. Armigell Esme Wade, Viscount Bellasis
and Wotton, was a product of his time. Of good family (his ancestor,
Armigell, was reputed to have landed in America before Gilbert or
Raleigh), he had inherited his manor of Bellasis, or Belsize, from one Sir
Esme Wade, ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Spain in the
delicate matter of Mendoza, and afterwards counsellor to James I, and
Lieutenant of the Tower. This Esme was a man of dark devices. It was he
who negotiated with Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it was he who wormed out of
Cobham the evidence against the great Raleigh. He became rich, and his
sister (the widow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into
the family of the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased
by the union of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade was
a Lord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his diary [July
17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised to the peerage
in 1667 by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton, and married for his
second wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope, second Earl of
Chesterfield. Allied to this powerful house, the family tree of Wotton
Wade grew and flourished.

In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,
and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemed to
have run itself out.

The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the adventurer,
with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the Tower. No sooner
had he become master of his fortune than he took to dice, drink, and
debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century. He was foremost
in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious “bloods” of the day.

Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a fact
which may stand for a page of narrative. “Young Wade,” he says, “is
reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that vulgarest of
all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say the fool is not yet
nineteen.” From a pigeon Armigell Wade became a hawk, and at thirty years
of age, having lost together with his estates all chance of winning the
one woman who might have saved him—his cousin Ellinor—he
became that most unhappy of all beings, a well-born blackleg. When he was
told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the rich shipbuilder, Sir
Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with fair-haired gentle Ellinor,
he swore, with fierce knitting of his black brows, that no law of man nor
Heaven should further restrain him in his selfish prodigality. “You have
sold your daughter and ruined me,” he said; “look to the consequences.”
Colonel Wade sneered at his fiery kinsman: “You will find Sir Richard’s
house a pleasant one to visit, Armigell; and he should be worth an income
to so experienced a gambler as yourself.” Lord Bellasis did visit at Sir
Richard’s house during the first year of his cousin’s marriage; but upon
the birth of the son who is the hero of this history, he affected a
quarrel with the city knight, and cursing him to the Prince and Poins for
a miserly curmudgeon, who neither diced nor drank like a gentleman,
departed, more desperately at war with fortune than ever, for his old
haunts. The year 1827 found him a hardened, hopeless old man of sixty,
battered in health and ruined in pocket; but who, by dint of stays,
hair-dye, and courage, yet faced the world with undaunted front, and dined
as gaily in bailiff-haunted Belsize as he had dined at Carlton House. Of
the possessions of the House of Wotton Wade, this old manor, timberless
and bare, was all that remained, and its master rarely visited it.

On the evening of May 3, 1827, Lord Bellasis had been attending a pigeon
match at Hornsey Wood, and having resisted the importunities of his
companion, Mr. Lionel Crofton (a young gentleman-rake, whose position in
the sporting world was not the most secure), who wanted him to go on into
town, he had avowed his intention of striking across Hampstead to Belsize.
“I have an appointment at the fir trees on the Heath,” he said.

“With a woman?” asked Mr. Crofton.

“Not at all; with a parson.”

“A parson!”

“You stare! Well, he is only just ordained. I met him last year at Bath on
his vacation from Cambridge, and he was good enough to lose some money to
me.”

“And now waits to pay it out of his first curacy. I wish your lordship joy
with all my soul. Then, we must push on, for it grows late.”

“Thanks, my dear sir, for the ‘we,’ but I must go alone,” said Lord
Bellasis dryly. “To-morrow you can settle with me for the sitting of last
week. Hark! the clock is striking nine. Good night.”

At half-past nine Richard Devine quitted his mother’s house to begin the
new life he had chosen, and so, drawn together by that strange fate of
circumstances which creates events, the father and son approached each
other.

As the young man gained the middle of the path which led to the Heath, he
met Sir Richard returning from the village. It was no part of his plan to
seek an interview with the man whom his mother had so deeply wronged, and
he would have slunk past in the gloom; but seeing him thus alone returning
to a desolated home, the prodigal was tempted to utter some words of
farewell and of regret. To his astonishment, however, Sir Richard passed
swiftly on, with body bent forward as one in the act of falling, and with
eyes unconscious of surroundings, staring straight into the distance.
Half-terrified at this strange appearance, Richard hurried onward, and at
a turn of the path stumbled upon something which horribly accounted for
the curious action of the old man. A dead body lay upon its face in the
heather; beside it was a heavy riding whip stained at the handle with
blood, and an open pocket-book. Richard took up the book, and read, in
gold letters on the cover, “Lord Bellasis.”

The unhappy young man knelt down beside the body and raised it. The skull
had been fractured by a blow, but it seemed that life yet lingered.
Overcome with horror—for he could not doubt but that his mother’s
worst fears had been realized—Richard knelt there holding his
murdered father in his arms, waiting until the murderer, whose name he
bore, should have placed himself beyond pursuit. It seemed an hour to his
excited fancy before he saw a light pass along the front of the house he
had quitted, and knew that Sir Richard had safely reached his chamber.
With some bewildered intention of summoning aid, he left the body and made
towards the town. As he stepped out on the path he heard voices, and
presently some dozen men, one of whom held a horse, burst out upon him,
and, with sudden fury, seized and flung him to the ground.

At first the young man, so rudely assailed, did not comprehend his own
danger. His mind, bent upon one hideous explanation of the crime, did not
see another obvious one which had already occurred to the mind of the
landlord of the Three Spaniards.

“God defend me!” cried Mr. Mogford, scanning by the pale light of the
rising moon the features of the murdered man, “but it is Lord Bellasis!—oh,
you bloody villain! Jem, bring him along here, p’r’aps his lordship can
recognize him!”

“It was not I!” cried Richard Devine. “For God’s sake, my lord say—”
then he stopped abruptly, and being forced on his knees by his captors,
remained staring at the dying man, in sudden and ghastly fear.

Those men in whom emotion has the effect of quickening circulation of the
blood reason rapidly in moments of danger, and in the terrible instant
when his eyes met those of Lord Bellasis, Richard Devine had summed up the
chances of his future fortune, and realized to the full his personal
peril. The runaway horse had given the alarm. The drinkers at the
Spaniards’ Inn had started to search the Heath, and had discovered a
fellow in rough costume, whose person was unknown to them, hastily
quitting a spot where, beside a rifled pocket-book and a blood-stained
whip, lay a dying man.

The web of circumstantial evidence had enmeshed him. An hour ago escape
would have been easy. He would have had but to cry, “I am the son of Sir
Richard Devine. Come with me to yonder house, and I will prove to you that
I have but just quitted it,”—to place his innocence beyond immediate
question. That course of action was impossible now. Knowing Sir Richard as
he did, and believing, moreover, that in his raging passion the old man
had himself met and murdered the destroyer of his honour, the son of Lord
Bellasis and Lady Devine saw himself in a position which would compel him
either to sacrifice himself, or to purchase a chance of safety at the
price of his mother’s dishonour and the death of the man whom his mother
had deceived. If the outcast son were brought a prisoner to North End
House, Sir Richard—now doubly oppressed of fate—would be
certain to deny him; and he would be compelled, in self-defence, to reveal
a story which would at once bring his mother to open infamy, and send to
the gallows the man who had been for twenty years deceived—the man
to whose kindness he owed education and former fortune. He knelt,
stupefied, unable to speak or move.

“Come,” cried Mogford again; “say, my lord, is this the villain?”

Lord Bellasis rallied his failing senses, his glazing eyes stared into his
son’s face with horrible eagerness; he shook his head, raised a feeble arm
as though to point elsewhere, and fell back dead.

“If you didn’t murder him, you robbed him,” growled Mogford, “and you
shall sleep at Bow Street to-night. Tom, run on to meet the patrol, and
leave word at the Gate-house that I’ve a passenger for the coach!—Bring
him on, Jack!—What’s your name, eh?”

He repeated the rough question twice before his prisoner answered, but at
length Richard Devine raised a pale face which stern resolution had
already hardened into defiant manhood, and said “Dawes—Rufus Dawes.”

His new life had begun already: for that night one, Rufus Dawes, charged
with murder and robbery, lay awake in prison, waiting for the fortune of
the morrow.

Two other men waited as eagerly. One, Mr. Lionel Crofton; the other, the
horseman who had appointment with the murdered Lord Bellasis under the
shadow of the fir trees on Hampstead Heath. As for Sir Richard Devine, he
waited for no one, for upon reaching his room he had fallen senseless in a
fit of apoplexy.

BOOK I.—THE SEA. 1827.

CHAPTER I. THE PRISON SHIP.

In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot
and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the Malabar lay
solitary on the surface of the glittering sea.

The sun—who rose on the left hand every morning a blazing ball, to
move slowly through the unbearable blue, until he sank fiery red in
mingling glories of sky and ocean on the right hand—had just got low
enough to peep beneath the awning that covered the poop-deck, and awaken a
young man, in an undress military uniform, who was dozing on a coil of
rope.

“Hang it!” said he, rising and stretching himself, with the weary sigh of
a man who has nothing to do, “I must have been asleep”; and then, holding
by a stay, he turned about and looked down into the waist of the ship.

Save for the man at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing, he was
alone on the deck. A few birds flew round about the vessel, and seemed to
pass under her stern windows only to appear again at her bows. A lazy
albatross, with the white water flashing from his wings, rose with a
dabbling sound to leeward, and in the place where he had been glided the
hideous fin of a silently-swimming shark. The seams of the well-scrubbed
deck were sticky with melted pitch, and the brass plate of the
compass-case sparkled in the sun like a jewel. There was no breeze, and as
the clumsy ship rolled and lurched on the heaving sea, her idle sails
flapped against her masts with a regularly recurring noise, and her
bowsprit would seem to rise higher with the water’s swell, to dip again
with a jerk that made each rope tremble and tauten. On the forecastle,
some half-dozen soldiers, in all varieties of undress, were playing at
cards, smoking, or watching the fishing-lines hanging over the catheads.

So far the appearance of the vessel differed in no wise from that of an
ordinary transport. But in the waist a curious sight presented itself. It
was as though one had built a cattle-pen there. At the foot of the
foremast, and at the quarter-deck, a strong barricade, loop-holed and
furnished with doors for ingress and egress, ran across the deck from
bulwark to bulwark. Outside this cattle-pen an armed sentry stood on
guard; inside, standing, sitting, or walking monotonously, within range of
the shining barrels in the arm chest on the poop, were some sixty men and
boys, dressed in uniform grey. The men and boys were prisoners of the
Crown, and the cattle-pen was their exercise ground. Their prison was down
the main hatchway, on the ‘tween decks, and the barricade, continued down,
made its side walls.

It was the fag end of the two hours’ exercise graciously permitted each
afternoon by His Majesty King George the Fourth to prisoners of the Crown,
and the prisoners of the Crown were enjoying themselves. It was not,
perhaps, so pleasant as under the awning on the poop-deck, but that sacred
shade was only for such great men as the captain and his officers, Surgeon
Pine, Lieutenant Maurice Frere, and, most important personages of all,
Captain Vickers and his wife.

That the convict leaning against the bulwarks would like to have been able
to get rid of his enemy the sun for a moment, was probable enough. His
companions, sitting on the combings of the main-hatch, or crouched in
careless fashion on the shady side of the barricade, were laughing and
talking, with blasphemous and obscene merriment hideous to contemplate;
but he, with cap pulled over his brows, and hands thrust into the pockets
of his coarse grey garments, held aloof from their dismal joviality.

The sun poured his hottest rays on his head unheeded, and though every
cranny and seam in the deck sweltered hot pitch under the fierce heat, the
man stood there, motionless and morose, staring at the sleepy sea. He had
stood thus, in one place or another, ever since the groaning vessel had
escaped from the rollers of the Bay of Biscay, and the miserable hundred
and eighty creatures among whom he was classed had been freed from their
irons, and allowed to sniff fresh air twice a day.

The low-browed, coarse-featured ruffians grouped about the deck cast many
a leer of contempt at the solitary figure, but their remarks were confined
to gestures only. There are degrees in crime, and Rufus Dawes, the
convicted felon, who had but escaped the gallows to toil for all his life
in irons, was a man of mark. He had been tried for the robbery and murder
of Lord Bellasis. The friendless vagabond’s lame story of finding on the
Heath a dying man would not have availed him, but for the curious fact
sworn to by the landlord of the Spaniards’ Inn, that the murdered nobleman
had shaken his head when asked if the prisoner was his assassin. The
vagabond was acquitted of the murder, but condemned to death for the
robbery, and London, who took some interest in the trial, considered him
fortunate when his sentence was commuted to transportation for life.

It was customary on board these floating prisons to keep each man’s crime
a secret from his fellows, so that if he chose, and the caprice of his
gaolers allowed him, he could lead a new life in his adopted home, without
being taunted with his former misdeeds. But, like other excellent devices,
the expedient was only a nominal one, and few out of the doomed hundred
and eighty were ignorant of the offence which their companions had
committed. The more guilty boasted of their superiority in vice; the petty
criminals swore that their guilt was blacker than it appeared. Moreover, a
deed so bloodthirsty and a respite so unexpected, had invested the name of
Rufus Dawes with a grim distinction, which his superior mental abilities,
no less than his haughty temper and powerful frame, combined to support. A
young man of two-and-twenty owning to no friends, and existing among them
but by the fact of his criminality, he was respected and admired. The
vilest of all the vile horde penned between decks, if they laughed at his
“fine airs” behind his back, cringed and submitted when they met him face
to face—for in a convict ship the greatest villain is the greatest
hero, and the only nobility acknowledged by that hideous commonwealth is
that Order of the Halter which is conferred by the hand of the hangman.

The young man on the poop caught sight of the tall figure leaning against
the bulwarks, and it gave him an excuse to break the monotony of his
employment.

“Here, you!” he called with an oath, “get out of the gangway!” Rufus Dawes
was not in the gangway—was, in fact, a good two feet from it, but at
the sound of Lieutenant Frere’s voice he started, and went obediently
towards the hatchway.

“Touch your hat, you dog!” cries Frere, coming to the quarter-railing.
“Touch your damned hat! Do you hear?”

Rufus Dawes touched his cap, saluting in half military fashion. “I’ll make
some of you fellows smart, if you don’t have a care,” went on the angry
Frere, half to himself. “Insolent blackguards!”

And then the noise of the sentry, on the quarter-deck below him, grounding
arms, turned the current of his thoughts. A thin, tall, soldier-like man,
with a cold blue eye, and prim features, came out of the cuddy below,
handing out a fair-haired, affected, mincing lady, of middle age. Captain
Vickers, of Mr. Frere’s regiment, ordered for service in Van Diemen’s
Land, was bringing his lady on deck to get an appetite for dinner.

Mrs. Vickers was forty-two (she owned to thirty-three), and had been a
garrison-belle for eleven weary years before she married prim John
Vickers. The marriage was not a happy one. Vickers found his wife
extravagant, vain, and snappish, and she found him harsh, disenchanted,
and commonplace. A daughter, born two years after their marriage, was the
only link that bound the ill-assorted pair. Vickers idolized little
Sylvia, and when the recommendation of a long sea-voyage for his failing
health induced him to exchange into the —th, he insisted upon
bringing the child with him, despite Mrs. Vickers’s reiterated objections
on the score of educational difficulties. “He could educate her himself,
if need be,” he said; “and she should not stay at home.”

So Mrs. Vickers, after a hard struggle, gave up the point and her dreams
of Bath together, and followed her husband with the best grace she could
muster. When fairly out to sea she seemed reconciled to her fate, and
employed the intervals between scolding her daughter and her maid, in
fascinating the boorish young Lieutenant, Maurice Frere.

Fascination was an integral portion of Julia Vickers’s nature; admiration
was all she lived for: and even in a convict ship, with her husband at her
elbow, she must flirt, or perish of mental inanition. There was no harm in
the creature. She was simply a vain, middle-aged woman, and Frere took her
attentions for what they were worth. Moreover, her good feeling towards
him was useful, for reasons which will shortly appear.

Running down the ladder, cap in hand, he offered her his assistance.

“Thank you, Mr. Frere. These horrid ladders. I really—he, he—quite
tremble at them. Hot! Yes, dear me, most oppressive. John, the camp-stool.
Pray, Mr. Frere—oh, thank you! Sylvia! Sylvia! John, have you my
smelling salts? Still a calm, I suppose? These dreadful calms!”

This semi-fashionable slip-slop, within twenty yards of the wild beasts’
den, on the other side of the barricade, sounded strange; but Mr. Frere
thought nothing of it. Familiarity destroys terror, and the incurable
flirt, fluttered her muslins, and played off her second-rate graces, under
the noses of the grinning convicts, with as much complacency as if she had
been in a Chatham ball-room. Indeed, if there had been nobody else near,
it is not unlikely that she would have disdainfully fascinated the
‘tween-decks, and made eyes at the most presentable of the convicts there.

Vickers, with a bow to Frere, saw his wife up the ladder, and then turned
for his daughter.

She was a delicate-looking child of six years old, with blue eyes and
bright hair. Though indulged by her father, and spoiled by her mother, the
natural sweetness of her disposition saved her from being disagreeable,
and the effects of her education as yet only showed themselves in a
thousand imperious prettinesses, which made her the darling of the ship.
Little Miss Sylvia was privileged to go anywhere and do anything, and even
convictism shut its foul mouth in her presence. Running to her father’s
side, the child chattered with all the volubility of flattered
self-esteem. She ran hither and thither, asked questions, invented
answers, laughed, sang, gambolled, peered into the compass-case, felt in
the pockets of the man at the helm, put her tiny hand into the big palm of
the officer of the watch, even ran down to the quarter-deck and pulled the
coat-tails of the sentry on duty.

At last, tired of running about, she took a little striped leather ball
from the bosom of her frock, and calling to her father, threw it up to him
as he stood on the poop. He returned it, and, shouting with laughter,
clapping her hands between each throw, the child kept up the game.

The convicts—whose slice of fresh air was nearly eaten—turned
with eagerness to watch this new source of amusement. Innocent laughter
and childish prattle were strange to them. Some smiled, and nodded with
interest in the varying fortunes of the game. One young lad could hardly
restrain himself from applauding. It was as though, out of the sultry heat
which brooded over the ship, a cool breeze had suddenly arisen.

In the midst of this mirth, the officer of the watch, glancing round the
fast crimsoning horizon, paused abruptly, and shading his eyes with his
hand, looked out intently to the westward.

Frere, who found Mrs. Vickers’s conversation a little tiresome, and had
been glancing from time to time at the companion, as though in expectation
of someone appearing, noticed the action.

“What is it, Mr. Best?”

“I don’t know exactly. It looks to me like a cloud of smoke.” And, taking
the glass, he swept the horizon.

“Let me see,” said Frere; and he looked also.

On the extreme horizon, just to the left of the sinking sun, rested, or
seemed to rest, a tiny black cloud. The gold and crimson, splashed all
about the sky, had overflowed around it, and rendered a clear view almost
impossible.

“I can’t quite make it out,” says Frere, handing back the telescope. “We
can see as soon as the sun goes down a little.”

Then Mrs. Vickers must, of course, look also, and was prettily affected
about the focus of the glass, applying herself to that instrument with
much girlish giggling, and finally declaring, after shutting one eye with
her fair hand, that positively she “could see nothing but sky, and
believed that wicked Mr. Frere was doing it on purpose.”

By and by, Captain Blunt appeared, and, taking the glass from his officer,
looked through it long and carefully. Then the mizentop was appealed to,
and declared that he could see nothing; and at last the sun went down with
a jerk, as though it had slipped through a slit in the sea, and the black
spot, swallowed up in the gathering haze, was seen no more.

As the sun sank, the relief guard came up the after hatchway, and the
relieved guard prepared to superintend the descent of the convicts. At
this moment Sylvia missed her ball, which, taking advantage of a sudden
lurch of the vessel, hopped over the barricade, and rolled to the feet of
Rufus Dawes, who was still leaning, apparently lost in thought, against
the side.

The bright spot of colour rolling across the white deck caught his eye;
stooping mechanically, he picked up the ball, and stepped forward to
return it. The door of the barricade was open and the sentry—a young
soldier, occupied in staring at the relief guard—did not notice the
prisoner pass through it. In another instant he was on the sacred
quarter-deck.

Heated with the game, her cheeks aglow, her eyes sparkling, her golden
hair afloat, Sylvia had turned to leap after her plaything, but even as
she turned, from under the shadow of the cuddy glided a rounded white arm;
and a shapely hand caught the child by the sash and drew her back. The
next moment the young man in grey had placed the toy in her hand.

Maurice Frere, descending the poop ladder, had not witnessed this little
incident; on reaching the deck, he saw only the unexplained presence of
the convict uniform.

“Thank you,” said a voice, as Rufus Dawes stooped before the pouting
Sylvia.

The convict raised his eyes and saw a young girl of eighteen or nineteen
years of age, tall, and well developed, who, dressed in a loose-sleeved
robe of some white material, was standing in the doorway. She had black
hair, coiled around a narrow and flat head, a small foot, white skin,
well-shaped hands, and large dark eyes, and as she smiled at him, her
scarlet lips showed her white even teeth.

He knew her at once. She was Sarah Purfoy, Mrs. Vickers’s maid, but he
never had been so close to her before; and it seemed to him that he was in
the presence of some strange tropical flower, which exhaled a heavy and
intoxicating perfume.

For an instant the two looked at each other, and then Rufus Dawes was
seized from behind by his collar, and flung with a shock upon the deck.

Leaping to his feet, his first impulse was to rush upon his assailant, but
he saw the ready bayonet of the sentry gleam, and he checked himself with
an effort, for his assailant was Mr. Maurice Frere.

“What the devil do you do here?” asked the gentleman with an oath. “You
lazy, skulking hound, what brings you here? If I catch you putting your
foot on the quarter-deck again, I’ll give you a week in irons!”

Rufus Dawes, pale with rage and mortification, opened his mouth to justify
himself, but he allowed the words to die on his lips. What was the use?
“Go down below, and remember what I’ve told you,” cried Frere; and
comprehending at once what had occurred, he made a mental minute of the
name of the defaulting sentry.

The convict, wiping the blood from his face, turned on his heel without a
word, and went back through the strong oak door into his den. Frere leant
forward and took the girl’s shapely hand with an easy gesture, but she
drew it away, with a flash of her black eyes.

“You coward!” she said.

The stolid soldier close beside them heard it, and his eye twinkled. Frere
bit his thick lips with mortification, as he followed the girl into the
cuddy. Sarah Purfoy, however, taking the astonished Sylvia by the hand,
glided into her mistress’s cabin with a scornful laugh, and shut the door
behind her.

CHAPTER II. SARAH PURFOY.

Convictism having been safely got under hatches, and put to bed in its
Government allowance of sixteen inches of space per man, cut a little
short by exigencies of shipboard, the cuddy was wont to pass some not
unpleasant evenings. Mrs. Vickers, who was poetical and owned a guitar,
was also musical and sang to it. Captain Blunt was a jovial, coarse
fellow; Surgeon Pine had a mania for story-telling; while if Vickers was
sometimes dull, Frere was always hearty. Moreover, the table was well
served, and what with dinner, tobacco, whist, music, and brandy and water,
the sultry evenings passed away with a rapidity of which the wild beasts
‘tween decks, cooped by sixes in berths of a mere five feet square, had no
conception.

On this particular evening, however, the cuddy was dull. Dinner fell flat,
and conversation languished.

“No signs of a breeze, Mr. Best?” asked Blunt, as the first officer came
in and took his seat.

“None, sir.”

“These—he, he!—awful calms,” says Mrs. Vickers. “A week, is it
not, Captain Blunt?”

“Thirteen days, mum,” growled Blunt.

“I remember, off the Coromandel coast,” put in cheerful Pine, “when we had
the plague in the Rattlesnake—”

“Captain Vickers, another glass of wine?” cried Blunt, hastening to cut
the anecdote short.

“Thank you, no more. I have the headache.”

“Headache—um—don’t wonder at it, going down among those
fellows. It is infamous the way they crowd these ships. Here we have over
two hundred souls on board, and not boat room for half of ’em.”

“Two hundred souls! Surely not,” says Vickers. “By the King’s Regulations—”

“One hundred and eighty convicts, fifty soldiers, thirty in ship’s crew,
all told, and—how many?—one, two three—seven in the
cuddy. How many do you make that?”

“We are just a little crowded this time,” says Best.

“It is very wrong,” says Vickers, pompously. “Very wrong. By the King’s
Regulations—”

But the subject of the King’s Regulations was even more distasteful to the
cuddy than Pine’s interminable anecdotes, and Mrs. Vickers hastened to
change the subject.

“Are you not heartily tired of this dreadful life, Mr. Frere?”

“Well, it is not exactly the life I had hoped to lead,” said Frere,
rubbing a freckled hand over his stubborn red hair; “but I must make the
best of it.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the lady, in that subdued manner with which one
comments upon a well-known accident, “it must have been a great shock to
you to be so suddenly deprived of so large a fortune.”

“Not only that, but to find that the black sheep who got it all sailed for
India within a week of my uncle’s death! Lady Devine got a letter from him
on the day of the funeral to say that he had taken his passage in the
Hydaspes for Calcutta, and never meant to come back again!”

“Sir Richard Devine left no other children?”

“No, only this mysterious Dick, whom I never saw, but who must have hated
me.”

“Dear, dear! These family quarrels are dreadful things. Poor Lady Devine,
to lose in one day a husband and a son!”

“And the next morning to hear of the murder of her cousin! You know that
we are connected with the Bellasis family. My aunt’s father married a
sister of the second Lord Bellasis.”

“Indeed. That was a horrible murder. So you think that the dreadful man
you pointed out the other day did it?”

“The jury seemed to think not,” said Mr. Frere, with a laugh; “but I don’t
know anybody else who could have a motive for it. However, I’ll go on deck
and have a smoke.”

“I wonder what induced that old hunks of a shipbuilder to try to cut off
his only son in favour of a cub of that sort,” said Surgeon Pine to
Captain Vickers as the broad back of Mr. Maurice Frere disappeared up the
companion.

“Some boyish follies abroad, I believe; self-made men are always impatient
of extravagance. But it is hard upon Frere. He is not a bad sort of fellow
for all his roughness, and when a young man finds that an accident
deprives him of a quarter of a million of money and leaves him without a
sixpence beyond his commission in a marching regiment under orders for a
convict settlement, he has some reason to rail against fate.”

“How was it that the son came in for the money after all, then?”

“Why, it seems that when old Devine returned from sending for his lawyer
to alter his will, he got a fit of apoplexy, the result of his rage, I
suppose, and when they opened his room door in the morning they found him
dead.”

“And the son’s away on the sea somewhere,” said Mr. Vickers “and knows
nothing of his good fortune. It is quite a romance.”

“I am glad that Frere did not get the money,” said Pine, grimly sticking
to his prejudice; “I have seldom seen a face I liked less, even among my
yellow jackets yonder.”

“Oh dear, Dr. Pine! How can you?” interjected Mrs. Vickers. “’Pon my soul,
ma’am, some of them have mixed in good society, I can tell you. There’s
pickpockets and swindlers down below who have lived in the best company.”

“Dreadful wretches!” cried Mrs. Vickers, shaking out her skirts. “John, I
will go on deck.”

At the signal, the party rose.

“Ecod, Pine,” says Captain Blunt, as the two were left alone together,
“you and I are always putting our foot into it!”

“Women are always in the way aboard ship,” returned Pine.

“Ah! Doctor, you don’t mean that, I know,” said a rich soft voice at his
elbow.

It was Sarah Purfoy emerging from her cabin.

“Here is the wench!” cries Blunt. “We are talking of your eyes, my dear.”
“Well, they’ll bear talking about, captain, won’t they?” asked she,
turning them full upon him.

“By the Lord, they will!” says Blunt, smacking his hand on the table.
“They’re the finest eyes I’ve seen in my life, and they’ve got the reddest
lips under ‘m that—”

“Let me pass, Captain Blunt, if you please. Thank you, doctor.”

And before the admiring commander could prevent her, she modestly swept
out of the cuddy.

“She’s a fine piece of goods, eh?” asked Blunt, watching her. “A spice o’
the devil in her, too.”

Old Pine took a huge pinch of snuff.

“Devil! I tell you what it is, Blunt. I don’t know where Vickers picked
her up, but I’d rather trust my life with the worst of those ruffians
‘tween decks, than in her keeping, if I’d done her an injury.”

Blunt laughed.

“I don’t believe she’d think much of sticking a man, either!” he said,
rising. “But I must go on deck, doctor.” Pine followed him more slowly. “I
don’t pretend to know much about women,” he said to himself, “but that
girl’s got a story of her own, or I’m much mistaken. What brings her on
board this ship as lady’s-maid is more than I can fathom.” And as,
sticking his pipe between his teeth, he walked down the now deserted deck
to the main hatchway, and turned to watch the white figure gliding up and
down the poop-deck, he saw it joined by another and a darker one, he
muttered, “She’s after no good, I’ll swear.”

At that moment his arm was touched by a soldier in undress uniform, who
had come up the hatchway. “What is it?”

The man drew himself up and saluted.

“If you please, doctor, one of the prisoners is taken sick, and as the
dinner’s over, and he’s pretty bad, I ventured to disturb your honour.”

“You ass!” says Pine—who, like many gruff men, had a good heart
under his rough shell—“why didn’t you tell me before?” and knocking
the ashes out of his barely-lighted pipe, he stopped that implement with a
twist of paper and followed his summoner down the hatchway.

In the meantime the woman who was the object of the grim old fellow’s
suspicions was enjoying the comparative coolness of the night air. Her
mistress and her mistress’s daughter had not yet come out of their cabin,
and the men had not yet finished their evening’s tobacco. The awning had
been removed, the stars were shining in the moonless sky, the poop guard
had shifted itself to the quarter-deck, and Miss Sarah Purfoy was walking
up and down the deserted poop, in close tête-à-tête with no less a person
than Captain Blunt himself. She had passed and repassed him twice
silently, and at the third turn the big fellow, peering into the twilight
ahead somewhat uneasily, obeyed the glitter of her great eyes, and joined
her.

“You weren’t put out, my wench,” he asked, “at what I said to you below?”

She affected surprise.

“What do you mean?”

“Why, at my—at what I—at my rudeness, there! For I was a bit
rude, I admit.”

“I? Oh dear, no. You were not rude.”

“Glad you think so!” returned Phineas Blunt, a little ashamed at what
looked like a confession of weakness on his part.

“You would have been—if I had let you.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it in your face. Do you think a woman can’t see in a man’s face
when he’s going to insult her?”

“Insult you, hey! Upon my word!”

“Yes, insult me. You’re old enough to be my father, Captain Blunt, but
you’ve no right to kiss me, unless I ask you.”

“Haw, haw!” laughed Blunt. “I like that. Ask me! Egad, I wish you would,
you black-eyed minx!”

“So would other people, I have no doubt.” “That soldier officer, for
instance. Hey, Miss Modesty? I’ve seen him looking at you as though he’d
like to try.”

The girl flashed at him with a quick side glance.

“You mean Lieutenant Frere, I suppose. Are you jealous of him?”

“Jealous! Why, damme, the lad was only breeched the other day. Jealous!”

“I think you are—and you’ve no need to be. He is a stupid booby,
though he is Lieutenant Frere.”

“So he is. You are right there, by the Lord.”

Sarah Purfoy laughed a low, full-toned laugh, whose sound made Blunt’s
pulse take a jump forward, and sent the blood tingling down to his fingers
ends.

“Captain Blunt,” said she, “you’re going to do a very silly thing.”

He came close to her and tried to take her hand.

“What?”

She answered by another question.

“How old are you?”

“Forty-two, if you must know.”

“Oh! And you are going to fall in love with a girl of nineteen.”

“Who is that?”

“Myself!” she said, giving him her hand and smiling at him with her rich
red lips.

The mizen hid them from the man at the wheel, and the twilight of tropical
stars held the main-deck. Blunt felt the breath of this strange woman warm
on his cheek, her eyes seemed to wax and wane, and the hard, small hand he
held burnt like fire.

“I believe you are right,” he cried. “I am half in love with you already.”

She gazed at him with a contemptuous sinking of her heavily fringed
eyelids, and withdrew her hand.

“Then don’t get to the other half, or you’ll regret it.”

“Shall I?” asked Blunt. “That’s my affair. Come, you little vixen, give me
that kiss you said I was going to ask you for below,” and he caught her in
his arms.

In an instant she had twisted herself free, and confronted him with
flashing eyes.

“You dare!” she cried. “Kiss me by force! Pooh! you make love like a
schoolboy. If you can make me like you, I’ll kiss you as often as you
will. If you can’t, keep your distance, please.”

Blunt did not know whether to laugh or be angry at this rebuff. He was
conscious that he was in rather a ridiculous position, and so decided to
laugh.

“You’re a spitfire, too. What must I do to make you like me?”

She made him a curtsy.

“That is your affair,” she said; and as the head of Mr. Frere appeared
above the companion, Blunt walked aft, feeling considerably bewildered,
and yet not displeased.

“She’s a fine girl, by jingo,” he said, cocking his cap, “and I’m hanged
if she ain’t sweet upon me.”

And then the old fellow began to whistle softly to himself as he paced the
deck, and to glance towards the man who had taken his place with no
friendly eyes. But a sort of shame held him as yet, and he kept aloof.

Maurice Frere’s greeting was short enough.

“Well, Sarah,” he said, “have you got out of your temper?”

She frowned.

“What did you strike the man for? He did you no harm.”

“He was out of his place. What business had he to come aft? One must keep
these wretches down, my girl.”

“Or they will be too much for you, eh? Do you think one man could capture
a ship, Mr. Maurice?”

“No, but one hundred might.”

“Nonsense! What could they do against the soldiers? There are fifty
soldiers.”

“So there are, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, never mind. It’s against the rules, and I won’t have it.”

“’Not according to the King’s Regulations,’ as Captain Vickers would say.”

Frere laughed at her imitation of his pompous captain.

“You are a strange girl; I can’t make you out. Come,” and he took her
hand, “tell me what you are really.”

“Will you promise not to tell?”

“Of course.”

“Upon your word?”

“Upon my word.”

“Well, then—but you’ll tell?”

“Not I. Come, go on.”

“Lady’s-maid in the family of a gentleman going abroad.”

“Sarah, you can’t be serious?” “I am serious. That was the advertisement I
answered.”

“But I mean what you have been. You were not a lady’s-maid all your life?”

She pulled her shawl closer round her and shivered.

“People are not born ladies’ maids, I suppose?”

“Well, who are you, then? Have you no friends? What have you been?”

She looked up into the young man’s face—a little less harsh at that
moment than it was wont to be—and creeping closer to him, whispered—“Do
you love me, Maurice?”

He raised one of the little hands that rested on the taffrail, and, under
cover of the darkness, kissed it.

“You know I do,” he said. “You may be a lady’s-maid or what you like, but
you are the loveliest woman I ever met.”

She smiled at his vehemence.

“Then, if you love me, what does it matter?” “If you loved me, you would
tell me,” said he, with a quickness which surprised himself.

“But I have nothing to tell, and I don’t love you—yet.”

He let her hand fall with an impatient gesture; and at that moment Blunt—who
could restrain himself no longer—came up.

“Fine night, Mr. Frere?”

“Yes, fine enough.”

“No signs of a breeze yet, though.”

“No, not yet.”

Just then, from out of the violet haze that hung over the horizon, a
strange glow of light broke.

“Hallo,” cries Frere, “did you see that?”

All had seen it, but they looked for its repetition in vain. Blunt rubbed
his eyes.

“I saw it,” he said, “distinctly. A flash of light.” They strained their
eyes to pierce through the obscurity.

“Best saw something like it before dinner. There must be thunder in the
air.”

At that instant a thin streak of light shot up and then sank again. There
was no mistaking it this time, and a simultaneous exclamation burst from
all on deck. From out the gloom which hung over the horizon rose a column
of flame that lighted up the night for an instant, and then sunk, leaving
a dull red spark upon the water.

“It’s a ship on fire,” cried Frere.

CHAPTER III. THE MONOTONY BREAKS.

They looked again, the tiny spark still burned, and immediately over it
there grew out of the darkness a crimson spot, that hung like a lurid star
in the air. The soldiers and sailors on the forecastle had seen it also,
and in a moment the whole vessel was astir. Mrs. Vickers, with little
Sylvia clinging to her dress, came up to share the new sensation; and at
the sight of her mistress, the modest maid withdrew discreetly from
Frere’s side. Not that there was any need to do so; no one heeded her.
Blunt, in his professional excitement, had already forgotten her presence,
and Frere was in earnest conversation with Vickers.

“Take a boat?” said that gentleman. “Certainly, my dear Frere, by all
means. That is to say, if the captain does not object, and it is not
contrary to the Regulations.”

“Captain, you’ll lower a boat, eh? We may save some of the poor devils,”
cries Frere, his heartiness of body reviving at the prospect of
excitement.

“Boat!” said Blunt, “why, she’s twelve miles off and more, and there’s not
a breath o’ wind!”

“But we can’t let ’em roast like chestnuts!” cried the other, as the glow
in the sky broadened and became more intense.

“What is the good of a boat?” said Pine. “The long-boat only holds thirty
men, and that’s a big ship yonder.”

“Well, take two boats—three boats! By Heaven, you’ll never let ’em
burn alive without stirring a finger to save ’em!”

“They’ve got their own boats,” says Blunt, whose coolness was in strong
contrast to the young officer’s impetuosity; “and if the fire gains,
they’ll take to ’em, you may depend. In the meantime, we’ll show ’em that
there’s someone near ’em.” And as he spoke, a blue light flared hissing
into the night.

“There, they’ll see that, I expect!” he said, as the ghastly flame rose,
extinguishing the stars for a moment, only to let them appear again
brighter in a darker heaven.

“Mr. Best—lower and man the quarter-boats! Mr. Frere—you can
go in one, if you like, and take a volunteer or two from those grey
jackets of yours amidships. I shall want as many hands as I can spare to
man the long-boat and cutter, in case we want ’em. Steady there, lads!
Easy!” and as the first eight men who could reach the deck parted to the
larboard and starboard quarter-boats, Frere ran down on the main-deck.

Mrs. Vickers, of course, was in the way, and gave a genteel scream as
Blunt rudely pushed past her with a scarce-muttered apology; but her maid
was standing erect and motionless, by the quarter-railing, and as the
captain paused for a moment to look round him, he saw her dark eyes fixed
on him admiringly. He was, as he said, over forty-two, burly and
grey-haired, but he blushed like a girl under her approving gaze.
Nevertheless, he said only, “That wench is a trump!” and swore a little.

Meanwhile Maurice Frere had passed the sentry and leapt down into the
‘tween decks. At his nod, the prison door was thrown open. The air was
hot, and that strange, horrible odour peculiar to closely-packed human
bodies filled the place. It was like coming into a full stable.

He ran his eye down the double tier of bunks which lined the side of the
ship, and stopped at the one opposite him.

There seemed to have been some disturbance there lately, for instead of
the six pair of feet which should have protruded therefrom, the gleam of
the bull’s-eye showed but four.

“What’s the matter here, sentry?” he asked.

“Prisoner ill, sir. Doctor sent him to hospital.”

“But there should be two.”

The other came from behind the break of the berths. It was Rufus Dawes. He
held by the side as he came, and saluted.

“I felt sick, sir, and was trying to get the scuttle open.”

The heads were all raised along the silent line, and eyes and ears were
eager to see and listen. The double tier of bunks looked terribly like a
row of wild beast cages at that moment.

Maurice Frere stamped his foot indignantly.

“Sick! What are you sick about, you malingering dog? I’ll give you
something to sweat the sickness out of you. Stand on one side here!”

Rufus Dawes, wondering, obeyed. He seemed heavy and dejected, and passed
his hand across his forehead, as though he would rub away a pain there.

“Which of you fellows can handle an oar?” Frere went on. “There, curse
you, I don’t want fifty! Three’ll do. Come on now, make haste!”

The heavy door clashed again, and in another instant the four “volunteers”
were on deck. The crimson glow was turning yellow now, and spreading over
the sky.

“Two in each boat!” cries Blunt. “I’ll burn a blue light every hour for
you, Mr. Best; and take care they don’t swamp you. Lower away, lads!” As
the second prisoner took the oar of Frere’s boat, he uttered a groan and
fell forward, recovering himself instantly. Sarah Purfoy, leaning over the
side, saw the occurrence.

“What is the matter with that man?” she said. “Is he ill?”

Pine was next to her, and looked out instantly. “It’s that big fellow in
No. 10,” he cried. “Here, Frere!”

But Frere heard him not. He was intent on the beacon that gleamed ever
brighter in the distance. “Give way, my lads!” he shouted. And amid a
cheer from the ship, the two boats shot out of the bright circle of the
blue light, and disappeared into the darkness.

Sarah Purfoy looked at Pine for an explanation, but he turned abruptly
away. For a moment the girl paused, as if in doubt; and then, ere his
retreating figure turned to retrace its steps, she cast a quick glance
around, and slipping down the ladder, made her way to the ‘tween decks.

The iron-studded oak barricade that, loop-holed for musketry, and
perforated with plated trapdoor for sterner needs, separated soldiers from
prisoners, was close to her left hand, and the sentry at its padlocked
door looked at her inquiringly. She laid her little hand on his big rough
one—a sentry is but mortal—and opened her brown eyes at him.

“The hospital,” she said. “The doctor sent me”; and before he could
answer, her white figure vanished down the hatch, and passed round the
bulkhead, behind which lay the sick man.

CHAPTER IV. THE HOSPITAL.

The hospital was nothing more nor less than a partitioned portion of the
lower deck, filched from the space allotted to the soldiers. It ran fore
and aft, coming close to the stern windows, and was, in fact, a sort of
artificial stern cabin. At a pinch, it might have held a dozen men.

Though not so hot as in the prison, the atmosphere of the lower deck was
close and unhealthy, and the girl, pausing to listen to the subdued hum of
conversation coming from the soldiers’ berths, turned strangely sick and
giddy. She drew herself up, however, and held out her hand to a man who
came rapidly across the misshapen shadows, thrown by the sulkily swinging
lantern, to meet her. It was the young soldier who had been that day
sentry at the convict gangway.

“Well, miss,” he said, “I am here, yer see, waiting for yer.”

“You are a good boy, Miles; but don’t you think I’m worth waiting for?”

Miles grinned from ear to ear.

“Indeed you be,” said he.

Sarah Purfoy frowned, and then smiled.

“Come here, Miles; I’ve got something for you.”

Miles came forward, grinning harder.

The girl produced a small object from the pocket of her dress. If Mrs.
Vickers had seen it she would probably have been angry, for it was nothing
less than the captain’s brandy-flask.

“Drink,” said she. “It’s the same as they have upstairs, so it won’t hurt
you.”

The fellow needed no pressing. He took off half the contents of the bottle
at a gulp, and then, fetching a long breath, stood staring at her.

“That’s prime!”

“Is it? I dare say it is.” She had been looking at him with unaffected
disgust as he drank. “Brandy is all you men understand.” Miles—still
sucking in his breath—came a pace closer.

“Not it,” said he, with a twinkle in his little pig’s eyes. “I understand
something else, miss, I can tell yer.”

The tone of the sentence seemed to awaken and remind her of her errand in
that place. She laughed as loudly and as merrily as she dared, and laid
her hand on the speaker’s arm. The boy—for he was but a boy, one of
those many ill-reared country louts who leave the plough-tail for the
musket, and, for a shilling a day, experience all the “pomp and
circumstance of glorious war”—reddened to the roots of his
closely-cropped hair.

“There, that’s quite close enough. You’re only a common soldier, Miles,
and you mustn’t make love to me.”

“Not make love to yer!” says Miles. “What did yer tell me to meet yer here
for then?”

She laughed again.

“What a practical animal you are! Suppose I had something to say to you?”

Miles devoured her with his eyes.

“It’s hard to marry a soldier,” he said, with a recruit’s proud intonation
of the word; “but yer might do worse, miss, and I’ll work for yer like a
slave, I will.”

She looked at him with curiosity and pleasure. Though her time was
evidently precious, she could not resist the temptation of listening to
praises of herself.

“I know you’re above me, Miss Sarah. You’re a lady, but I love yer, I do,
and you drives me wild with yer tricks.”

“Do I?”

“Do yer? Yes, yer do. What did yer come an’ make up to me for, and then go
sweetheartin’ with them others?”

“What others?”

“Why, the cuddy folk—the skipper, and the parson, and that Frere. I
see yer walkin’ the deck wi’ un o’ nights. Dom ‘um, I’d put a bullet
through his red head as soon as look at un.”

“Hush! Miles dear—they’ll hear you.”

Her face was all aglow, and her expanded nostrils throbbed. Beautiful as
the face was, it had a tigerish look about it at that moment.

Encouraged by the epithet, Miles put his arm round her slim waist, just as
Blunt had done, but she did not resent it so abruptly. Miles had promised
more.

“Hush!” she whispered, with admirably-acted surprise—“I heard a
noise!” and as the soldier started back, she smoothed her dress
complacently.

“There is no one!” cried he.

“Isn’t there? My mistake, then. Now come here, Miles.”

Miles obeyed.

“Who is in the hospital?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, I want to go in.”

Miles scratched his head, and grinned.

“Yer carn’t.”

“Why not? You’ve let me in before.” “Against the doctor’s orders. He told
me special to let no one in but himself.”

“Nonsense.”

“It ain’t nonsense. There was a convict brought in to-night, and nobody’s
to go near him.”

“A convict!” She grew more interested. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Dunno. But he’s to be kep’ quiet until old Pine comes down.”

She became authoritative.

“Come, Miles, let me go in.”

“Don’t ask me, miss. It’s against orders, and—”

“Against orders? Why, you were blustering about shooting people just now.”

The badgered Miles grew angry. “Was I? Bluster or no bluster, you don’t go
in.” She turned away. “Oh, very well. If this is all the thanks I get for
wasting my time down here, I shall go on deck again.”

Miles became uneasy.

“There are plenty of agreeable people there.”

Miles took a step after her.

“Mr. Frere will let me go in, I dare say, if I ask him.”

Miles swore under his breath.

“Dom Mr. Frere! Go in if yer like,” he said. “I won’t stop yer, but
remember what I’m doin’ of.”

She turned again at the foot of the ladder, and came quickly back.

“That’s a good lad. I knew you would not refuse me”; and smiling at the
poor lad she was befooling, she passed into the cabin.

There was no lantern, and from the partially-blocked stern windows came
only a dim, vaporous light. The dull ripple of the water as the ship
rocked on the slow swell of the sea made a melancholy sound, and the sick
man’s heavy breathing seemed to fill the air. The slight noise made by the
opening door roused him; he rose on his elbow and began to mutter. Sarah
Purfoy paused in the doorway to listen, but she could make nothing of the
low, uneasy murmuring. Raising her arm, conspicuous by its white sleeve in
the gloom, she beckoned Miles.

“The lantern,” she whispered, “bring me the lantern!”

He unhooked it from the rope where it swung, and brought it towards her.
At that moment the man in the bunk sat up erect, and twisted himself
towards the light. “Sarah!” he cried, in shrill sharp tones. “Sarah!” and
swooped with a lean arm through the dusk, as though to seize her.

The girl leapt out of the cabin like a panther, struck the lantern out of
her lover’s hand, and was back at the bunk-head in a moment. The convict
was a young man of about four-and-twenty. His hands—clutched
convulsively now on the blankets—were small and well-shaped, and the
unshaven chin bristled with promise of a strong beard. His wild black eyes
glared with all the fire of delirium, and as he gasped for breath, the
sweat stood in beads on his sallow forehead.

The aspect of the man was sufficiently ghastly, and Miles, drawing back
with an oath, did not wonder at the terror which had seized Mrs. Vickers’s
maid. With open mouth and agonized face, she stood in the centre of the
cabin, lantern in hand, like one turned to stone, gazing at the man on the
bed.

“Ecod, he be a sight!” says Miles, at length. “Come away, miss, and shut
the door. He’s raving, I tell yer.”

The sound of his voice recalled her.

She dropped the lantern, and rushed to the bed.

“You fool; he’s choking, can’t you see? Water! give me water!”

And wreathing her arms around the man’s head, she pulled it down on her
bosom, rocking it there, half savagely, to and fro.

Awed into obedience by her voice, Miles dipped a pannikin into a small
puncheon, cleated in the corner of the cabin, and gave it her; and,
without thanking him, she placed it to the sick prisoner’s lips. He drank
greedily, and closed his eyes with a grateful sigh.

Just then the quick ears of Miles heard the jingle of arms. “Here’s the
doctor coming, miss!” he cried. “I hear the sentry saluting. Come away!
Quick!”

She seized the lantern, and, opening the horn slide, extinguished it.

“Say it went out,” she said in a fierce whisper, “and hold your tongue.
Leave me to manage.”

She bent over the convict as if to arrange his pillow, and then glided out
of the cabin, just as Pine descended the hatchway.

“Hallo!” cried he, stumbling, as he missed his footing; “where’s the
light?”

“Here, sir,” says Miles, fumbling with the lantern. “It’s all right, sir.
It went out, sir.”

“Went out! What did you let it go out for, you blockhead!” growled the
unsuspecting Pine. “Just like you boobies! What is the use of a light if
it ‘goes out’, eh?” As he groped his way, with outstretched arms, in the
darkness, Sarah Purfoy slipped past him unnoticed, and gained the upper
deck.

CHAPTER V. THE BARRACOON.

In the prison of the ‘tween decks reigned a darkness pregnant with
murmurs. The sentry at the entrance to the hatchway was supposed to
“prevent the prisoners from making a noise,” but he put a very liberal
interpretation upon the clause, and so long as the prisoners refrained
from shouting, yelling, and fighting—eccentricities in which they
sometimes indulged—he did not disturb them. This course of conduct
was dictated by prudence, no less than by convenience, for one sentry was
but little over so many; and the convicts, if pressed too hard, would
raise a sort of bestial boo-hoo, in which all voices were confounded, and
which, while it made noise enough and to spare, utterly precluded
individual punishment. One could not flog a hundred and eighty men, and it
was impossible to distinguish any particular offender. So, in virtue of
this last appeal, convictism had established a tacit right to converse in
whispers, and to move about inside its oaken cage.

To one coming in from the upper air, the place would have seemed in pitchy
darkness, but the convict eye, accustomed to the sinister twilight, was
enabled to discern surrounding objects with tolerable distinctness. The
prison was about fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, and ran the full
height of the ‘tween decks, viz., about five feet ten inches high. The
barricade was loop-holed here and there, and the planks were in some
places wide enough to admit a musket barrel. On the aft side, next the
soldiers’ berths, was a trap door, like the stoke-hole of a furnace. At
first sight this appeared to be contrived for the humane purpose of
ventilation, but a second glance dispelled this weak conclusion. The
opening was just large enough to admit the muzzle of a small howitzer,
secured on the deck below. In case of a mutiny, the soldiers could sweep
the prison from end to end with grape shot. Such fresh air as there was,
filtered through the loopholes, and came, in somewhat larger quantity,
through a wind-sail passed into the prison from the hatchway. But the
wind-sail, being necessarily at one end only of the place, the air it
brought was pretty well absorbed by the twenty or thirty lucky fellows
near it, and the other hundred and fifty did not come so well off. The
scuttles were open, certainly, but as the row of bunks had been built
against them, the air they brought was the peculiar property of such men
as occupied the berths into which they penetrated. These berths were
twenty-eight in number, each containing six men. They ran in a double tier
round three sides of the prison, twenty at each side, and eight affixed to
that portion of the forward barricade opposite the door. Each berth was
presumed to be five feet six inches square, but the necessities of stowage
had deprived them of six inches, and even under that pressure twelve men
were compelled to sleep on the deck. Pine did not exaggerate when he spoke
of the custom of overcrowding convict ships; and as he was entitled to
half a guinea for every man he delivered alive at Hobart Town, he had some
reason to complain.

When Frere had come down, an hour before, the prisoners were all snugly
between their blankets. They were not so now; though, at the first clink
of the bolts, they would be back again in their old positions, to all
appearances sound asleep. As the eye became accustomed to the foetid
duskiness of the prison, a strange picture presented itself. Groups of
men, in all imaginable attitudes, were lying, standing, sitting, or pacing
up and down. It was the scene on the poop-deck over again; only, here
being no fear of restraining keepers, the wild beasts were a little more
free in their movements. It is impossible to convey, in words, any idea of
the hideous phantasmagoria of shifting limbs and faces which moved through
the evil-smelling twilight of this terrible prison-house. Callot might
have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to
describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths in humanity which
one cannot explore, as there are mephitic caverns into which one dare not
penetrate.

Old men, young men, and boys, stalwart burglars and highway robbers, slept
side by side with wizened pickpockets or cunning-featured area-sneaks. The
forger occupied the same berth with the body-snatcher. The man of
education learned strange secrets of house-breakers’ craft, and the vulgar
ruffian of St. Giles took lessons of self-control from the keener
intellect of the professional swindler. The fraudulent clerk and the flash
“cracksman” interchanged experiences. The smuggler’s stories of lucky
ventures and successful runs were capped by the footpad’s reminiscences of
foggy nights and stolen watches. The poacher, grimly thinking of his sick
wife and orphaned children, would start as the night-house ruffian clapped
him on the shoulder and bade him, with a curse, to take good heart and “be
a man.” The fast shopboy whose love of fine company and high living had
brought him to this pass, had shaken off the first shame that was on him,
and listened eagerly to the narratives of successful vice that fell so
glibly from the lips of his older companions. To be transported seemed no
such uncommon fate. The old fellows laughed, and wagged their grey heads
with all the glee of past experience, and listening youth longed for the
time when it might do likewise. Society was the common foe, and
magistrates, gaolers, and parsons were the natural prey of all noteworthy
mankind. Only fools were honest, only cowards kissed the rod, and failed
to meditate revenge on that world of respectability which had wronged
them. Each new-comer was one more recruit to the ranks of ruffianism, and
not a man penned in that reeking den of infamy but became a sworn hater of
law, order, and “free-men.” What he might have been before mattered not.
He was now a prisoner, and—thrust into a suffocating barracoon,
herded with the foulest of mankind, with all imaginable depths of
blasphemy and indecency sounded hourly in his sight and hearing—he
lost his self-respect, and became what his gaolers took him to be—a
wild beast to be locked under bolts and bars, lest he should break out and
tear them.

The conversation ran upon the sudden departure of the four. What could
they want with them at that hour?

“I tell you there’s something up on deck,” says one to the group nearest
him. “Don’t you hear all that rumbling and rolling?”

“What did they lower boats for? I heard the dip o’ the oars.”

“Don’t know, mate. P’r’aps a burial job,” hazarded a short, stout fellow,
as a sort of happy suggestion.

“One of those coves in the parlour!” said another; and a laugh followed
the speech.

“No such luck. You won’t hang your jib for them yet awhile. More like the
skipper agone fishin’.”

“The skipper don’t go fishin’, yer fool. What would he do fishin’?—special
in the middle o’ the night.”

“That ‘ud be like old Dovery, eh?” says a fifth, alluding to an old
grey-headed fellow, who—a returned convict—was again under
sentence for body-snatching.

“Ay,” put in a young man, who had the reputation of being the smartest
“crow” (the “look-out” man of a burglars’ gang) in London—“’fishers
of men,’ as the parson says.”

The snuffling imitation of a Methodist preacher was good, and there was
another laugh.

Just then a miserable little cockney pickpocket, feeling his way to the
door, fell into the party.

A volley of oaths and kicks received him.

“I beg your pardon, gen’l’men,” cries the miserable wretch, “but I want
h’air.”

“Go to the barber’s and buy a wig, then!” says the “Crow”, elated at the
success of his last sally.

“Oh, sir, my back!”

“Get up!” groaned someone in the darkness. “Oh, Lord, I’m smothering!
Here, sentry!”

“Vater!” cried the little cockney. “Give us a drop o’ vater, for mercy’s
sake. I haven’t moist’ned my chaffer this blessed day.”

“Half a gallon a day, bo’, and no more,” says a sailor next him.

“Yes, what have yer done with yer half-gallon, eh?” asked the Crow
derisively. “Someone stole it,” said the sufferer.

“He’s been an’ blued it,” squealed someone. “Been an’ blued it to buy a
Sunday veskit with! Oh, ain’t he a vicked young man?” And the speaker hid
his head under the blankets, in humorous affectation of modesty.

All this time the miserable little cockney—he was a tailor by trade—had
been grovelling under the feet of the Crow and his companions.

“Let me h’up, gents” he implored—“let me h’up. I feel as if I should
die—I do.”

“Let the gentleman up,” says the humorist in the bunk. “Don’t yer see his
kerridge is avaitin’ to take him to the Hopera?”

The conversation had got a little loud, and, from the topmost bunk on the
near side, a bullet head protruded.

“Ain’t a cove to get no sleep?” cried a gruff voice. “My blood, if I have
to turn out, I’ll knock some of your empty heads together.”

It seemed that the speaker was a man of mark, for the noise ceased
instantly; and, in the lull which ensued, a shrill scream broke from the
wretched tailor.

“Help! they’re killing me! Ah-h-h-!”

“Wot’s the matter,” roared the silencer of the riot, jumping from his
berth, and scattering the Crow and his companions right and left. “Let him
be, can’t yer?”

“H’air!” cried the poor devil—“h’air; I’m fainting!”

Just then there came another groan from the man in the opposite bunk.
“Well, I’m blessed!” said the giant, as he held the gasping tailor by the
collar and glared round him. “Here’s a pretty go! All the blessed chickens
ha’ got the croup!”

The groaning of the man in the bunk redoubled.

“Pass the word to the sentry,” says someone more humane than the rest.
“Ah,” says the humorist, “pass him out; it’ll be one the less. We’d rather
have his room than his company.”

“Sentry, here’s a man sick.”

But the sentry knew his duty better than to reply. He was a young soldier,
but he had been well informed of the artfulness of convict stratagems;
and, moreover, Captain Vickers had carefully apprised him “that by the
King’s Regulations, he was forbidden to reply to any question or
communication addressed to him by a convict, but, in the event of being
addressed, was to call the non-commissioned officer on duty.” Now, though
he was within easy hailing distance of the guard on the quarter-deck, he
felt a natural disinclination to disturb those gentlemen merely for the
sake of a sick convict, and knowing that, in a few minutes, the third
relief would come on duty, he decided to wait until then.

In the meantime the tailor grew worse, and began to moan dismally.

“Here! ‘ullo!” called out his supporter, in dismay. “Hold up ‘ere! Wot’s
wrong with yer? Don’t come the drops ‘ere. Pass him down, some of yer,”
and the wretch was hustled down to the doorway.

“Vater!” he whispered, beating feebly with his hand on the thick oak.

“Get us a drink, mister, for Gord’s sake!”

But the prudent sentry answered never a word, until the ship’s bell warned
him of the approach of the relief guard; and then honest old Pine, coming
with anxious face to inquire after his charge, received the intelligence
that there was another prisoner sick. He had the door unlocked and the
tailor outside in an instant. One look at the flushed, anxious face was
enough.

“Who’s that moaning in there?” he asked.

It was the man who had tried to call for the sentry an hour back, and Pine
had him out also; convictism beginning to wonder a little.

“Take ’em both aft to the hospital,” he said; “and, Jenkins, if there are
any more men taken sick, let them pass the word for me at once. I shall be
on deck.”

The guard stared in each other’s faces, with some alarm, but said nothing,
thinking more of the burning ship, which now flamed furiously across the
placid water, than of peril nearer home; but as Pine went up the hatchway
he met Blunt.

“We’ve got the fever aboard!”

“Good God! Do you mean it, Pine?”

Pine shook his grizzled head sorrowfully.

“It’s this cursed calm that’s done it; though I expected it all along,
with the ship crammed as she is. When I was in the Hecuba—”

“Who is it?”

Pine laughed a half-pitying, half-angry laugh.

“A convict, of course. Who else should it be? They are reeking like
bullocks at Smithfield down there. A hundred and eighty men penned into a
place fifty feet long, with the air like an oven—what could you
expect?”

Poor Blunt stamped his foot.

“It isn’t my fault,” he cried. “The soldiers are berthed aft. If the
Government will overload these ships, I can’t help it.”

“The Government! Ah! The Government! The Government don’t sleep, sixty men
a-side, in a cabin only six feet high. The Government don’t get typhus
fever in the tropics, does it?”

“No—but—”

“But what does the Government care, then?”

Blunt wiped his hot forehead.

“Who was the first down?”

“No. 97 berth; ten on the lower tier. John Rex he calls himself.”

“Are you sure it’s the fever?”

“As sure as I can be yet. Head like a fire-ball, and tongue like a strip
of leather. Gad, don’t I know it?” and Pine grinned mournfully. “I’ve got
him moved into the hospital. Hospital! It is a hospital! As dark as a
wolf’s mouth. I’ve seen dog kennels I liked better.”

Blunt nodded towards the volume of lurid smoke that rolled up out of the
glow.—“Suppose there is a shipload of those poor devils? I can’t
refuse to take ’em in.”

“No,” says Pine gloomily, “I suppose you can’t. If they come, I must stow
’em somewhere. We’ll have to run for the Cape, with the first breeze, if
they do come, that is all I can see for it,” and he turned away to watch
the burning vessel.

CHAPTER VI. THE FATE OF THE “HYDASPES”.

In the meanwhile the two boats made straight for the red column that
uprose like a gigantic torch over the silent sea.

As Blunt had said, the burning ship lay a good twelve miles from the
Malabar, and the pull was a long and a weary one. Once fairly away from
the protecting sides of the vessel that had borne them thus far on their
dismal journey, the adventurers seemed to have come into a new atmosphere.
The immensity of the ocean over which they slowly moved revealed itself
for the first time. On board the prison ship, surrounded with all the
memories if not with the comforts of the shore they had quitted, they had
not realized how far they were from that civilization which had given them
birth. The well-lighted, well-furnished cuddy, the homely mirth of the
forecastle, the setting of sentries and the changing of guards, even the
gloom and terror of the closely-locked prison, combined to make the
voyagers feel secure against the unknown dangers of the sea. That defiance
of Nature which is born of contact with humanity, had hitherto sustained
them, and they felt that, though alone on the vast expanse of waters, they
were in companionship with others of their kind, and that the perils one
man had passed might be successfully dared by another. But now—with
one ship growing smaller behind them, and the other, containing they knew
not what horror of human agony and human helplessness, lying a burning
wreck in the black distance ahead of them—they began to feel their
own littleness. The Malabar, that huge sea monster, in whose capacious
belly so many human creatures lived and suffered, had dwindled to a
walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how infinitely small had their own
frail cockboat appeared as they shot out from under her towering stern!
Then the black hull rising above them, had seemed a tower of strength,
built to defy the utmost violence of wind and wave; now it was but a slip
of wood floating—on an unknown depth of black, fathomless water. The
blue light, which, at its first flashing over the ocean, had made the very
stars pale their lustre, and lighted up with ghastly radiance the enormous
vault of heaven, was now only a point, brilliant and distinct it is true,
but which by its very brilliance dwarfed the ship into insignificance. The
Malabar lay on the water like a glow-worm on a floating leaf, and the
glare of the signal-fire made no more impression on the darkness than the
candle carried by a solitary miner would have made on the abyss of a
coal-pit.

And yet the Malabar held two hundred creatures like themselves!

The water over which the boats glided was black and smooth, rising into
huge foamless billows, the more terrible because they were silent. When
the sea hisses, it speaks, and speech breaks the spell of terror; when it
is inert, heaving noiselessly, it is dumb, and seems to brood over
mischief. The ocean in a calm is like a sulky giant; one dreads that it
may be meditating evil. Moreover, an angry sea looks less vast in extent
than a calm one. Its mounting waves bring the horizon nearer, and one does
not discern how for many leagues the pitiless billows repeat themselves.
To appreciate the hideous vastness of the ocean one must see it when it
sleeps.

The great sky uprose from this silent sea without a cloud. The stars hung
low in its expanse, burning in a violent mist of lower ether. The heavens
were emptied of sound, and each dip of the oars was re-echoed in space by
a succession of subtle harmonies. As the blades struck the dark water, it
flashed fire, and the tracks of the boats resembled two sea-snakes
writhing with silent undulations through a lake of quicksilver.

It had been a sort of race hitherto, and the rowers, with set teeth and
compressed lips, had pulled stroke for stroke. At last the foremost boat
came to a sudden pause. Best gave a cheery shout and passed her, steering
straight into the broad track of crimson that already reeked on the sea
ahead.

“What is it?” he cried.

But he heard only a smothered curse from Frere, and then his consort
pulled hard to overtake him.

It was, in fact, nothing of consequence—only a prisoner “giving in”.

“Curse it!” says Frere, “What’s the matter with you? Oh, you, is it?—Dawes!
Of course, Dawes. I never expected anything better from such a skulking
hound. Come, this sort of nonsense won’t do with me. It isn’t as nice as
lolloping about the hatchways, I dare say, but you’ll have to go on, my
fine fellow.”

“He seems sick, sir,” said (with) compassionate bow.

“Sick! Not he. Shamming. Come, give way now! Put your backs into it!” and
the convict having picked up his oar, the boat shot forward again.

But, for all Mr. Frere’s urging, he could not recover the way he had lost,
and Best was the first to run in under the black cloud that hung over the
crimsoned water.

At his signal, the second boat came alongside.

“Keep wide,” he said. “If there are many fellows yet aboard, they’ll swamp
us; and I think there must be, as we haven’t met the boats,” and then
raising his voice, as the exhausted crew lay on their oars, he hailed the
burning ship.

She was a huge, clumsily-built vessel, with great breadth of beam, and a
lofty poop-deck. Strangely enough, though they had so lately seen the
fire, she was already a wreck, and appeared to be completely deserted. The
chief hold of the fire was amidships, and the lower deck was one mass of
flame. Here and there were great charred rifts and gaps in her sides, and
the red-hot fire glowed through these as through the bars of a grate. The
main-mast had fallen on the starboard side, and trailed a blackened wreck
in the water, causing the unwieldy vessel to lean over heavily. The fire
roared like a cataract, and huge volumes of flame-flecked smoke poured up
out of the hold, and rolled away in a low-lying black cloud over the sea.

As Frere’s boat pulled slowly round her stern, he hailed the deck again
and again.

Still there was no answer, and though the flood of light that dyed the
water blood-red struck out every rope and spar distinct and clear, his
straining eyes could see no living soul aboard. As they came nearer, they
could distinguish the gilded letters of her name.

“What is it, men?” cried Frere, his voice almost drowned amid the roar of
the flames. “Can you see?”

Rufus Dawes, impelled, it would seem, by some strong impulse of curiosity,
stood erect, and shaded his eyes with his hand.

“Well—can’t you speak? What is it?”

“The Hydaspes!”

Frere gasped.

The Hydaspes! The ship in which his cousin Richard Devine had sailed! The
ship for which those in England might now look in vain! The Hydaspes which—something
he had heard during the speculations as to this missing cousin flashed
across him.

“Back water, men! Round with her! Pull for your lives!”

Best’s boat glided alongside.

“Can you see her name?”

Frere, white with terror, shouted a reply.

“The Hydaspes! I know her. She is bound for Calcutta, and she has five
tons of powder aboard!”

There was no need for more words. The single sentence explained the whole
mystery of her desertion. The crew had taken to the boats on the first
alarm, and had left their death-fraught vessel to her fate. They were
miles off by this time, and unluckily for themselves, perhaps, had steered
away from the side where rescue lay.

The boats tore through the water. Eager as the men had been to come, they
were more eager to depart. The flames had even now reached the poop; in a
few minutes it would be too late. For ten minutes or more not a word was
spoken. With straining arms and labouring chests, the rowers tugged at the
oars, their eyes fixed on the lurid mass they were leaving. Frere and
Best, with their faces turned back to the terror they fled from, urged the
men to greater efforts. Already the flames had lapped the flag, already
the outlines of the stern carvings were blurred by the fire.

Another moment, and all would be over. Ah! it had come at last. A dull
rumbling sound; the burning ship parted asunder; a pillar of fire, flecked
with black masses that were beams and planks, rose up out of the ocean;
there was a terrific crash, as though sea and sky were coming together;
and then a mighty mountain of water rose, advanced, caught, and passed
them, and they were alone—deafened, stunned, and breathless, in a
sudden horror of thickest darkness, and a silence like that of the tomb.

The splashing of the falling fragments awoke them from their stupor, and
then the blue light of the Malabar struck out a bright pathway across the
sea, and they knew that they were safe.

On board the Malabar two men paced the deck, waiting for dawn.

It came at last. The sky lightened, the mist melted away, and then a long,
low, far-off streak of pale yellow light floated on the eastern horizon.
By and by the water sparkled, and the sea changed colour, turning from
black to yellow, and from yellow to lucid green. The man at the masthead
hailed the deck. The boats were in sight, and as they came towards the
ship, the bright water flashing from the labouring oars, a crowd of
spectators hanging over the bulwarks cheered and waved their hats.

“Not a soul!” cried Blunt. “No one but themselves. Well, I’m glad they’re
safe anyway.”

The boats drew alongside, and in a few seconds Frere was upon deck.

“Well, Mr. Frere?”

“No use,” cried Frere, shivering. “We only just had time to get away. The
nearest thing in the world, sir.”

“Didn’t you see anyone?”

“Not a soul. They must have taken to the boats.”

“Then they can’t be far off,” cried Blunt, sweeping the horizon with his
glass. “They must have pulled all the way, for there hasn’t been enough
wind to fill a hollow tooth with.” “Perhaps they pulled in the wrong
direction,” said Frere. “They had a good four hours’ start of us, you
know.”

Then Best came up, and told the story to a crowd of eager listeners. The
sailors having hoisted and secured the boats, were hurried off to the
forecastle, there to eat, and relate their experience between mouthfuls,
and the four convicts were taken in charge and locked below again.

“You had better go and turn in, Frere,” said Pine gruffly. “It’s no use
whistling for a wind here all day.”

Frere laughed—in his heartiest manner. “I think I will,” he said.
“I’m dog tired, and as sleepy as an owl,” and he descended the poop
ladder. Pine took a couple of turns up and down the deck, and then
catching Blunt’s eye, stopped in front of Vickers.

“You may think it a hard thing to say, Captain Vickers, but it’s just as
well if we don’t find these poor devils. We have quite enough on our hands
as it is.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Pine?” says Vickers, his humane feelings getting
the better of his pomposity. “You would not surely leave the unhappy men
to their fate.”

“Perhaps,” returned the other, “they would not thank us for taking them
aboard.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“The fever has broken out.”

Vickers raised his brows. He had no experience of such things; and though
the intelligence was startling, the crowded condition of the prison
rendered it easy to be understood, and he apprehended no danger to
himself.

“It is a great misfortune; but, of course, you will take such steps—”

“It is only in the prison, as yet,” says Pine, with a grim emphasis on the
word; “but there is no saying how long it may stop there. I have got three
men down as it is.” “Well, sir, all authority in the matter is in your
hands. Any suggestions you make, I will, of course, do my best to carry
out.”

“Thank ye. I must have more room in the hospital to begin with. The
soldiers must lie a little closer.”

“I will see what can be done.”

“And you had better keep your wife and the little girl as much on deck as
possible.”

Vickers turned pale at the mention of his child. “Good Heaven! do you
think there is any danger?”

“There is, of course, danger to all of us; but with care we may escape it.
There’s that maid, too. Tell her to keep to herself a little more. She has
a trick of roaming about the ship I don’t like. Infection is easily
spread, and children always sicken sooner than grown-up people.”

Vickers pressed his lips together. This old man, with his harsh, dissonant
voice, and hideous practicality, seemed like a bird of ill omen.

Blunt, hitherto silently listening, put in a word for defence of the
absent woman. “The wench is right enough, Pine,” said he. “What’s the
matter with her?”

“Yes, she’s all right, I’ve no doubt. She’s less likely to take it than
any of us. You can see her vitality in her face—as many lives as a
cat. But she’d bring infection quicker than anybody.”

“I’ll—I’ll go at once,” cried poor Vickers, turning round. The woman
of whom they were speaking met him on the ladder. Her face was paler than
usual, and dark circles round her eyes gave evidence of a sleepless night.
She opened her red lips to speak, and then, seeing Vickers, stopped
abruptly.

“Well, what is it?”

She looked from one to the other. “I came for Dr. Pine.”

Vickers, with the quick intelligence of affection, guessed her errand.
“Someone is ill?”

“Miss Sylvia, sir. It is nothing to signify, I think. A little feverish
and hot, and my mistress—”

Vickers was down the ladder in an instant, with scared face.

Pine caught the girl’s round firm arm. “Where have you been?” Two great
flakes of red came out in her white cheeks, and she shot an indignant
glance at Blunt.

“Come, Pine, let the wench alone!”

“Were you with the child last night?” went on Pine, without turning his
head.

“No; I have not been in the cabin since dinner yesterday. Mrs. Vickers
only called me in just now. Let go my arm, sir, you hurt me.”

Pine loosed his hold as if satisfied at the reply. “I beg your pardon,” he
said gruffly. “I did not mean to hurt you. But the fever has broken out in
the prison, and I think the child has caught it. You must be careful where
you go.” And then, with an anxious face, he went in pursuit of Vickers.

Sarah Purfoy stood motionless for an instant, in deadly terror. Her lips
parted, her eyes glittered, and she made a movement as though to retrace
her steps.

“Poor soul!” thought honest Blunt, “how she feels for the child! D——
that lubberly surgeon, he’s hurt her!—Never mind, my lass,” he said
aloud. It was broad daylight, and he had not as much courage in
love-making as at night. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve been in ships with fever
before now.”

Awaking, as it were, at the sound of his voice, she came closer to him.
“But ship fever! I have heard of it! Men have died like rotten sheep in
crowded vessels like this.”

“Tush! Not they. Don’t be frightened; Miss Sylvia won’t die, nor you
neither.” He took her hand. “It may knock off a few dozen prisoners or so.
They are pretty close packed down there—”

She drew her hand away; and then, remembering herself, gave it him again.

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing—a pain. I did not sleep last night.”

“There, there; you are upset, I dare say. Go and lie down.”

She was staring away past him over the sea, as if in thought. So intently
did she look that he involuntarily turned his head, and the action
recalled her to herself. She brought her fine straight brows together for
a moment, and then raised them with the action of a thinker who has
decided on his course of conduct.

“I have a toothache,” said she, putting her hand to her face.

“Take some laudanum,” says Blunt, with dim recollections of his mother’s
treatment of such ailments. “Old Pine’ll give you some.”

To his astonishment she burst into tears.

“There—there! Don’t cry, my dear. Hang it, don’t cry. What are you
crying about?”

She dashed away the bright drops, and raised her face with a rainy smile
of trusting affection. “Nothing! I am lonely. So far from home; and—and
Dr. Pine hurt my arm. Look!”

She bared that shapely member as she spoke, and sure enough there were
three red marks on the white and shining flesh.

“The ruffian!” cried Blunt, “it’s too bad.” And after a hasty look around
him, the infatuated fellow kissed the bruise. “I’ll get the laudanum for
you,” he said. “You shan’t ask that bear for it. Come into my cabin.”

Blunt’s cabin was in the starboard side of the ship, just under the poop
awning, and possessed three windows—one looking out over the side,
and two upon deck. The corresponding cabin on the other side was occupied
by Mr. Maurice Frere. He closed the door, and took down a small medicine
chest, cleated above the hooks where hung his signal-pictured telescope.

“Here,” said he, opening it. “I’ve carried this little box for years, but
it ain’t often I want to use it, thank God. Now, then, put some o’ this
into your mouth, and hold it there.”

“Good gracious, Captain Blunt, you’ll poison me! Give me the bottle; I’ll
help myself.”

“Don’t take too much,” says Blunt. “It’s dangerous stuff, you know.”

“You need not fear. I’ve used it before.”

The door was shut, and as she put the bottle in her pocket, the amorous
captain caught her in his arms.

“What do you say? Come, I think I deserve a kiss for that.”

Her tears were all dry long ago, and had only given increased colour to
her face. This agreeable woman never wept long enough to make herself
distasteful. She raised her dark eyes to his for a moment, with a saucy
smile. “By and by,” said she, and escaping, gained her cabin. It was next
to that of her mistress, and she could hear the sick child feebly moaning.
Her eyes filled with tears—real ones this time.

“Poor little thing,” she said; “I hope she won’t die.”

And then she threw herself on her bed, and buried her hot head in the
pillow. The intelligence of the fever seemed to have terrified her. Had
the news disarranged some well-concocted plan of hers? Being near the
accomplishment of some cherished scheme long kept in view, had the sudden
and unexpected presence of disease falsified her carefully-made
calculations, and cast an almost insurmountable obstacle in her path?

“She die! and through me? How did I know that he had the fever? Perhaps I
have taken it myself—I feel ill.” She turned over on the bed, as if
in pain, and then started to a sitting position, stung by a sudden
thought. “Perhaps he might die! The fever spreads quickly, and if so, all
this plotting will have been useless. It must be done at once. It will
never do to break down now,” and taking the phial from her pocket, she
held it up, to see how much it contained. It was three parts full. “Enough
for both,” she said, between her set teeth. The action of holding up the
bottle reminded her of the amorous Blunt, and she smiled. “A strange way
to show affection for a man,” she said to herself, “and yet he doesn’t
care, and I suppose I shouldn’t by this time. I’ll go through with it,
and, if the worst comes to the worst, I can fall back on Maurice.” She
loosened the cork of the phial, so that it would come out with as little
noise as possible, and then placed it carefully in her bosom. “I will get
a little sleep if I can,” she said. “They have got the note, and it shall
be done to-night.”

CHAPTER VII. TYPHUS FEVER.

The felon Rufus Dawes had stretched himself in his bunk and tried to
sleep. But though he was tired and sore, and his head felt like lead, he
could not but keep broad awake. The long pull through the pure air, if it
had tired him, had revived him, and he felt stronger; but for all that,
the fatal sickness that was on him maintained its hold; his pulse beat
thickly, and his brain throbbed with unnatural heat. Lying in his narrow
space—in the semi-darkness—he tossed his limbs about, and
closed his eyes in vain—he could not sleep. His utmost efforts
induced only an oppressive stagnation of thought, through which he heard
the voices of his fellow-convicts; while before his eyes was still the
burning Hydaspes—that vessel whose destruction had destroyed for
ever all trace of the unhappy Richard Devine.

It was fortunate for his comfort, perhaps, that the man who had been
chosen to accompany him was of a talkative turn, for the prisoners
insisted upon hearing the story of the explosion a dozen times over, and
Rufus Dawes himself had been roused to give the name of the vessel with
his own lips. Had it not been for the hideous respect in which he was
held, it is possible that he might have been compelled to give his version
also, and to join in the animated discussion which took place upon the
possibility of the saving of the fugitive crew. As it was, however, he was
left in peace, and lay unnoticed, trying to sleep.

The detachment of fifty being on deck—airing—the prison was
not quite so hot as at night, and many of the convicts made up for their
lack of rest by snatching a dog-sleep in the bared bunks. The four
volunteer oarsmen were allowed to “take it out.”

As yet there had been no alarm of fever. The three seizures had excited
some comment, however, and had it not been for the counter-excitement of
the burning ship, it is possible that Pine’s precaution would have been
thrown away. The “Old Hands”—who had been through the Passage before—suspected,
but said nothing, save among themselves. It was likely that the weak and
sickly would go first, and that there would be more room for those
remaining. The Old Hands were satisfied.

Three of these Old Hands were conversing together just behind the
partition of Dawes’s bunk. As we have said, the berths were five feet
square, and each contained six men. No. 10, the berth occupied by Dawes,
was situated on the corner made by the joining of the starboard and centre
lines, and behind it was a slight recess, in which the scuttle was fixed.
His “mates” were at present but three in number, for John Rex and the
cockney tailor had been removed to the hospital. The three that remained
were now in deep conversation in the shelter of the recess. Of these, the
giant—who had the previous night asserted his authority in the
prison—seemed to be the chief. His name was Gabbett. He was a
returned convict, now on his way to undergo a second sentence for
burglary. The other two were a man named Sanders, known as the “Moocher”,
and Jemmy Vetch, the Crow. They were talking in whispers, but Rufus Dawes,
lying with his head close to the partition, was enabled to catch much of
what they said.

At first the conversation turned on the catastrophe of the burning ship
and the likelihood of saving the crew. From this it grew to anecdote of
wreck and adventure, and at last Gabbett said something which made the
listener start from his indifferent efforts to slumber, into sudden broad
wakefulness.

It was the mention of his own name, coupled with that of the woman he had
met on the quarter-deck, that roused him.

“I saw her speaking to Dawes yesterday,” said the giant, with an oath. “We
don’t want no more than we’ve got. I ain’t goin’ to risk my neck for Rex’s
woman’s fancies, and so I’ll tell her.”

“It was something about the kid,” says the Crow, in his elegant slang. “I
don’t believe she ever saw him before. Besides, she’s nuts on Jack, and
ain’t likely to pick up with another man.”

“If I thort she was agoin’ to throw us over, I’d cut her throat as soon as
look at her!” snorts Gabbett savagely.

“Jack ud have a word in that,” snuffles the Moocher; “and he’s a curious
cove to quarrel with.”

“Well, stow yer gaff,” grumbled Mr. Gabbett, “and let’s have no more
chaff. If we’re for bizness, let’s come to bizness.”

“What are we to do now?” asked the Moocher. “Jack’s on the sick list, and
the gal won’t stir a’thout him.”

“Ay,” returned Gabbett, “that’s it.”

“My dear friends,” said the Crow, “my keyind and keristian friends, it is
to be regretted that when natur’ gave you such tremendously thick skulls,
she didn’t put something inside of ’em. I say that now’s the time. Jack’s
in the ‘orspital; what of that? That don’t make it no better for him, does
it? Not a bit of it; and if he drops his knife and fork, why then, it’s my
opinion that the gal won’t stir a peg. It’s on his account, not ours, that
she’s been manoovering, ain’t it?”

“Well!” says Mr. Gabbett, with the air of one who was but partly
convinced, “I s’pose it is.”

“All the more reason of getting it off quick. Another thing, when the boys
know there’s fever aboard, you’ll see the rumpus there’ll be. They’ll be
ready enough to join us then. Once get the snapper chest, and we’re right
as ninepenn’orth o’ hapence.”

This conversation, interspersed with oaths and slang as it was, had an
intense interest for Rufus Dawes. Plunged into prison, hurriedly tried,
and by reason of his surroundings ignorant of the death of his father and
his own fortune, he had hitherto—in his agony and sullen gloom—held
aloof from the scoundrels who surrounded him, and repelled their hideous
advances of friendship. He now saw his error. He knew that the name he had
once possessed was blotted out, that any shred of his old life which had
clung to him hitherto, was shrivelled in the fire that consumed the
“Hydaspes”. The secret, for the preservation of which Richard Devine had
voluntarily flung away his name, and risked a terrible and disgraceful
death, would be now for ever safe; for Richard Devine was dead—lost
at sea with the crew of the ill-fated vessel in which, deluded by a
skilfully-sent letter from the prison, his mother believed him to have
sailed. Richard Devine was dead, and the secret of his birth would die
with him. Rufus Dawes, his alter ego, alone should live. Rufus Dawes, the
convicted felon, the suspected murderer, should live to claim his freedom,
and work out his vengeance; or, rendered powerful by the terrible
experience of the prison-sheds, should seize both, in defiance of gaol or
gaoler.

With his head swimming, and his brain on fire, he eagerly listened for
more. It seemed as if the fever which burnt in his veins had consumed the
grosser part of his sense, and given him increased power of hearing. He
was conscious that he was ill. His bones ached, his hands burned, his head
throbbed, but he could hear distinctly, and, he thought, reason on what he
heard profoundly.

“But we can’t stir without the girl,” Gabbett said. “She’s got to stall
off the sentry and give us the orfice.”

The Crow’s sallow features lighted up with a cunning smile.

“Dear old caper merchant! Hear him talk!” said he, “as if he had the
wisdom of Solomon in all his glory? Look here!”

And he produced a dirty scrap of paper, over which his companions eagerly
bent their heads.

“Where did yer get that?”

“Yesterday afternoon Sarah was standing on the poop throwing bits o’ toke
to the gulls, and I saw her a-looking at me very hard. At last she came
down as near the barricade as she dared, and throwed crumbs and such like
up in the air over the side. By and by a pretty big lump, doughed up
round, fell close to my foot, and, watching a favourable opportunity, I
pouched it. Inside was this bit o’ rag-bag.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Gabbett, “that’s more like. Read it out, Jemmy.”

The writing, though feminine in character, was bold and distinct. Sarah
had evidently been mindful of the education of her friends, and had
desired to give them as little trouble as possible.

“All is right. Watch me when I come up to-morrow evening at three bells.
If I drop my handkerchief, get to work at the time agreed on. The sentry
will be safe.”

Rufus Dawes, though his eyelids would scarcely keep open, and a terrible
lassitude almost paralysed his limbs, eagerly drank in the whispered
sentence. There was a conspiracy to seize the ship. Sarah Purfoy was in
league with the convicts—was herself the wife or mistress of one of
them. She had come on board armed with a plot for his release, and this
plot was about to be put in execution. He had heard of the atrocities
perpetrated by successful mutineers. Story after story of such nature had
often made the prison resound with horrible mirth. He knew the characters
of the three ruffians who, separated from him by but two inches of
planking, jested and laughed over their plans of freedom and vengeance.
Though he conversed but little with his companions, these men were his
berth mates, and he could not but know how they would proceed to wreak
their vengeance on their gaolers.

True, that the head of this formidable chimera—John Rex, the forger—was
absent, but the two hands, or rather claws—the burglar and the
prison-breaker—were present, and the slimly-made, effeminate Crow,
if he had not the brains of the master, yet made up for his flaccid
muscles and nerveless frame by a cat-like cunning, and a spirit of
devilish volatility that nothing could subdue. With such a powerful ally
outside as the mock maid-servant, the chance of success was enormously
increased. There were one hundred and eighty convicts and but fifty
soldiers. If the first rush proved successful—and the precautions
taken by Sarah Purfoy rendered success possible—the vessel was
theirs. Rufus Dawes thought of the little bright-haired child who had run
so confidingly to meet him, and shuddered.

“There!” said the Crow, with a sneering laugh, “what do you think of that?
Does the girl look like nosing us now?”

“No,” says the giant, stretching his great arms with a grin of delight, as
one stretches one’s chest in the sun, “that’s right, that is. That’s more
like bizness.”

“England, home and beauty!” said Vetch, with a mock-heroic air, strangely
out of tune with the subject under discussion. “You’d like to go home
again, wouldn’t you, old man?”

Gabbett turned on him fiercely, his low forehead wrinkled into a frown of
ferocious recollection.

“You!” he said—“You think the chain’s fine sport, don’t yer? But
I’ve been there, my young chicken, and I knows what it means.”

There was silence for a minute or two. The giant was plunged in gloomy
abstraction, and Vetch and the Moocher interchanged a significant glance.
Gabbett had been ten years at the colonial penal settlement of Macquarie
Harbour, and he had memories that he did not confide to his companions.
When he indulged in one of these fits of recollection, his friends found
it best to leave him to himself.

Rufus Dawes did not understand the sudden silence. With all his senses
stretched to the utmost to listen, the cessation of the whispered colloquy
affected him strangely. Old artillery-men have said that, after being at
work for days in the trenches, accustomed to the continued roar of the
guns, a sudden pause in the firing will cause them intense pain. Something
of this feeling was experienced by Rufus Dawes. His faculties of hearing
and thinking—both at their highest pitch—seemed to break down.
It was as though some prop had been knocked from under him. No longer
stimulated by outward sounds, his senses appeared to fail him. The blood
rushed into his eyes and ears. He made a violent, vain effort to retain
his consciousness, but with a faint cry fell back, striking his head
against the edge of the bunk.

The noise roused the burglar in an instant. There was someone in the
berth! The three looked into each other’s eyes, in guilty alarm, and then
Gabbett dashed round the partition.

“It’s Dawes!” said the Moocher. “We had forgotten him!”

“He’ll join us, mate—he’ll join us!” cried Vetch, fearful of
bloodshed.

Gabbett uttered a furious oath, and flinging himself on to the prostrate
figure, dragged it, head foremost, to the floor. The sudden vertigo had
saved Rufus Dawes’s life. The robber twisted one brawny hand in his shirt,
and pressing the knuckles down, prepared to deliver a blow that should for
ever silence the listener, when Vetch caught his arm. “He’s been asleep,”
he cried. “Don’t hit him! See, he’s not awake yet.”

A crowd gathered round. The giant relaxed his grip, but the convict gave
only a deep groan, and allowed his head to fall on his shoulder. “You’ve
killed him!” cried someone.

Gabbett took another look at the purpling face and the bedewed forehead,
and then sprang erect, rubbing at his right hand, as though he would rub
off something sticking there.

“He’s got the fever!” he roared, with a terror-stricken grimace.

“The what?” asked twenty voices.

“The fever, ye grinning fools!” cried Gabbett. “I’ve seen it before
to-day. The typhus is aboard, and he’s the fourth man down!”

The circle of beast-like faces, stretched forward to “see the fight,”
widened at the half-uncomprehended, ill-omened word. It was as though a
bombshell had fallen into the group. Rufus Dawes lay on the deck
motionless, breathing heavily. The savage circle glared at his prostrate
body. The alarm ran round, and all the prison crowded down to stare at
him. All at once he uttered a groan, and turning, propped his body on his
two rigid arms, and made an effort to speak. But no sound issued from his
convulsed jaws.

“He’s done,” said the Moocher brutally. “He didn’t hear nuffin’, I’ll
pound it.”

The noise of the heavy bolts shooting back broke the spell. The first
detachment were coming down from “exercise.” The door was flung back, and
the bayonets of the guard gleamed in a ray of sunshine that shot down the
hatchway. This glimpse of sunlight—sparkling at the entrance of the
foetid and stifling prison—seemed to mock their miseries. It was as
though Heaven laughed at them. By one of those terrible and strange
impulses which animate crowds, the mass, turning from the sick man, leapt
towards the doorway. The interior of the prison flashed white with
suddenly turned faces. The gloom scintillated with rapidly moving hands.
“Air! air! Give us air!”

“That’s it!” said Sanders to his companions. “I thought the news would
rouse ’em.”

Gabbett—all the savage in his blood stirred by the sight of flashing
eyes and wrathful faces—would have thrown himself forward with the
rest, but Vetch plucked him back.

“It’ll be over in a moment,” he said. “It’s only a fit they’ve got.” He
spoke truly. Through the uproar was heard the rattle of iron on iron, as
the guard “stood to their arms,” and the wedge of grey cloth broke, in
sudden terror of the levelled muskets.

There was an instant’s pause, and then old Pine walked, unmolested, down
the prison and knelt by the body of Rufus Dawes.

The sight of the familiar figure, so calmly performing its familiar duty,
restored all that submission to recognized authority which strict
discipline begets. The convicts slunk away into their berths, or
officiously ran to help “the doctor,” with affectation of intense
obedience. The prison was like a schoolroom, into which the master had
suddenly returned. “Stand back, my lads! Take him up, two of you, and
carry him to the door. The poor fellow won’t hurt you.” His orders were
obeyed, and the old man, waiting until his patient had been safely
received outside, raised his hand to command attention. “I see you know
what I have to tell. The fever has broken out. That man has got it. It is
absurd to suppose that no one else will be seized. I might catch it
myself. You are much crowded down here, I know; but, my lads, I can’t help
that; I didn’t make the ship, you know.”

“’Ear, ‘ear!”

“It is a terrible thing, but you must keep orderly and quiet, and bear it
like men. You know what the discipline is, and it is not in my power to
alter it. I shall do my best for your comfort, and I look to you to help
me.”

Holding his grey head very erect indeed, the brave old fellow passed
straight down the line, without looking to the right or left. He had said
just enough, and he reached the door amid a chorus of “’Ear, ‘ear!”
“Bravo!” “True for you, docther!” and so on. But when he got fairly
outside, he breathed more freely. He had performed a ticklish task, and he
knew it.

“’Ark at ’em,” growled the Moocher from his corner, “a-cheerin’ at the
bloody noos!”

“Wait a bit,” said the acuter intelligence of Jemmy Vetch. “Give ’em time.
There’ll be three or four more down afore night, and then we’ll see!”

CHAPTER VIII. A DANGEROUS CRISIS.

It was late in the afternoon when Sarah Purfoy awoke from her uneasy
slumber. She had been dreaming of the deed she was about to do, and was
flushed and feverish; but, mindful of the consequences which hung upon the
success or failure of the enterprise, she rallied herself, bathed her face
and hands, and ascended with as calm an air as she could assume to the
poop-deck.

Nothing was changed since yesterday. The sentries’ arms glittered in the
pitiless sunshine, the ship rolled and creaked on the swell of the dreamy
sea, and the prison-cage on the lower deck was crowded with the same
cheerless figures, disposed in the attitudes of the day before. Even Mr.
Maurice Frere, recovered from his midnight fatigues, was lounging on the
same coil of rope, in precisely the same position.

Yet the eye of an acute observer would have detected some difference
beneath this outward varnish of similarity. The man at the wheel looked
round the horizon more eagerly, and spit into the swirling,
unwholesome-looking water with a more dejected air than before. The
fishing-lines still hung dangling over the catheads, but nobody touched
them. The soldiers and sailors on the forecastle, collected in knots, had
no heart even to smoke, but gloomily stared at each other. Vickers was in
the cuddy writing; Blunt was in his cabin; and Pine, with two carpenters
at work under his directions, was improvising increased hospital
accommodation. The noise of mallet and hammer echoed in the soldiers’
berth ominously; the workmen might have been making coffins. The prison
was strangely silent, with the lowering silence which precedes a
thunderstorm; and the convicts on deck no longer told stories, nor laughed
at obscene jests, but sat together, moodily patient, as if waiting for
something. Three men—two prisoners and a soldier—had succumbed
since Rufus Dawes had been removed to the hospital; and though as yet
there had been no complaint or symptom of panic, the face of each man,
soldier, sailor, or prisoner, wore an expectant look, as though he
wondered whose turn would come next. On the ship—rolling ceaselessly
from side to side, like some wounded creature, on the opaque profundity of
that stagnant ocean—a horrible shadow had fallen. The Malabar seemed
to be enveloped in an electric cloud, whose sullen gloom a chance spark
might flash into a blaze that should consume her.

The woman who held in her hands the two ends of the chain that would
produce this spark, paused, came up upon deck, and, after a glance round,
leant against the poop railing, and looked down into the barricade. As we
have said, the prisoners were in knots of four and five, and to one group
in particular her glance was directed. Three men, leaning carelessly
against the bulwarks, watched her every motion.

“There she is, right enough,” growled Mr. Gabbett, as if in continuation
of a previous remark. “Flash as ever, and looking this way, too.”

“I don’t see no wipe,” said the practical Moocher.

“Patience is a virtue, most noble knuckler!” says the Crow, with affected
carelessness. “Give the young woman time.”

“Blowed if I’m going to wait no longer,” says the giant, licking his
coarse blue lips. “’Ere we’ve been bluffed off day arter day, and kep’
dancin’ round the Dandy’s wench like a parcel o’ dogs. The fever’s aboard,
and we’ve got all ready. What’s the use o’ waitin’? Orfice, or no orfice,
I’m for bizness at once!—”

“—There, look at that,” he added, with an oath, as the figure of
Maurice Frere appeared side by side with that of the waiting-maid, and the
two turned away up the deck together.

“It’s all right, you confounded muddlehead!” cried the Crow, losing
patience with his perverse and stupid companion. “How can she give us the
office with that cove at her elbow?”

Gabbett’s only reply to this question was a ferocious grunt, and a sudden
elevation of his clenched fist, which caused Mr. Vetch to retreat
precipitately. The giant did not follow; and Mr. Vetch, folding his arms,
and assuming an attitude of easy contempt, directed his attention to Sarah
Purfoy. She seemed an object of general attraction, for at the same moment
a young soldier ran up the ladder to the forecastle, and eagerly bent his
gaze in her direction.

Maurice Frere had come behind her and touched her on the shoulder. Since
their conversation the previous evening, he had made up his mind to be
fooled no longer. The girl was evidently playing with him, and he would
show her that he was not to be trifled with.

“Well, Sarah!”

“Well, Mr. Frere,” dropping her hand, and turning round with a smile.

“How well you are looking to-day! Positively lovely!”

“You have told me that so often,” says she, with a pout. “Have you nothing
else to say?”

“Except that I love you.” This in a most impassioned manner.

“That is no news. I know you do.”

“Curse it, Sarah, what is a fellow to do?” His profligacy was failing him
rapidly. “What is the use of playing fast and loose with a fellow this
way?”

“A ‘fellow’ should be able to take care of himself, Mr. Frere. I didn’t
ask you to fall in love with me, did I? If you don’t please me, it is not
your fault, perhaps.”

“What do you mean?”

“You soldiers have so many things to think of—your guards and
sentries, and visits and things. You have no time to spare for a poor
woman like me.”

“Spare!” cries Frere, in amazement. “Why, damme, you won’t let a fellow
spare! I’d spare fast enough, if that was all.” She cast her eyes down to
the deck and a modest flush rose in her cheeks. “I have so much to do,”
she said, in a half-whisper. “There are so many eyes upon me, I cannot
stir without being seen.”

She raised her head as she spoke, and to give effect to her words, looked
round the deck. Her glance crossed that of the young soldier on the
forecastle, and though the distance was too great for her to distinguish
his features, she guessed who he was—Miles was jealous. Frere,
smiling with delight at her change of manner, came close to her, and
whispered in her ear. She affected to start, and took the opportunity of
exchanging a signal with the Crow.

“I will come at eight o’clock,” said she, with modestly averted face.

“They relieve the guard at eight,” he said deprecatingly.

She tossed her head. “Very well, then, attend to your guard; I don’t
care.”

“But, Sarah, consider—”

“As if a woman in love ever considers!” said she, turning upon him a
burning glance, which in truth might have melted a more icy man than he.
—She loved him then! What a fool he would be to refuse. To get her
to come was the first object; how to make duty fit with pleasure would be
considered afterwards. Besides, the guard could relieve itself for once
without his supervision.

“Very well, at eight then, dearest.”

“Hush!” said she. “Here comes that stupid captain.”

And as Frere left her, she turned, and with her eyes fixed on the convict
barricade, dropped the handkerchief she held in her hand over the poop
railing. It fell at the feet of the amorous captain, and with a quick
upward glance, that worthy fellow picked it up, and brought it to her.

“Oh, thank you, Captain Blunt,” said she, and her eyes spoke more than her
tongue.

“Did you take the laudanum?” whispered Blunt, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Some of it,” said she. “I will bring you back the bottle to-night.”

Blunt walked aft, humming cheerily, and saluted Frere with a slap on the
back. The two men laughed, each at his own thoughts, but their laughter
only made the surrounding gloom seem deeper than before.

Sarah Purfoy, casting her eyes toward the barricade, observed a change in
the position of the three men. They were together once more, and the Crow,
having taken off his prison cap, held it at arm’s length with one hand,
while he wiped his brow with the other. Her signal had been observed.

During all this, Rufus Dawes, removed to the hospital, was lying flat on
his back, staring at the deck above him, trying to think of something he
wanted to say.

When the sudden faintness, which was the prelude to his sickness, had
overpowered him, he remembered being torn out of his bunk by fierce hands—remembered
a vision of savage faces, and the presence of some danger that menaced
him. He remembered that, while lying on his blankets, struggling with the
coming fever, he had overheard a conversation of vital importance to
himself and to the ship, but of the purport of that conversation he had
not the least idea. In vain he strove to remember—in vain his will,
struggling with delirium, brought back snatches and echoes of sense; they
slipped from him again as fast as caught. He was oppressed with the weight
of half-recollected thought. He knew that a terrible danger menaced him;
that could he but force his brain to reason connectedly for ten
consecutive minutes, he could give such information as would avert that
danger, and save the ship. But, lying with hot head, parched lips, and
enfeebled body, he was as one possessed—he could move nor hand nor
foot.

The place where he lay was but dimly lighted. The ingenuity of Pine had
constructed a canvas blind over the port, to prevent the sun striking into
the cabin, and this blind absorbed much of the light. He could but just
see the deck above his head, and distinguish the outlines of three other
berths, apparently similar to his own. The only sounds that broke the
silence were the gurgling of the water below him, and the Tap tap, Tap
tap, of Pine’s hammers at work upon the new partition. By and by the noise
of these hammers ceased, and then the sick man could hear gasps, and
moans, and mutterings—the signs that his companions yet lived.

All at once a voice called out, “Of course his bills are worth four
hundred pounds; but, my good sir, four hundred pounds to a man in my
position is not worth the getting. Why, I’ve given four hundred pounds for
a freak of my girl Sarah! Is it right, eh, Jezebel? She’s a good girl,
though, as girls go. Mrs. Lionel Crofton, of the Crofts, Sevenoaks, Kent—Sevenoaks,
Kent—Seven——”

A gleam of light broke in on the darkness which wrapped Rufus Dawes’s
tortured brain. The man was John Rex, his berth mate. With an effort he
spoke.

“Rex!”

“Yes, yes. I’m coming; don’t be in a hurry. The sentry’s safe, and the
howitzer is but five paces from the door. A rush upon deck, lads, and
she’s ours! That is, mine. Mine and my wife’s, Mrs. Lionel Crofton, of
Seven Crofts, no oaks—Sarah Purfoy, lady’s-maid and nurse—ha!
ha!—lady’s-maid and nurse!”

This last sentence contained the name-clue to the labyrinth in which Rufus
Dawes’s bewildered intellects were wandering. “Sarah Purfoy!” He
remembered now each detail of the conversation he had so strangely
overheard, and how imperative it was that he should, without delay, reveal
the plot that threatened the ship. How that plot was to be carried out, he
did not pause to consider; he was conscious that he was hanging over the
brink of delirium, and that, unless he made himself understood before his
senses utterly deserted him, all was lost.

He attempted to rise, but found that his fever-thralled limbs refused to
obey the impulse of his will. He made an effort to speak, but his tongue
clove to the roof of his mouth, and his jaws stuck together. He could not
raise a finger nor utter a sound. The boards over his head waved like a
shaken sheet, and the cabin whirled round, while the patch of light at his
feet bobbed up and down like the reflection from a wavering candle. He
closed his eyes with a terrible sigh of despair, and resigned himself to
his fate. At that instant the sound of hammering ceased, and the door
opened. It was six o’clock, and Pine had come to have a last look at his
patients before dinner. It seemed that there was somebody with him, for a
kind, though somewhat pompous, voice remarked upon the scantiness of
accommodation, and the “necessity—the absolute necessity” of
complying with the King’s Regulations.

Honest Vickers, though agonized for the safety of his child, would not
abate a jot of his duty, and had sternly come to visit the sick men, aware
as he was that such a visit would necessitate his isolation from the cabin
where his child lay. Mrs. Vickers—weeping and bewailing herself
coquettishly at garrison parties—had often said that “poor dear John
was such a disciplinarian, quite a slave to the service.”

“Here they are,” said Pine; “six of ’em. This fellow”—going to the
side of Rex—“is the worst. If he had not a constitution like a
horse, I don’t think he could live out the night.”

“Three, eighteen, seven, four,” muttered Rex; “dot and carry one. Is that
an occupation for a gentleman? No, sir. Good night, my lord, good night.
Hark! The clock is striking nine; five, six, seven, eight! Well, you’ve
had your day, and can’t complain.”

“A dangerous fellow,” says Pine, with the light upraised. “A very
dangerous fellow—that is, he was. This is the place, you see—a
regular rat-hole; but what can one do?”

“Come, let us get on deck,” said Vickers, with a shudder of disgust.

Rufus Dawes felt the sweat break out into beads on his forehead. They
suspected nothing. They were going away. He must warn them. With a violent
effort, in his agony he turned over in the bunk and thrust out his hand
from the blankets.

“Hullo! what’s this?” cried Pine, bringing the lantern to bear upon it.
“Lie down, my man. Eh!—water, is it? There, steady with it now”; and
he lifted a pannikin to the blackened, froth-fringed lips. The cool
draught moistened his parched gullet, and the convict made a last effort
to speak.

“Sarah Purfoy—to-night—the prison—MUTINY!”

The last word, almost shrieked out, in the sufferer’s desperate efforts to
articulate, recalled the wandering senses of John Rex. “Hush!” he cried.
“Is that you, Jemmy? Sarah’s right. Wait till she gives the word.”

“He’s raving,” said Vickers.

Pine caught the convict by the shoulder. “What do you say, my man? A
mutiny of the prisoners!”

With his mouth agape and his hands clenched, Rufus Dawes, incapable of
further speech, made a last effort to nod assent, but his head fell upon
his breast; the next moment, the flickering light, the gloomy prison, the
eager face of the doctor, and the astonished face of Vickers, vanished
from before his straining eyes. He saw the two men stare at each other, in
mingled incredulity and alarm, and then he was floating down the cool
brown river of his boyhood, on his way—in company with Sarah Purfoy
and Lieutenant Frere—to raise the mutiny of the Hydaspes, that lay
on the stocks in the old house at Hampstead.

CHAPTER IX. WOMAN’S WEAPONS.

The two discoverers of this awkward secret held a council of war. Vickers
was for at once calling the guard, and announcing to the prisoners that
the plot—whatever it might be—had been discovered; but Pine,
accustomed to convict ships, overruled this decision.

“You don’t know these fellows as well as I do,” said he. “In the first
place there may be no mutiny at all. The whole thing is, perhaps, some
absurdity of that fellow Dawes—and should we once put the notion of
attacking us into the prisoners’ heads, there is no telling what they
might do.”

“But the man seemed certain,” said the other. “He mentioned my wife’s
maid, too!”

“Suppose he did?—and, begad, I dare say he’s right—I never
liked the look of the girl. To tell them that we have found them out this
time won’t prevent ’em trying it again. We don’t know what their scheme is
either. If it is a mutiny, half the ship’s company may be in it. No,
Captain Vickers, allow me, as surgeon-superintendent, to settle our course
of action. You are aware that—”

“—That, by the King’s Regulations, you are invested with full
powers,” interrupted Vickers, mindful of discipline in any extremity. “Of
course, I merely suggested—and I know nothing about the girl, except
that she brought a good character from her last mistress—a Mrs.
Crofton I think the name was. We were glad to get anybody to make a voyage
like this.”

“Well,” says Pine, “look here. Suppose we tell these scoundrels that their
design, whatever it may be, is known. Very good. They will profess
absolute ignorance, and try again on the next opportunity, when, perhaps,
we may not know anything about it. At all events, we are completely
ignorant of the nature of the plot and the names of the ringleaders. Let
us double the sentries, and quietly get the men under arms. Let Miss Sarah
do what she pleases, and when the mutiny breaks out, we will nip it in the
bud; clap all the villains we get in irons, and hand them over to the
authorities in Hobart Town. I am not a cruel man, sir, but we have got a
cargo of wild beasts aboard, and we must be careful.”

“But surely, Mr. Pine, have you considered the probable loss of life? I—really—some
more humane course perhaps? Prevention, you know—”

Pine turned round upon him with that grim practicality which was a part of
his nature. “Have you considered the safety of the ship, Captain Vickers?
You know, or have heard of, the sort of things that take place in these
mutinies. Have you considered what will befall those half-dozen women in
the soldiers’ berths? Have you thought of the fate of your own wife and
child?”

Vickers shuddered.

“Have it your way, Mr. Pine; you know best perhaps. But don’t risk more
lives than you can help.”

“Be easy, sir,” says old Pine; “I am acting for the best; upon my soul I
am. You don’t know what convicts are, or rather what the law has made ’em—yet—”

“Poor wretches!” says Vickers, who, like many martinets, was in reality
tender-hearted. “Kindness might do much for them. After all, they are our
fellow-creatures.”

“Yes,” returned the other, “they are. But if you use that argument to them
when they have taken the vessel, it won’t avail you much. Let me manage,
sir; and for God’s sake, say nothing to anybody. Our lives may hang upon a
word.”

Vickers promised, and kept his promise so far as to chat cheerily with
Blunt and Frere at dinner, only writing a brief note to his wife to tell
her that, whatever she heard, she was not to stir from her cabin until he
came to her; he knew that, with all his wife’s folly, she would obey
unhesitatingly, when he couched an order in such terms.

According to the usual custom on board convict ships, the guards relieved
each other every two hours, and at six p.m. the poop guard was removed to
the quarter-deck, and the arms which, in the daytime, were disposed on the
top of the arm-chest, were placed in an arm-rack constructed on the
quarter-deck for that purpose. Trusting nothing to Frere—who,
indeed, by Pine’s advice, was, as we have seen, kept in ignorance of the
whole matter—Vickers ordered all the men, save those who had been on
guard during the day, to be under arms in the barrack, forbade
communication with the upper deck, and placed as sentry at the barrack
door his own servant, an old soldier, on whose fidelity he could
thoroughly rely. He then doubled the guards, took the keys of the prison
himself from the non-commissioned officer whose duty it was to keep them,
and saw that the howitzer on the lower deck was loaded with grape. It was
a quarter to seven when Pine and he took their station at the main
hatchway, determined to watch until morning.

At a quarter past seven, any curious person looking through the window of
Captain Blunt’s cabin would have seen an unusual sight. That gallant
commander was sitting on the bed-place, with a glass of rum and water in
his hand, and the handsome waiting-maid of Mrs. Vickers was seated on a
stool by his side. At a first glance it was perceptible that the captain
was very drunk. His grey hair was matted all ways about his reddened face,
and he was winking and blinking like an owl in the sunshine. He had drunk
a larger quantity of wine than usual at dinner, in sheer delight at the
approaching assignation, and having got out the rum bottle for a quiet
“settler” just as the victim of his fascinations glided through the
carefully-adjusted door, he had been persuaded to go on drinking.

“Cuc-come, Sarah,” he hiccuped. “It’s all very fine, my lass, but you
needn’t be so—hic—proud, you know. I’m a plain sailor—plain
s’lor, Srr’h. Ph’n’as Bub—blunt, commander of the Mal-Mal- Malabar.
Wors’ ‘sh good talkin’?”

Sarah allowed a laugh to escape her, and artfully protruded an ankle at
the same time. The amorous Phineas lurched over, and made shift to take
her hand.

“You lovsh me, and I—hic—lovsh you, Sarah. And a preshus tight
little craft you—hic—are. Giv’sh—kiss, Sarah.”

Sarah got up and went to the door.

“Wotsh this? Goin’! Sarah, don’t go,” and he staggered up; and with the
grog swaying fearfully in one hand, made at her.

The ship’s bell struck the half-hour. Now or never was the time. Blunt
caught her round the waist with one arm, and hiccuping with love and rum,
approached to take the kiss he coveted. She seized the moment, surrendered
herself to his embrace, drew from her pocket the laudanum bottle, and
passing her hand over his shoulder, poured half its contents into the
glass.

“Think I’m—hic—drunk, do yer? Nun—not I, my wench.”

“You will be if you drink much more. Come, finish that and be quiet, or
I’ll go away.”

But she threw a provocation into her glance as she spoke, which belied her
words, and which penetrated even the sodden intellect of poor Blunt. He
balanced himself on his heels for a moment, and holding by the moulding of
the cabin, stared at her with a fatuous smile of drunken admiration, then
looked at the glass in his hand, hiccuped with much solemnity thrice, and,
as though struck with a sudden sense of duty unfulfilled, swallowed the
contents at a gulp. The effect was almost instantaneous. He dropped the
tumbler, lurched towards the woman at the door, and then making a
half-turn in accordance with the motion of the vessel, fell into his bunk,
and snored like a grampus.

Sarah Purfoy watched him for a few minutes, and then having blown out the
light, stepped out of the cabin, and closed the door behind her. The dusky
gloom which had held the deck on the previous night enveloped all forward
of the main-mast. A lantern swung in the forecastle, and swayed with the
motion of the ship. The light at the prison door threw a glow through the
open hatch, and in the cuddy, at her right hand, the usual row of
oil-lamps burned. She looked mechanically for Vickers, who was ordinarily
there at that hour, but the cuddy was empty. So much the better, she
thought, as she drew her dark cloak around her, and tapped at Frere’s
door. As she did so, a strange pain shot through her temples, and her
knees trembled. With a strong effort she dispelled the dizziness that had
almost overpowered her, and held herself erect. It would never do to break
down now.

The door opened, and Maurice Frere drew her into the cabin. “So you have
come?” said he.

“You see I have. But, oh! if I should be seen!”

“Seen? Nonsense! Who is to see you?”

“Captain Vickers, Doctor Pine, anybody.”

“Not they. Besides, they’ve gone off down to Pine’s cabin since dinner.
They’re all right.”

Gone off to Pine’s cabin! The intelligence struck her with dismay. What
was the cause of such an unusual proceeding? Surely they did not suspect!
“What do they want there?” she asked.

Maurice Frere was not in the humour to argue questions of probability.
“Who knows? I don’t. Confound ’em,” he added, “what does it matter to us?
We don’t want them, do we, Sarah?”

She seemed to be listening for something, and did not reply. Her nervous
system was wound up to the highest pitch of excitement. The success of the
plot depended on the next five minutes.

“What are you staring at? Look at me, can’t you? What eyes you have! And
what hair!”

At that instant the report of a musket-shot broke the silence. The mutiny
had begun!

The sound awoke the soldier to a sense of his duty. He sprang to his feet,
and disengaging the arms that clung about his neck, made for the door. The
moment for which the convict’s accomplice had waited approached. She hung
upon him with all her weight. Her long hair swept across his face, her
warm breath was on his cheek, her dress exposed her round, smooth
shoulder. He, intoxicated, conquered, had half-turned back, when suddenly
the rich crimson died away from her lips, leaving them an ashen grey
colour. Her eyes closed in agony; loosing her hold of him, she staggered
to her feet, pressed her hands upon her bosom, and uttered a sharp cry of
pain.

The fever which had been on her two days, and which, by a strong exercise
of will, she had struggled against—encouraged by the violent
excitement of the occasion—had attacked her at this supreme moment.
Deathly pale and sick, she reeled to the side of the cabin. There was
another shot, and a violent clashing of arms; and Frere, leaving the
miserable woman to her fate, leapt out on to the deck.

CHAPTER X. EIGHT BELLS.

At seven o’clock there had been also a commotion in the prison. The news
of the fever had awoke in the convicts all that love of liberty which had
but slumbered during the monotony of the earlier part of the voyage. Now
that death menaced them, they longed fiercely for the chance of escape
which seemed permitted to freemen. “Let us get out!” they said, each man
speaking to his particular friend. “We are locked up here to die like
sheep.” Gloomy faces and desponding looks met the gaze of each, and
sometimes across this gloom shot a fierce glance that lighted up its
blackness, as a lightning-flash renders luridly luminous the indigo
dullness of a thunder-cloud. By and by, in some inexplicable way, it came
to be understood that there was a conspiracy afloat, that they were to be
released from their shambles, that some amongst them had been plotting for
freedom. The ‘tween decks held its foul breath in wondering anxiety,
afraid to breathe its suspicions. The influence of this predominant idea
showed itself by a strange shifting of atoms. The mass of villainy,
ignorance, and innocence began to be animated with something like a
uniform movement. Natural affinities came together, and like allied itself
to like, falling noiselessly into harmony, as the pieces of glass and
coloured beads in a kaleidoscope assume mathematical forms. By seven bells
it was found that the prison was divided into three parties—the
desperate, the timid, and the cautious. These three parties had arranged
themselves in natural sequence. The mutineers, headed by Gabbett, Vetch,
and the Moocher, were nearest to the door; the timid—boys, old men,
innocent poor wretches condemned on circumstantial evidence, or rustics
condemned to be turned into thieves for pulling a turnip—were at the
farther end, huddling together in alarm; and the prudent—that is to
say, all the rest, ready to fight or fly, advance or retreat, assist the
authorities or their companions, as the fortune of the day might direct—occupied
the middle space. The mutineers proper numbered, perhaps, some thirty men,
and of these thirty only half a dozen knew what was really about to be
done.

The ship’s bell strikes the half-hour, and as the cries of the three
sentries passing the word to the quarter-deck die away, Gabbett, who has
been leaning with his back against the door, nudges Jemmy Vetch.

“Now, Jemmy,” says he in a whisper, “tell ’em!”

The whisper being heard by those nearest the giant, a silence ensues,
which gradually spreads like a ripple over the surface of the crowd,
reaching even the bunks at the further end.

“Gentlemen,” says Mr. Vetch, politely sarcastic in his own hangdog
fashion, “myself and my friends here are going to take the ship for you.
Those who like to join us had better speak at once, for in about half an
hour they will not have the opportunity.”

He pauses, and looks round with such an impertinently confident air, that
three waverers in the party amidships slip nearer to hear him.

“You needn’t be afraid,” Mr. Vetch continues, “we have arranged it all for
you. There are friends waiting for us outside, and the door will be open
directly. All we want, gentlemen, is your vote and interest—I mean
your—”

“Gaffing agin!” interrupts the giant angrily. “Come to business, carn’t
yer? Tell ’em they may like it or lump it, but we mean to have the ship,
and them as refuses to join us we mean to chuck overboard. That’s about
the plain English of it!”

This practical way of putting it produces a sensation, and the
conservative party at the other end look in each other’s faces with some
alarm. A grim murmur runs round, and somebody near Mr. Gabbett laughs a
laugh of mingled ferocity and amusement, not reassuring to timid people.
“What about the sogers?” asked a voice from the ranks of the cautious.

“D—- the sogers!” cries the Moocher, moved by a sudden inspiration.
“They can but shoot yer, and that’s as good as dyin’ of typhus anyway!”

The right chord had been struck now, and with a stifled roar the prison
admitted the truth of the sentiment. “Go on, old man!” cries Jemmy Vetch
to the giant, rubbing his thin hands with eldritch glee. “They’re all
right!” And then, his quick ears catching the jingle of arms, he said,
“Stand by now for the door—one rush’ll do it.”

It was eight o’clock and the relief guard was coming from the after deck.
The crowd of prisoners round the door held their breath to listen. “It’s
all planned,” says Gabbett, in a low growl. “W’en the door h’opens we
rush, and we’re in among the guard afore they know where they are. Drag
’em back into the prison, grab the h’arm-rack, and it’s all over.”

“They’re very quiet about it,” says the Crow suspiciously. “I hope it’s
all right.”

“Stand from the door, Miles,” says Pine’s voice outside, in its usual calm
accents.

The Crow was relieved. The tone was an ordinary one, and Miles was the
soldier whom Sarah Purfoy had bribed not to fire. All had gone well.

The keys clashed and turned, and the bravest of the prudent party, who had
been turning in his mind the notion of risking his life for a pardon, to
be won by rushing forward at the right moment and alarming the guard,
checked the cry that was in his throat as he saw the men round the door
draw back a little for their rush, and caught a glimpse of the giant’s
bristling scalp and bared gums.

“NOW!” cries Jemmy Vetch, as the iron-plated oak swung back, and with the
guttural snarl of a charging wild boar, Gabbett hurled himself out of the
prison.

The red line of light which glowed for an instant through the doorway was
blotted out by a mass of figures. All the prison surged forward, and
before the eye could wink, five, ten, twenty, of the most desperate were
outside. It was as though a sea, breaking against a stone wall, had found
some breach through which to pour its waters. The contagion of battle
spread. Caution was forgotten; and those at the back, seeing Jemmy Vetch
raised upon the crest of that human billow which reared its black outline
against an indistinct perspective of struggling figures, responded to his
grin of encouragement by rushing furiously forward.

Suddenly a horrible roar like that of a trapped wild beast was heard. The
rushing torrent choked in the doorway, and from out the lantern glow into
which the giant had rushed, a flash broke, followed by a groan, as the
perfidious sentry fell back shot through the breast. The mass in the
doorway hung irresolute, and then by sheer weight of pressure from behind
burst forward, and as it so burst, the heavy door crashed into its jambs,
and the bolts were shot into their places.

All this took place by one of those simultaneous movements which are so
rapid in execution, so tedious to describe in detail. At one instant the
prison door had opened, at the next it had closed. The picture which had
presented itself to the eyes of the convicts was as momentary as are those
of the thaumatoscope. The period of time that had elapsed between the
opening and the shutting of the door could have been marked by the musket
shot.

The report of another shot, and then a noise of confused cries, mingled
with the clashing of arms, informed the imprisoned men that the ship had
been alarmed. How would it go with their friends on deck? Would they
succeed in overcoming the guards, or would they be beaten back? They would
soon know; and in the hot dusk, straining their eyes to see each other,
they waited for the issue Suddenly the noises ceased, and a strange
rumbling sound fell upon the ears of the listeners.

What had taken place?

This—the men pouring out of the darkness into the sudden glare of
the lanterns, rushed, bewildered, across the deck. Miles, true to his
promise, did not fire, but the next instant Vickers had snatched the
firelock from him, and leaping into the stream, turned about and fired
down towards the prison. The attack was more sudden then he had expected,
but he did not lose his presence of mind. The shot would serve a double
purpose. It would warn the men in the barrack, and perhaps check the rush
by stopping up the doorway with a corpse. Beaten back, struggling, and
indignant, amid the storm of hideous faces, his humanity vanished, and he
aimed deliberately at the head of Mr. James Vetch; the shot, however,
missed its mark, and killed the unhappy Miles.

Gabbett and his companions had by this time reached the foot of the
companion ladder, there to encounter the cutlasses of the doubled guard
gleaming redly in the glow of the lanterns. A glance up the hatchway
showed the giant that the arms he had planned to seize were defended by
ten firelocks, and that, behind the open doors of the partition which ran
abaft the mizenmast, the remainder of the detachment stood to their arms.
Even his dull intellect comprehended that the desperate project had
failed, and that he had been betrayed. With the roar of despair which had
penetrated into the prison, he turned to fight his way back, just in time
to see the crowd in the gangway recoil from the flash of the musket fired
by Vickers. The next instant, Pine and two soldiers, taking advantage of
the momentary cessation of the press, shot the bolts, and secured the
prison.

The mutineers were caught in a trap.

The narrow space between the barracks and the barricade was choked with
struggling figures. Some twenty convicts, and half as many soldiers,
struck and stabbed at each other in the crowd. There was barely
elbow-room, and attacked and attackers fought almost without knowing whom
they struck. Gabbett tore a cutlass from a soldier, shook his huge head,
and calling on the Moocher to follow, bounded up the ladder, desperately
determined to brave the fire of the watch. The Moocher, close at the
giant’s heels, flung himself upon the nearest soldier, and grasping his
wrist, struggled for the cutlass. A brawny, bull-necked fellow next him
dashed his clenched fist in the soldier’s face, and the man maddened by
the blow, let go the cutlass, and drawing his pistol, shot his new
assailant through the head. It was this second shot that had aroused
Maurice Frere.

As the young lieutenant sprang out upon the deck, he saw by the position
of the guard that others had been more mindful of the safety of the ship
than he. There was, however, no time for explanation, for, as he reached
the hatchway, he was met by the ascending giant, who uttered a hideous
oath at the sight of this unexpected adversary, and, too close to strike
him, locked him in his arms. The two men were drawn together. The guard on
the quarter-deck dared not fire at the two bodies that, twined about each
other, rolled across the deck, and for a moment Mr. Frere’s cherished
existence hung upon the slenderest thread imaginable.

The Moocher, spattered with the blood and brains of his unfortunate
comrade, had already set his foot upon the lowest step of the ladder, when
the cutlass was dashed from his hand by a blow from a clubbed firelock,
and he was dragged roughly backwards. As he fell upon the deck, he saw the
Crow spring out of the mass of prisoners who had been, an instant before,
struggling with the guard, and, gaining the cleared space at the bottom of
the ladder, hold up his hands, as though to shield himself from a blow.
The confusion had now become suddenly stilled, and upon the group before
the barricade had fallen that mysterious silence which had perplexed the
inmates of the prison.

They were not perplexed for long. The two soldiers who, with the
assistance of Pine, had forced-to the door of the prison, rapidly unbolted
that trap-door in the barricade, of which mention has been made in a
previous chapter, and, at a signal from Vickers, three men ran the loaded
howitzer from its sinister shelter near the break of the barrack berths,
and, training the deadly muzzle to a level with the opening in the
barricade, stood ready to fire.

“Surrender!” cried Vickers, in a voice from which all “humanity” had
vanished. “Surrender, and give up your ringleaders, or I’ll blow you to
pieces!”

There was no tremor in his voice, and though he stood, with Pine by his
side, at the very mouth of the levelled cannon, the mutineers perceived,
with that acuteness which imminent danger brings to the most stolid of
brains, that, did they hesitate an instant, he would keep his word. There
was an awful moment of silence, broken only by a skurrying noise in the
prison, as though a family of rats, disturbed at a flour cask, were
scampering to the ship’s side for shelter. This skurrying noise was made
by the convicts rushing to their berths to escape the threatened shower of
grape; to the twenty desperadoes cowering before the muzzle of the
howitzer it spoke more eloquently than words. The charm was broken; their
comrades would refuse to join them. The position of affairs at this crisis
was a strange one. From the opened trap-door came a sort of subdued
murmur, like that which sounds within the folds of a sea-shell, but, in
the oblong block of darkness which it framed, nothing was visible. The
trap-door might have been a window looking into a tunnel. On each side of
this horrible window, almost pushed before it by the pressure of one upon
the other, stood Pine, Vickers, and the guard. In front of the little
group lay the corpse of the miserable boy whom Sarah Purfoy had led to
ruin; and forced close upon, yet shrinking back from the trampled and
bloody mass, crouched in mingled terror and rage, the twenty mutineers.
Behind the mutineers, withdrawn from the patch of light thrown by the open
hatchway, the mouth of the howitzer threatened destruction; and behind the
howitzer, backed up by an array of brown musket barrels, suddenly glowed
the tiny fire of the burning match in the hand of Vickers’s trusty
servant.

The entrapped men looked up the hatchway, but the guard had already closed
in upon it, and some of the ship’s crew—with that carelessness of
danger characteristic of sailors—were peering down upon them. Escape
was hopeless.

“One minute!” cried Vickers, confident that one second would be enough—“one
minute to go quietly, or—”

“Surrender, mates, for God’s sake!” shrieked some unknown wretch from out
of the darkness of the prison. “Do you want to be the death of us?”

Jemmy Vetch, feeling, by that curious sympathy which nervous natures
possess, that his comrades wished him to act as spokesman, raised his
shrill tones. “We surrender,” he said. “It’s no use getting our brains
blown out.” And raising his hands, he obeyed the motion of Vickers’s
fingers, and led the way towards the barrack.

“Bring the irons forward, there!” shouted Vickers, hastening from his
perilous position; and before the last man had filed past the still
smoking match, the cling of hammers announced that the Crow had resumed
those fetters which had been knocked off his dainty limbs a month
previously in the Bay of Biscay.

In another moment the trap-door was closed, the howitzer rumbled back to
its cleatings, and the prison breathed again.

In the meantime, a scene almost as exciting had taken place on the upper
deck. Gabbett, with the blind fury which the consciousness of failure
brings to such brute-like natures, had seized Frere by the throat,
determined to put an end to at least one of his enemies. But desperate
though he was, and with all the advantage of weight and strength upon his
side, he found the young lieutenant a more formidable adversary than he
had anticipated.

Maurice Frere was no coward. Brutal and selfish though he might be, his
bitterest enemies had never accused him of lack of physical courage.
Indeed, he had been—in the rollicking days of old that were gone—celebrated
for the display of very opposite qualities. He was an amateur at manly
sports. He rejoiced in his muscular strength, and, in many a tavern brawl
and midnight riot of his own provoking, had proved the fallacy of the
proverb which teaches that a bully is always a coward. He had the tenacity
of a bulldog—once let him get his teeth in his adversary, and he
would hold on till he died. In fact he was, as far as personal vigour
went, a Gabbett with the education of a prize-fighter; and, in a personal
encounter between two men of equal courage, science tells more than
strength. In the struggle, however, that was now taking place, science
seemed to be of little value. To the inexperienced eye, it would appear
that the frenzied giant, gripping the throat of the man who had fallen
beneath him, must rise from the struggle an easy victor. Brute force was
all that was needed—there was neither room nor time for the display
of any cunning of fence.

But knowledge, though it cannot give strength, gives coolness. Taken by
surprise as he was, Maurice Frere did not lose his presence of mind. The
convict was so close upon him that there was no time to strike; but, as he
was forced backwards, he succeeded in crooking his knee round the thigh of
his assailant, and thrust one hand into his collar. Over and over they
rolled, the bewildered sentry not daring to fire, until the ship’s side
brought them up with a violent jerk, and Frere realized that Gabbett was
below him. Pressing with all the might of his muscles, he strove to resist
the leverage which the giant was applying to turn him over, but he might
as well have pushed against a stone wall. With his eyes protruding, and
every sinew strained to its uttermost, he was slowly forced round, and he
felt Gabbett releasing his grasp, in order to draw back and aim at him an
effectual blow. Disengaging his left hand, Frere suddenly allowed himself
to sink, and then, drawing up his right knee, struck Gabbett beneath the
jaw, and as the huge head was forced backwards by the blow, dashed his
fist into the brawny throat. The giant reeled backwards, and, falling on
his hands and knees, was in an instant surrounded by sailors.

Now began and ended, in less time than it takes to write it, one of those
Homeric struggles of one man against twenty, which are none the less
heroic because the Ajax is a convict, and the Trojans merely ordinary
sailors. Shaking his assailants to the deck as easily as a wild boar
shakes off the dogs which clamber upon his bristly sides, the convict
sprang to his feet, and, whirling the snatched-up cutlass round his head,
kept the circle at bay. Four times did the soldiers round the hatchway
raise their muskets, and four times did the fear of wounding the men who
had flung themselves upon the enraged giant compel them to restrain their
fire. Gabbett, his stubbly hair on end, his bloodshot eyes glaring with
fury, his great hand opening and shutting in air, as though it gasped for
something to seize, turned himself about from side to side—now here,
now there, bellowing like a wounded bull. His coarse shirt, rent from
shoulder to flank, exposed the play of his huge muscles. He was bleeding
from a cut on his forehead, and the blood, trickling down his face,
mingled with the foam on his lips, and dropped sluggishly on his hairy
breast. Each time that an assailant came within reach of the swinging
cutlass, the ruffian’s form dilated with a fresh access of passion. At one
moment bunched with clinging adversaries—his arms, legs, and
shoulders a hanging mass of human bodies—at the next, free,
desperate, alone in the midst of his foes, his hideous countenance
contorted with hate and rage, the giant seemed less a man than a demon, or
one of those monstrous and savage apes which haunt the solitudes of the
African forests. Spurning the mob who had rushed in at him, he strode
towards his risen adversary, and aimed at him one final blow that should
put an end to his tyranny for ever. A notion that Sarah Purfoy had
betrayed him, and that the handsome soldier was the cause of the betrayal,
had taken possession of his mind, and his rage had concentrated itself
upon Maurice Frere. The aspect of the villain was so appalling, that,
despite his natural courage, Frere, seeing the backward sweep of the
cutlass, absolutely closed his eyes with terror, and surrendered himself
to his fate.

As Gabbett balanced himself for the blow, the ship, which had been rocking
gently on a dull and silent sea, suddenly lurched—the convict lost
his balance, swayed, and fell. Ere he could rise he was pinioned by twenty
hands.

Authority was almost instantaneously triumphant on the upper and lower
decks. The mutiny was over.

CHAPTER XI. DISCOVERIES AND CONFESSIONS.

The shock was felt all through the vessel, and Pine, who had been watching
the ironing of the last of the mutineers, at once divined its cause.

“Thank God!” he cried, “there’s a breeze at last!” and as the overpowered
Gabbett, bruised, bleeding, and bound, was dragged down the hatchway, the
triumphant doctor hurried upon deck to find the Malabar plunging through
the whitening water under the influence of a fifteen-knot breeze.

“Stand by to reef topsails! Away aloft, men, and furl the royals!” cries
Best from the quarter-deck; and in the midst of the cheery confusion
Maurice Frere briefly recapitulated what had taken place, taking care,
however, to pass over his own dereliction of duty as rapidly as possible.

Pine knit his brows. “Do you think that she was in the plot?” he asked.

“Not she!” says Frere—eager to avert inquiry. “How should she be?
Plot! She’s sickening of fever, or I’m much mistaken.”

Sure enough, on opening the door of the cabin, they found Sarah Purfoy
lying where she had fallen a quarter of an hour before. The clashing of
cutlasses and the firing of muskets had not roused her.

“We must make a sick-bay somewhere,” says Pine, looking at the senseless
figure with no kindly glance; “though I don’t think she’s likely to be
very bad. Confound her! I believe that she’s the cause of all this. I’ll
find out, too, before many hours are over; for I’ve told those fellows
that unless they confess all about it before to-morrow morning, I’ll get
them six dozen a-piece the day after we anchor in Hobart Town. I’ve a
great mind to do it before we get there. Take her head, Frere, and we’ll
get her out of this before Vickers comes up. What a fool you are, to be
sure! I knew what it would be with women aboard ship. I wonder Mrs. V.
hasn’t been out before now. There—steady past the door. Why, man,
one would think you never had your arm round a girl’s waist before! Pooh!
don’t look so scared—I won’t tell. Make haste, now, before that
little parson comes. Parsons are regular old women to chatter”; and thus
muttering Pine assisted to carry Mrs. Vickers’s maid into her cabin.

“By George, but she’s a fine girl!” he said, viewing the inanimate body
with the professional eye of a surgeon. “I don’t wonder at you making a
fool of yourself. Chances are, you’ve caught the fever, though this breeze
will help to blow it out of us, please God. That old jackass, Blunt, too!—he
ought to be ashamed of himself, at his age!”

“What do you mean?” asked Frere hastily, as he heard a step approach.
“What has Blunt to say about her?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned Pine. “He was smitten too, that’s all. Like a
good many more, in fact.”

“A good many more!” repeated the other, with a pretence of carelessness.

“Yes!” laughed Pine. “Why, man, she was making eyes at every man in the
ship! I caught her kissing a soldier once.”

Maurice Frere’s cheeks grew hot. The experienced profligate had been taken
in, deceived, perhaps laughed at. All the time he had flattered himself
that he was fascinating the black-eyed maid, the black-eyed maid had been
twisting him round her finger, and perhaps imitating his love-making for
the gratification of her soldier-lover. It was not a pleasant thought; and
yet, strange to say, the idea of Sarah’s treachery did not make him
dislike her. There is a sort of love—if love it can be called—which
thrives under ill-treatment. Nevertheless, he cursed with some appearance
of disgust.

Vickers met them at the door. “Pine, Blunt has the fever. Mr. Best found
him in his cabin groaning. Come and look at him.”

The commander of the Malabar was lying on his bunk in the betwisted
condition into which men who sleep in their clothes contrive to get
themselves. The doctor shook him, bent down over him, and then loosened
his collar. “He’s not sick,” he said; “he’s drunk! Blunt! wake up! Blunt!”

But the mass refused to move.

“Hallo!” says Pine, smelling at the broken tumbler, “what’s this? Smells
queer. Rum? No. Eh! Laudanum! By George, he’s been hocussed!”

“Nonsense!”

“I see it,” slapping his thigh. “It’s that infernal woman! She’s drugged
him, and meant to do the same for”—(Frere gave him an imploring
look)—“for anybody else who would be fool enough to let her do it.
Dawes was right, sir. She’s in it; I’ll swear she’s in it.”

“What! my wife’s maid? Nonsense!” said Vickers.

“Nonsense!” echoed Frere.

“It’s no nonsense. That soldier who was shot, what’s his name?—Miles,
he—but, however, it doesn’t matter. It’s all over now.” “The men
will confess before morning,” says Vickers, “and we’ll see.” And he went
off to his wife’s cabin.

His wife opened the door for him. She had been sitting by the child’s
bedside, listening to the firing, and waiting for her husband’s return
without a murmur. Flirt, fribble, and shrew as she was, Julia Vickers had
displayed, in times of emergency, that glowing courage which women of her
nature at times possess. Though she would yawn over any book above the
level of a genteel love story; attempt to fascinate, with ludicrous
assumption of girlishness, boys young enough to be her sons; shudder at a
frog, and scream at a spider, she could sit throughout a quarter of an
hour of such suspense as she had just undergone with as much courage as if
she had been the strongest-minded woman that ever denied her sex. “Is it
all over?” she asked.

“Yes, thank God!” said Vickers, pausing on the threshold. “All is safe
now, though we had a narrow escape, I believe. How’s Sylvia?” The child
was lying on the bed with her fair hair scattered over the pillow, and her
tiny hands moving restlessly to and fro.

“A little better, I think, though she has been talking a good deal.”

The red lips parted, and the blue eyes, brighter than ever, stared
vacantly around. The sound of her father’s voice seemed to have roused
her, for she began to speak a little prayer: “God bless papa and mamma,
and God bless all on board this ship. God bless me, and make me a good
girl, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our Lord. Amen.”

The sound of the unconscious child’s simple prayer had something awesome
in it, and John Vickers, who, not ten minutes before, would have sealed
his own death warrant unhesitatingly to preserve the safety of the vessel,
felt his eyes fill with unwonted tears. The contrast was curious. From out
the midst of that desolate ocean—in a fever-smitten prison ship,
leagues from land, surrounded by ruffians, thieves, and murderers, the
baby voice of an innocent child called confidently on Heaven.

Two hours afterwards—as the Malabar, escaped from the peril which
had menaced her, plunged cheerily through the rippling water—the
mutineers, by the spokesman, Mr. James Vetch, confessed.

“They were very sorry, and hoped that their breach of discipline would be
forgiven. It was the fear of the typhus which had driven them to it. They
had no accomplices either in the prison or out of it, but they felt it but
right to say that the man who had planned the mutiny was Rufus Dawes.”

The malignant cripple had guessed from whom the information which had led
to the failure of the plot had been derived, and this was his
characteristic revenge.

CHAPTER XII. A NEWSPAPER PARAGRAPH.

Extracted from the Hobart Town Courier of the 12th November, 1827:—

“The examination of the prisoners who were concerned in the attempt upon
the Malabar was concluded on Tuesday last. The four ringleaders, Dawes
Gabbett, Vetch, and Sanders, were condemned to death; but we understand
that, by the clemency of his Excellency the Governor, their sentence has
been commuted to six years at the penal settlement of Macquarie Harbour.”

END OF BOOK THE FIRST

BOOK II.—MACQUARIE HARBOUR. 1833.

CHAPTER I. THE TOPOGRAPHY OF VAN DIEMEN’S LAND.

The south-east coast of Van Diemen’s Land, from the solitary Mewstone to
the basaltic cliffs of Tasman’s Head, from Tasman’s Head to Cape Pillar,
and from Cape Pillar to the rugged grandeur of Pirates’ Bay, resembles a
biscuit at which rats have been nibbling. Eaten away by the continual
action of the ocean which, pouring round by east and west, has divided the
peninsula from the mainland of the Australasian continent—and done
for Van Diemen’s Land what it has done for the Isle of Wight—the
shore line is broken and ragged. Viewed upon the map, the fantastic
fragments of island and promontory which lie scattered between the
South-West Cape and the greater Swan Port, are like the curious forms
assumed by melted lead spilt into water. If the supposition were not too
extravagant, one might imagine that when the Australian continent was
fused, a careless giant upset the crucible, and spilt Van Diemen’s land in
the ocean. The coast navigation is as dangerous as that of the
Mediterranean. Passing from Cape Bougainville to the east of Maria Island,
and between the numerous rocks and shoals which lie beneath the triple
height of the Three Thumbs, the mariner is suddenly checked by Tasman’s
Peninsula, hanging, like a huge double-dropped ear-ring, from the
mainland. Getting round under the Pillar rock through Storm Bay to Storing
Island, we sight the Italy of this miniature Adriatic. Between Hobart Town
and Sorrell, Pittwater and the Derwent, a strangely-shaped point of land—the
Italian boot with its toe bent upwards—projects into the bay, and,
separated from this projection by a narrow channel, dotted with rocks, the
long length of Bruny Island makes, between its western side and the cliffs
of Mount Royal, the dangerous passage known as D’Entrecasteaux Channel. At
the southern entrance of D’Entrecasteaux Channel, a line of sunken rocks,
known by the generic name of the Actaeon reef, attests that Bruny Head was
once joined with the shores of Recherche Bay; while, from the South Cape
to the jaws of Macquarie Harbour, the white water caused by sunken reefs,
or the jagged peaks of single rocks abruptly rising in mid sea, warn the
mariner off shore.

It would seem as though nature, jealous of the beauties of her silver
Derwent, had made the approach to it as dangerous as possible; but once
through the archipelago of D’Entrecasteaux Channel, or the less dangerous
eastern passage of Storm Bay, the voyage up the river is delightful. From
the sentinel solitude of the Iron Pot to the smiling banks of New Norfolk,
the river winds in a succession of reaches, narrowing to a deep channel
cleft between rugged and towering cliffs. A line drawn due north from the
source of the Derwent would strike another river winding out from the
northern part of the island, as the Derwent winds out from the south. The
force of the waves, expended, perhaps, in destroying the isthmus which,
two thousand years ago, probably connected Van Diemen’s Land with the
continent has been here less violent. The rounding currents of the
Southern Ocean, meeting at the mouth of the Tamar, have rushed upwards
over the isthmus they have devoured, and pouring against the south coast
of Victoria, have excavated there that inland sea called Port Philip Bay.
If the waves have gnawed the south coast of Van Diemen’s Land, they have
bitten a mouthful out of the south coast of Victoria. The Bay is a
millpool, having an area of nine hundred square miles, with a race between
the heads two miles across.

About a hundred and seventy miles to the south of this mill-race lies Van
Diemen’s Land, fertile, fair, and rich, rained upon by the genial showers
from the clouds which, attracted by the Frenchman’s Cap, Wyld’s Crag, or
the lofty peaks of the Wellington and Dromedary range, pour down upon the
sheltered valleys their fertilizing streams. No parching hot wind—the
scavenger, if the torment, of the continent—blows upon her crops and
corn. The cool south breeze ripples gently the blue waters of the Derwent,
and fans the curtains of the open windows of the city which nestles in the
broad shadow of Mount Wellington. The hot wind, born amid the burning sand
of the interior of the vast Australian continent, sweeps over the scorched
and cracking plains, to lick up their streams and wither the herbage in
its path, until it meets the waters of the great south bay; but in its
passage across the straits it is reft of its fire, and sinks, exhausted
with its journey, at the feet of the terraced slopes of Launceston.

The climate of Van Diemen’s Land is one of the loveliest in the world.
Launceston is warm, sheltered, and moist; and Hobart Town, protected by
Bruny Island and its archipelago of D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Storm Bay
from the violence of the southern breakers, preserves the mean temperature
of Smyrna; whilst the district between these two towns spreads in a
succession of beautiful valleys, through which glide clear and sparkling
streams. But on the western coast, from the steeple-rocks of Cape Grim to
the scrub-encircled barrenness of Sandy Cape, and the frowning entrance to
Macquarie Harbour, the nature of the country entirely changes. Along that
iron-bound shore, from Pyramid Island and the forest-backed solitude of
Rocky Point, to the great Ram Head, and the straggling harbour of Port
Davey, all is bleak and cheerless. Upon that dreary beach the rollers of
the southern sea complete their circuit of the globe, and the storm that
has devastated the Cape, and united in its eastern course with the icy
blasts which sweep northward from the unknown terrors of the southern
pole, crashes unchecked upon the Huon pine forests, and lashes with rain
the grim front of Mount Direction. Furious gales and sudden tempests
affright the natives of the coast. Navigation is dangerous, and the
entrance to the “Hell’s Gates” of Macquarie Harbour—at the time of
which we are writing (1833), in the height of its ill-fame as a convict
settlement—is only to be attempted in calm weather. The sea-line is
marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels
they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in
prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp
and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes
desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown. The
shipwrecked sailor, crawling painfully to the summit of basalt cliffs, or
the ironed convict, dragging his tree trunk to the edge of some beetling
plateau, looks down upon a sea of fog, through which rise mountain-tops
like islands; or sees through the biting sleet a desert of scrub and crag
rolling to the feet of Mount Heemskirk and Mount Zeehan—crouched
like two sentinel lions keeping watch over the seaboard.

CHAPTER II. THE SOLITARY OF “HELL’S GATES”.

“Hell’s Gates,” formed by a rocky point, which runs abruptly northward,
almost touches, on its eastern side, a projecting arm of land which guards
the entrance to King’s River. In the middle of the gates is a natural bolt—that
is to say, an island-which, lying on a sandy bar in the very jaws of the
current, creates a double whirlpool, impossible to pass in the smoothest
weather. Once through the gates, the convict, chained on the deck of the
inward-bound vessel, sees in front of him the bald cone of the Frenchman’s
Cap, piercing the moist air at a height of five thousand feet; while,
gloomed by overhanging rocks, and shadowed by gigantic forests, the black
sides of the basin narrow to the mouth of the Gordon. The turbulent stream
is the colour of indigo, and, being fed by numerous rivulets, which ooze
through masses of decaying vegetable matter, is of so poisonous a nature
that it is not only undrinkable, but absolutely kills the fish, which in
stormy weather are driven in from the sea. As may be imagined, the furious
tempests which beat upon this exposed coast create a strong surf-line.
After a few days of north-west wind the waters of the Gordon will be found
salt for twelve miles up from the bar. The head-quarters of the settlement
were placed on an island not far from the mouth of this inhospitable
river, called Sarah Island.

Though now the whole place is desolate, and a few rotting posts and logs
alone remain-mute witnesses of scenes of agony never to be revived—in
the year 1833 the buildings were numerous and extensive. On Philip’s
Island, on the north side of the harbour, was a small farm, where
vegetables were grown for the use of the officers of the establishment;
and, on Sarah Island, were sawpits, forges, dockyards, gaol, guard-house,
barracks, and jetty. The military force numbered about sixty men, who,
with convict-warders and constables, took charge of more than three
hundred and fifty prisoners. These miserable wretches, deprived of every
hope, were employed in the most degrading labour. No beast of burden was
allowed on the settlement; all the pulling and dragging was done by human
beings. About one hundred “good-conduct” men were allowed the lighter toil
of dragging timber to the wharf, to assist in shipbuilding; the others cut
down the trees that fringed the mainland, and carried them on their
shoulders to the water’s edge. The denseness of the scrub and bush
rendered it necessary for a “roadway,” perhaps a quarter of a mile in
length, to be first constructed; and the trunks of trees, stripped of
their branches, were rolled together in this roadway, until a “slide” was
made, down which the heavier logs could be shunted towards the harbour.
The timber thus obtained was made into rafts, and floated to the sheds, or
arranged for transportation to Hobart Town. The convicts were lodged on
Sarah Island, in barracks flanked by a two-storied prison, whose “cells”
were the terror of the most hardened. Each morning they received their
breakfast of porridge, water, and salt, and then rowed, under the
protection of their guard, to the wood-cutting stations, where they worked
without food, until night. The launching and hewing of the timber
compelled them to work up to their waists in water. Many of them were
heavily ironed. Those who died were buried on a little plot of ground,
called Halliday’s Island (from the name of the first man buried there),
and a plank stuck into the earth, and carved with the initials of the
deceased, was the only monument vouchsafed him.

Sarah Island, situated at the south-east corner of the harbour, is long
and low. The commandant’s house was built in the centre, having the
chaplain’s house and barracks between it and the gaol. The hospital was on
the west shore, and in a line with it lay the two penitentiaries. Lines of
lofty palisades ran round the settlement, giving it the appearance of a
fortified town. These palisades were built for the purpose of warding off
the terrific blasts of wind, which, shrieking through the long and narrow
bay as through the keyhole of a door, had in former times tore off roofs
and levelled boat-sheds. The little town was set, as it were, in defiance
of Nature, at the very extreme of civilization, and its inhabitants
maintained perpetual warfare with the winds and waves.

But the gaol of Sarah Island was not the only prison in this desolate
region.

At a little distance from the mainland is a rock, over the rude side of
which the waves dash in rough weather. On the evening of the 3rd December,
1833, as the sun was sinking behind the tree-tops on the left side of the
harbour, the figure of a man appeared on the top of this rock. He was clad
in the coarse garb of a convict, and wore round his ankles two iron rings,
connected by a short and heavy chain. To the middle of this chain a
leathern strap was attached, which, splitting in the form of a T, buckled
round his waist, and pulled the chain high enough to prevent him from
stumbling over it as he walked. His head was bare, and his coarse,
blue-striped shirt, open at the throat, displayed an embrowned and
muscular neck. Emerging from out a sort of cell, or den, contrived by
nature or art in the side of the cliff, he threw on a scanty fire, which
burned between two hollowed rocks, a small log of pine wood, and then
returning to his cave, and bringing from it an iron pot, which contained
water, he scooped with his toil-hardened hands a resting-place for it in
the ashes, and placed it on the embers. It was evident that the cave was
at once his storehouse and larder, and that the two hollowed rocks formed
his kitchen.

Having thus made preparations for supper, he ascended a pathway which led
to the highest point of the rock. His fetters compelled him to take short
steps, and, as he walked, he winced as though the iron bit him. A
handkerchief or strip of cloth was twisted round his left ankle; on which
the circlet had chafed a sore. Painfully and slowly, he gained his
destination, and flinging himself on the ground, gazed around him. The
afternoon had been stormy, and the rays of the setting sun shone redly on
the turbid and rushing waters of the bay. On the right lay Sarah Island;
on the left the bleak shore of the opposite and the tall peak of the
Frenchman’s Cap; while the storm hung sullenly over the barren hills to
the eastward. Below him appeared the only sign of life. A brig was being
towed up the harbour by two convict-manned boats.

The sight of this brig seemed to rouse in the mind of the solitary of the
rock a strain of reflection, for, sinking his chin upon his hand, he fixed
his eyes on the incoming vessel, and immersed himself in moody thought.
More than an hour had passed, yet he did not move. The ship anchored, the
boats detached themselves from her sides, the sun sank, and the bay was
plunged in gloom. Lights began to twinkle along the shore of the
settlement. The little fire died, and the water in the iron pot grew cold;
yet the watcher on the rock did not stir. With his eyes staring into the
gloom, and fixed steadily on the vessel, he lay along the barren cliff of
his lonely prison as motionless as the rock on which he had stretched
himself.

This solitary man was Rufus Dawes.

CHAPTER III. A SOCIAL EVENING.

In the house of Major Vickers, Commandant of Macquarie Harbour, there was,
on this evening of December 3rd, unusual gaiety.

Lieutenant Maurice Frere, late in command at Maria Island, had
unexpectedly come down with news from head-quarters. The Ladybird,
Government schooner, visited the settlement on ordinary occasions twice a
year, and such visits were looked forward to with no little eagerness by
the settlers. To the convicts the arrival of the Ladybird meant arrival of
new faces, intelligence of old comrades, news of how the world, from which
they were exiled, was progressing. When the Ladybird arrived, the chained
and toil-worn felons felt that they were yet human, that the universe was
not bounded by the gloomy forests which surrounded their prison, but that
there was a world beyond, where men, like themselves, smoked, and drank,
and laughed, and rested, and were Free. When the Ladybird arrived, they
heard such news as interested them—that is to say, not mere foolish
accounts of wars or ship arrivals, or city gossip, but matters
appertaining to their own world—how Tom was with the road gangs,
Dick on a ticket-of-leave, Harry taken to the bush, and Jack hung at the
Hobart Town Gaol. Such items of intelligence were the only news they cared
to hear, and the new-comers were well posted up in such matters. To the
convicts the Ladybird was town talk, theatre, stock quotations, and latest
telegrams. She was their newspaper and post-office, the one excitement of
their dreary existence, the one link between their own misery and the
happiness of their fellow-creatures. To the Commandant and the “free men”
this messenger from the outer life was scarcely less welcome. There was
not a man on the island who did not feel his heart grow heavier when her
white sails disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.

On the present occasion business of more than ordinary importance had
procured for Major Vickers this pleasurable excitement. It had been
resolved by Governor Arthur that the convict establishment should be
broken up. A succession of murders and attempted escapes had called public
attention to the place, and its distance from Hobart Town rendered it
inconvenient and expensive. Arthur had fixed upon Tasman’s Peninsula—the
earring of which we have spoken—as a future convict depôt, and
naming it Port Arthur, in honour of himself, had sent down Lieutenant
Maurice Frere with instructions for Vickers to convey the prisoners of
Macquarie Harbour thither.

In order to understand the magnitude and meaning of such an order as that
with which Lieutenant Frere was entrusted, we must glance at the social
condition of the penal colony at this period of its history.

Nine years before, Colonel Arthur, late Governor of Honduras, had arrived
at a most critical moment. The former Governor, Colonel Sorrell, was a man
of genial temperament, but little strength of character. He was, moreover,
profligate in his private life; and, encouraged by his example, his
officers violated all rules of social decency. It was common for an
officer to openly keep a female convict as his mistress. Not only would
compliance purchase comforts, but strange stories were afloat concerning
the persecution of women who dared to choose their own lovers. To put down
this profligacy was the first care of Arthur; and in enforcing a severe
attention to etiquette and outward respectability, he perhaps erred on the
side of virtue. Honest, brave, and high-minded, he was also penurious and
cold, and the ostentatious good humour of the colonists dashed itself in
vain against his polite indifference. In opposition to this official
society created by Governor Arthur was that of the free settlers and the
ticket-of-leave men. The latter were more numerous than one would be apt
to suppose. On the 2nd November, 1829, thirty-eight free pardons and
fifty-six conditional pardons appeared on the books; and the number of
persons holding tickets-of-leave, on the 26th of September the same year,
was seven hundred and forty-five.

Of the social condition of these people at this time it is impossible to
speak without astonishment. According to the recorded testimony of many
respectable persons-Government officials, military officers, and free
settlers-the profligacy of the settlers was notorious. Drunkenness was a
prevailing vice. Even children were to be seen in the streets intoxicated.
On Sundays, men and women might be observed standing round the
public-house doors, waiting for the expiration of the hours of public
worship, in order to continue their carousing. As for the condition of the
prisoner population, that, indeed, is indescribable. Notwithstanding the
severe punishment for sly grog-selling, it was carried on to a large
extent. Men and women were found intoxicated together, and a bottle of
brandy was considered to be cheaply bought at the price of twenty lashes.
In the factory—a prison for females—the vilest abuses were
committed, while the infamies current, as matters of course, in chain
gangs and penal settlements, were of too horrible a nature to be more than
hinted at here. All that the vilest and most bestial of human creatures
could invent and practise, was in this unhappy country invented and
practised without restraint and without shame.

Seven classes of criminals were established in 1826, when the new barracks
for prisoners at Hobart Town were finished. The first class were allowed
to sleep out of barracks, and to work for themselves on Saturday; the
second had only the last-named indulgence; the third were only allowed
Saturday afternoon; the fourth and fifth were “refractory and disorderly
characters—to work in irons;” the sixth were “men of the most
degraded and incorrigible character—to be worked in irons, and kept
entirely separate from the other prisoners;” while the seventh were the
refuse of this refuse—the murderers, bandits, and villains, whom
neither chain nor lash could tame. They were regarded as socially dead,
and shipped to Hell’s Gates, or Maria Island. Hells Gates was the most
dreaded of all these houses of bondage. The discipline at the place was so
severe, and the life so terrible, that prisoners would risk all to escape
from it. In one year, of eighty-five deaths there, only thirty were from
natural causes; of the remaining dead, twenty-seven were drowned, eight
killed accidentally, three shot by the soldiers, and twelve murdered by
their comrades. In 1822, one hundred and sixty-nine men out of one hundred
and eighty-two were punished to the extent of two thousand lashes. During
the ten years of its existence, one hundred and twelve men escaped, out of
whom sixty-two only were found-dead. The prisoners killed themselves to
avoid living any longer, and if so fortunate as to penetrate the desert of
scrub, heath, and swamp, which lay between their prison and the settled
districts, preferred death to recapture. Successfully to transport the
remnant of this desperate band of doubly-convicted felons to Arthur’s new
prison, was the mission of Maurice Frere.

He was sitting by the empty fire-place, with one leg carelessly thrown
over the other, entertaining the company with his usual indifferent air.
The six years that had passed since his departure from England had given
him a sturdier frame and a fuller face. His hair was coarser, his face
redder, and his eye more hard, but in demeanour he was little changed.
Sobered he might be, and his voice had acquired that decisive, insured
tone which a voice exercised only in accents of command invariably
acquires, but his bad qualities were as prominent as ever. His five years’
residence at Maria Island had increased that brutality of thought, and
overbearing confidence in his own importance, for which he had been always
remarkable, but it had also given him an assured air of authority, which
covered the more unpleasant features of his character. He was detested by
the prisoners—as he said, “it was a word and a blow with him”—but,
among his superiors, he passed for an officer, honest and painstaking,
though somewhat bluff and severe.

“Well, Mrs. Vickers,” he said, as he took a cup of tea from the hands of
that lady, “I suppose you won’t be sorry to get away from this place, eh?
Trouble you for the toast, Vickers!”

“No indeed,” says poor Mrs. Vickers, with the old girlishness shadowed by
six years; “I shall be only too glad. A dreadful place! John’s duties,
however, are imperative. But the wind! My dear Mr. Frere, you’ve no idea
of it; I wanted to send Sylvia to Hobart Town, but John would not let her
go.”

“By the way, how is Miss Sylvia?” asked Frere, with the patronising air
which men of his stamp adopt when they speak of children.

“Not very well, I’m sorry to say,” returned Vickers. “You see, it’s lonely
for her here. There are no children of her own age, with the exception of
the pilot’s little girl, and she cannot associate with her. But I did not
like to leave her behind, and endeavoured to teach her myself.”

“Hum! There was a-ha-governess, or something, was there not?” said Frere,
staring into his tea-cup. “That maid, you know—what was her name?”

“Miss Purfoy,” said Mrs. Vickers, a little gravely. “Yes, poor thing! A
sad story, Mr. Frere.”

Frere’s eye twinkled.

“Indeed! I left, you know, shortly after the trial of the mutineers, and
never heard the full particulars.” He spoke carelessly, but he awaited the
reply with keen curiosity.

“A sad story!” repeated Mrs. Vickers. “She was the wife of that wretched
man, Rex, and came out as my maid in order to be near him. She would never
tell me her history, poor thing, though all through the dreadful
accusations made by that horrid doctor—I always disliked that man—I
begged her almost on my knees. You know how she nursed Sylvia and poor
John. Really a most superior creature. I think she must have been a
governess.”

Mr. Frere raised his eyebrows abruptly, as though he would say, Governess!
Of course. Happy suggestion. Wonder it never occurred to me before.
“However, her conduct was most exemplary—really most exemplary—and
during the six months we were in Hobart Town she taught little Sylvia a
great deal. Of course she could not help her wretched husband, you know.
Could she?”

“Certainly not!” said Frere heartily. “I heard something about him too.
Got into some scrape, did he not? Half a cup, please.”

“Miss Purfoy, or Mrs. Rex, as she really was, though I don’t suppose Rex
is her real name either—sugar and milk, I think you said—came
into a little legacy from an old aunt in England.” Mr. Frere gave a little
bluff nod, meaning thereby, Old aunt! Exactly. Just what might have been
expected. “And left my service. She took a little cottage on the New Town
road, and Rex was assigned to her as her servant.”

“I see. The old dodge!” says Frere, flushing a little. “Well?”

“Well, the wretched man tried to escape, and she helped him. He was to get
to Launceston, and so on board a vessel to Sydney; but they took the
unhappy creature, and he was sent down here. She was only fined, but it
ruined her.”

“Ruined her?”

“Well, you see, only a few people knew of her relationship to Rex, and she
was rather respected. Of course, when it became known, what with that
dreadful trial and the horrible assertions of Dr. Pine—you will not
believe me, I know, there was something about that man I never liked—she
was quite left alone. She wanted me to bring her down here to teach
Sylvia; but John thought that it was only to be near her husband, and
wouldn’t allow it.”

“Of course it was,” said Vickers, rising. “Frere, if you’d like to smoke,
we’ll go on the verandah.—She will never be satisfied until she gets
that scoundrel free.”

“He’s a bad lot, then?” says Frere, opening the glass window, and leading
the way to the sandy garden. “You will excuse my roughness, Mrs. Vickers,
but I have become quite a slave to my pipe. Ha, ha, it’s wife and child to
me!”

“Oh, a very bad lot,” returned Vickers; “quiet and silent, but ready for
any villainy. I count him one of the worst men we have. With the exception
of one or two more, I think he is the worst.”

“Why don’t you flog ’em?” says Frere, lighting his pipe in the gloom. “By
George, sir, I cut the hides off my fellows if they show any nonsense!”

“Well,” says Vickers, “I don’t care about too much cat myself. Barton, who
was here before me, flogged tremendously, but I don’t think it did any
good. They tried to kill him several times. You remember those twelve
fellows who were hung? No! Ah, of course, you were away.”

“What do you do with ’em?”

“Oh, flog the worst, you know; but I don’t flog more than a man a week, as
a rule, and never more than fifty lashes. They’re getting quieter now.
Then we iron, and dumb-cells, and maroon them.”

“Do what?”

“Give them solitary confinement on Grummet Island. When a man gets very
bad, we clap him into a boat with a week’s provisions and pull him over to
Grummet. There are cells cut in the rock, you see, and the fellow pulls up
his commissariat after him, and lives there by himself for a month or so.
It tames them wonderfully.”

“Does it?” said Frere. “By Jove! it’s a capital notion. I wish I had a
place of that sort at Maria.”

“I’ve a fellow there now,” says Vickers; “Dawes. You remember him, of
course—the ringleader of the mutiny in the Malabar. A dreadful
ruffian. He was most violent the first year I was here. Barton used to
flog a good deal, and Dawes had a childish dread of the cat. When I came
in—when was it?—in ’29, he’d made a sort of petition to be
sent back to the settlement. Said that he was innocent of the mutiny, and
that the accusation against him was false.”

“The old dodge,” said Frere again. “A match? Thanks.”

“Of course, I couldn’t let him go; but I took him out of the chain-gang,
and put him on the Osprey. You saw her in the dock as you came in. He
worked for some time very well, and then tried to bolt again.”

“The old trick. Ha! ha! don’t I know it?” says Mr. Frere, emitting a
streak of smoke in the air, expressive of preternatural wisdom.

“Well, we caught him, and gave him fifty. Then he was sent to the
chain-gang, cutting timber. Then we put him into the boats, but he
quarrelled with the coxswain, and then we took him back to the
timber-rafts. About six weeks ago he made another attempt—together
with Gabbett, the man who nearly killed you—but his leg was chafed
with the irons, and we took him. Gabbett and three more, however, got
away.”

“Haven’t you found ’em?” asked Frere, puffing at his pipe.

“No. But they’ll come to the same fate as the rest,” said Vickers, with a
sort of dismal pride. “No man ever escaped from Macquarie Harbour.”

Frere laughed. “By the Lord!” said he, “it will be rather hard for ’em if
they don’t come back before the end of the month, eh?”

“Oh,” said Vickers, “they’re sure to come—if they can come at all;
but once lost in the scrub, a man hasn’t much chance for his life.”

“When do you think you will be ready to move?” asked Frere.

“As soon as you wish. I don’t want to stop a moment longer than I can
help. It is a terrible life, this.”

“Do you think so?” asked his companion, in unaffected surprise. “I like
it. It’s dull, certainly. When I first went to Maria I was dreadfully
bored, but one soon gets used to it. There is a sort of satisfaction to
me, by George, in keeping the scoundrels in order. I like to see the
fellows’ eyes glint at you as you walk past ’em. Gad, they’d tear me to
pieces, if they dared, some of ’em!” and he laughed grimly, as though the
hate he inspired was a thing to be proud of.

“How shall we go?” asked Vickers. “Have you got any instructions?”

“No,” says Frere; “it’s all left to you. Get ’em up the best way you can,
Arthur said, and pack ’em off to the new peninsula. He thinks you too far
off here, by George! He wants to have you within hail.”

“It’s dangerous taking so many at once,” suggested Vickers.

“Not a bit. Batten ’em down and keep the sentries awake, and they won’t do
any harm.”

“But Mrs. Vickers and the child?”

“I’ve thought of that. You take the Ladybird with the prisoners, and leave
me to bring up Mrs. Vickers in the Osprey.”

“We might do that. Indeed, it’s the best way, I think. I don’t like the
notion of having Sylvia among those wretches, and yet I don’t like to
leave her.”

“Well,” says Frere, confident of his own ability to accomplish anything he
might undertake, “I’ll take the Ladybird, and you the Osprey. Bring up
Mrs. Vickers yourself.”

“No, no,” said Vickers, with a touch of his old pomposity, “that won’t do.
By the King’s Regulations—”

“All right,” interjected Frere, “you needn’t quote ’em. ‘The officer
commanding is obliged to place himself in charge’—all right, my dear
sir. I’ve no objection in life.”

“It was Sylvia that I was thinking of,” said Vickers.

“Well, then,” cries the other, as the door of the room inside opened, and
a little white figure came through into the broad verandah. “Here she is!
Ask her yourself. Well, Miss Sylvia, will you come and shake hands with an
old friend?”

The bright-haired baby of the Malabar had become a bright-haired child of
some eleven years old, and as she stood in her simple white dress in the
glow of the lamplight, even the unaesthetic mind of Mr. Frere was struck
by her extreme beauty. Her bright blue eyes were as bright and as blue as
ever. Her little figure was as upright and as supple as a willow rod; and
her innocent, delicate face was framed in a nimbus of that fine golden
hair—dry and electrical, each separate thread shining with a lustre
of its own—with which the dreaming painters of the middle ages
endowed and glorified their angels.

“Come and give me a kiss, Miss Sylvia!” cries Frere. “You haven’t
forgotten me, have you?”

But the child, resting one hand on her father’s knee, surveyed Mr. Frere
from head to foot with the charming impertinence of childhood, and then,
shaking her head, inquired: “Who is he, papa?”

“Mr. Frere, darling. Don’t you remember Mr. Frere, who used to play ball
with you on board the ship, and who was so kind to you when you were
getting well? For shame, Sylvia!”

There was in the chiding accents such an undertone of tenderness, that the
reproof fell harmless.

“I remember you,” said Sylvia, tossing her head; “but you were nicer then
than you are now. I don’t like you at all.”

“You don’t remember me,” said Frere, a little disconcerted, and affecting
to be intensely at his ease. “I am sure you don’t. What is my name?”

“Lieutenant Frere. You knocked down a prisoner who picked up my ball. I
don’t like you.”

“You’re a forward young lady, upon my word!” said Frere, with a great
laugh. “Ha! ha! so I did, begad, I recollect now. What a memory you’ve
got!”

“He’s here now, isn’t he, papa?” went on Sylvia, regardless of
interruption. “Rufus Dawes is his name, and he’s always in trouble. Poor
fellow, I’m sorry for him. Danny says he’s queer in his mind.”

“And who’s Danny?” asked Frere, with another laugh.

“The cook,” replied Vickers. “An old man I took out of hospital. Sylvia,
you talk too much with the prisoners. I have forbidden you once or twice
before.”

“But Danny is not a prisoner, papa—he’s a cook,” says Sylvia,
nothing abashed, “and he’s a clever man. He told me all about London,
where the Lord Mayor rides in a glass coach, and all the work is done by
free men. He says you never hear chains there. I should like to see
London, papa!”

“So would Mr. Danny, I have no doubt,” said Frere.

“No—he didn’t say that. But he wants to see his old mother, he says.
Fancy Danny’s mother! What an ugly old woman she must be! He says he’ll
see her in Heaven. Will he, papa?”

“I hope so, my dear.”

“Papa!”

“Yes.”

“Will Danny wear his yellow jacket in Heaven, or go as a free man?”

Frere burst into a roar at this.

“You’re an impertinent fellow, sir!” cried Sylvia, her bright eyes
flashing. “How dare you laugh at me? If I was papa, I’d give you half an
hour at the triangles. Oh, you impertinent man!” and, crimson with rage,
the spoilt little beauty ran out of the room. Vickers looked grave, but
Frere was constrained to get up to laugh at his ease.

“Good! ‘Pon honour, that’s good! The little vixen!—Half an hour at
the triangles! Ha-ha! ha, ha, ha!”

“She is a strange child,” said Vickers, “and talks strangely for her age;
but you mustn’t mind her. She is neither girl nor woman, you see; and her
education has been neglected. Moreover, this gloomy place and its
associations—what can you expect from a child bred in a convict
settlement?”

“My dear sir,” says the other, “she’s delightful! Her innocence of the
world is amazing!”

“She must have three or four years at a good finishing school at Sydney.
Please God, I will give them to her when we go back—or send her to
England if I can. She is a good-hearted girl, but she wants polishing
sadly, I’m afraid.”

Just then someone came up the garden path and saluted.

“What is it, Troke?”

“Prisoner given himself up, sir.”

“Which of them?”

“Gabbett. He came back to-night.”

“Alone?” “Yes, sir. The rest have died—he says.”

“What’s that?” asked Frere, suddenly interested.

“The bolter I was telling you about—Gabbett, your old friend. He’s
returned.”

“How long has he been out?”

“Nigh six weeks, sir,” said the constable, touching his cap.

“Gad, he’s had a narrow squeak for it, I’ll be bound. I should like to see
him.”

“He’s down at the sheds,” said the ready Troke—“a ‘good conduct’
burglar. You can see him at once, gentlemen, if you like.”

“What do you say, Vickers?”

“Oh, by all means.”

CHAPTER IV. THE BOLTER.

It was not far to the sheds, and after a few minutes’ walk through the
wooden palisades they reached a long stone building, two storeys high,
from which issued a horrible growling, pierced with shrilly screamed
songs. At the sound of the musket butts clashing on the pine-wood
flagging, the noises ceased, and a silence more sinister than sound fell
on the place.

Passing between two rows of warders, the two officers reached a sort of
ante-room to the gaol, containing a pine-log stretcher, on which a mass of
something was lying. On a roughly-made stool, by the side of this
stretcher, sat a man, in the grey dress (worn as a contrast to the yellow
livery) of “good conduct” prisoners. This man held between his knees a
basin containing gruel, and was apparently endeavouring to feed the mass
on the pine logs.

“Won’t he eat, Steve?” asked Vickers.

And at the sound of the Commandant’s voice, Steve arose.

“Dunno what’s wrong wi’ ‘un, sir,” he said, jerking up a finger to his
forehead. “He seems jest muggy-pated. I can’t do nothin’ wi’ ‘un.”

“Gabbett!”

The intelligent Troke, considerately alive to the wishes of his superior
officers, dragged the mass into a sitting posture.

Gabbett—for it was he—passed one great hand over his face, and
leaning exactly in the position in which Troke placed him, scowled,
bewildered, at his visitors.

“Well, Gabbett,” says Vickers, “you’ve come back again, you see. When will
you learn sense, eh? Where are your mates?”

The giant did not reply.

“Do you hear me? Where are your mates?”

“Where are your mates?” repeated Troke.

“Dead,” says Gabbett.

“All three of them?”

“Ay.”

“And how did you get back?”

Gabbett, in eloquent silence, held out a bleeding foot.

“We found him on the point, sir,” said Troke, jauntily explaining, “and
brought him across in the boat. He had a basin of gruel, but he didn’t
seem hungry.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you eat your gruel?”

Gabbett curled his great lips.

“I have eaten it. Ain’t yer got nuffin’ better nor that to flog a man on?
Ugh! yer a mean lot! Wot’s it to be this time, Major? Fifty?”

And laughing, he rolled down again on the logs.

“A nice specimen!” said Vickers, with a hopeless smile. “What can one do
with such a fellow?”

“I’d flog his soul out of his body,” said Frere, “if he spoke to me like
that!”

Troke and the others, hearing the statement, conceived an instant respect
for the new-comer. He looked as if he would keep his word.

The giant raised his great head and looked at the speaker, but did not
recognize him. He saw only a strange face—a visitor perhaps. “You
may flog, and welcome, master,” said he, “if you’ll give me a fig o’
tibbacky.” Frere laughed. The brutal indifference of the rejoinder suited
his humour, and, with a glance at Vickers, he took a small piece of
cavendish from the pocket of his pea-jacket, and gave it to the recaptured
convict. Gabbett snatched it as a cur snatches at a bone, and thrust it
whole into his mouth.

“How many mates had he?” asked Maurice, watching the champing jaws as one
looks at a strange animal, and asking the question as though a “mate” was
something a convict was born with—like a mole, for instance.

“Three, sir.”

“Three, eh? Well, give him thirty lashes, Vickers.”

“And if I ha’ had three more,” growled Gabbett, mumbling at his tobacco,
“you wouldn’t ha’ had the chance.”

“What does he say?”

But Troke had not heard, and the “good-conduct” man, shrinking as it
seemed, slightly from the prisoner, said he had not heard either. The
wretch himself, munching hard at his tobacco, relapsed into his restless
silence, and was as though he had never spoken.

As he sat there gloomily chewing, he was a spectacle to shudder at. Not so
much on account of his natural hideousness, increased a thousand-fold by
the tattered and filthy rags which barely covered him. Not so much on
account of his unshaven jaws, his hare-lip, his torn and bleeding feet,
his haggard cheeks, and his huge, wasted frame. Not only because, looking
at the animal, as he crouched, with one foot curled round the other, and
one hairy arm pendant between his knees, he was so horribly unhuman, that
one shuddered to think that tender women and fair children must, of
necessity, confess to fellowship of kind with such a monster. But also
because, in his slavering mouth, his slowly grinding jaws, his restless
fingers, and his bloodshot, wandering eyes, there lurked a hint of some
terror more awful than the terror of starvation—a memory of a
tragedy played out in the gloomy depths of that forest which had vomited
him forth again; and the shadow of this unknown horror, clinging to him,
repelled and disgusted, as though he bore about with him the reek of the
shambles.

“Come,” said Vickers, “Let us go back. I shall have to flog him again, I
suppose. Oh, this place! No wonder they call it ‘Hell’s Gates’.”

“You are too soft-hearted, my dear sir,” said Frere, half-way up the
palisaded path. “We must treat brutes like brutes.”

Major Vickers, inured as he was to such sentiments, sighed. “It is not for
me to find fault with the system,” he said, hesitating, in his reverence
for “discipline”, to utter all the thought; “but I have sometimes wondered
if kindness would not succeed better than the chain and the cat.”

“Your old ideas!” laughed his companion. “Remember, they nearly cost us
our lives on the Malabar. No, no. I’ve seen something of convicts—though,
to be sure, my fellows were not so bad as yours—and there’s only one
way. Keep ’em down, sir. Make ’em feel what they are. They’re there to
work, sir. If they won’t work, flog ’em until they will. If they work well—why
a taste of the cat now and then keeps ’em in mind of what they may expect
if they get lazy.” They had reached the verandah now. The rising moon
shone softly on the bay beneath them, and touched with her white light the
summit of the Grummet Rock.

“That is the general opinion, I know,” returned Vickers. “But consider the
life they lead. Good God!” he added, with sudden vehemence, as Frere
paused to look at the bay. “I’m not a cruel man, and never, I believe,
inflicted an unmerited punishment, but since I have been here ten
prisoners have drowned themselves from yonder rock, rather than live on in
their misery. Only three weeks ago, two men, with a wood-cutting party in
the hills, having had some words with the overseer, shook hands with the
gang, and then, hand in hand, flung themselves over the cliff. It’s
horrible to think of!”

“They shouldn’t get sent here,” said practical Frere. “They knew what they
had to expect. Serve ’em right.”

“But imagine an innocent man condemned to this place!”

“I can’t,” said Frere, with a laugh. “Innocent man be hanged! They’re all
innocent, if you’d believe their own stories. Hallo! what’s that red light
there?”

“Dawes’s fire, on Grummet Rock,” says Vickers, going in; “the man I told
you about. Come in and have some brandy-and-water, and we’ll shut the door
in place.”

CHAPTER V. SYLVIA.

“Well,” said Frere, as they went in, “you’ll be out of it soon. You can
get all ready to start by the end of the month, and I’ll bring on Mrs.
Vickers afterwards.”

“What is that you say about me?” asked the sprightly Mrs. Vickers from
within. “You wicked men, leaving me alone all this time!”

“Mr. Frere has kindly offered to bring you and Sylvia after us in the
Osprey. I shall, of course, have to take the Ladybird.”

“You are most kind, Mr. Frere, really you are,” says Mrs. Vickers, a
recollection of her flirtation with a certain young lieutenant, six years
before, tinging her cheeks. “It is really most considerate of you. Won’t
it be nice, Sylvia, to go with Mr. Frere and mamma to Hobart Town?”

“Mr. Frere,” says Sylvia, coming from out a corner of the room, “I am very
sorry for what I said just now. Will you forgive me?”

She asked the question in such a prim, old-fashioned way, standing in
front of him, with her golden locks streaming over her shoulders, and her
hands clasped on her black silk apron (Julia Vickers had her own notions
about dressing her daughter), that Frere was again inclined to laugh.

“Of course I’ll forgive you, my dear,” he said. “You didn’t mean it, I
know.”

“Oh, but I did mean it, and that’s why I’m sorry. I am a very naughty girl
sometimes, though you wouldn’t think so” (this with a charming
consciousness of her own beauty), “especially with Roman history. I don’t
think the Romans were half as brave as the Carthaginians; do you, Mr.
Frere?”

Maurice, somewhat staggered by this question, could only ask, “Why not?”

“Well, I don’t like them half so well myself,” says Sylvia, with feminine
disdain of reasons. “They always had so many soldiers, though the others
were so cruel when they conquered.”

“Were they?” says Frere.

“Were they! Goodness gracious, yes! Didn’t they cut poor Regulus’s eyelids
off, and roll him down hill in a barrel full of nails? What do you call
that, I should like to know?” and Mr. Frere, shaking his red head with
vast assumption of classical learning, could not but concede that that was
not kind on the part of the Carthaginians.

“You are a great scholar, Miss Sylvia,” he remarked, with a consciousness
that this self-possessed girl was rapidly taking him out of his depth.

“Are you fond of reading?”

“Very.”

“And what books do you read?”

“Oh, lots! ‘Paul and Virginia’, and ‘Paradise Lost’, and ‘Shakespeare’s
Plays’, and ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and ‘Blair’s Sermons’, and ‘The Tasmanian
Almanack’, and ‘The Book of Beauty’, and ‘Tom Jones’.”

“A somewhat miscellaneous collection, I fear,” said Mrs. Vickers, with a
sickly smile—she, like Gallio, cared for none of these things—“but
our little library is necessarily limited, and I am not a great reader.
John, my dear, Mr. Frere would like another glass of brandy-and-water. Oh,
don’t apologize; I am a soldier’s wife, you know. Sylvia, my love, say
good-night to Mr. Frere, and retire.”

“Good-night, Miss Sylvia. Will you give me a kiss?”

“No!”

“Sylvia, don’t be rude!”

“I’m not rude,” cries Sylvia, indignant at the way in which her literary
confidence had been received. “He’s rude! I won’t kiss you. Kiss you
indeed! My goodness gracious!”

“Won’t you, you little beauty?” cried Frere, suddenly leaning forward, and
putting his arm round the child. “Then I must kiss you!”

To his astonishment, Sylvia, finding herself thus seized and kissed
despite herself, flushed scarlet, and, lifting up her tiny fist, struck
him on the cheek with all her force.

The blow was so sudden, and the momentary pain so sharp, that Maurice
nearly slipped into his native coarseness, and rapped out an oath.

“My dear Sylvia!” cried Vickers, in tones of grave reproof.

But Frere laughed, caught both the child’s hands in one of his own, and
kissed her again and again, despite her struggles. “There!” he said, with
a sort of triumph in his tone. “You got nothing by that, you see.”

Vickers rose, with annoyance visible on his face, to draw the child away;
and as he did so, she, gasping for breath, and sobbing with rage, wrenched
her wrist free, and in a storm of childish passion struck her tormentor
again and again. “Man!” she cried, with flaming eyes, “Let me go! I hate
you! I hate you! I hate you!”

“I am very sorry for this, Frere,” said Vickers, when the door was closed
again. “I hope she did not hurt you.”

“Not she! I like her spirit. Ha, ha! That’s the way with women all the
world over. Nothing like showing them that they’ve got a master.”

Vickers hastened to turn the conversation, and, amid recollections of old
days, and speculations as to future prospects, the little incident was
forgotten. But when, an hour later, Mr. Frere traversed the passage that
led to his bedroom, he found himself confronted by a little figure wrapped
in a shawl. It was his childish enemy.

“I’ve waited for you, Mr. Frere,” said she, “to beg pardon. I ought not to
have struck you; I am a wicked girl. Don’t say no, because I am; and if I
don’t grow better I shall never go to Heaven.”

Thus addressing him, the child produced a piece of paper, folded like a
letter, from beneath the shawl, and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Go back to bed, my dear; you’ll catch cold.”

“It’s a written apology; and I sha’n’t catch cold, because I’ve got my
stockings on. If you don’t accept it,” she added, with an arching of the
brows, “it is not my fault. I have struck you, but I apologize. Being a
woman, I can’t offer you satisfaction in the usual way.”

Mr. Frere stifled the impulse to laugh, and made his courteous adversary a
low bow.

“I accept your apology, Miss Sylvia,” said he.

“Then,” returned Miss Sylvia, in a lofty manner, “there is nothing more to
be said, and I have the honour to bid you good-night, sir.”

The little maiden drew her shawl close around her with immense dignity,
and marched down the passage as calmly as though she had been Amadis of
Gaul himself.

Frere, gaining his room choking with laughter, opened the folded paper by
the light of the tallow candle, and read, in a quaint, childish hand:—

SIR,—I have struck you. I apologize in writing. Your humble servant
to command, SYLVIA VICKERS.

“I wonder what book she took that out of?” he said. “’Pon my word she must
be a little cracked. ‘Gad, it’s a queer life for a child in this place,
and no mistake.”

CHAPTER VI. A LEAP IN THE DARK.

Two or three mornings after the arrival of the Ladybird, the solitary
prisoner of the Grummet Rock noticed mysterious movements along the shore
of the island settlement. The prison boats, which had put off every
morning at sunrise to the foot of the timbered ranges on the other side of
the harbour, had not appeared for some days. The building of a pier, or
breakwater, running from the western point of the settlement, was
discontinued; and all hands appeared to be occupied with the newly-built
Osprey, which was lying on the slips. Parties of soldiers also daily left
the Ladybird, and assisted at the mysterious work in progress. Rufus
Dawes, walking his little round each day, in vain wondered what this
unusual commotion portended. Unfortunately, no one came to enlighten his
ignorance.

A fortnight after this, about the 15th of December, he observed another
curious fact. All the boats on the island put off one morning to the
opposite side of the harbour, and in the course of the day a great smoke
arose along the side of the hills. The next day the same was repeated; and
on the fourth day the boats returned, towing behind them a huge raft. This
raft, made fast to the side of the Ladybird, proved to be composed of
planks, beams, and joists, all of which were duly hoisted up, and stowed
in the hold of the brig.

This set Rufus Dawes thinking. Could it possibly be that the
timber-cutting was to be abandoned, and that the Government had hit upon
some other method of utilizing its convict labour? He had hewn timber and
built boats, and tanned hides and made shoes. Was it possible that some
new trade was to be initiated? Before he had settled this point to his
satisfaction, he was startled by another boat expedition. Three boats’
crews went down the bay, and returned, after a day’s absence, with an
addition to their number in the shape of four strangers and a quantity of
stores and farming implements. Rufus Dawes, catching sight of these last,
came to the conclusion that the boats had been to Philip’s Island, where
the “garden” was established, and had taken off the gardeners and garden
produce. Rufus Dawes decided that the Ladybird had brought a new
commandant—his sight, trained by his half-savage life, had already
distinguished Mr. Maurice Frere—and that these mysteries were
“improvements” under the new rule. When he arrived at this point of
reasoning, another conjecture, assuming his first to have been correct,
followed as a natural consequence. Lieutenant Frere would be a more severe
commandant than Major Vickers. Now, severity had already reached its
height, so far as he was concerned; so the unhappy man took a final
resolution—he would kill himself. Before we exclaim against the sin
of such a determination, let us endeavour to set before us what the sinner
had suffered during the past six years.

We have already a notion of what life on a convict ship means; and we have
seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had passed before he set foot on
the barren shore of Hell’s Gates. But to appreciate in its intensity the
agony he suffered since that time, we must multiply the infamy of the
‘tween decks of the Malabar a hundred fold. In that prison was at least
some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were not utterly lost to
shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamous the companionship,
terrible the memory of past happiness—there was yet ignorance of the
future, there was yet hope. But at Macquarie Harbour was poured out the
very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst had come, and the worst
must for ever remain. The pit of torment was so deep that one could not
even see Heaven. There was no hope there so long as life remained. Death
alone kept the keys of that island prison.

Is it possible to imagine, even for a moment, what an innocent man, gifted
with ambition, endowed with power to love and to respect, must have
suffered during one week of such punishment? We ordinary men, leading
ordinary lives—walking, riding, laughing, marrying and giving in
marriage—can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideas
we may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evil
company inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained and
degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to our daily
toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whom all that
savours of decency and manliness is held in an open scorn, we should die,
perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know, how
unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beings as
those who dragged the tree-trunks to the banks of the Gordon, and toiled,
blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandpit of Sarah Island. No
human creature could describe to what depth of personal abasement and
self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him. Even if he had the
power to write, he dared not. As one whom in a desert, seeking for a face,
should come to a pool of blood, and seeing his own reflection, fly—so
would such a one hasten from the contemplation of his own degrading agony.
Imagine such torment endured for six years!

Ignorant that the sights and sounds about him were symptoms of the final
abandonment of the settlement, and that the Ladybird was sent down to
bring away the prisoners, Rufus Dawes decided upon getting rid of that
burden of life which pressed upon him so heavily. For six years he had
hewn wood and drawn water; for six years he had hoped against hope; for
six years he had lived in the valley of the shadow of Death. He dared not
recapitulate to himself what he had suffered. Indeed, his senses were
deadened and dulled by torture. He cared to remember only one thing—that
he was a Prisoner for Life. In vain had been his first dream of freedom.
He had done his best, by good conduct, to win release; but the villainy of
Vetch and Rex had deprived him of the fruit of his labour. Instead of
gaining credit by his exposure of the plot on board the Malabar, he was
himself deemed guilty, and condemned, despite his asseverations of
innocence. The knowledge of his “treachery”—for so it was deemed
among his associates—while it gained for him no credit with the
authorities, procured for him the detestation and ill-will of the monsters
among whom he found himself. On his arrival at Hell’s Gates he was a
marked man—a Pariah among those beings who were Pariahs to all the
world beside. Thrice his life was attempted; but he was not then quite
tired of living, and he defended it. This defence was construed by an
overseer into a brawl, and the irons from which he had been relieved were
replaced. His strength—brute attribute that alone could avail him—made
him respected after this, and he was left at peace. At first this
treatment was congenial to his temperament; but by and by it became
annoying, then painful, then almost unendurable. Tugging at his oar,
digging up to his waist in slime, or bending beneath his burden of pine
wood, he looked greedily for some excuse to be addressed. He would take
double weight when forming part of the human caterpillar along whose back
lay a pine tree, for a word of fellowship. He would work double tides to
gain a kindly sentence from a comrade. In his utter desolation he agonized
for the friendship of robbers and murderers. Then the reaction came, and
he hated the very sound of their voices. He never spoke, and refused to
answer when spoken to. He would even take his scanty supper alone, did his
chain so permit him. He gained the reputation of a sullen, dangerous,
half-crazy ruffian. Captain Barton, the superintendent, took pity on him,
and made him his gardener. He accepted the pity for a week or so, and then
Barton, coming down one morning, found the few shrubs pulled up by the
roots, the flower-beds trampled into barrenness, and his gardener sitting
on the ground among the fragments of his gardening tools. For this act of
wanton mischief he was flogged. At the triangles his behaviour was
considered curious. He wept and prayed to be released, fell on his knees
to Barton, and implored pardon. Barton would not listen, and at the first
blow the prisoner was silent. From that time he became more sullen than
ever, only at times he was observed, when alone, to fling himself on the
ground and cry like a child. It was generally thought that his brain was
affected.

When Vickers came, Dawes sought an interview, and begged to be sent back
to Hobart Town. This was refused, of course, but he was put to work on the
Osprey. After working there for some time, and being released from his
irons, he concealed himself on the slip, and in the evening swam across
the harbour. He was pursued, retaken, and flogged. Then he ran the dismal
round of punishment. He burnt lime, dragged timber, and tugged at the oar.
The heaviest and most degrading tasks were always his. Shunned and hated
by his companions, feared by the convict overseers, and regarded with
unfriendly eyes by the authorities, Rufus Dawes was at the very bottom of
that abyss of woe into which he had voluntarily cast himself. Goaded to
desperation by his own thoughts, he had joined with Gabbett and the
unlucky three in their desperate attempt to escape; but, as Vickers
stated, he had been captured almost instantly. He was lamed by the heavy
irons he wore, and though Gabbett—with a strange eagerness for which
after events accounted—insisted that he could make good his flight,
the unhappy man fell in the first hundred yards of the terrible race, and
was seized by two volunteers before he could rise again. His capture
helped to secure the brief freedom of his comrades; for Mr. Troke, content
with one prisoner, checked a pursuit which the nature of the ground
rendered dangerous, and triumphantly brought Dawes back to the settlement
as his peace-offering for the negligence which had resulted in the loss of
the other four. For this madness the refractory convict had been condemned
to the solitude of the Grummet Rock.

In that dismal hermitage, his mind, preying on itself, had become
disordered. He saw visions and dreamt dreams. He would lie for hours
motionless, staring at the sun or the sea. He held converse with imaginary
beings. He enacted the scene with his mother over again. He harangued the
rocks, and called upon the stones about him to witness his innocence and
his sacrifice. He was visited by the phantoms of his early friends, and
sometimes thought his present life a dream. Whenever he awoke, however, he
was commanded by a voice within himself to leap into the surges which
washed the walls of his prison, and to dream these sad dreams no more.

In the midst of this lethargy of body and brain, the unusual occurrences
along the shore of the settlement roused in him a still fiercer hatred of
life. He saw in them something incomprehensible and terrible, and read in
them threats of an increase of misery. Had he known that the Ladybird was
preparing for sea, and that it had been already decided to fetch him from
the Rock and iron him with the rest for safe passage to Hobart Town, he
might have paused; but he knew nothing, save that the burden of life was
insupportable, and that the time had come for him to be rid of it.

In the meantime, the settlement was in a fever of excitement. In less than
three weeks from the announcement made by Vickers, all had been got ready.
The Commandant had finally arranged with Frere as to his course of action.
He would himself accompany the Ladybird with the main body. His wife and
daughter were to remain until the sailing of the Osprey, which Mr. Frere—charged
with the task of final destruction—was to bring up as soon as
possible. “I will leave you a corporal’s guard, and ten prisoners as a
crew,” Vickers said. “You can work her easily with that number.” To which
Frere, smiling at Mrs. Vickers in a self-satisfied way, had replied that
he could do with five prisoners if necessary, for he knew how to get
double work out of the lazy dogs.

Among the incidents which took place during the breaking up was one which
it is necessary to chronicle. Near Philip’s Island, on the north side of
the harbour, is situated Coal Head, where a party had been lately at work.
This party, hastily withdrawn by Vickers to assist in the business of
devastation, had left behind it some tools and timber, and at the eleventh
hour a boat’s crew was sent to bring away the débris. The tools were duly
collected, and the pine logs—worth twenty-five shillings apiece in
Hobart Town—duly rafted and chained. The timber was secured, and the
convicts, towing it after them, pulled for the ship just as the sun sank.
In the general relaxation of discipline and haste, the raft had not been
made with as much care as usual, and the strong current against which the
boat was labouring assisted the negligence of the convicts. The logs began
to loosen, and although the onward motion of the boat kept the chain taut,
when the rowers slackened their exertions the mass parted, and Mr. Troke,
hooking himself on to the side of the Ladybird, saw a huge log slip out
from its fellows and disappear into the darkness. Gazing after it with an
indignant and disgusted stare, as though it had been a refractory prisoner
who merited two days’ “solitary”, he thought he heard a cry from the
direction in which it had been borne. He would have paused to listen, but
all his attention was needed to save the timber, and to prevent the boat
from being swamped by the struggling mass at her stern.

The cry had proceeded from Rufus Dawes. From his solitary rock he had
watched the boat pass him and make for the Ladybird in the channel, and he
had decided—with that curious childishness into which the mind
relapses on such supreme occasions—that the moment when the
gathering gloom swallowed her up, should be the moment when he would
plunge into the surge below him. The heavily-labouring boat grew dimmer
and dimmer, as each tug of the oars took her farther from him. Presently,
only the figure of Mr. Troke in the stern sheets was visible; then that
also disappeared, and as the nose of the timber raft rose on the swell of
the next wave, Rufus Dawes flung himself into the sea.

He was heavily ironed, and he sank like a stone. He had resolved not to
attempt to swim, and for the first moment kept his arms raised above his
head, in order to sink the quicker. But, as the short, sharp agony of
suffocation caught him, and the shock of the icy water dispelled the
mental intoxication under which he was labouring, he desperately struck
out, and, despite the weight of his irons, gained the surface for an
instant. As he did so, all bewildered, and with the one savage instinct of
self-preservation predominant over all other thoughts, he became conscious
of a huge black mass surging upon him out of the darkness. An instant’s
buffet with the current, an ineffectual attempt to dive beneath it, a
horrible sense that the weight at his feet was dragging him down,—and
the huge log, loosened from the raft, was upon him, crushing him beneath
its rough and ragged sides. All thoughts of self-murder vanished with the
presence of actual peril, and uttering that despairing cry which had been
faintly heard by Troke, he flung up his arms to clutch the monster that
was pushing him down to death. The log passed completely over him,
thrusting him beneath the water, but his hand, scraping along the
splintered side, came in contact with the loop of hide rope that yet hung
round the mass, and clutched it with the tenacity of a death grip. In
another instant he got his head above water, and making good his hold,
twisted himself, by a violent effort, across the log.

For a moment he saw the lights from the stern windows of the anchored
vessels low in the distance, Grummet Rock disappeared on his left, then,
exhausted, breathless, and bruised, he closed his eyes, and the drifting
log bore him swiftly and silently away into the darkness.

At daylight the next morning, Mr. Troke, landing on the prison rock found
it deserted. The prisoner’s cap was lying on the edge of the little cliff,
but the prisoner himself had disappeared. Pulling back to the Ladybird,
the intelligent Troke pondered on the circumstance, and in delivering his
report to Vickers mentioned the strange cry he had heard the night before.
“It’s my belief, sir, that he was trying to swim the bay,” he said. “He
must ha’ gone to the bottom anyhow, for he couldn’t swim five yards with
them irons.”

Vickers, busily engaged in getting under weigh, accepted this very natural
supposition without question. The prisoner had met his death either by his
own act, or by accident. It was either a suicide or an attempt to escape,
and the former conduct of Rufus Dawes rendered the latter explanation a
more probable one. In any case, he was dead. As Mr. Troke rightly
surmised, no man could swim the bay in irons; and when the Ladybird, an
hour later, passed the Grummet Rock, all on board her believed that the
corpse of its late occupant was lying beneath the waves that seethed at
its base.

CHAPTER VII. THE LAST OF MACQUARIE HARBOUR.

Rufus Dawes was believed to be dead by the party on board the Ladybird,
and his strange escape was unknown to those still at Sarah Island. Maurice
Frere, if he bestowed a thought upon the refractory prisoner of the Rock,
believed him to be safely stowed in the hold of the schooner, and already
half-way to Hobart Town; while not one of the eighteen persons on board
the Osprey suspected that the boat which had put off for the marooned man
had returned without him. Indeed the party had little leisure for thought;
Mr. Frere, eager to prove his ability and energy, was making strenuous
exertions to get away, and kept his unlucky ten so hard at work that
within a week from the departure of the Ladybird the Osprey was ready for
sea. Mrs. Vickers and the child, having watched with some excusable regret
the process of demolishing their old home, had settled down in their small
cabin in the brig, and on the evening of the 11th of January, Mr. Bates,
the pilot, who acted as master, informed the crew that Lieutenant Frere
had given orders to weigh anchor at daybreak.

At daybreak accordingly the brig set sail, with a light breeze from the
south-west, and by three o’clock in the afternoon anchored safely outside
the Gates. Unfortunately the wind shifted to the north-west, which caused
a heavy swell on the bar, and prudent Mr. Bates, having consideration for
Mrs. Vickers and the child, ran back ten miles into Wellington Bay, and
anchored there again at seven o’clock in the morning. The tide was running
strongly, and the brig rolled a good deal. Mrs. Vickers kept to her cabin,
and sent Sylvia to entertain Lieutenant Frere. Sylvia went, but was not
entertaining. She had conceived for Frere one of those violent antipathies
which children sometimes own without reason, and since the memorable night
of the apology had been barely civil to him. In vain did he pet her and
compliment her, she was not to be flattered into liking him. “I do not
like you, sir,” she said in her stilted fashion, “but that need make no
difference to you. You occupy yourself with your prisoners; I can amuse
myself without you, thank you.” “Oh, all right,” said Frere, “I don’t want
to interfere”; but he felt a little nettled nevertheless. On this
particular evening the young lady relaxed her severity of demeanour. Her
father away, and her mother sick, the little maiden felt lonely, and as a
last resource accepted her mother’s commands and went to Frere. He was
walking up and down the deck, smoking.

“Mr. Frere, I am sent to talk to you.”

“Are you? All right—go on.”

“Oh dear, no. It is the gentleman’s place to entertain. Be amusing!”

“Come and sit down then,” said Frere, who was in good humour at the
success of his arrangements. “What shall we talk about?”

“You stupid man! As if I knew! It is your place to talk. Tell me a fairy
story.”

“’Jack and the Beanstalk’?” suggested Frere.

“Jack and the grandmother! Nonsense. Make one up out of your head, you
know.”

Frere laughed.

“I can’t,” he said. “I never did such a thing in my life.”

“Then why not begin? I shall go away if you don’t begin.”

Frere rubbed his brows. “Well, have you read—have you read ‘Robinson
Crusoe?’”—as if the idea was a brilliant one.

“Of course I have,” returned Sylvia, pouting. “Read it?—yes.
Everybody’s read ‘Robinson Crusoe!’”

“Oh, have they? Well, I didn’t know; let me see now.” And pulling hard at
his pipe, he plunged into literary reflection.

Sylvia, sitting beside him, eagerly watching for the happy thought that
never came, pouted and said, “What a stupid, stupid man you are! I shall
be so glad to get back to papa again. He knows all sorts of stories,
nearly as many as old Danny.”

“Danny knows some, then?”

“Danny!”—with as much surprise as if she said “Walter Scott!” “Of
course he does. I suppose now,” putting her head on one side, with an
amusing expression of superiority, “you never heard the story of the
‘Banshee’?”

“No, I never did.”

“Nor the ‘White Horse of the Peppers’?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose not. Nor the ‘Changeling’? nor the ‘Leprechaun’?” “No.”

Sylvia got off the skylight on which she had been sitting, and surveyed
the smoking animal beside her with profound contempt.

“Mr. Frere, you are really a most ignorant person. Excuse me if I hurt
your feelings; I have no wish to do that; but really you are a most
ignorant person—for your age, of course.”

Maurice Frere grew a little angry. “You are very impertinent, Sylvia,”
said he.

“Miss Vickers is my name, Lieutenant Frere, and I shall go and talk to Mr.
Bates.”

Which threat she carried out on the spot; and Mr. Bates, who had filled
the dangerous office of pilot, told her about divers and coral reefs, and
some adventures of his—a little apocryphal—in the China Seas.
Frere resumed his smoking, half angry with himself, and half angry with
the provoking little fairy. This elfin creature had a fascination for him
which he could not account for.

However, he saw no more of her that evening, and at breakfast the next
morning she received him with quaint haughtiness.

“When shall we be ready to sail? Mr. Frere, I’ll take some marmalade.
Thank you.”

“I don’t know, missy,” said Bates. “It’s very rough on the Bar; me and Mr.
Frere was a soundin’ of it this marnin’, and it ain’t safe yet.”

“Well,” said Sylvia, “I do hope and trust we sha’n’t be shipwrecked, and
have to swim miles and miles for our lives.”

“Ho, ho!” laughed Frere; “don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you.”

“Can you swim, Mr. Bates?” asked Sylvia.

“Yes, miss, I can.”

“Well, then, you shall take me; I like you. Mr. Frere can take mamma.
We’ll go and live on a desert island, Mr. Bates, won’t we, and grow
cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit, and—what nasty hard biscuits!—I’ll
be Robinson Crusoe, and you shall be Man Friday. I’d like to live on a
desert island, if I was sure there were no savages, and plenty to eat and
drink.”

“That would be right enough, my dear, but you don’t find them sort of
islands every day.”

“Then,” said Sylvia, with a decided nod, “we won’t be ship-wrecked, will
we?”

“I hope not, my dear.”

“Put a biscuit in your pocket, Sylvia, in case of accidents,” suggested
Frere, with a grin.

“Oh! you know my opinion of you, sir. Don’t speak; I don’t want any
argument”.

“Don’t you?—that’s right.”

“Mr. Frere,” said Sylvia, gravely pausing at her mother’s cabin door, “if
I were Richard the Third, do you know what I should do with you?”

“No,” says Frere, eating complacently; “what would you do?”

“Why, I’d make you stand at the door of St. Paul’s Cathedral in a white
sheet, with a lighted candle in your hand, until you gave up your wicked
aggravating ways—you Man!”

The picture of Mr. Frere in a white sheet, with a lighted candle in his
hand, at the door of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was too much for Mr. Bates’s
gravity, and he roared with laughter. “She’s a queer child, ain’t she,
sir? A born natural, and a good-natured little soul.”

“When shall we be able to get away, Mr. Bates?” asked Frere, whose dignity
was wounded by the mirth of the pilot.

Bates felt the change of tone, and hastened to accommodate himself to his
officer’s humour. “I hopes by evening, sir,” said he; “if the tide
slackens then I’ll risk it; but it’s no use trying it now.”

“The men were wanting to go ashore to wash their clothes,” said Frere.

“If we are to stop here till evening, you had better let them go after
dinner.”

“All right, sir,” said Bates.

The afternoon passed off auspiciously. The ten prisoners went ashore and
washed their clothes. Their names were James Barker, James Lesly, John
Lyon, Benjamin Riley, William Cheshire, Henry Shiers, William Russen,
James Porter, John Fair, and John Rex. This last scoundrel had come on
board latest of all. He had behaved himself a little better recently, and
during the work attendant upon the departure of the Ladybird, had been
conspicuously useful. His intelligence and influence among his
fellow-prisoners combined to make him a somewhat important personage, and
Vickers had allowed him privileges from which he had been hitherto
debarred. Mr. Frere, however, who superintended the shipment of some
stores, seemed to be resolved to take advantage of Rex’s evident
willingness to work. He never ceased to hurry and find fault with him. He
vowed that he was lazy, sulky, or impertinent. It was “Rex, come here! Do
this! Do that!” As the prisoners declared among themselves, it was evident
that Mr. Frere had a “down” on the “Dandy”. The day before the Ladybird
sailed, Rex—rejoicing in the hope of speedy departure—had
suffered himself to reply to some more than usually galling remark and Mr.
Frere had complained to Vickers. “The fellow’s too ready to get away,”
said he. “Let him stop for the Osprey, it will be a lesson to him.”
Vickers assented, and John Rex was informed that he was not to sail with
the first party. His comrades vowed that this order was an act of tyranny;
but he himself said nothing. He only redoubled his activity, and—despite
all his wish to the contrary—Frere was unable to find fault. He even
took credit to himself for “taming” the convict’s spirit, and pointed out
Rex—silent and obedient—as a proof of the excellence of severe
measures. To the convicts, however, who knew John Rex better, this silent
activity was ominous. He returned with the rest, however, on the evening
of the 13th, in apparently cheerful mood. Indeed Mr. Frere, who, wearied
by the delay, had decided to take the whale-boat in which the prisoners
had returned, and catch a few fish before dinner, observed him laughing
with some of the others, and again congratulated himself.

The time wore on. Darkness was closing in, and Mr. Bates, walking the
deck, kept a look-out for the boat, with the intention of weighing anchor
and making for the Bar. All was secure. Mrs. Vickers and the child were
safely below. The two remaining soldiers (two had gone with Frere) were
upon deck, and the prisoners in the forecastle were singing. The wind was
fair, and the sea had gone down. In less than an hour the Osprey would be
safely outside the harbour.

CHAPTER VIII. THE POWER OF THE WILDERNESS.

The drifting log that had so strangely served as a means of saving Rufus
Dawes swam with the current that was running out of the bay. For some time
the burden that it bore was an insensible one. Exhausted with his
desperate struggle for life, the convict lay along the rough back of this
Heaven-sent raft without motion, almost without breath. At length a
violent shock awoke him to consciousness, and he perceived that the log
had become stranded on a sandy point, the extremity of which was lost in
darkness. Painfully raising himself from his uncomfortable posture, he
staggered to his feet, and crawling a few paces up the beach, flung
himself upon the ground and slept.

When morning dawned, he recognized his position. The log had, in passing
under the lee of Philip’s Island, been cast upon the southern point of
Coal Head; some three hundred yards from him were the mutilated sheds of
the coal gang. For some time he lay still, basking in the warm rays of the
rising sun, and scarcely caring to move his bruised and shattered limbs.
The sensation of rest was so exquisite, that it overpowered all other
considerations, and he did not even trouble himself to conjecture the
reason for the apparent desertion of the huts close by him. If there was
no one there—well and good. If the coal party had not gone, he would
be discovered in a few moments, and brought back to his island prison. In
his exhaustion and misery, he accepted the alternative and slept again.

As he laid down his aching head, Mr. Troke was reporting his death to
Vickers, and while he still slept, the Ladybird, on her way out, passed
him so closely that any one on board her might, with a good glass, have
espied his slumbering figure as it lay upon the sand.

When he woke it was past midday, and the sun poured its full rays upon
him. His clothes were dry in all places, save the side on which he had
been lying, and he rose to his feet refreshed by his long sleep. He
scarcely comprehended, as yet, his true position. He had escaped, it was
true, but not for long. He was versed in the history of escapes, and knew
that a man alone on that barren coast was face to face with starvation or
recapture. Glancing up at the sun, he wondered indeed, how it was that he
had been free so long. Then the coal sheds caught his eye, and he
understood that they were untenanted. This astonished him, and he began to
tremble with vague apprehension. Entering, he looked around, expecting
every moment to see some lurking constable, or armed soldier. Suddenly his
glance fell upon the food rations which lay in the corner where the
departing convicts had flung them the night before. At such a moment, this
discovery seemed like a direct revelation from Heaven. He would not have
been surprised had they disappeared. Had he lived in another age, he would
have looked round for the angel who had brought them.

By and by, having eaten of this miraculous provender, the poor creature
began—reckoning by his convict experience—to understand what
had taken place. The coal workings were abandoned; the new Commandant had
probably other work for his beasts of burden to execute, and an absconder
would be safe here for a few hours at least. But he must not stay. For him
there was no rest. If he thought to escape, it behoved him to commence his
journey at once. As he contemplated the meat and bread, something like a
ray of hope entered his gloomy soul. Here was provision for his needs. The
food before him represented the rations of six men. Was it not possible to
cross the desert that lay between him and freedom on such fare? The very
supposition made his heart beat faster. It surely was possible. He must
husband his resources; walk much and eat little; spread out the food for
one day into the food for three. Here was six men’s food for one day, or
one man’s food for six days. He would live on a third of this, and he
would have rations for eighteen days. Eighteen days! What could he not do
in eighteen days? He could walk thirty miles a day—forty miles a day—that
would be six hundred miles and more. Yet stay; he must not be too
sanguine; the road was difficult; the scrub was in places impenetrable. He
would have to make détours, and turn upon his tracks, to waste precious
time. He would be moderate, and say twenty miles a day. Twenty miles a day
was very easy walking. Taking a piece of stick from the ground, he made
the calculation in the sand. Eighteen days, and twenty miles a day—three
hundred and sixty miles. More than enough to take him to freedom. It could
be done! With prudence, it could be done! He must be careful and
abstemious! Abstemious! He had already eaten too much, and he hastily
pulled a barely-tasted piece of meat from his mouth, and replaced it with
the rest. The action which at any other time would have seemed disgusting,
was, in the case of this poor creature, merely pitiable.

Having come to this resolution, the next thing was to disencumber himself
of his irons. This was more easily done than he expected. He found in the
shed an iron gad, and with that and a stone he drove out the rivets. The
rings were too strong to be “ovalled”, * or he would have been free long
ago. He packed the meat and bread together, and then pushing the gad into
his belt—it might be needed as a weapon of defence—he set out
on his journey.

His intention was to get round the settlement to the coast, reach the
settled districts, and, by some tale of shipwreck or of wandering, procure
assistance. As to what was particularly to be done when he found himself
among free men, he did not pause to consider. At that point his
difficulties seemed to him to end. Let him but traverse the desert that
was before him, and he would trust to his own ingenuity, or the chance of
fortune, to avert suspicion. The peril of immediate detection was so
imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed into
insignificance.

Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbanding his
food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplishing forty
more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the thorny melaleuca, and
felt at last that he was beyond pursuit. The next day he advanced more
slowly. The bush was unpropitious. Dense scrub and savage jungle impeded
his path; barren and stony mountain ranges arose before him. He was lost
in gullies, entangled in thickets, bewildered in morasses. The sea that
had hitherto gleamed, salt, glittering, and hungry upon his right hand,
now shifted to his left. He had mistaken his course, and he must turn
again. For two days did this bewilderment last, and on the third he came
to a mighty cliff that pierced with its blunt pinnacle the clustering
bush. He must go over or round this obstacle, and he decided to go round
it. A natural pathway wound about its foot. Here and there branches were
broken, and it seemed to the poor wretch, fainting under the weight of his
lessening burden, that his were not the first footsteps which had trodden
there. The path terminated in a glade, and at the bottom of this glade was
something that fluttered. Rufus Dawes pressed forward, and stumbled over a
corpse!

In the terrible stillness of that solitary place he felt suddenly as
though a voice had called to him. All the hideous fantastic tales of
murder which he had read or heard seemed to take visible shape in the
person of the loathly carcase before him, clad in the yellow dress of a
convict, and lying flung together on the ground as though struck down.
Stooping over it, impelled by an irresistible impulse to know the worst,
he found the body was mangled. One arm was missing, and the skull had been
beaten in by some heavy instrument! The first thought—that this heap
of rags and bones was a mute witness to the folly of his own undertaking,
the corpse of some starved absconder—gave place to a second more
horrible suspicion. He recognized the number imprinted on the coarse cloth
as that which had designated the younger of the two men who had escaped
with Gabbett. He was standing on the place where a murder had been
committed! A murder!—and what else? Thank God the food he carried
was not yet exhausted! He turned and fled, looking back fearfully as he
went. He could not breathe in the shadow of that awful mountain.

Crashing through scrub and brake, torn, bleeding, and wild with terror, he
reached a spur on the range, and looked around him. Above him rose the
iron hills, below him lay the panorama of the bush. The white cone of the
Frenchman’s Cap was on his right hand, on his left a succession of ranges
seemed to bar further progress. A gleam, as of a lake, streaked the
eastward. Gigantic pine trees reared their graceful heads against the opal
of the evening sky, and at their feet the dense scrub through which he had
so painfully toiled, spread without break and without flaw. It seemed as
though he could leap from where he stood upon a solid mass of tree-tops.
He raised his eyes, and right against him, like a long dull sword, lay the
narrow steel-blue reach of the harbour from which he had escaped. One
darker speck moved on the dark water. It was the Osprey making for the
Gates. It seemed that he could throw a stone upon her deck. A faint cry of
rage escaped him. During the last three days in the bush he must have
retraced his steps, and returned upon his own track to the settlement!
More than half his allotted time had passed, and he was not yet thirty
miles from his prison. Death had waited to overtake him in this barbarous
wilderness. As a cat allows a mouse to escape her for a while, so had he
been permitted to trifle with his fate, and lull himself into a false
security. Escape was hopeless now. He never could escape; and as the
unhappy man raised his despairing eyes, he saw that the sun, redly sinking
behind a lofty pine which topped the opposite hill, shot a ray of crimson
light into the glade below him. It was as though a bloody finger pointed
at the corpse which lay there, and Rufus Dawes, shuddering at the dismal
omen, averting his face, plunged again into the forest.

For four days he wandered aimlessly through the bush. He had given up all
hopes of making the overland journey, and yet, as long as his scanty
supply of food held out, he strove to keep away from the settlement.
Unable to resist the pangs of hunger, he had increased his daily ration;
and though the salted meat, exposed to rain and heat, had begun to turn
putrid, he never looked at it but he was seized with a desire to eat his
fill. The coarse lumps of carrion and the hard rye-loaves were to him
delicious morsels fit for the table of an emperor. Once or twice he was
constrained to pluck and eat the tops of tea-trees and peppermint shrubs.
These had an aromatic taste, and sufficed to stay the cravings of hunger
for a while, but they induced a raging thirst, which he slaked at the icy
mountain springs. Had it not been for the frequency of these streams, he
must have died in a few days. At last, on the twelfth day from his
departure from the Coal Head, he found himself at the foot of Mount
Direction, at the head of the peninsula which makes the western side of
the harbour. His terrible wandering had but led him to make a complete
circuit of the settlement, and the next night brought him round the shores
of Birches Inlet to the landing-place opposite to Sarah Island. His stock
of provisions had been exhausted for two days, and he was savage with
hunger. He no longer thought of suicide. His dominant idea was now to get
food. He would do as many others had done before him—give himself up
to be flogged and fed. When he reached the landing-place, however, the
guard-house was empty. He looked across at the island prison, and saw no
sign of life. The settlement was deserted! The shock of this discovery
almost deprived him of reason. For days, that had seemed centuries, he had
kept life in his jaded and lacerated body solely by the strength of his
fierce determination to reach the settlement; and now that he had reached
it, after a journey of unparalleled horror, he found it deserted. He
struck himself to see if he was not dreaming. He refused to believe his
eyesight. He shouted, screamed, and waved his tattered garments in the
air. Exhausted by these paroxysms, he said to himself, quite calmly, that
the sun beating on his unprotected head had dazed his brain, and that in a
few minutes he should see well-remembered boats pulling towards him. Then,
when no boat came, he argued that he was mistaken in the place; the island
yonder was not Sarah Island, but some other island like it, and that in a
second or so he would be able to detect the difference. But the inexorable
mountains, so hideously familiar for six weary years, made mute reply, and
the sea, crawling at his feet, seemed to grin at him with a thin-lipped,
hungry mouth. Yet the fact of the desertion seemed so inexplicable that he
could not realize it. He felt as might have felt that wanderer in the
enchanted mountains, who, returning in the morning to look for his
companions, found them turned to stone.

At last the dreadful truth forced itself upon him; he retired a few paces,
and then, with a horrible cry of furious despair, stumbled forward towards
the edge of the little reef that fringed the shore. Just as he was about
to fling himself for the second time into the dark water, his eyes,
sweeping in a last long look around the bay, caught sight of a strange
appearance on the left horn of the sea beach. A thin, blue streak,
uprising from behind the western arm of the little inlet, hung in the
still air. It was the smoke of a fire!

The dying wretch felt inspired with new hope. God had sent him a direct
sign from Heaven. The tiny column of bluish vapour seemed to him as
glorious as the Pillar of Fire that led the Israelites. There were yet
human beings near him!—and turning his face from the hungry sea, he
tottered with the last effort of his failing strength towards the blessed
token of their presence.

CHAPTER IX. THE SEIZURE OF THE “OSPREY”

Frere’s fishing expedition had been unsuccessful, and in consequence
prolonged. The obstinacy of his character appeared in the most trifling
circumstances, and though the fast deepening shades of an Australian
evening urged him to return, yet he lingered, unwilling to come back
empty-handed. At last a peremptory signal warned him. It was the sound of
a musket fired on board the brig: Mr. Bates was getting impatient; and
with a scowl, Frere drew up his lines, and ordered the two soldiers to
pull for the vessel.

The Osprey yet sat motionless on the water, and her bare masts gave no
sign of making sail. To the soldiers, pulling with their backs to her, the
musket shot seemed the most ordinary occurrence in the world. Eager to
quit the dismal prison-bay, they had viewed Mr Frere’s persistent fishing
with disgust, and had for the previous half hour longed to hear the signal
of recall which had just startled them. Suddenly, however, they noticed a
change of expression in the sullen face of their commander. Frere, sitting
in the stern sheets, with his face to the Osprey, had observed a peculiar
appearance on her decks. The bulwarks were every now and then topped by
strange figures, who disappeared as suddenly as they came, and a faint
murmur of voices floated across the intervening sea. Presently the report
of another musket shot echoed among the hills, and something dark fell
from the side of the vessel into the water. Frere, with an imprecation of
mingled alarm and indignation, sprang to his feet, and shading his eyes
with his hand, looked towards the brig. The soldiers, resting on their
oars, imitated his gesture, and the whale-boat, thus thrown out of trim,
rocked from side to side dangerously. A moment’s anxious pause, and then
another musket shot, followed by a woman’s shrill scream, explained all.
The prisoners had seized the brig. “Give way!” cried Frere, pale with rage
and apprehension, and the soldiers, realizing at once the full terror of
their position, forced the heavy whale-boat through the water as fast as
the one miserable pair of oars could take her.

Mr. Bates, affected by the insidious influence of the hour, and lulled
into a sense of false security, had gone below to tell his little playmate
that she would soon be on her way to the Hobart Town of which she had
heard so much; and, taking advantage of his absence, the soldier not on
guard went to the forecastle to hear the prisoners singing. He found the
ten together, in high good humour, listening to a “shanty” sung by three
of their number. The voices were melodious enough, and the words of the
ditty—chanted by many stout fellows in many a forecastle before and
since—of that character which pleases the soldier nature. Private
Grimes forgot all about the unprotected state of the deck, and sat down to
listen.

While he listened, absorbed in tender recollections, James Lesly, William
Cheshire, William Russen, John Fair, and James Barker slipped to the
hatchway and got upon the deck. Barker reached the aft hatchway as the
soldier who was on guard turned to complete his walk, and passing his arm
round his neck, pulled him down before he could utter a cry. In the
confusion of the moment the man loosed his grip of the musket to grapple
with his unseen antagonist, and Fair, snatching up the weapon, swore to
blow out his brains if he raised a finger. Seeing the sentry thus secured,
Cheshire, as if in pursuance of a preconcerted plan, leapt down the after
hatchway, and passed up the muskets from the arm-racks to Lesly and
Russen. There were three muskets in addition to the one taken from the
sentry, and Barker, leaving his prisoner in charge of Fair, seized one of
them, and ran to the companion ladder. Russen, left unarmed by this
manoeuvre, appeared to know his own duty. He came back to the forecastle,
and passing behind the listening soldier, touched the singer on the
shoulder. This was the appointed signal, and John Rex, suddenly
terminating his song with a laugh, presented his fist in the face of the
gaping Grimes. “No noise!” he cried. “The brig’s ours”; and ere Grimes
could reply, he was seized by Lyon and Riley, and bound securely.

“Come on, lads!” says Rex, “and pass the prisoner down here. We’ve got her
this time, I’ll go bail!” In obedience to this order, the now gagged
sentry was flung down the fore hatchway, and the hatch secured. “Stand on
the hatchway, Porter,” cries Rex again; “and if those fellows come up,
knock ’em down with a handspoke. Lesly and Russen, forward to the
companion ladder! Lyon, keep a look-out for the boat, and if she comes too
near, fire!”

As he spoke the report of the first musket rang out. Barker had apparently
fired up the companion hatchway.

When Mr. Bates had gone below, he found Sylvia curled upon the cushions of
the state-room, reading. “Well, missy!” he said, “we’ll soon be on our way
to papa.”

Sylvia answered by asking a question altogether foreign to the subject.
“Mr. Bates,” said she, pushing the hair out of her blue eyes, “what’s a
coracle?”

“A which?” asked Mr. Bates.

“A coracle. C-o-r-a-c-l-e,” said she, spelling it slowly. “I want to
know.”

The bewildered Bates shook his head. “Never heard of one, missy,” said he,
bending over the book. “What does it say?”

“’The Ancient Britons,’” said Sylvia, reading gravely, “’were little
better than Barbarians. They painted their bodies with Woad’—that’s
blue stuff, you know, Mr. Bates—’and, seated in their light coracles
of skin stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild
and savage appearance.’”

“Hah,” said Mr. Bates, when this remarkable passage was read to him,
“that’s very mysterious, that is. A corricle, a cory “—a bright
light burst upon him. “A curricle you mean, missy! It’s a carriage! I’ve
seen ’em in Hy’ Park, with young bloods a-drivin’ of ’em.”

“What are young bloods?” asked Sylvia, rushing at this “new opening”.

“Oh, nobs! Swell coves, don’t you know,” returned poor Bates, thus again
attacked. “Young men o’ fortune that is, that’s given to doing it grand.”

“I see,” said Sylvia, waving her little hand graciously. “Noblemen and
Princes and that sort of people. Quite so. But what about coracle?”

“Well,” said the humbled Bates, “I think it’s a carriage, missy. A sort of
Pheayton, as they call it.”

Sylvia, hardly satisfied, returned to the book. It was a little
mean-looking volume—a “Child’s History of England”—and after
perusing it awhile with knitted brows, she burst into a childish laugh.

“Why, my dear Mr. Bates!” she cried, waving the History above her head in
triumph, “what a pair of geese we are! A carriage! Oh you silly man! It’s
a boat!”

“Is it?” said Mr. Bates, in admiration of the intelligence of his
companion. “Who’d ha’ thought that now? Why couldn’t they call it a boat
at once, then, and ha’ done with it?” and he was about to laugh also,
when, raising his eyes, he saw in the open doorway the figure of James
Barker, with a musket in his hand.

“Hallo! What’s this? What do you do here, sir?”

“Sorry to disturb yer,” says the convict, with a grin, “but you must come
along o’ me, Mr. Bates.”

Bates, at once comprehending that some terrible misfortune had occurred,
did not lose his presence of mind. One of the cushions of the couch was
under his right hand, and snatching it up he flung it across the little
cabin full in the face of the escaped prisoner. The soft mass struck the
man with force sufficient to blind him for an instant. The musket exploded
harmlessly in the air, and ere the astonished Barker could recover his
footing, Bates had hurled him out of the cabin, and crying “Mutiny!”
locked the cabin door on the inside.

The noise brought out Mrs. Vickers from her berth, and the poor little
student of English history ran into her arms.

“Good Heavens, Mr. Bates, what is it?”

Bates, furious with rage, so far forgot himself as to swear. “It’s a
mutiny, ma’am,” said he. “Go back to your cabin and lock the door. Those
bloody villains have risen on us!” Julia Vickers felt her heart grow sick.
Was she never to escape out of this dreadful life? “Go into your cabin,
ma’am,” says Bates again, “and don’t move a finger till I tell ye. Maybe
it ain’t so bad as it looks; I’ve got my pistols with me, thank God, and
Mr. Frere’ll hear the shot anyway. Mutiny? On deck there!” he cried at the
full pitch of his voice, and his brow grew damp with dismay when a mocking
laugh from above was the only response.

Thrusting the woman and child into the state berth, the bewildered pilot
cocked a pistol, and snatching a cutlass from the arm stand fixed to the
butt of the mast which penetrated the cabin, he burst open the door with
his foot, and rushed to the companion ladder. Barker had retreated to the
deck, and for an instant he thought the way was clear, but Lesly and
Russen thrust him back with the muzzles of the loaded muskets. He struck
at Russen with the cutlass, missed him, and, seeing the hopelessness of
the attack, was fain to retreat.

In the meanwhile, Grimes and the other soldier had loosed themselves from
their bonds, and, encouraged by the firing, which seemed to them a sign
that all was not yet lost, made shift to force up the forehatch. Porter,
whose courage was none of the fiercest, and who had been for years given
over to that terror of discipline which servitude induces, made but a
feeble attempt at resistance, and forcing the handspike from him, the
sentry, Jones, rushed aft to help the pilot. As Jones reached the waist,
Cheshire, a cold-blooded blue-eyed man, shot him dead. Grimes fell over
the corpse, and Cheshire, clubbing the musket—had he another barrel
he would have fired—coolly battered his head as he lay, and then,
seizing the body of the unfortunate Jones in his arms, tossed it into the
sea. “Porter, you lubber!” he cried, exhausted with the effort to lift the
body, “come and bear a hand with this other one!” Porter advanced aghast,
but just then another occurrence claimed the villain’s attention, and poor
Grimes’s life was spared for that time.

Rex, inwardly raging at this unexpected resistance on the part of the
pilot, flung himself on the skylight, and tore it up bodily. As he did so,
Barker, who had reloaded his musket, fired down into the cabin. The ball
passed through the state-room door, and splintering the wood, buried
itself close to the golden curls of poor little Sylvia. It was this
hair’s-breadth escape which drew from the agonized mother that shriek
which, pealing through the open stern window, had roused the soldiers in
the boat.

Rex, who, by the virtue of his dandyism, yet possessed some abhorrence of
useless crime, imagined that the cry was one of pain, and that Barker’s
bullet had taken deadly effect. “You’ve killed the child, you villain!” he
cried.

“What’s the odds?” asked Barker sulkily. “She must die any way, sooner or
later.”

Rex put his head down the skylight, and called on Bates to surrender, but
Bates only drew his other pistol. “Would you commit murder?” he asked,
looking round with desperation in his glance.

“No, no,” cried some of the men, willing to blink the death of poor Jones.
“It’s no use making things worse than they are. Bid him come up, and we’ll
do him no harm.” “Come up, Mr. Bates,” says Rex, “and I give you my word
you sha’n’t be injured.”

“Will you set the major’s lady and child ashore, then?” asked Bates,
sturdily facing the scowling brows above him.

“Yes.”

“Without injury?” continued the other, bargaining, as it were, at the very
muzzles of the muskets.

“Ay, ay! It’s all right!” returned Russen. “It’s our liberty we want,
that’s all.”

Bates, hoping against hope for the return of the boat, endeavoured to gain
time. “Shut down the skylight, then,” said he, with the ghost of an
authority in his voice, “until I ask the lady.”

This, however, John Rex refused to do. “You can ask well enough where you
are,” he said.

But there was no need for Mr. Bates to put a question. The door of the
state-room opened, and Mrs. Vickers appeared, trembling, with Sylvia by
her side. “Accept, Mr. Bates,” she said, “since it must be so. We should
gain nothing by refusing. We are at their mercy—God help us!”

“Amen to that,” says Bates under his breath, and then aloud, “We agree!”

“Put your pistols on the table, and come up, then,” says Rex, covering the
table with his musket as he spoke. “And nobody shall hurt you.”

CHAPTER X. JOHN REX’S REVENGE.

Mrs Vickers, pale and sick with terror, yet sustained by that strange
courage of which we have before spoken, passed rapidly under the open
skylight, and prepared to ascend. Sylvia—her romance crushed by too
dreadful reality—clung to her mother with one hand, and with the
other pressed close to her little bosom the “English History”. In her
all-absorbing fear she had forgotten to lay it down.

“Get a shawl, ma’am, or something,” says Bates, “and a hat for missy.”

Mrs. Vickers looked back across the space beneath the open skylight, and
shuddering, shook her head. The men above swore impatiently at the delay,
and the three hastened on deck.

“Who’s to command the brig now?” asked undaunted Bates, as they came up.

“I am,” says John Rex, “and, with these brave fellows, I’ll take her round
the world.”

The touch of bombast was not out of place. It jumped so far with the
humour of the convicts that they set up a feeble cheer, at which Sylvia
frowned. Frightened as she was, the prison-bred child was as much
astonished at hearing convicts cheer as a fashionable lady would be to
hear her footman quote poetry. Bates, however—practical and calm—took
quite another view of the case. The bold project, so boldly avowed, seemed
to him a sheer absurdity. The “Dandy” and a crew of nine convicts navigate
a brig round the world! Preposterous; why, not a man aboard could work a
reckoning! His nautical fancy pictured the Osprey helplessly rolling on
the swell of the Southern Ocean, or hopelessly locked in the ice of the
Antarctic Seas, and he dimly guessed at the fate of the deluded ten. Even
if they got safe to port, the chances of final escape were all against
them, for what account could they give of themselves? Overpowered by these
reflections, the honest fellow made one last effort to charm his captors
back to their pristine bondage.

“Fools!” he cried, “do you know what you are about to do? You will never
escape. Give up the brig, and I will declare, before my God, upon the
Bible, that I will say nothing, but give all good characters.”

Lesly and another burst into a laugh at this wild proposition, but Rex,
who had weighed his chances well beforehand, felt the force of the pilot’s
speech, and answered seriously.

“It’s no use talking,” he said, shaking his still handsome head. “We have
got the brig, and we mean to keep her. I can navigate her, though I am no
seaman, so you needn’t talk further about it, Mr. Bates. It’s liberty we
require.”

“What are you going to do with us?” asked Bates.

“Leave you behind.”

Bates’s face blanched. “What, here?”

“Yes. It don’t look a picturesque spot, does it? And yet I’ve lived here
for some years”; and he grinned.

Bates was silent. The logic of that grin was unanswerable.

“Come!” cried the Dandy, shaking off his momentary melancholy, “look alive
there! Lower away the jolly-boat. Mrs. Vickers, go down to your cabin and
get anything you want. I am compelled to put you ashore, but I have no
wish to leave you without clothes.” Bates listened, in a sort of dismal
admiration, at this courtly convict. He could not have spoken like that
had life depended on it. “Now, my little lady,” continued Rex, “run down
with your mamma, and don’t be frightened.”

Sylvia flashed burning red at this indignity. “Frightened! If there had
been anybody else here but women, you never would have taken the brig.
Frightened! Let me pass, prisoner!”

The whole deck burst into a great laugh at this, and poor Mrs. Vickers
paused, trembling for the consequences of the child’s temerity. To thus
taunt the desperate convict who held their lives in his hands seemed sheer
madness. In the boldness of the speech however, lay its safeguard. Rex—whose
politeness was mere bravado—was stung to the quick by the reflection
upon his courage, and the bitter accent with which the child had
pronounced the word prisoner (the generic name of convicts) made him bite
his lips with rage. Had he had his will, he would have struck the little
creature to the deck, but the hoarse laugh of his companions warned him to
forbear. There is “public opinion” even among convicts, and Rex dared not
vent his passion on so helpless an object. As men do in such cases, he
veiled his anger beneath an affectation of amusement. In order to show
that he was not moved by the taunt, he smiled upon the taunter more
graciously than ever.

“Your daughter has her father’s spirit, madam,” said he to Mrs. Vickers,
with a bow.

Bates opened his mouth to listen. His ears were not large enough to take
in the words of this complimentary convict. He began to think that he was
the victim of a nightmare. He absolutely felt that John Rex was a greater
man at that moment than John Bates.

As Mrs. Vickers descended the hatchway, the boat with Frere and the
soldiers came within musket range, and Lesly, according to orders, fired
his musket over their heads, shouting to them to lay to But Frere, boiling
with rage at the manner in which the tables had been turned on him, had
determined not to resign his lost authority without a struggle.
Disregarding the summons, he came straight on, with his eyes fixed on the
vessel. It was now nearly dark, and the figures on the deck were
indistinguishable. The indignant lieutenant could but guess at the
condition of affairs. Suddenly, from out of the darkness a voice hailed
him—

“Hold water! back water!” it cried, and was then seemingly choked in its
owner’s throat.

The voice was the property of Mr. Bates. Standing near the side, he had
observed Rex and Fair bring up a great pig of iron, erst used as part of
the ballast of the brig, and poise it on the rail. Their intention was but
too evident; and honest Bates, like a faithful watch-dog, barked to warn
his master. Bloodthirsty Cheshire caught him by the throat, and Frere,
unheeding, ran the boat alongside, under the very nose of the revengeful
Rex. The mass of iron fell half in-board upon the now stayed boat, and
gave her sternway, with a splintered plank.

“Villains!” cried Frere, “would you swamp us?”

“Aye,” laughed Rex, “and a dozen such as ye! The brig’s ours, can’t ye
see, and we’re your masters now!”

Frere, stifling an exclamation of rage, cried to the bow to hook on, but
the bow had driven the boat backward, and she was already beyond arm’s
length of the brig. Looking up, he saw Cheshire’s savage face, and heard
the click of the lock as he cocked his piece. The two soldiers, exhausted
by their long pull, made no effort to stay the progress of the boat, and
almost before the swell caused by the plunge of the mass of iron had
ceased to agitate the water, the deck of the Osprey had become invisible
in the darkness.

Frere struck his fist upon the thwart in sheer impotence of rage. “The
scoundrels!” he said, between his teeth, “they’ve mastered us. What do
they mean to do next?”

The answer came pat to the question. From the dark hull of the brig broke
a flash and a report, and a musket ball cut the water beside them with a
chirping noise. Between the black indistinct mass which represented the
brig, and the glimmering water, was visible a white speck, which gradually
neared them.

“Come alongside with ye!” hailed a voice, “or it will be the worse for
ye!”

“They want to murder us,” says Frere. “Give way, men!”

But the two soldiers, exchanging glances one with the other, pulled the
boat’s head round, and made for the vessel. “It’s no use, Mr. Frere,” said
the man nearest him; “we can do no good now, and they won’t hurt us, I
dare say.”

“You dogs, you are in league with them,” bursts out Frere, purple with
indignation. “Do you mutiny?”

“Come, come, sir,” returned the soldier, sulkily, “this ain’t the time to
bully; and, as for mutiny, why, one man’s about as good as another just
now.”

This speech from the lips of a man who, but a few minutes before, would
have risked his life to obey orders of his officer, did more than an
hour’s reasoning to convince Maurice Frere of the hopelessness of
resistance. His authority—born of circumstance, and supported by
adventitious aid—had left him. The musket shot had reduced him to
the ranks. He was now no more than anyone else; indeed, he was less than
many, for those who held the firearms were the ruling powers. With a groan
he resigned himself to his fate, and looking at the sleeve of the undress
uniform he wore, it seemed to him that virtue had gone out of it. When
they reached the brig, they found that the jolly-boat had been lowered and
laid alongside. In her were eleven persons; Bates with forehead gashed,
and hands bound, the stunned Grimes, Russen and Fair pulling, Lyon, Riley,
Cheshire, and Lesly with muskets, and John Rex in the stern sheets, with
Bates’s pistols in his trousers’ belt, and a loaded musket across his
knees. The white object which had been seen by the men in the whale-boat
was a large white shawl which wrapped Mrs. Vickers and Sylvia.

Frere muttered an oath of relief when he saw this white bundle. He had
feared that the child was injured. By the direction of Rex the whale-boat
was brought alongside the jolly-boat, and Cheshire and Lesly boarded her.
Lesly then gave his musket to Rex, and bound Frere’s hands behind him, in
the same manner as had been done for Bates. Frere attempted to resist this
indignity, but Cheshire, clapping his musket to his ear, swore he would
blow out his brains if he uttered another syllable; Frere, catching the
malignant eye of John Rex, remembered how easily a twitch of the finger
would pay off old scores, and was silent. “Step in here, sir, if you
please,” said Rex, with polite irony. “I am sorry to be compelled to tie
you, but I must consult my own safety as well as your convenience.” Frere
scowled, and, stepping awkwardly into the jolly-boat, fell. Pinioned as he
was, he could not rise without assistance, and Russen pulled him roughly
to his feet with a coarse laugh. In his present frame of mind, that laugh
galled him worse than his bonds.

Poor Mrs. Vickers, with a woman’s quick instinct, saw this, and, even amid
her own trouble, found leisure to console him. “The wretches!” she said,
under her breath, as Frere was flung down beside her, “to subject you to
such indignity!” Sylvia said nothing, and seemed to shrink from the
lieutenant. Perhaps in her childish fancy she had pictured him as coming
to her rescue, armed cap-a-pie, and clad in dazzling mail, or, at the very
least, as a muscular hero, who would settle affairs out of hand by sheer
personal prowess. If she had entertained any such notion, the reality must
have struck coldly upon her senses. Mr. Frere, purple, clumsy, and bound,
was not at all heroic.

“Now, my lads,” says Rex—who seemed to have endured the cast-off
authority of Frere—“we give you your choice. Stay at Hell’s Gates,
or come with us!”

The soldiers paused, irresolute. To join the mutineers meant a certainty
of hard work, with a chance of ultimate hanging. Yet to stay with the
prisoners was—as far as they could see—to incur the inevitable
fate of starvation on a barren coast. As is often the case on such
occasions, a trifle sufficed to turn the scale. The wounded Grimes, who
was slowly recovering from his stupor, dimly caught the meaning of the
sentence, and in his obfuscated condition of intellect must needs make
comment upon it. “Go with him, ye beggars!” said he, “and leave us honest
men! Oh, ye’ll get a tying-up for this.”

The phrase “tying-up” brought with it recollection of the worst portion of
military discipline, the cat, and revived in the minds of the pair already
disposed to break the yoke that sat so heavily upon them, a train of
dismal memories. The life of a soldier on a convict station was at that
time a hard one. He was often stinted in rations, and of necessity
deprived of all rational recreation, while punishment for offences was
prompt and severe. The companies drafted to the penal settlements were not
composed of the best material, and the pair had good precedent for the
course they were about to take.

“Come,” says Rex, “I can’t wait here all night. The wind is freshening,
and we must make the Bar. Which is it to be?”

“We’ll go with you!” says the man who had pulled the stroke in the
whale-boat, spitting into the water with averted face. Upon which
utterance the convicts burst into joyous oaths, and the pair were received
with much hand-shaking.

Then Rex, with Lyon and Riley as a guard, got into the whale boat, and
having loosed the two prisoners from their bonds, ordered them to take the
place of Russen and Fair. The whale-boat was manned by the seven
mutineers, Rex steering, Fair, Russen, and the two recruits pulling, and
the other four standing up, with their muskets levelled at the jolly-boat.
Their long slavery had begotten such a dread of authority in these men
that they feared it even when it was bound and menaced by four muskets.
“Keep your distance!” shouted Cheshire, as Frere and Bates, in obedience
to orders, began to pull the jolly-boat towards the shore; and in this
fashion was the dismal little party conveyed to the mainland.

It was night when they reached it, but the clear sky began to thrill with
a late moon as yet unrisen, and the waves, breaking gently upon the beach,
glimmered with a radiance born of their own motion. Frere and Bates,
jumping ashore, helped out Mrs. Vickers, Sylvia, and the wounded Grimes.
This being done under the muzzles of the muskets, Rex commanded that Bates
and Frere should push the jolly-boat as far as they could from the shore,
and Riley catching her by a boat-hook as she came towards them, she was
taken in tow.

“Now, boys,” says Cheshire, with a savage delight, “three cheers for old
England and Liberty!”

Upon which a great shout went up, echoed by the grim hills which had
witnessed so many miseries.

To the wretched five, this exultant mirth sounded like a knell of death.
“Great God!” cried Bates, running up to his knees in water after the
departing boats, “would you leave us here to starve?”

The only answer was the jerk and dip of the retreating oars.

CHAPTER XI. LEFT AT “HELL’S GATES.”

There is no need to dwell upon the mental agonies of that miserable night.
Perhaps, of all the five, the one least qualified to endure it realized
the prospect of suffering most acutely. Mrs. Vickers—lay-figure and
noodle as she was—had the keen instinct of approaching danger, which
is in her sex a sixth sense. She was a woman and a mother, and owned a
double capacity for suffering. Her feminine imagination pictured all the
horrors of death by famine, and having realized her own torments, her
maternal love forced her to live them over again in the person of her
child. Rejecting Bates’s offer of a pea-jacket and Frere’s vague tenders
of assistance, the poor woman withdrew behind a rock that faced the sea,
and, with her daughter in her arms, resigned herself to her torturing
thoughts. Sylvia, recovered from her terror, was almost content, and,
curled in her mother’s shawl, slept. To her little soul this midnight
mystery of boats and muskets had all the flavour of a romance. With Bates,
Frere, and her mother so close to her, it was impossible to be afraid;
besides, it was obvious that papa—the Supreme Being of the
settlement—must at once return and severely punish the impertinent
prisoners who had dared to insult his wife and child, and as Sylvia
dropped off to sleep, she caught herself, with some indignation, pitying
the mutineers for the tremendous scrape they had got themselves into. How
they would be flogged when papa came back! In the meantime this sleeping
in the open air was novel and rather pleasant.

Honest Bates produced a piece of biscuit, and, with all the generosity of
his nature, suggested that this should be set aside for the sole use of
the two females, but Mrs. Vickers would not hear of it. “We must all share
alike,” said she, with something of the spirit that she knew her husband
would have displayed under like circumstance; and Frere wondered at her
apparent strength of mind. Had he been gifted with more acuteness, he
would not have wondered; for when a crisis comes to one of two persons who
have lived much together, the influence of the nobler spirit makes itself
felt. Frere had a tinder-box in his pocket, and he made a fire with some
dry leaves and sticks. Grimes fell asleep, and the two men sitting at
their fire discussed the chances of escape. Neither liked to openly broach
the supposition that they had been finally deserted. It was concluded
between them that unless the brig sailed in the night—and the now
risen moon showed her yet lying at anchor—the convicts would return
and bring them food. This supposition proved correct, for about an hour
after daylight they saw the whale-boat pulling towards them.

A discussion had arisen amongst the mutineers as to the propriety of at
once making sail, but Barker, who had been one of the pilot-boat crew, and
knew the dangers of the Bar, vowed that he would not undertake to steer
the brig through the Gates until morning; and so the boats being secured
astern, a strict watch was set, lest the helpless Bates should attempt to
rescue the vessel. During the evening—the excitement attendant upon
the outbreak having passed away, and the magnitude of the task before them
being more fully apparent to their minds—a feeling of pity for the
unfortunate party on the mainland took possession of them. It was quite
possible that the Osprey might be recaptured, in which case five useless
murders would have been committed; and however callous in bloodshed were
the majority of the ten, not one among them could contemplate in cold
blood, without a twinge of remorse, the death of the harmless child of the
Commandant.

John Rex, seeing how matters were going, made haste to take to himself the
credit of mercy. He ruled, and had always ruled, his ruffians not so much
by suggesting to them the course they should take, as by leading them on
the way they had already chosen for themselves. “I propose,” said he,
“that we divide the provisions. There are five of them and twelve of us.
Then nobody can blame us.”

“Ay,” said Porter, mindful of a similar exploit, “and if we’re taken, they
can tell what we have done. Don’t let our affair be like that of the
Cypress, to leave them to starve.” “Ay, ay,” says Barker, “you’re right!
When Fergusson was topped at Hobart Town, I heard old Troke say that if
he’d not refused to set the tucker ashore, he might ha’ got off with a
whole skin.”

Thus urged, by self-interest, as well as sentiment, to mercy, the
provision was got upon deck by daylight, and a division was made. The
soldiers, with generosity born of remorse, were for giving half to the
marooned men, but Barker exclaimed against this. “When the schooner finds
they don’t get to headquarters, she’s bound to come back and look for
’em,” said he; “and we’ll want all the tucker we can get, maybe, afore we
sights land.”

This reasoning was admitted and acted upon. There was in the harness-cask
about fifty pounds of salt meat, and a third of this quantity, together
with half a small sack of flour, some tea and sugar mixed together in a
bag, and an iron kettle and pannikin, was placed in the whale-boat. Rex,
fearful of excesses among his crew, had also lowered down one of the two
small puncheons of rum which the store-room contained. Cheshire disputed
this, and stumbling over a goat that had been taken on board from Philip’s
Island, caught the creature by the leg, and threw it into the sea, bidding
Rex take that with him also. Rex dragged the poor beast into the boat, and
with this miscellaneous cargo pushed off to the shore. The poor goat,
shivering, began to bleat piteously, and the men laughed. To a stranger it
would have appeared that the boat contained a happy party of fishermen, or
coast settlers, returning with the proceeds of a day’s marketing.

Laying off as the water shallowed, Rex called to Bates to come for the
cargo, and three men with muskets standing up as before, ready to resist
any attempt at capture, the provisions, goat and all, were carried ashore.
“There!” says Rex, “you can’t say we’ve used you badly, for we’ve divided
the provisions.” The sight of this almost unexpected succour revived the
courage of the five, and they felt grateful. After the horrible anxiety
they had endured all that night, they were prepared to look with kindly
eyes upon the men who had come to their assistance.

“Men,” said Bates, with something like a sob in his voice, “I didn’t
expect this. You are good fellows, for there ain’t much tucker aboard, I
know.”

“Yes,” affirmed Frere, “you’re good fellows.”

Rex burst into a savage laugh. “Shut your mouth, you tyrant,” said he,
forgetting his dandyism in the recollection of his former suffering. “It
ain’t for your benefit. You may thank the lady and the child for it.”

Julia Vickers hastened to propitiate the arbiter of her daughter’s fate.
“We are obliged to you,” she said, with a touch of quiet dignity
resembling her husband’s; “and if I ever get back safely, I will take care
that your kindness shall be known.”

The swindler and forger took off his leather cap with quite an air. It was
five years since a lady had spoken to him, and the old time when he was
Mr. Lionel Crofton, a “gentleman sportsman”, came back again for an
instant. At that moment, with liberty in his hand, and fortune all before
him, he felt his self-respect return, and he looked the lady in the face
without flinching.

“I sincerely trust, madam,” said he, “that you will get back safely. May I
hope for your good wishes for myself and my companions?”

Listening, Bates burst into a roar of astonished enthusiasm. “What a dog
it is!” he cried. “John Rex, John Rex, you were never made to be a
convict, man!”

Rex smiled. “Good-bye, Mr. Bates, and God preserve you!”

“Good-bye,” says Bates, rubbing his hat off his face, “and I—I—damme,
I hope you’ll get safe off—there! for liberty’s sweet to every man.”

“Good-bye, prisoners!” says Sylvia, waving her handkerchief; “and I hope
they won’t catch you, too.”

So, with cheers and waving of handkerchiefs, the boat departed.

In the emotion which the apparently disinterested conduct of John Rex had
occasioned the exiles, all earnest thought of their own position had
vanished, and, strange to say, the prevailing feeling was that of anxiety
for the ultimate fate of the mutineers. But as the boat grew smaller and
smaller in the distance, so did their consciousness of their own situation
grow more and more distinct; and when at last the boat had disappeared in
the shadow of the brig, all started, as if from a dream, to the wakeful
contemplation of their own case.

A council of war was held, with Mr. Frere at the head of it, and the
possessions of the little party were thrown into common stock. The salt
meat, flour, and tea were placed in a hollow rock at some distance from
the beach, and Mr. Bates was appointed purser, to apportion to each,
without fear or favour, his stated allowance. The goat was tethered with a
piece of fishing line sufficiently long to allow her to browse. The cask
of rum, by special agreement, was placed in the innermost recess of the
rock, and it was resolved that its contents should not be touched except
in case of sickness, or in last extremity. There was no lack of water, for
a spring ran bubbling from the rocks within a hundred yards of the spot
where the party had landed. They calculated that, with prudence, their
provisions would last them for nearly four weeks.

It was found, upon a review of their possessions, that they had among them
three pocket knives, a ball of string, two pipes, matches and a fig of
tobacco, fishing lines with hooks, and a big jack-knife which Frere had
taken to gut the fish he had expected to catch. But they saw with dismay
that there was nothing which could be used axe-wise among the party. Mrs.
Vickers had her shawl, and Bates a pea-jacket, but Frere and Grimes were
without extra clothing. It was agreed that each should retain his own
property, with the exception of the fishing lines, which were confiscated
to the commonwealth.

Having made these arrangements, the kettle, filled with water from the
spring, was slung from three green sticks over the fire, and a pannikin of
weak tea, together with a biscuit, served out to each of the party, save
Grimes, who declared himself unable to eat. Breakfast over, Bates made a
damper, which was cooked in the ashes, and then another council was held
as to future habitation.

It was clearly evident that they could not sleep in the open air. It was
the middle of summer, and though no annoyance from rain was apprehended,
the heat in the middle of the day was most oppressive. Moreover, it was
absolutely necessary that Mrs. Vickers and the child should have some
place to themselves. At a little distance from the beach was a sandy rise,
that led up to the face of the cliff, and on the eastern side of this rise
grew a forest of young trees. Frere proposed to cut down these trees, and
make a sort of hut with them. It was soon discovered, however, that the
pocket knives were insufficient for this purpose, but by dint of notching
the young saplings and then breaking them down, they succeeded, in a
couple of hours, in collecting wood enough to roof over a space between
the hollow rock which contained the provisions and another rock, in shape
like a hammer, which jutted out within five yards of it. Mrs. Vickers and
Sylvia were to have this hut as a sleeping-place, and Frere and Bates,
lying at the mouth of the larder, would at once act as a guard to it and
them. Grimes was to make for himself another hut where the fire had been
lighted on the previous night.

When they got back to dinner, inspirited by this resolution, they found
poor Mrs. Vickers in great alarm. Grimes, who, by reason of the dint in
his skull, had been left behind, was walking about the sea-beach, talking
mysteriously, and shaking his fist at an imaginary foe. On going up to
him, they discovered that the blow had affected his brain, for he was
delirious. Frere endeavoured to soothe him, without effect; and at last,
by Bates’s advice, the poor fellow was rolled in the sea. The cold bath
quelled his violence, and, being laid beneath the shade of a rock hard by,
he fell into a condition of great muscular exhaustion, and slept.

The damper was then portioned out by Bates, and, together with a small
piece of meat, it formed the dinner of the party. Mrs. Vickers reported
that she had observed a great commotion on board the brig, and thought
that the prisoners must be throwing overboard such portions of the cargo
as were not absolutely necessary to them, in order to lighten her. This
notion Bates declared to be correct, and further pointed out that the
mutineers had got out a kedge-anchor, and by hauling on the kedge-line,
were gradually warping the brig down the harbour. Before dinner was over a
light breeze sprang up, and the Osprey, running up the union-jack
reversed, fired a musket, either in farewell or triumph, and, spreading
her sails, disappeared round the western horn of the harbour.

Mrs. Vickers, taking Sylvia with her, went away a few paces, and leaning
against the rugged wall of her future home, wept bitterly. Bates and Frere
affected cheerfulness, but each felt that he had hitherto regarded the
presence of the brig as a sort of safeguard, and had never fully realized
his own loneliness until now.

The necessity for work, however, admitted of no indulgence of vain sorrow,
and Bates setting the example, the pair worked so hard that by nightfall
they had torn down and dragged together sufficient brushwood to complete
Mrs. Vickers’s hut. During the progress of this work they were often
interrupted by Grimes, who persisted in vague rushes at them, exclaiming
loudly against their supposed treachery in leaving him at the mercy of the
mutineers. Bates also complained of the pain caused by the wound in his
forehead, and that he was afflicted with a giddiness which he knew not how
to avert. By dint of frequently bathing his head at the spring, however,
he succeeded in keeping on his legs, until the work of dragging together
the boughs was completed, when he threw himself on the ground, and
declared that he could rise no more.

Frere applied to him the remedy that had been so successfully tried upon
Grimes, but the salt water inflamed his wound and rendered his condition
worse. Mrs. Vickers recommended that a little spirit and water should be
used to wash the cut, and the cask was got out and broached for that
purpose. Tea and damper formed their evening meal; and by the light of a
blazing fire, their condition looked less desperate. Mrs. Vickers had set
the pannikin on a flat stone, and dispensed the tea with an affectation of
dignity which would have been absurd had it not been heart-rending. She
had smoothed her hair and pinned the white shawl about her coquettishly;
she even ventured to lament to Mr. Frere that she had not brought more
clothes. Sylvia was in high spirits, and scorned to confess hunger. When
the tea had been drunk, she fetched water from the spring in the kettle,
and bathed Bates’s head with it. It was resolved that, on the morrow, a
search should be made for some place from which to cast the fishing line,
and that one of the number should fish daily.

The condition of the unfortunate Grimes now gave cause for the greatest
uneasiness. From maundering foolishly he had taken to absolute violence,
and had to be watched by Frere. After much muttering and groaning, the
poor fellow at last dropped off to sleep, and Frere, having assisted Bates
to his sleeping-place in front of the rock, and laid him down on a heap of
green brushwood, prepared to snatch a few hours’ slumber. Wearied by
excitement and the labours of the day, he slept heavily, but, towards
morning, was awakened by a strange noise.

Grimes, whose delirium had apparently increased, had succeeded in forcing
his way through the rude fence of brushwood, and had thrown himself upon
Bates with the ferocity of insanity. Growling to himself, he had seized
the unfortunate pilot by the throat, and the pair were struggling
together. Bates, weakened by the sickness that had followed upon his wound
in the head, was quite unable to cope with his desperate assailant, but
calling feebly upon Frere for help, had made shift to lay hold upon the
jack-knife of which we have before spoken. Frere, starting to his feet,
rushed to the assistance of the pilot, but was too late. Grimes, enraged
by the sight of the knife, tore it from Bates’s grasp, and before Frere
could catch his arm, plunged it twice into the unfortunate man’s breast.

“I’m a dead man!” cried Bates faintly.

The sight of the blood, together with the exclamation of his victim,
recalled Grimes to consciousness. He looked in bewilderment at the bloody
weapon, and then, flinging it from him, rushed away towards the sea, into
which he plunged headlong.

Frere, aghast at this sudden and terrible tragedy, gazed after him, and
saw from out the placid water, sparkling in the bright beams of morning, a
pair of arms, with outstretched hands, emerge; a black spot, that was a
head, uprose between these stiffening arms, and then, with a horrible cry,
the whole disappeared, and the bright water sparkled as placidly as
before. The eyes of the terrified Frere, travelling back to the wounded
man, saw, midway between this sparkling water and the knife that lay on
the sand, an object that went far to explain the maniac’s sudden burst of
fury. The rum cask lay upon its side by the remnants of last night’s fire,
and close to it was a clout, with which the head of the wounded man had
been bound. It was evident that the poor creature, wandering in his
delirium, had come across the rum cask, drunk a quantity of its contents,
and been maddened by the fiery spirit.

Frere hurried to the side of Bates, and lifting him up, strove to staunch
the blood that flowed from his chest. It would seem that he had been
resting himself on his left elbow, and that Grimes, snatching the knife
from his right hand, had stabbed him twice in the right breast. He was
pale and senseless, and Frere feared that the wound was mortal. Tearing
off his neck-handkerchief, he endeavoured to bandage the wound, but found
that the strip of silk was insufficient for the purpose. The noise had
roused Mrs. Vickers, who, stifling her terror, made haste to tear off a
portion of her dress, and with this a bandage of sufficient width was
made. Frere went to the cask to see if, haply, he could obtain from it a
little spirit with which to moisten the lips of the dying man, but it was
empty. Grimes, after drinking his fill, had overturned the unheaded
puncheon, and the greedy sand had absorbed every drop of liquor. Sylvia
brought some water from the spring, and Mrs. Vickers bathing Bates’s head
with this, he revived a little. By-and-by Mrs. Vickers milked the goat—she
had never done such a thing before in all her life—and the milk
being given to Bates in a pannikin, he drank it eagerly, but vomited it
almost instantly. It was evident that he was sinking from some internal
injury.

None of the party had much appetite for breakfast, but Frere, whose
sensibilities were less acute than those of the others, ate a piece of
salt meat and damper. It struck him, with a curious feeling of pleasant
selfishness, that now Grimes had gone, the allowance of provisions would
be increased, and that if Bates went also, it would be increased still
further. He did not give utterance to his thoughts, however, but sat with
the wounded man’s head on his knees, and brushed the settling flies from
his face. He hoped, after all, that the pilot would not die, for he should
then be left alone to look after the women. Perhaps some such thought was
agitating Mrs. Vickers also. As for Sylvia, she made no secret of her
anxiety.

“Don’t die, Mr. Bates—oh, don’t die!” she said, standing piteously
near, but afraid to touch him. “Don’t leave mamma and me alone in this
dreadful place!”

Poor Bates, of course, said nothing, but Frere frowned heavily, and Mrs.
Vickers said reprovingly, “Sylvia!” just as if they had been in the old
house on distant Sarah Island.

In the afternoon Frere went away to drag together some wood for the fire,
and when he returned he found the pilot near his end. Mrs. Vickers said
that for an hour he had lain without motion, and almost without breath.
The major’s wife had seen more than one death-bed, and was calm enough;
but poor little Sylvia, sitting on a stone hard by, shook with terror. She
had a dim notion that death must be accompanied by violence. As the sun
sank, Bates rallied; but the two watchers knew that it was but the final
flicker of the expiring candle. “He’s going!” said Frere at length, under
his breath, as though fearful of awaking his half-slumbering soul. Mrs.
Vickers, her eyes streaming with silent tears, lifted the honest head, and
moistened the parched lips with her soaked handkerchief. A tremor shook
the once stalwart limbs, and the dying man opened his eyes. For an instant
he seemed bewildered, and then, looking from one to the other,
intelligence returned to his glance, and it was evident that he remembered
all. His gaze rested upon the pale face of the affrighted Sylvia, and then
turned to Frere. There could be no mistaking the mute appeal of those
eloquent eyes.

“Yes, I’ll take care of her,” said Frere.

Bates smiled, and then, observing that the blood from his wound had
stained the white shawl of Mrs. Vickers, he made an effort to move his
head. It was not fitting that a lady’s shawl should be stained with the
blood of a poor fellow like himself. The fashionable fribble, with quick
instinct, understood the gesture, and gently drew the head back upon her
bosom. In the presence of death the woman was womanly. For a moment all
was silent, and they thought he had gone; but all at once he opened his
eyes and looked round for the sea.

“Turn my face to it once more,” he whispered; and as they raised him, he
inclined his ear to listen. “It’s calm enough here, God bless it,” he
said; “but I can hear the waves a-breaking hard upon the Bar!”

And so his head dropped, and he died.

As Frere relieved Mrs. Vickers from the weight of the corpse, Sylvia ran
to her mother. “Oh, mamma, mamma,” she cried, “why did God let him die
when we wanted him so much?”

Before it grew dark, Frere made shift to carry the body to the shelter of
some rocks at a little distance, and spreading the jacket over the face,
he piled stones upon it to keep it steady. The march of events had been so
rapid that he scarcely realized that since the previous evening two of the
five human creatures left in this wilderness had escaped from it. As he
did realize it, he began to wonder whose turn it would be next.

Mrs. Vickers, worn out by the fatigue and excitement of the day, retired
to rest early; and Sylvia, refusing to speak to Frere, followed her
mother. This manifestation of unaccountable dislike on the part of the
child hurt Maurice more than he cared to own. He felt angry with her for
not loving him, and yet he took no pains to conciliate her. It was with a
curious pleasure that he remembered how she must soon look up to him as
her chief protector. Had Sylvia been just a few years older, the young man
would have thought himself in love with her.

The following day passed gloomily. It was hot and sultry, and a dull haze
hung over the mountains. Frere spent the morning in scooping a grave in
the sand, in which to inter poor Bates. Practically awake to his own
necessities, he removed such portions of clothing from the body as would
be useful to him, but hid them under a stone, not liking to let Mrs.
Vickers see what he had done. Having completed the grave by midday, he
placed the corpse therein, and rolled as many stones as possible to the
sides of the mound. In the afternoon he cast the fishing line from the
point of a rock he had marked the day before, but caught nothing. Passing
by the grave, on his return, he noticed that Mrs. Vickers had placed at
the head of it a rude cross, formed by tying two pieces of stick together.

After supper—the usual salt meat and damper—he lit an
economical pipe, and tried to talk to Sylvia. “Why won’t you be friends
with me, missy?” he asked.

“I don’t like you,” said Sylvia. “You frighten me.”

“Why?”

“You are not kind. I don’t mean that you do cruel things; but you are—oh,
I wish papa was here!” “Wishing won’t bring him!” says Frere, pressing his
hoarded tobacco together with prudent forefinger.

“There! That’s what I mean! Is that kind? ‘Wishing won’t bring him!’ Oh,
if it only would!”

“I didn’t mean it unkindly,” says Frere. “What a strange child you are.”

“There are persons,” says Sylvia, “who have no Affinity for each other. I
read about it in a book papa had, and I suppose that’s what it is. I have
no Affinity for you. I can’t help it, can I?”

“Rubbish!” Frere returned. “Come here, and I’ll tell you a story.”

Mrs. Vickers had gone back to her cave, and the two were alone by the
fire, near which stood the kettle and the newly-made damper. The child,
with some show of hesitation, came to him, and he caught and placed her on
his knee. The moon had not yet risen, and the shadows cast by the
flickering fire seemed weird and monstrous. The wicked wish to frighten
this helpless creature came to Maurice Frere.

“There was once,” said he, “a Castle in an old wood, and in this Castle
there lived an Ogre, with great goggle eyes.”

“You silly man!” said Sylvia, struggling to be free. “You are trying to
frighten me!”

“And this Ogre lived on the bones of little girls. One day a little girl
was travelling the wood, and she heard the Ogre coming. ‘Haw! haw! Haw!
haw!’”

“Mr. Frere, let me down!”

“She was terribly frightened, and she ran, and ran, and ran, until all of
a sudden she saw—”

A piercing scream burst from his companion. “Oh! oh! What’s that?” she
cried, and clung to her persecutor.

Beyond the fire stood the figure of a man. He staggered forward, and then,
falling on his knees, stretched out his hands, and hoarsely articulated
one word—“Food.” It was Rufus Dawes.

The sound of a human voice broke the spell of terror that was on the
child, and as the glow from the fire fell upon the tattered yellow
garments, she guessed at once the whole story. Not so Maurice Frere. He
saw before him a new danger, a new mouth to share the scanty provision,
and snatching a brand from the fire he kept the convict at bay. But Rufus
Dawes, glaring round with wolfish eyes, caught sight of the damper resting
against the iron kettle, and made a clutch at it. Frere dashed the brand
in his face. “Stand back!” he cried. “We have no food to spare!”

The convict uttered a savage cry, and raising the iron gad, plunged
forward desperately to attack this new enemy; but, quick as thought, the
child glided past Frere, and, snatching the loaf, placed it in the hands
of the starving man, with “Here, poor prisoner, eat!” and then, turning to
Frere, she cast upon him a glance so full of horror, indignation, and
surprise, that the man blushed and threw down the brand.

As for Rufus Dawes, the sudden apparition of this golden-haired girl
seemed to have transformed him. Allowing the loaf to slip through his
fingers, he gazed with haggard eyes at the retreating figure of the child,
and as it vanished into the darkness outside the circle of firelight, the
unhappy man sank his face upon his blackened, horny hands, and burst into
tears.

CHAPTER XII. “MR.” DAWES.

The coarse tones of Maurice Frere roused him. “What do you want?” he
asked. Rufus Dawes, raising his head, contemplated the figure before him,
and recognized it. “Is it you?” he said slowly.

“What do you mean? Do you know me?” asked Frere, drawing back. But the
convict did not reply. His momentary emotion passed away, the pangs of
hunger returned, and greedily seizing upon the piece of damper, he began
to eat in silence.

“Do you hear, man?” repeated Frere, at length. “What are you?”

“An escaped prisoner. You can give me up in the morning. I’ve done my
best, and I’m beat.”

The sentence struck Frere with dismay. The man did not know that the
settlement had been abandoned!

“I cannot give you up. There is no one but myself and a woman and child on
the settlement.” Rufus Dawes, pausing in his eating, stared at him in
amazement. “The prisoners have gone away in the schooner. If you choose to
remain free, you can do so as far as I am concerned. I am as helpless as
you are.”

“But how do you come here?”

Frere laughed bitterly. To give explanations to convicts was foreign to
his experience, and he did not relish the task. In this case, however,
there was no help for it. “The prisoners mutinied and seized the brig.”

“What brig?”

“The Osprey.”

A terrible light broke upon Rufus Dawes, and he began to understand how he
had again missed his chance. “Who took her?”

“That double-dyed villain, John Rex,” says Frere, giving vent to his
passion. “May she sink, and burn, and—”

“Have they gone, then?” cried the miserable man, clutching at his hair
with a gesture of hopeless rage.

“Yes; two days ago, and left us here to starve.” Rufus Dawes burst into a
laugh so discordant that it made the other shudder. “We’ll starve
together, Maurice Frere,” said he, “for while you’ve a crust, I’ll share
it. If I don’t get liberty, at least I’ll have revenge!”

The sinister aspect of this famished savage, sitting with his chin on his
ragged knees, rocking himself to and fro in the light of the fire, gave
Mr. Maurice Frere a new sensation. He felt as might have felt that African
hunter who, returning to his camp fire, found a lion there. “Wretch!” said
he, shrinking from him, “why should you wish to be revenged on me?”

The convict turned upon him with a snarl. “Take care what you say! I’ll
have no hard words. Wretch! If I am a wretch, who made me one? If I hate
you and myself and the world, who made me hate it? I was born free—as
free as you are. Why should I be sent to herd with beasts, and condemned
to this slavery, worse than death? Tell me that, Maurice Frere—tell
me that!” “I didn’t make the laws,” says Frere, “why do you attack me?”

“Because you are what I was. You are FREE! You can do as you please. You
can love, you can work, you can think. I can only hate!” He paused as if
astonished at himself, and then continued, with a low laugh. “Fine words
for a convict, eh! But, never mind, it’s all right, Mr. Frere; we’re equal
now, and I sha’n’t die an hour sooner than you, though you are a ‘free
man’!”

Frere began to think that he was dealing with another madman.

“Die! There’s no need to talk of dying,” he said, as soothingly as it was
possible for him to say it. “Time enough for that by-and-by.”

“There spoke the free man. We convicts have an advantage over you
gentlemen. You are afraid of death; we pray for it. It is the best thing
that can happen to us. Die! They were going to hang me once. I wish they
had. My God, I wish they had!”

There was such a depth of agony in this terrible utterance that Maurice
Frere was appalled at it. “There, go and sleep, my man,” he said. “You are
knocked up. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Hold on a bit!” cried Rufus Dawes, with a coarseness of manner altogether
foreign to that he had just assumed. “Who’s with ye?”

“The wife and daughter of the Commandant,” replied Frere, half afraid to
refuse an answer to a question so fiercely put.

“No one else?”

“No.” “Poor souls!” said the convict, “I pity them.” And then he stretched
himself, like a dog, before the blaze, and went to sleep instantly.
Maurice Frere, looking at the gaunt figure of this addition to the party,
was completely puzzled how to act. Such a character had never before come
within the range of his experience. He knew not what to make of this
fierce, ragged, desperate man, who wept and threatened by turns—who
was now snarling in the most repulsive bass of the convict gamut, and now
calling upon Heaven in tones which were little less than eloquent. At
first he thought of precipitating himself upon the sleeping wretch and
pinioning him, but a second glance at the sinewy, though wasted, limbs
forbade him to follow out the rash suggestion of his own fears. Then a
horrible prompting—arising out of his former cowardice—made
him feel for the jack-knife with which one murder had already been
committed. Their stock of provisions was so scanty, and after all, the
lives of the woman and child were worth more than that of this unknown
desperado! But, to do him justice, the thought no sooner shaped itself
than he crushed it out. “We’ll wait till morning, and see how he shapes,”
said Frere to himself; and pausing at the brushwood barricade, behind
which the mother and daughter were clinging to each other, he whispered
that he was on guard outside, and that the absconder slept. But when
morning dawned, he found that there was no need for alarm. The convict was
lying in almost the same position as that in which he had left him, and
his eyes were closed. His threatening outbreak of the previous night had
been produced by the excitement of his sudden rescue, and he was now
incapable of violence. Frere advanced, and shook him by the shoulder.

“Not alive!” cried the poor wretch, waking with a start, and raising his
arm to strike. “Keep off!”

“It’s all right,” said Frere. “No one is going to harm you. Wake up.”

Rufus Dawes glanced around him stupidly, and then remembering what had
happened, with a great effort, he staggered to his feet. “I thought they’d
got me!” he said, “but it’s the other way, I see. Come, let’s have
breakfast, Mr. Frere. I’m hungry.”

“You must wait,” said Frere. “Do you think there is no one here but
yourself?”

Rufus Dawes, swaying to and fro from weakness, passed his shred of a cuff
over his eyes. “I don’t know anything about it. I only know I’m hungry.”

Frere stopped short. Now or never was the time to settle future relations.
Lying awake in the night, with the jack-knife ready to his hand, he had
decided on the course of action that must be adopted. The convict should
share with the rest, but no more. If he rebelled at that, there must be a
trial of strength between them. “Look you here,” he said. “We have but
barely enough food to serve us until help comes—if it does come. I
have the care of that poor woman and child, and I will see fair play for
their sakes. You shall share with us to our last bit and drop, but, by
Heaven, you shall get no more.”

The convict, stretching out his wasted arms, looked down upon them with
the uncertain gaze of a drunken man. “I am weak now,” he said. “You have
the best of me”; and then he sank suddenly down upon the ground,
exhausted. “Give me a drink,” he moaned, feebly motioning with his hand.
Frere got him water in the pannikin, and having drunk it, he smiled and
lay down to sleep again. Mrs. Vickers and Sylvia, coming out while he
still slept, recognized him as the desperado of the settlement.

“He was the most desperate man we had,” said Mrs. Vickers, identifying
herself with her husband. “Oh, what shall we do?”

“He won’t do much harm,” returned Frere, looking down at the notorious
ruffian with curiosity. “He’s as near dead as can be.”

Sylvia looked up at him with her clear child’s glance. “We mustn’t let him
die,” said she. “That would be murder.” “No, no,” returned Frere, hastily,
“no one wants him to die. But what can we do?”

“I’ll nurse him!” cried Sylvia.

Frere broke into one of his coarse laughs, the first one that he had
indulged in since the mutiny. “You nurse him! By George, that’s a good
one!” The poor little child, weak and excitable, felt the contempt in the
tone, and burst into a passion of sobs. “Why do you insult me, you wicked
man? The poor fellow’s ill, and he’ll—he’ll die, like Mr. Bates. Oh,
mamma, mamma, Let’s go away by ourselves.”

Frere swore a great oath, and walked away. He went into the little wood
under the cliff, and sat down. He was full of strange thoughts, which he
could not express, and which he had never owned before. The dislike the
child bore to him made him miserable, and yet he took delight in
tormenting her. He was conscious that he had acted the part of a coward
the night before in endeavouring to frighten her, and that the detestation
she bore him was well earned; but he had fully determined to stake his
life in her defence, should the savage who had thus come upon them out of
the desert attempt violence, and he was unreasonably angry at the pity she
had shown. It was not fair to be thus misinterpreted. But he had done
wrong to swear, and more so in quitting them so abruptly. The
consciousness of his wrong-doing, however, only made him more confirmed in
it. His native obstinacy would not allow him to retract what he had said—even
to himself. Walking along, he came to Bates’s grave, and the cross upon
it. Here was another evidence of ill-treatment. She had always preferred
Bates. Now that Bates was gone, she must needs transfer her childish
affections to a convict. “Oh,” said Frere to himself, with pleasant
recollections of many coarse triumphs in love-making, “if you were a
woman, you little vixen, I’d make you love me!” When he had said this, he
laughed at himself for his folly—he was turning romantic! When he
got back, he found Dawes stretched upon the brushwood, with Sylvia sitting
near him.

“He is better,” said Mrs. Vickers, disdaining to refer to the scene of the
morning. “Sit down and have something to eat, Mr. Frere.”

“Are you better?” asked Frere, abruptly.

To his surprise, the convict answered quite civilly, “I shall be strong
again in a day or two, and then I can help you, sir.”

“Help me? How?” “To build a hut here for the ladies. And we’ll live here
all our lives, and never go back to the sheds any more.”

“He has been wandering a little,” said Mrs. Vickers. “Poor fellow, he
seems quite well behaved.”

The convict began to sing a little German song, and to beat the refrain
with his hand. Frere looked at him with curiosity. “I wonder what the
story of that man’s life has been,” he said. “A queer one, I’ll be bound.”

Sylvia looked up at him with a forgiving smile. “I’ll ask him when he gets
well,” she said, “and if you are good, I’ll tell you, Mr. Frere.”

Frere accepted the proffered friendship. “I am a great brute, Sylvia,
sometimes, ain’t I?” he said, “but I don’t mean it.”

“You are,” returned Sylvia, frankly, “but let’s shake hands, and be
friends. It’s no use quarrelling when there are only four of us, is it?”
And in this way was Rufus Dawes admitted a member of the family circle.

Within a week from the night on which he had seen the smoke of Frere’s
fire, the convict had recovered his strength, and had become an important
personage. The distrust with which he had been at first viewed had worn
off, and he was no longer an outcast, to be shunned and pointed at, or to
be referred to in whispers. He had abandoned his rough manner, and no
longer threatened or complained, and though at times a profound melancholy
would oppress him, his spirits were more even than those of Frere, who was
often moody, sullen, and overbearing. Rufus Dawes was no longer the
brutalized wretch who had plunged into the dark waters of the bay to
escape a life he loathed, and had alternately cursed and wept in the
solitudes of the forests. He was an active member of society—a
society of four—and he began to regain an air of independence and
authority. This change had been wrought by the influence of little Sylvia.
Recovered from the weakness consequent upon this terrible journey, Rufus
Dawes had experienced for the first time in six years the soothing power
of kindness. He had now an object to live for beyond himself. He was of
use to somebody, and had he died, he would have been regretted. To us this
means little; to this unhappy man it meant everything. He found, to his
astonishment, that he was not despised, and that, by the strange
concurrence of circumstances, he had been brought into a position in which
his convict experiences gave him authority. He was skilled in all the
mysteries of the prison sheds. He knew how to sustain life on as little
food as possible. He could fell trees without an axe, bake bread without
an oven, build a weatherproof hut without bricks or mortar. From the
patient he became the adviser; and from the adviser, the commander. In the
semi-savage state to which these four human beings had been brought, he
found that savage accomplishments were of most value. Might was Right, and
Maurice Frere’s authority of gentility soon succumbed to Rufus Dawes’s
authority of knowledge.

As the time wore on, and the scanty stock of provisions decreased, he
found that his authority grew more and more powerful. Did a question arise
as to the qualities of a strange plant, it was Rufus Dawes who could
pronounce upon it. Were fish to be caught, it was Rufus Dawes who caught
them. Did Mrs. Vickers complain of the instability of her brushwood hut,
it was Rufus Dawes who worked a wicker shield, and plastering it with
clay, produced a wall that defied the keenest wind. He made cups out of
pine-knots, and plates out of bark-strips. He worked harder than any three
men. Nothing daunted him, nothing discouraged him. When Mrs. Vickers fell
sick, from anxiety and insufficient food, it was Rufus Dawes who gathered
fresh leaves for her couch, who cheered her by hopeful words, who
voluntarily gave up half his own allowance of meat that she might grow
stronger on it. The poor woman and her child called him “Mr.” Dawes.

Frere watched all this with dissatisfaction that amounted at times to
positive hatred. Yet he could say nothing, for he could not but
acknowledge that, beside Dawes, he was incapable. He even submitted to
take orders from this escaped convict—it was so evident that the
escaped convict knew better than he. Sylvia began to look upon Dawes as a
second Bates. He was, moreover, all her own. She had an interest in him,
for she had nursed and protected him. If it had not been for her, this
prodigy would not have lived. He felt for her an absorbing affection that
was almost a passion. She was his good angel, his protectress, his glimpse
of Heaven. She had given him food when he was starving, and had believed
in him when the world—the world of four—had looked coldly on
him. He would have died for her, and, for love of her, hoped for the
vessel which should take her back to freedom and give him again into
bondage.

But the days stole on, and no vessel appeared. Each day they eagerly
scanned the watery horizon; each day they longed to behold the bowsprit of
the returning Ladybird glide past the jutting rock that shut out the view
of the harbour—but in vain. Mrs. Vickers’s illness increased, and
the stock of provisions began to run short. Dawes talked of putting
himself and Frere on half allowance. It was evident that, unless succour
came in a few days, they must starve.

Frere mooted all sorts of wild plans for obtaining food. He would make a
journey to the settlement, and, swimming the estuary, search if haply any
casks of biscuit had been left behind in the hurry of departure. He would
set springes for the seagulls, and snare the pigeons at Liberty Point. But
all these proved impracticable, and with blank faces they watched their
bag of flour grow smaller and smaller daily. Then the notion of escape was
broached. Could they construct a raft? Impossible without nails or ropes.
Could they build a boat? Equally impossible for the same reason. Could
they raise a fire sufficient to signal a ship? Easily; but what ship would
come within reach of that doubly-desolate spot? Nothing could be done but
wait for a vessel, which was sure to come for them sooner or later; and,
growing weaker day by day, they waited.

One morning Sylvia was sitting in the sun reading the “English History”,
which, by the accident of fright, she had brought with her on the night of
the mutiny. “Mr. Frere,” said she, suddenly, “what is an alchemist?”

“A man who makes gold,” was Frere’s not very accurate definition.

“Do you know one?”

“No.”

“Do you, Mr. Dawes?”

“I knew a man once who thought himself one.”

“What! A man who made gold?”

“After a fashion.”

“But did he make gold?” persisted Sylvia.

“No, not absolutely make it. But he was, in his worship of money, an
alchemist for all that.”

“What became of him?”

“I don’t know,” said Dawes, with so much constraint in his tone that the
child instinctively turned the subject.

“Then, alchemy is a very old art?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did the Ancient Britons know it?”

“No, not as old as that!”

Sylvia suddenly gave a little scream. The remembrance of the evening when
she read about the Ancient Britons to poor Bates came vividly into her
mind, and though she had since re-read the passage that had then attracted
her attention a hundred times, it had never before presented itself to her
in its full significance. Hurriedly turning the well-thumbed leaves, she
read aloud the passage which had provoked remark:—

“’The Ancient Britons were little better than Barbarians. They painted
their bodies with Woad, and, seated in their light coracles of skin
stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild and
savage appearance.’”

“A coracle! That’s a boat! Can’t we make a coracle, Mr. Dawes?”

CHAPTER XIII. WHAT THE SEAWEED SUGGESTED.

The question gave the marooned party new hopes. Maurice Frere, with his
usual impetuosity, declared that the project was a most feasible one, and
wondered—as such men will wonder—that it had never occurred to
him before. “It’s the simplest thing in the world!” he cried. “Sylvia, you
have saved us!” But upon taking the matter into more earnest
consideration, it became apparent that they were as yet a long way from
the realization of their hopes. To make a coracle of skins seemed
sufficiently easy, but how to obtain the skins! The one miserable hide of
the unlucky she-goat was utterly inadequate for the purpose. Sylvia—her
face beaming with the hope of escape, and with delight at having been the
means of suggesting it—watched narrowly the countenance of Rufus
Dawes, but she marked no answering gleam of joy in those eyes. “Can’t it
be done, Mr. Dawes?” she asked, trembling for the reply.

The convict knitted his brows gloomily.

“Come, Dawes!” cried Frere, forgetting his enmity for an instant in the
flash of new hope, “can’t you suggest something?”

Rufus Dawes, thus appealed to as the acknowledged Head of the little
society, felt a pleasant thrill of self-satisfaction. “I don’t know,” he
said. “I must think of it. It looks easy, and yet—” He paused as
something in the water caught his eye. It was a mass of bladdery seaweed
that the returning tide was wafting slowly to the shore. This object,
which would have passed unnoticed at any other time, suggested to Rufus
Dawes a new idea. “Yes,” he added slowly, with a change of tone, “it may
be done. I think I can see my way.”

The others preserved a respectful silence until he should speak again.
“How far do you think it is across the bay?” he asked of Frere.

“What, to Sarah Island?”

“No, to the Pilot Station.”

“About four miles.”

The convict sighed. “Too far to swim now, though I might have done it
once. But this sort of life weakens a man. It must be done after all.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Frere.

“To kill the goat.”

Sylvia uttered a little cry; she had become fond of her dumb companion.
“Kill Nanny! Oh, Mr. Dawes! What for?”

“I am going to make a boat for you,” he said, “and I want hides, and
thread, and tallow.”

A few weeks back Maurice Frere would have laughed at such a sentence, but
he had begun now to comprehend that this escaped convict was not a man to
be laughed at, and though he detested him for his superiority, he could
not but admit that he was superior.

“You can’t get more than one hide off a goat, man?” he said, with an
inquiring tone in his voice—as though it was just possible that such
a marvellous being as Dawes could get a second hide, by virtue of some
secret process known only to himself.

“I am going to catch other goats.” “Where?”

“At the Pilot Station.”

“But how are you going to get there?”

“Float across. Come, there is not time for questioning! Go and cut down
some saplings, and let us begin!”

The lieutenant-master looked at the convict prisoner with astonishment,
and then gave way to the power of knowledge, and did as he was ordered.
Before sundown that evening the carcase of poor Nanny, broken into various
most unbutcherly fragments, was hanging on the nearest tree; and Frere,
returning with as many young saplings as he could drag together, found
Rufus Dawes engaged in a curious occupation. He had killed the goat, and
having cut off its head close under the jaws, and its legs at the
knee-joint, had extracted the carcase through a slit made in the lower
portion of the belly, which slit he had now sewn together with string.
This proceeding gave him a rough bag, and he was busily engaged in filling
this bag with such coarse grass as he could collect. Frere observed, also,
that the fat of the animal was carefully preserved, and the intestines had
been placed in a pool of water to soak.

The convict, however, declined to give information as to what he intended
to do. “It’s my own notion,” he said. “Let me alone. I may make a failure
of it.” Frere, on being pressed by Sylvia, affected to know all about the
scheme, but to impose silence on himself. He was galled to think that a
convict brain should contain a mystery which he might not share.

On the next day, by Rufus Dawes’s direction, Frere cut down some rushes
that grew about a mile from the camping ground, and brought them in on his
back. This took him nearly half a day to accomplish. Short rations were
beginning to tell upon his physical powers. The convict, on the other
hand, trained by a woeful experience in the Boats to endurance of
hardship, was slowly recovering his original strength.

“What are they for?” asked Frere, as he flung the bundles down. His master
condescended to reply. “To make a float.”

“Well?”

The other shrugged his broad shoulders. “You are very dull, Mr. Frere. I
am going to swim over to the Pilot Station, and catch some of those goats.
I can get across on the stuffed skin, but I must float them back on the
reeds.”

“How the doose do you mean to catch ’em?” asked Frere, wiping the sweat
from his brow.

The convict motioned to him to approach. He did so, and saw that his
companion was cleaning the intestines of the goat. The outer membrane
having been peeled off, Rufus Dawes was turning the gut inside out. This
he did by turning up a short piece of it, as though it were a coat-sleeve,
and dipping the turned-up cuff into a pool of water. The weight of the
water pressing between the cuff and the rest of the gut, bore down a
further portion; and so, by repeated dippings, the whole length was turned
inside out. The inner membrane having been scraped away, there remained a
fine transparent tube, which was tightly twisted, and set to dry in the
sun.

“There is the catgut for the noose,” said Dawes. “I learnt that trick at
the settlement. Now come here.”

Frere, following, saw that a fire had been made between two stones, and
that the kettle was partly sunk in the ground near it. On approaching the
kettle, he found it full of smooth pebbles.

“Take out those stones,” said Dawes.

Frere obeyed, and saw at the bottom of the kettle a quantity of sparkling
white powder, and the sides of the vessel crusted with the same material.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Salt.”

“How did you get it?”

“I filled the kettle with sea-water, and then, heating those pebbles
red-hot in the fire, dropped them into it. We could have caught the steam
in a cloth and wrung out fresh water had we wished to do so. But, thank
God, we have plenty.”

Frere started. “Did you learn that at the settlement, too?” he asked.

Rufus Dawes laughed, with a sort of bitterness in his tones. “Do you think
I have been at ‘the settlement’ all my life? The thing is very simple, it
is merely evaporation.”

Frere burst out in sudden, fretful admiration: “What a fellow you are,
Dawes! What are you—I mean, what have you been?”

A triumphant light came into the other’s face, and for the instant he
seemed about to make some startling revelation. But the light faded, and
he checked himself with a gesture of pain.

“I am a convict. Never mind what I have been. A sailor, a shipbuilder,
prodigal, vagabond—what does it matter? It won’t alter my fate, will
it?”

“If we get safely back,” says Frere, “I’ll ask for a free pardon for you.
You deserve it.”

“Come,” returned Dawes, with a discordant laugh. “Let us wait until we get
back.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t want favour at your hands,” he said, with a return of the old
fierceness. “Let us get to work. Bring up the rushes here, and tie them
with a fishing line.”

At this instant Sylvia came up. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dawes. Hard at work?
Oh! what’s this in the kettle?” The voice of the child acted like a charm
upon Rufus Dawes. He smiled quite cheerfully.

“Salt, miss. I am going to catch the goats with that.”

“Catch the goats! How? Put it on their tails?” she cried merrily.

“Goats are fond of salt, and when I get over to the Pilot Station I shall
set traps for them baited with this salt. When they come to lick it, I
shall have a noose of catgut ready to catch them—do you understand?”

“But how will you get across?”

“You will see to-morrow.”

CHAPTER XIV. A WONDERFUL DAY’S WORK.

The next morning Rufus Dawes was stirring by daylight. He first got his
catgut wound upon a piece of stick, and then, having moved his frail
floats alongside the little rock that served as a pier, he took a fishing
line and a larger piece of stick, and proceeded to draw a diagram on the
sand. This diagram when completed represented a rude outline of a punt,
eight feet long and three broad. At certain distances were eight points—four
on each side—into which small willow rods were driven. He then awoke
Frere and showed the diagram to him.

“Get eight stakes of celery-top pine,” he said. “You can burn them where
you cannot cut them, and drive a stake into the place of each of these
willow wands. When you have done that, collect as many willows as you can
get. I shall not be back until tonight. Now give me a hand with the
floats.”

Frere, coming to the pier, saw Dawes strip himself, and piling his clothes
upon the stuffed goat-skin, stretch himself upon the reed bundles, and,
paddling with his hands, push off from the shore. The clothes floated high
and dry, but the reeds, depressed by the weight of the body, sank so that
the head of the convict alone appeared above water. In this fashion he
gained the middle of the current, and the out-going tide swept him down
towards the mouth of the harbour.

Frere, sulkily admiring, went back to prepare the breakfast—they
were on half rations now, Dawes having forbidden the slaughtered goat to
be eaten, lest his expedition should prove unsuccessful—wondering at
the chance which had thrown this convict in his way. “Parsons would call
it ‘a special providence,’” he said to himself. “For if it hadn’t been for
him, we should never have got thus far. If his ‘boat’ succeeds, we’re all
right, I suppose. He’s a clever dog. I wonder who he is.” His training as
a master of convicts made him think how dangerous such a man would be on a
convict station. It would be difficult to keep a fellow of such resources.
“They’ll have to look pretty sharp after him if they ever get him back,”
he thought. “I’ll have a fine tale to tell of his ingenuity.” The
conversation of the previous day occurred to him. “I promised to ask for a
free pardon. He wouldn’t have it, though. Too proud to accept it at my
hands! Wait until we get back. I’ll teach him his place; for, after all,
it is his own liberty that he is working for as well as mine—I mean
ours.” Then a thought came into his head that was in every way worthy of
him. “Suppose we took the boat, and left him behind!” The notion seemed so
ludicrously wicked that he laughed involuntarily.

“What is it, Mr. Frere?”

“Oh, it’s you, Sylvia, is it? Ha, ha, ha! I was thinking of something—something
funny.”

“Indeed,” said Sylvia, “I am glad of that. Where’s Mr. Dawes?”

Frere was displeased at the interest with which she asked the question.

“You are always thinking of that fellow. It’s Dawes, Dawes, Dawes all day
long. He has gone.”

“Oh!” with a sorrowful accent. “Mamma wants to see him.”

“What about?” says Frere roughly. “Mamma is ill, Mr. Frere.”

“Dawes isn’t a doctor. What’s the matter with her?”

“She is worse than she was yesterday. I don’t know what is the matter.”

Frere, somewhat alarmed, strode over to the little cavern.

The “lady of the Commandant” was in a strange plight. The cavern was
lofty, but narrow. In shape it was three-cornered, having two sides open
to the wind. The ingenuity of Rufus Dawes had closed these sides with
wicker-work and clay, and a sort of door of interlaced brushwood hung at
one of them. Frere pushed open this door and entered. The poor woman was
lying on a bed of rushes strewn over young brushwood, and was moaning
feebly. From the first she had felt the privation to which she was
subjected most keenly, and the mental anxiety from which she suffered
increased her physical debility. The exhaustion and lassitude to which she
had partially succumbed soon after Dawes’s arrival, had now completely
overcome her, and she was unable to rise.

“Cheer up, ma’am,” said Maurice, with an assumption of heartiness. “It
will be all right in a day or two.”

“Is it you? I sent for Mr. Dawes.”

“He is away just now. I am making a boat. Did not Sylvia tell you?”

“She told me that he was making one.”

“Well, I—that is, we—are making it. He will be back again
tonight. Can I do anything for you?”

“No, thank you. I only wanted to know how he was getting on. I must go
soon—if I am to go. Thank you, Mr. Frere. I am much obliged to you.
This is a—he-e—dreadful place to have visitors, isn’t it?”

“Never mind,” said Frere, again, “you will be back in Hobart Town in a few
days now. We are sure to get picked up by a ship. But you must cheer up.
Have some tea or something.”

“No, thank you—I don’t feel well enough to eat. I am tired.”

Sylvia began to cry.

“Don’t cry, dear. I shall be better by and by. Oh, I wish Mr. Dawes was
back.”

Maurice Frere went out indignant. This “Mr.” Dawes was everybody, it
seemed, and he was nobody. Let them wait a little. All that day, working
hard to carry out the convict’s directions, he meditated a thousand plans
by which he could turn the tables. He would accuse Dawes of violence. He
would demand that he should be taken back as an “absconder”. He would
insist that the law should take its course, and that the “death” which was
the doom of all who were caught in the act of escape from a penal
settlement should be enforced. Yet if they got safe to land, the
marvellous courage and ingenuity of the prisoner would tell strongly in
his favour. The woman and child would bear witness to his tenderness and
skill, and plead for him. As he had said, the convict deserved a pardon.
The mean, bad man, burning with wounded vanity and undefined jealousy,
waited for some method to suggest itself, by which he might claim the
credit of the escape, and snatch from the prisoner, who had dared to rival
him, the last hope of freedom.

Rufus Dawes, drifting with the current, had allowed himself to coast along
the eastern side of the harbour until the Pilot Station appeared in view
on the opposite shore. By this time it was nearly seven o’clock. He landed
at a sandy cove, and drawing up his raft, proceeded to unpack from among
his garments a piece of damper. Having eaten sparingly, and dried himself
in the sun, he replaced the remains of his breakfast, and pushed his
floats again into the water. The Pilot Station lay some distance below
him, on the opposite shore. He had purposely made his second start from a
point which would give him this advantage of position; for had he
attempted to paddle across at right angles, the strength of the current
would have swept him out to sea. Weak as he was, he several times nearly
lost his hold on the reeds. The clumsy bundle presenting too great a
broadside to the stream, whirled round and round, and was once or twice
nearly sucked under. At length, however, breathless and exhausted, he
gained the opposite bank, half a mile below the point he had attempted to
make, and carrying his floats out of reach of the tide, made off across
the hill to the Pilot Station.

Arrived there about midday, he set to work to lay his snares. The goats,
with whose hides he hoped to cover the coracle, were sufficiently numerous
and tame to encourage him to use every exertion. He carefully examined the
tracks of the animals, and found that they converged to one point—the
track to the nearest water. With much labour he cut down bushes, so as to
mask the approach to the waterhole on all sides save where these tracks
immediately conjoined. Close to the water, and at unequal distances along
the various tracks, he scattered the salt he had obtained by his rude
distillation of sea-water. Between this scattered salt and the points
where he judged the animals would be likely to approach, he set his traps,
made after the following manner. He took several pliant branches of young
trees, and having stripped them of leaves and twigs, dug with his knife
and the end of the rude paddle he had made for the voyage across the
inlet, a succession of holes, about a foot deep. At the thicker end of
these saplings he fastened, by a piece of fishing line, a small cross-bar,
which swung loosely, like the stick handle which a schoolboy fastens to
the string of his pegtop. Forcing the ends of the saplings thus prepared
into the holes, he filled in and stamped down the earth all around them.
The saplings, thus anchored as it were by the cross-pieces of stick, not
only stood firm, but resisted all his efforts to withdraw them. To the
thin ends of these saplings he bound tightly, into notches cut in the
wood, and secured by a multiplicity of twisting, the catgut springes he
had brought from the camping ground. The saplings were then bent double,
and the gutted ends secured in the ground by the same means as that
employed to fix the butts. This was the most difficult part of the
business, for it was necessary to discover precisely the amount of
pressure that would hold the bent rod without allowing it to escape by
reason of this elasticity, and which would yet “give” to a slight pull on
the gut. After many failures, however, this happy medium was discovered;
and Rufus Dawes, concealing his springes by means of twigs, smoothed the
disturbed sand with a branch and retired to watch the effect of his
labours. About two hours after he had gone, the goats came to drink. There
were five goats and two kids, and they trotted calmly along the path to
the water. The watcher soon saw that his precautions had been in a manner
wasted. The leading goat marched gravely into the springe, which, catching
him round his neck, released the bent rod, and sprang him off his legs
into the air. He uttered a comical bleat, and then hung kicking. Rufus
Dawes, though the success of the scheme was a matter of life and death,
burst out laughing at the antics of the beast. The other goats bounded off
at this sudden elevation of their leader, and three more were entrapped at
a little distance. Rufus Dawes now thought it time to secure his prize,
though three of the springes were as yet unsprung. He ran down to the old
goat, knife in hand, but before he could reach him the barely-dried catgut
gave way, and the old fellow, shaking his head with grotesque dismay, made
off at full speed. The others, however, were secured and killed. The loss
of the springe was not a serious one, for three traps remained unsprung,
and before sundown Rufus Dawes had caught four more goats. Removing with
care the catgut that had done such good service, he dragged the carcases
to the shore, and proceeded to pack them upon his floats. He discovered,
however, that the weight was too great, and that the water, entering
through the loops of the stitching in the hide, had so soaked the
rush-grass as to render the floats no longer buoyant. He was compelled,
therefore, to spend two hours in re-stuffing the skin with such material
as he could find. Some light and flock-like seaweed, which the action of
the water had swathed after the fashion of haybands along the shore,
formed an excellent substitute for grass, and, having bound his bundle of
rushes lengthwise, with the goat-skin as a centre-piece, he succeeded in
forming a sort of rude canoe, upon which the carcases floated securely.

He had eaten nothing since the morning, and the violence of his exertions
had exhausted him. Still, sustained by the excitement of the task he had
set himself, he dismissed with fierce impatience the thought of rest, and
dragged his weary limbs along the sand, endeavouring to kill fatigue by
further exertion. The tide was now running in, and he knew it was
imperative that he should regain the further shore while the current was
in his favour. To cross from the Pilot Station at low water was
impossible. If he waited until the ebb, he must spend another day on the
shore, and he could not afford to lose an hour. Cutting a long sapling, he
fastened to one end of it the floating bundle, and thus guided it to a
spot where the beach shelved abruptly into deep water. It was a clear
night, and the risen moon large and low, flung a rippling streak of silver
across the sea. On the other side of the bay all was bathed in a violet
haze, which veiled the inlet from which he had started in the morning. The
fire of the exiles, hidden behind a point of rock, cast a red glow into
the air. The ocean breakers rolled in upon the cliffs outside the bar,
with a hoarse and threatening murmur; and the rising tide rippled and
lapped with treacherous melody along the sand. He touched the chill water
and drew back. For an instant he determined to wait until the beams of
morning should illumine that beautiful but treacherous sea, and then the
thought of the helpless child, who was, without doubt, waiting and
watching for him on the shore, gave new strength to his wearied frame; and
fixing his eyes on the glow that, hovering above the dark tree-line,
marked her presence, he pushed the raft before him out into the sea. The
reeds sustained him bravely, but the strength of the current sucked him
underneath the water, and for several seconds he feared that he should be
compelled to let go his hold. But his muscles, steeled in the slow fire of
convict-labour, withstood this last strain upon them, and,
half-suffocated, with bursting chest and paralysed fingers, he preserved
his position, until the mass, getting out of the eddies along the
shore-line, drifted steadily down the silvery track that led to the
settlement. After a few moments’ rest, he set his teeth, and urged his
strange canoe towards the shore. Paddling and pushing, he gradually edged
it towards the fire-light; and at last, just when his stiffened limbs
refused to obey the impulse of his will, and he began to drift onwards
with the onward tide, he felt his feet strike firm ground. Opening his
eyes—closed in the desperation of his last efforts—he found
himself safe under the lee of the rugged promontory which hid the fire. It
seemed that the waves, tired of persecuting him, had, with disdainful
pity, cast him ashore at the goal of his hopes. Looking back, he for the
first time realized the frightful peril he had escaped, and shuddered. To
this shudder succeeded a thrill of triumph. “Why had he stayed so long,
when escape was so easy?” Dragging the carcases above high-water mark, he
rounded the little promontory and made for the fire. The recollection of
the night when he had first approached it came upon him, and increased his
exultation. How different a man was he now from then! Passing up the sand,
he saw the stakes which he had directed Frere to cut whiten in the
moonshine. His officer worked for him! In his own brain alone lay the
secret of escape! He—Rufus Dawes—the scarred, degraded
“prisoner”, could alone get these three beings back to civilization. Did
he refuse to aid them, they would for ever remain in that prison, where he
had so long suffered. The tables were turned—he had become a gaoler!
He had gained the fire before the solitary watcher there heard his
footsteps, and spread his hands to the blaze in silence. He felt as Frere
would have felt, had their positions been reversed, disdainful of the man
who had stopped at home.

Frere, starting, cried, “It is you! Have you succeeded?”

Rufus Dawes nodded.

“What! Did you catch them?”

“There are four carcases down by the rocks. You can have meat for
breakfast to-morrow!”

The child, at the sound of the voice, came running down from the hut. “Oh,
Mr. Dawes! I am so glad! We were beginning to despair—mamma and I.”

Dawes snatched her from the ground, and bursting into a joyous laugh,
swung her into the air. “Tell me,” he cried, holding up the child with two
dripping arms above him, “what you will do for me if I bring you and mamma
safe home again?”

“Give you a free pardon,” says Sylvia, “and papa shall make you his
servant!” Frere burst out laughing at this reply, and Dawes, with a
choking sensation in his throat, put the child upon the ground and walked
away.

This was in truth all he could hope for. All his scheming, all his
courage, all his peril, would but result in the patronage of a great man
like Major Vickers. His heart, big with love, with self-denial, and with
hopes of a fair future, would have this flattering unction laid to it. He
had performed a prodigy of skill and daring, and for his reward he was to
be made a servant to the creatures he had protected. Yet what more could a
convict expect? Sylvia saw how deeply her unconscious hand had driven the
iron, and ran up to the man she had wounded. “And, Mr. Dawes, remember
that I shall love you always.” The convict, however, his momentary
excitement over, motioned her away; and she saw him stretch himself
wearily under the shadow of a rock.

CHAPTER XV. THE CORACLE.

In the morning, however, Rufus Dawes was first at work, and made no
allusion to the scene of the previous evening. He had already skinned one
of the goats, and he directed Frere to set to work upon another. “Cut down
the rump to the hock, and down the brisket to the knee,” he said. “I want
the hides as square as possible.” By dint of hard work they got the four
goats skinned, and the entrails cleaned ready for twisting, by breakfast
time; and having broiled some of the flesh, made a hearty meal. Mrs.
Vickers being no better, Dawes went to see her, and seemed to have made
friends again with Sylvia, for he came out of the hut with the child’s
hand in his. Frere, who was cutting the meat in long strips to dry in the
sun, saw this, and it added fresh fuel to the fire in his unreasonable
envy and jealousy. However, he said nothing, for his enemy had not yet
shown him how the boat was to be made. Before midday, however, he was a
partner in the secret, which, after all, was a very simple one.

Rufus Dawes took two of the straightest and most tapered of the celery-top
pines which Frere had cut on the previous day, and lashed them tightly
together, with the butts outwards. He thus produced a spliced stick about
twelve feet long. About two feet from either end he notched the young tree
until he could bend the extremities upwards; and having so bent them, he
secured the bent portions in their places by means of lashings of raw
hide. The spliced trees now presented a rude outline of the section of a
boat, having the stem, keel, and stern all in one piece. This having been
placed lengthwise between the stakes, four other poles, notched in two
places, were lashed from stake to stake, running crosswise to the keel,
and forming the knees. Four saplings were now bent from end to end of the
upturned portions of the keel that represented stem and stern. Two of
these four were placed above, as gunwales; two below as bottom rails. At
each intersection the sticks were lashed firmly with fishing line. The
whole framework being complete, the stakes were drawn out, and there lay
upon the ground the skeleton of a boat eight feet long by three broad.

Frere, whose hands were blistered and sore, would fain have rested; but
the convict would not hear of it. “Let us finish,” he said regardless of
his own fatigue; “the skins will be dry if we stop.”

“I can work no more,” says Frere sulkily; “I can’t stand. You’ve got
muscles of iron, I suppose. I haven’t.”

“They made me work when I couldn’t stand, Maurice Frere. It is wonderful
what spirit the cat gives a man. There’s nothing like work to get rid of
aching muscles—so they used to tell me.”

“Well, what’s to be done now?”

“Cover the boat. There, you can set the fat to melt, and sew these hides
together. Two and two, do you see? and then sew the pair at the necks.
There is plenty of catgut yonder.”

“Don’t talk to me as if I was a dog!” says Frere suddenly. “Be civil,
can’t you.”

But the other, busily trimming and cutting at the projecting pieces of
sapling, made no reply. It is possible that he thought the fatigued
lieutenant beneath his notice. About an hour before sundown the hides were
ready, and Rufus Dawes, having in the meantime interlaced the ribs of the
skeleton with wattles, stretched the skins over it, with the hairy side
inwards. Along the edges of this covering he bored holes at intervals, and
passing through these holes thongs of twisted skin, he drew the whole to
the top rail of the boat. One last precaution remained. Dipping the
pannikin into the melted tallow, he plentifully anointed the seams of the
sewn skins. The boat, thus turned topsy-turvy, looked like a huge walnut
shell covered with red and reeking hide, or the skull of some Titan who
had been scalped. “There!” cried Rufus Dawes, triumphant. “Twelve hours in
the sun to tighten the hides, and she’ll swim like a duck.”

The next day was spent in minor preparations. The jerked goat-meat was
packed securely into as small a compass as possible. The rum barrel was
filled with water, and water bags were improvised out of portions of the
intestines of the goats. Rufus Dawes, having filled these last with water,
ran a wooden skewer through their mouths, and twisted it tight, tourniquet
fashion. He also stripped cylindrical pieces of bark, and having sewn each
cylinder at the side, fitted to it a bottom of the same material, and
caulked the seams with gum and pine-tree resin. Thus four tolerable
buckets were obtained. One goatskin yet remained, and out of that it was
determined to make a sail. “The currents are strong,” said Rufus Dawes,
“and we shall not be able to row far with such oars as we have got. If we
get a breeze it may save our lives.” It was impossible to “step” a mast in
the frail basket structure, but this difficulty was overcome by a simple
contrivance. From thwart to thwart two poles were bound, and the mast,
lashed between these poles with thongs of raw hide, was secured by shrouds
of twisted fishing line running fore and aft. Sheets of bark were placed
at the bottom of the craft, and made a safe flooring. It was late in the
afternoon on the fourth day when these preparations were completed, and it
was decided that on the morrow they should adventure the journey. “We will
coast down to the Bar,” said Rufus Dawes, “and wait for the slack of the
tide. I can do no more now.”

Sylvia, who had seated herself on a rock at a little distance, called to
them. Her strength was restored by the fresh meat, and her childish
spirits had risen with the hope of safety. The mercurial little creature
had wreathed seaweed about her head, and holding in her hand a long twig
decorated with a tuft of leaves to represent a wand, she personified one
of the heroines of her books.

“I am the Queen of the Island,” she said merrily, “and you are my obedient
subjects. Pray, Sir Eglamour, is the boat ready?”

“It is, your Majesty,” said poor Dawes.

“Then we will see it. Come, walk in front of me. I won’t ask you to rub
your nose upon the ground, like Man Friday, because that would be
uncomfortable. Mr. Frere, you don’t play?”

“Oh, yes!” says Frere, unable to withstand the charming pout that
accompanied the words. “I’ll play. What am I to do?”

“You must walk on this side, and be respectful. Of course it is only
Pretend, you know,” she added, with a quick consciousness of Frere’s
conceit. “Now then, the Queen goes down to the Seashore surrounded by her
Nymphs! There is no occasion to laugh, Mr. Frere. Of course, Nymphs are
very different from you, but then we can’t help that.”

Marching in this pathetically ridiculous fashion across the sand, they
halted at the coracle. “So that is the boat!” says the Queen, fairly
surprised out of her assumption of dignity. “You are a Wonderful Man, Mr.
Dawes!”

Rufus Dawes smiled sadly. “It is very simple.”

“Do you call this simple?” says Frere, who in the general joy had shaken
off a portion of his sulkiness. “By George, I don’t! This is ship-building
with a vengeance, this is. There’s no scheming about this—it’s all
sheer hard work.”

“Yes!” echoed Sylvia, “sheer hard work—sheer hard work by good Mr.
Dawes!” And she began to sing a childish chant of triumph, drawing lines
and letters in the sand the while, with the sceptre of the Queen.

“Good Mr. Dawes! Good Mr. Dawes! This is the work of Good Mr. Dawes!”

Maurice could not resist a sneer.

“See-saw, Margery Daw, Sold her bed, and lay upon straw!” said he.

“Good Mr. Dawes!” repeated Sylvia. “Good Mr. Dawes! Why shouldn’t I say
it? You are disagreeable, sir. I won’t play with you any more,” and she
went off along the sand.

“Poor little child,” said Rufus Dawes. “You speak too harshly to her.”

Frere—now that the boat was made—had regained his
self-confidence. Civilization seemed now brought sufficiently close to him
to warrant his assuming the position of authority to which his social
position entitled him. “One would think that a boat had never been built
before to hear her talk,” he said. “If this washing-basket had been one of
my old uncle’s three-deckers, she couldn’t have said much more. By the
Lord!” he added, with a coarse laugh, “I ought to have a natural talent
for ship-building; for if the old villain hadn’t died when he did, I
should have been a ship-builder myself.”

Rufus Dawes turned his back at the word “died”, and busied himself with
the fastenings of the hides. Could the other have seen his face, he would
have been struck by its sudden pallor.

“Ah!” continued Frere, half to himself, and half to his companion, “that’s
a sum of money to lose, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” asked the convict, without turning his face.

“Mean! Why, my good fellow, I should have been left a quarter of a million
of money, but the old hunks who was going to give it to me died before he
could alter his will, and every shilling went to a scapegrace son, who
hadn’t been near the old man for years. That’s the way of the world, isn’t
it?”

Rufus Dawes, still keeping his face away, caught his breath as if in
astonishment, and then, recovering himself, he said in a harsh voice, “A
fortunate fellow—that son!”

“Fortunate!” cries Frere, with another oath. “Oh yes, he was fortunate! He
was burnt to death in the Hydaspes, and never heard of his luck. His
mother has got the money, though. I never saw a shilling of it.” And then,
seemingly displeased with himself for having allowed his tongue to get the
better of his dignity, he walked away to the fire, musing, doubtless, on
the difference between Maurice Frere, with a quarter of a million,
disporting himself in the best society that could be procured, with
command of dog-carts, prize-fighters, and gamecocks galore; and Maurice
Frere, a penniless lieutenant, marooned on the barren coast of Macquarie
Harbour, and acting as boat-builder to a runaway convict.

Rufus Dawes was also lost in reverie. He leant upon the gunwale of the
much-vaunted boat, and his eyes were fixed upon the sea, weltering golden
in the sunset, but it was evident that he saw nothing of the scene before
him. Struck dumb by the sudden intelligence of his fortune, his
imagination escaped from his control, and fled away to those scenes which
he had striven so vainly to forget. He was looking far away—across
the glittering harbour and the wide sea beyond it—looking at the old
house at Hampstead, with its well-remembered gloomy garden. He pictured
himself escaped from this present peril, and freed from the sordid
thraldom which so long had held him. He saw himself returning, with some
plausible story of his wanderings, to take possession of the wealth which
was his—saw himself living once more, rich, free, and respected, in
the world from which he had been so long an exile. He saw his mother’s
sweet pale face, the light of a happy home circle. He saw himself—received
with tears of joy and marvelling affection—entering into this home
circle as one risen from the dead. A new life opened radiant before him,
and he was lost in the contemplation of his own happiness.

So absorbed was he that he did not hear the light footstep of the child
across the sand. Mrs. Vickers, having been told of the success which had
crowned the convict’s efforts, had overcome her weakness so far as to
hobble down the beach to the boat, and now, heralded by Sylvia,
approached, leaning on the arm of Maurice Frere.

“Mamma has come to see the boat, Mr. Dawes!” cries Sylvia, but Dawes did
not hear.

The child reiterated her words, but still the silent figure did not reply.

“Mr. Dawes!” she cried again, and pulled him by the coat-sleeve.

The touch aroused him, and looking down, he saw the pretty, thin face
upturned to his. Scarcely conscious of what he did, and still following
out the imagining which made him free, wealthy, and respected, he caught
the little creature in his arms—as he might have caught his own
daughter—and kissed her. Sylvia said nothing; but Mr. Frere—arrived,
by his chain of reasoning, at quite another conclusion as to the state of
affairs—was astonished at the presumption of the man. The lieutenant
regarded himself as already reinstated in his old position, and with Mrs.
Vickers on his arm, reproved the apparent insolence of the convict as
freely as he would have done had they both been at his own little kingdom
of Maria Island. “You insolent beggar!” he cried. “Do you dare! Keep your
place, sir!”

The sentence recalled Rufus Dawes to reality. His place was that of a
convict. What business had he with tenderness for the daughter of his
master? Yet, after all he had done, and proposed to do, this harsh
judgment upon him seemed cruel. He saw the two looking at the boat he had
built. He marked the flush of hope on the cheek of the poor lady, and the
full-blown authority that already hardened the eye of Maurice Frere, and
all at once he understood the result of what he had done. He had, by his
own act, given himself again to bondage. As long as escape was
impracticable, he had been useful, and even powerful. Now he had pointed
out the way of escape, he had sunk into the beast of burden once again. In
the desert he was “Mr.” Dawes, the saviour; in civilized life he would
become once more Rufus Dawes, the ruffian, the prisoner, the absconder. He
stood mute, and let Frere point out the excellences of the craft in
silence; and then, feeling that the few words of thanks uttered by the
lady were chilled by her consciousness of the ill-advised freedom he had
taken with the child, he turned on his heel, and strode up into the bush.

“A queer fellow,” said Frere, as Mrs. Vickers followed the retreating
figure with her eyes. “Always in an ill temper.” “Poor man! He has behaved
very kindly to us,” said Mrs. Vickers. Yet even she felt the change of
circumstance, and knew that, without any reason she could name, her blind
trust and hope in the convict who had saved their lives had been
transformed into a patronizing kindliness which was quite foreign to
esteem or affection.

“Come, let us have some supper,” says Frere. “The last we shall eat here,
I hope. He will come back when his fit of sulks is over.”

But he did not come back, and, after a few expressions of wonder at his
absence, Mrs. Vickers and her daughter, rapt in the hopes and fears of the
morrow, almost forgot that he had left them. With marvellous credulity
they looked upon the terrible stake they were about to play for as already
won. The possession of the boat seemed to them so wonderful, that the
perils of the voyage they were to make in it were altogether lost sight
of. As for Maurice Frere, he was rejoiced that the convict was out of the
way. He wished that he was out of the way altogether.

CHAPTER XVI. THE WRITING ON THE SAND.

Having got out of eye-shot of the ungrateful creatures he had befriended,
Rufus Dawes threw himself upon the ground in an agony of mingled rage and
regret. For the first time for six years he had tasted the happiness of
doing good, the delight of self-abnegation. For the first time for six
years he had broken through the selfish misanthropy he had taught himself.
And this was his reward! He had held his temper in check, in order that it
might not offend others. He had banished the galling memory of his
degradation, lest haply some shadow of it might seem to fall upon the fair
child whose lot had been so strangely cast with his. He had stifled the
agony he suffered, lest its expression should give pain to those who
seemed to feel for him. He had forborne retaliation, when retaliation
would have been most sweet. Having all these years waited and watched for
a chance to strike his persecutors, he had held his hand now that an
unlooked-for accident had placed the weapon of destruction in his grasp.
He had risked his life, forgone his enmities, almost changed his nature—and
his reward was cold looks and harsh words, so soon as his skill had paved
the way to freedom. This knowledge coming upon him while the thrill of
exultation at the astounding news of his riches yet vibrated in his brain,
made him grind his teeth with rage at his own hard fate. Bound by the
purest and holiest of ties—the affection of a son to his mother—he
had condemned himself to social death, rather than buy his liberty and
life by a revelation which would shame the gentle creature whom he loved.
By a strange series of accidents, fortune had assisted him to maintain the
deception he had practised. His cousin had not recognized him. The very
ship in which he was believed to have sailed had been lost with every soul
on board. His identity had been completely destroyed—no link
remained which could connect Rufus Dawes, the convict, with Richard
Devine, the vanished heir to the wealth of the dead ship-builder.

Oh, if he had only known! If, while in the gloomy prison, distracted by a
thousand fears, and weighed down by crushing evidence of circumstance, he
had but guessed that death had stepped between Sir Richard and his
vengeance, he might have spared himself the sacrifice he had made. He had
been tried and condemned as a nameless sailor, who could call no witnesses
in his defence, and give no particulars as to his previous history. It was
clear to him now that he might have adhered to his statement of ignorance
concerning the murder, locked in his breast the name of the murderer, and
have yet been free. Judges are just, but popular opinion is powerful, and
it was not impossible that Richard Devine, the millionaire, would have
escaped the fate which had overtaken Rufus Dawes, the sailor. Into his
calculations in the prison—when, half-crazed with love, with terror,
and despair, he had counted up his chances of life—the wild
supposition that he had even then inherited the wealth of the father who
had disowned him, had never entered. The knowledge of that fact would have
altered the whole current of his life, and he learnt it for the first time
now—too late. Now, lying prone upon the sand; now, wandering
aimlessly up and down among the stunted trees that bristled white beneath
the mist-barred moon; now, sitting—as he had sat in the prison long
ago—with the head gripped hard between his hands, swaying his body
to and fro, he thought out the frightful problem of his bitter life. Of
little use was the heritage that he had gained. A convict-absconder, whose
hands were hard with menial service, and whose back was scarred with the
lash, could never be received among the gently nurtured. Let him lay claim
to his name and rights, what then? He was a convicted felon, and his name
and rights had been taken from him by the law. Let him go and tell Maurice
Frere that he was his lost cousin. He would be laughed at. Let him
proclaim aloud his birth and innocence, and the convict-sheds would grin,
and the convict overseer set him to harder labour. Let him even, by dint
of reiteration, get his wild story believed, what would happen? If it was
heard in England—after the lapse of years, perhaps—that a
convict in the chain-gang in Macquarie Harbour—a man held to be a
murderer, and whose convict career was one long record of mutiny and
punishment—claimed to be the heir to an English fortune, and to own
the right to dispossess staid and worthy English folk of their rank and
station, with what feeling would the announcement be received? Certainly
not with a desire to redeem this ruffian from his bonds and place him in
the honoured seat of his dead father. Such intelligence would be regarded
as a calamity, an unhappy blot upon a fair reputation, a disgrace to an
honoured and unsullied name. Let him succeed, let him return again to the
mother who had by this time become reconciled, in a measure, to his loss;
he would, at the best, be to her a living shame, scarcely less degrading
than that which she had dreaded.

But success was almost impossible. He did not dare to retrace his steps
through the hideous labyrinth into which he had plunged. Was he to show
his scarred shoulders as a proof that he was a gentleman and an innocent
man? Was he to relate the nameless infamies of Macquarie Harbour as a
proof that he was entitled to receive the hospitalities of the generous,
and to sit, a respected guest, at the tables of men of refinement? Was he
to quote the horrible slang of the prison-ship, and retail the filthy
jests of the chain-gang and the hulks, as a proof that he was a fit
companion for pure-minded women and innocent children? Suppose even that
he could conceal the name of the real criminal, and show himself guiltless
of the crime for which he had been condemned, all the wealth in the world
could not buy back that blissful ignorance of evil which had once been
his. All the wealth in the world could not purchase the self-respect which
had been cut out of him by the lash, or banish from his brain the memory
of his degradation.

For hours this agony of thought racked him. He cried out as though with
physical pain, and then lay in a stupor, exhausted with actual physical
suffering. It was hopeless to think of freedom and of honour. Let him keep
silence, and pursue the life fate had marked out for him. He would return
to bondage. The law would claim him as an absconder, and would mete out to
him such punishment as was fitting. Perhaps he might escape severest
punishment, as a reward for his exertions in saving the child. He might
consider himself fortunate if such was permitted to him. Fortunate!
Suppose he did not go back at all, but wandered away into the wilderness
and died? Better death than such a doom as his. Yet need he die? He had
caught goats, he could catch fish. He could build a hut. In here was,
perchance, at the deserted settlement some remnant of seed corn that,
planted, would give him bread. He had built a boat, he had made an oven,
he had fenced in a hut. Surely he could contrive to live alone savage and
free. Alone! He had contrived all these marvels alone! Was not the boat he
himself had built below upon the shore? Why not escape in her, and leave
to their fate the miserable creatures who had treated him with such
ingratitude?

The idea flashed into his brain, as though someone had spoken the words
into his ear. Twenty strides would place him in possession of the boat,
and half an hour’s drifting with the current would take him beyond
pursuit. Once outside the Bar, he would make for the westward, in the
hopes of falling in with some whaler. He would doubtless meet with one
before many days, and he was well supplied with provision and water in the
meantime. A tale of shipwreck would satisfy the sailors, and—he
paused—he had forgotten that the rags which he wore would betray
him. With an exclamation of despair, he started from the posture in which
he was lying. He thrust out his hands to raise himself, and his fingers
came in contact with something soft. He had been lying at the foot of some
loose stones that were piled cairnwise beside a low-growing bush; and the
object that he had touched was protruding from beneath these stones. He
caught it and dragged it forth. It was the shirt of poor Bates. With
trembling hands he tore away the stones, and pulled forth the rest of the
garments. They seemed as though they had been left purposely for him.
Heaven had sent him the very disguise he needed.

The night had passed during his reverie, and the first faint streaks of
dawn began to lighten in the sky. Haggard and pale, he rose to his feet,
and scarcely daring to think about what he proposed to do, ran towards the
boat. As he ran, however, the voice that he had heard encouraged him.
“Your life is of more importance than theirs. They will die, but they have
been ungrateful and deserve death. You will escape out of this Hell, and
return to the loving heart who mourns you. You can do more good to mankind
than by saving the lives of these people who despise you. Moreover, they
may not die. They are sure to be sent for. Think of what awaits you when
you return—an absconded convict!”

He was within three feet of the boat, when he suddenly checked himself,
and stood motionless, staring at the sand with as much horror as though he
saw there the Writing which foretold the doom of Belshazzar. He had come
upon the sentence traced by Sylvia the evening before, and glittering in
the low light of the red sun suddenly risen from out the sea, it seemed to
him that the letters had shaped themselves at his very feet,

GOOD MR. DAWES.

“Good Mr. Dawes”! What a frightful reproach there was to him in that
simple sentence! What a world of cowardice, baseness, and cruelty, had not
those eleven letters opened to him! He heard the voice of the child who
had nursed him, calling on him to save her. He saw her at that instant
standing between him and the boat, as she had stood when she held out to
him the loaf, on the night of his return to the settlement.

He staggered to the cavern, and, seizing the sleeping Frere by the arm,
shook him violently. “Awake! awake!” he cried, “and let us leave this
place!” Frere, starting to his feet, looked at the white face and
bloodshot eyes of the wretched man before him with blunt astonishment.
“What’s the matter with you, man?” he said. “You look as if you’d seen a
ghost!”

At the sound of his voice Rufus Dawes gave a long sigh, and drew his hand
across his eyes.

“Come, Sylvia!” shouted Frere. “It’s time to get up. I am ready to go!”

The sacrifice was complete. The convict turned away, and two great
glistening tears rolled down his rugged face, and fell upon the sand.

CHAPTER XVII. AT SEA.

An hour after sunrise, the frail boat, which was the last hope of these
four human beings, drifted with the outgoing current towards the mouth of
the harbour. When first launched she had come nigh swamping, being
overloaded, and it was found necessary to leave behind a great portion of
the dried meat. With what pangs this was done can be easily imagined, for
each atom of food seemed to represent an hour of life. Yet there was no
help for it. As Frere said, it was “neck or nothing with them”. They must
get away at all hazards.

That evening they camped at the mouth of the Gates, Dawes being afraid to
risk a passage until the slack of the tide, and about ten o’clock at night
adventured to cross the Bar. The night was lovely, and the sea calm. It
seemed as though Providence had taken pity on them; for, notwithstanding
the insecurity of the craft and the violence of the breakers, the dreaded
passage was made with safety. Once, indeed, when they had just entered the
surf, a mighty wave, curling high above them, seemed about to overwhelm
the frail structure of skins and wickerwork; but Rufus Dawes, keeping the
nose of the boat to the sea, and Frere baling with his hat, they succeeded
in reaching deep water. A great misfortune, however, occurred. Two of the
bark buckets, left by some unpardonable oversight uncleated, were washed
overboard, and with them nearly a fifth of their scanty store of water. In
the face of the greater peril, the accident seemed trifling; and as,
drenched and chilled, they gained the open sea, they could not but admit
that fortune had almost miraculously befriended them.

They made tedious way with their rude oars; a light breeze from the
north-west sprang up with the dawn, and, hoisting the goat-skin sail, they
crept along the coast. It was resolved that the two men should keep watch
and watch; and Frere for the second time enforced his authority by giving
the first watch to Rufus Dawes. “I am tired,” he said, “and shall sleep
for a little while.”

Rufus Dawes, who had not slept for two nights, and who had done all the
harder work, said nothing. He had suffered so much during the last two
days that his senses were dulled to pain.

Frere slept until late in the afternoon, and, when he woke, found the boat
still tossing on the sea, and Sylvia and her mother both seasick. This
seemed strange to him. Sea-sickness appeared to be a malady which belonged
exclusively to civilization. Moodily watching the great green waves which
curled incessantly between him and the horizon, he marvelled to think how
curiously events had come about. A leaf had, as it were, been torn out of
his autobiography. It seemed a lifetime since he had done anything but
moodily scan the sea or shore. Yet, on the morning of leaving the
settlement, he had counted the notches on a calendar-stick he carried, and
had been astonished to find them but twenty-two in number. Taking out his
knife, he cut two nicks in the wicker gunwale of the coracle. That brought
him to twenty-four days. The mutiny had taken place on the 13th of
January; it was now the 6th of February. “Surely,” thought he, “the
Ladybird might have returned by this time.” There was no one to tell him
that the Ladybird had been driven into Port Davey by stress of weather,
and detained there for seventeen days.

That night the wind fell, and they had to take to their oars. Rowing all
night, they made but little progress, and Rufus Dawes suggested that they
should put in to the shore and wait until the breeze sprang up. But, upon
getting under the lee of a long line of basaltic rocks which rose abruptly
out of the sea, they found the waves breaking furiously upon a horseshoe
reef, six or seven miles in length. There was nothing for it but to coast
again. They coasted for two days, without a sign of a sail, and on the
third day a great wind broke upon them from the south-east, and drove them
back thirty miles. The coracle began to leak, and required constant
bailing. What was almost as bad, the rum cask, that held the best part of
their water, had leaked also, and was now half empty. They caulked it, by
cutting out the leak, and then plugging the hole with linen.

“It’s lucky we ain’t in the tropics,” said Frere. Poor Mrs. Vickers, lying
in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in her wet shawl, and chilled to the
bone with the bitter wind, had not the heart to speak. Surely the stifling
calm of the tropics could not be worse than this bleak and barren sea.

The position of the four poor creatures was now almost desperate. Mrs.
Vickers, indeed, seemed completely prostrated; and it was evident that,
unless some help came, she could not long survive the continued exposure
to the weather. The child was in somewhat better case. Rufus Dawes had
wrapped her in his woollen shirt, and, unknown to Frere, had divided with
her daily his allowance of meat. She lay in his arms at night, and in the
day crept by his side for shelter and protection. As long as she was near
him she felt safe. They spoke little to each other, but when Rufus Dawes
felt the pressure of her tiny hand in his, or sustained the weight of her
head upon his shoulder, he almost forgot the cold that froze him, and the
hunger that gnawed him.

So two more days passed, and yet no sail. On the tenth day after their
departure from Macquarie Harbour they came to the end of their provisions.
The salt water had spoiled the goat-meat, and soaked the bread into a
nauseous paste. The sea was still running high, and the wind, having
veered to the north, was blowing with increased violence. The long low
line of coast that stretched upon their left hand was at times obscured by
a blue mist. The water was the colour of mud, and the sky threatened rain.
The wretched craft to which they had entrusted themselves was leaking in
four places. If caught in one of the frequent storms which ravaged that
iron-bound coast, she could not live an hour. The two men, wearied,
hungry, and cold, almost hoped for the end to come quickly. To add to
their distress, the child was seized with fever. She was hot and cold by
turns, and in the intervals of moaning talked deliriously. Rufus Dawes,
holding her in his arms, watched the suffering he was unable to alleviate
with a savage despair at his heart. Was she to die after all?

So another day and night passed, and the eleventh morning saw the boat yet
alive, rolling in the trough of the same deserted sea. The four exiles lay
in her almost without breath.

All at once Dawes uttered a cry, and, seizing the sheet, put the clumsy
craft about. “A sail! a sail!” he cried. “Do you not see her?”

Frere’s hungry eyes ranged the dull water in vain.

“There is no sail, fool!” he said. “You mock us!”

The boat, no longer following the line of the coast, was running nearly
due south, straight into the great Southern Ocean. Frere tried to wrest
the thong from the hand of the convict, and bring the boat back to her
course. “Are you mad?” he asked, in fretful terror, “to run us out to
sea?”

“Sit down!” returned the other, with a menacing gesture, and staring
across the grey water. “I tell you I see a sail!”

Frere, overawed by the strange light which gleamed in the eyes of his
companion, shifted sulkily back to his place. “Have your own way,” he
said, “madman! It serves me right for putting off to sea in such a devil’s
craft as this!”

After all, what did it matter? As well be drowned in mid-ocean as in sight
of land.

The long day wore out, and no sail appeared. The wind freshened towards
evening, and the boat, plunging clumsily on the long brown waves,
staggered as though drunk with the water she had swallowed, for at one
place near the bows the water ran in and out as through a slit in a wine
skin. The coast had altogether disappeared, and the huge ocean—vast,
stormy, and threatening—heaved and hissed all around them. It seemed
impossible that they should live until morning. But Rufus Dawes, with his
eyes fixed on some object visible alone to him, hugged the child in his
arms, and drove the quivering coracle into the black waste of night and
sea. To Frere, sitting sullenly in the bows, the aspect of this grim
immovable figure, with its back-blown hair and staring eyes, had in it
something supernatural and horrible. He began to think that privation and
anxiety had driven the unhappy convict mad.

Thinking and shuddering over his fate, he fell—as it seemed to him—into
a momentary sleep, in the midst of which someone called to him. He started
up, with shaking knees and bristling hair. The day had broken, and the
dawn, in one long pale streak of sickly saffron, lay low on the left hand.
Between this streak of saffron-coloured light and the bows of the boat
gleamed for an instant a white speck.

“A sail! a sail!” cried Rufus Dawes, a wild light gleaming in his eyes,
and a strange tone vibrating in his voice. “Did I not tell you that I saw
a sail?”

Frere, utterly confounded, looked again, with his heart in his mouth, and
again did the white speck glimmer. For an instant he felt almost safe, and
then a blanker despair than before fell upon him. From the distance at
which she was, it was impossible for the ship to sight the boat.

“They will never see us!” he cried. “Dawes—Dawes! Do you hear? They
will never see us!”

Rufus Dawes started as if from a trance. Lashing the sheet to the pole
which served as a gunwale, he laid the sleeping child by her mother, and
tearing up the strip of bark on which he had been sitting, moved to the
bows of the boat.

“They will see this! Tear up that board! So! Now, place it thus across the
bows. Hack off that sapling end! Now that dry twist of osier! Never mind
the boat, man; we can afford to leave her now. Tear off that outer strip
of hide. See, the wood beneath is dry! Quick—you are so slow.”

“What are you going to do?” cried Frere, aghast, as the convict tore up
all the dry wood he could find, and heaped it on the sheet of bark placed
on the bows.

“To make a fire! See!”

Frere began to comprehend. “I have three matches left,” he said, fumbling,
with trembling fingers, in his pocket. “I wrapped them in one of the
leaves of the book to keep them dry.”

The word “book” was a new inspiration. Rufus Dawes seized upon the English
History, which had already done such service, tore out the drier leaves in
the middle of the volume, and carefully added them to the little heap of
touchwood.

“Now, steady!”

The match was struck and lighted. The paper, after a few obstinate
curlings, caught fire, and Frere, blowing the young flame with his breath,
the bark began to burn. He piled upon the fire all that was combustible,
the hides began to shrivel, and a great column of black smoke rose up over
the sea.

“Sylvia!” cried Rufus Dawes. “Sylvia! My darling! You are saved!”

She opened her blue eyes and looked at him, but gave no sign of
recognition. Delirium had hold of her, and in the hour of safety the child
had forgotten her preserver. Rufus Dawes, overcome by this last cruel
stroke of fortune, sat down in the stern of the boat, with the child in
his arms, speechless. Frere, feeding the fire, thought that the chance he
had so longed for had come. With the mother at the point of death, and the
child delirious, who could testify to this hated convict’s skilfulness? No
one but Mr. Maurice Frere, and Mr. Maurice Frere, as Commandant of
convicts, could not but give up an “absconder” to justice.

The ship changed her course, and came towards this strange fire in the
middle of the ocean. The boat, the fore part of her blazing like a pine
torch, could not float above an hour. The little group of the convict and
the child remained motionless. Mrs. Vickers was lying senseless, ignorant
even of the approaching succour.

The ship—a brig, with American colours flying—came within hail
of them. Frere could almost distinguish figures on her deck. He made his
way aft to where Dawes was sitting, unconscious, with the child in his
arms, and stirred him roughly with his foot.

“Go forward,” he said, in tones of command, “and give the child to me.”

Rufus Dawes raised his head, and, seeing the approaching vessel, awoke to
the consciousness of his duty. With a low laugh, full of unutterable
bitterness, he placed the burden he had borne so tenderly in the arms of
the lieutenant, and moved to the blazing bows.

The brig was close upon them. Her canvas loomed large and dusky, shadowing
the sea. Her wet decks shone in the morning sunlight. From her bulwarks
peered bearded and eager faces, looking with astonishment at this burning
boat and its haggard company, alone on that barren and stormy ocean.

Frere, with Sylvia in his arms, waited for her.

END OF BOOK THE SECOND

BOOK III.—PORT ARTHUR. 1838.

CHAPTER I. A LABOURER IN THE VINEYARD.

“Society in Hobart Town, in this year of grace 1838, is, my dear lord,
composed of very curious elements.” So ran a passage in the sparkling
letter which the Rev. Mr. Meekin, newly-appointed chaplain, and
seven-days’ resident in Van Diemen’s Land, was carrying to the post
office, for the delectation of his patron in England. As the reverend
gentleman tripped daintily down the summer street that lay between the
blue river and the purple mountain, he cast his mild eyes hither and
thither upon human nature, and the sentence he had just penned recurred to
him with pleasurable appositeness. Elbowed by well-dressed officers of
garrison, bowing sweetly to well-dressed ladies, shrinking from
ill-dressed, ill-odoured ticket-of-leave men, or hastening across a street
to avoid being run down by the hand-carts that, driven by little gangs of
grey-clothed convicts, rattled and jangled at him unexpectedly from behind
corners, he certainly felt that the society through which he moved was
composed of curious elements. Now passed, with haughty nose in the air, a
newly-imported government official, relaxing for an instant his rigidity
of demeanour to smile languidly at the chaplain whom Governor Sir John
Franklin delighted to honour; now swaggered, with coarse defiance of
gentility and patronage, a wealthy ex-prisoner, grown fat on the profits
of rum. The population that was abroad on that sunny December afternoon
had certainly an incongruous appearance to a dapper clergyman lately
arrived from London, and missing, for the first time in his sleek,
easy-going life, those social screens which in London civilization
decorously conceal the frailties and vices of human nature. Clad in glossy
black, of the most fashionable clerical cut, with dandy boots, and gloves
of lightest lavender—a white silk overcoat hinting that its wearer
was not wholly free from sensitiveness to sun and heat—the Reverend
Meekin tripped daintily to the post office, and deposited his letter. Two
ladies met him as he turned.

“Mr. Meekin!”

Mr. Meekin’s elegant hat was raised from his intellectual brow and hovered
in the air, like some courteous black bird, for an instant. “Mrs.
Jellicoe! Mrs. Protherick! My dear leddies, this is an unexpected
pleasure! And where, pray, are you going on this lovely afternoon? To stay
in the house is positively sinful. Ah! what a climate—but the Trail
of the Serpent, my dear Mrs. Protherick—the Trail of the Serpent—”
and he sighed.

“It must be a great trial to you to come to the colony,” said Mrs.
Jellicoe, sympathizing with the sigh.

Meekin smiled, as a gentlemanly martyr might have smiled. “The Lord’s
work, dear leddies—the Lord’s work. I am but a poor labourer in the
vineyard, toiling through the heat and burden of the day.” The aspect of
him, with his faultless tie, his airy coat, his natty boots, and his
self-satisfied Christian smile, was so unlike a poor labourer toiling
through the heat and burden of the day, that good Mrs. Jellicoe, the wife
of an orthodox Comptroller of Convicts’ Stores, felt a horrible thrill of
momentary heresy. “I would rather have remained in England,” continued Mr.
Meekin, smoothing one lavender finger with the tip of another, and arching
his elegant eyebrows in mild deprecation of any praise of his self-denial,
“but I felt it my duty not to refuse the offer made me through the
kindness of his lordship. Here is a field, leddies—a field for the
Christian pastor. They appeal to me, leddies, these lambs of our Church—these
lost and outcast lambs of our Church.”

Mrs. Jellicoe shook her gay bonnet ribbons at Mr. Meekin, with a hearty
smile. “You don’t know our convicts,” she said (from the tone of her jolly
voice it might have been “our cattle”). “They are horrible creatures. And
as for servants—my goodness, I have a fresh one every week. When you
have been here a little longer, you will know them better, Mr. Meekin.”

“They are quite unbearable at times.” said Mrs. Protherick, the widow of a
Superintendent of Convicts’ Barracks, with a stately indignation mantling
in her sallow cheeks. “I am ordinarily the most patient creature
breathing, but I do confess that the stupid vicious wretches that one gets
are enough to put a saint out of temper.” “We have all our crosses, dear
leddies—all our crosses,” said the Rev. Mr. Meekin piously. “Heaven
send us strength to bear them! Good-morning.”

“Why, you are going our way,” said Mrs. Jellicoe. “We can walk together.”

“Delighted! I am going to call on Major Vickers.”

“And I live within a stone’s throw,” returned Mrs. Protherick.

“What a charming little creature she is, isn’t she?”

“Who?” asked Mr. Meekin, as they walked.

“Sylvia. You don’t know her! Oh, a dear little thing.”

“I have only met Major Vickers at Government House,” said Meekin.

“I haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing his daughter.”

“A sad thing,” said Mrs. Jellicoe. “Quite a romance, if it was not so sad,
you know. His wife, poor Mrs. Vickers.”

“Indeed! What of her?” asked Meekin, bestowing a condescending bow on a
passer-by. “Is she an invalid?”

“She is dead, poor soul,” returned jolly Mrs. Jellicoe, with a fat sigh.
“You don’t mean to say you haven’t heard the story, Mr. Meekin?”

“My dear leddies, I have only been in Hobart Town a week, and I have not
heard the story.”

“It’s about the mutiny, you know, the mutiny at Macquarie Harbour. The
prisoners took the ship, and put Mrs. Vickers and Sylvia ashore somewhere.
Captain Frere was with them, too. The poor things had a dreadful time, and
nearly died. Captain Frere made a boat at last, and they were picked up by
a ship. Poor Mrs. Vickers only lived a few hours, and little Sylvia—she
was only twelve years old then—was quite light-headed. They thought
she wouldn’t recover.”

“How dreadful! And has she recovered?”

“Oh, yes, she’s quite strong now, but her memory’s gone.”

“Her memory?”

“Yes,” struck in Mrs. Protherick, eager to have a share in the
storytelling. “She doesn’t remember anything about the three or four weeks
they were ashore—at least, not distinctly.”

“It’s a great mercy!” interrupted Mrs. Jellicoe, determined to keep the
post of honour. “Who wants her to remember these horrors? From Captain
Frere’s account, it was positively awful!”

“You don’t say so!” said Mr. Meekin, dabbing his nose with a dainty
handkerchief.

“A ‘bolter’—that’s what we call an escaped prisoner, Mr. Meekin—happened
to be left behind, and he found them out, and insisted on sharing the
provisions—the wretch! Captain Frere was obliged to watch him
constantly for fear he should murder them. Even in the boat he tried to
run them out to sea and escape. He was one of the worst men in the
Harbour, they say; but you should hear Captain Frere tell the story.”

“And where is he now?” asked Mr. Meekin, with interest.

“Captain Frere?”

“No, the prisoner.”

“Oh, goodness, I don’t know—at Port Arthur, I think. I know that he
was tried for bolting, and would have been hanged but for Captain Frere’s
exertions.”

“Dear, dear! a strange story, indeed,” said Mr. Meekin. “And so the young
lady doesn’t know anything about it?” “Only what she has been told, of
course, poor dear. She’s engaged to Captain Frere.”

“Really! To the man who saved her. How charming—quite a romance!”

“Isn’t it? Everybody says so. And Captain Frere’s so much older than she
is.”

“But her girlish love clings to her heroic protector,” said Meekin, mildly
poetical. “Remarkable and beautiful. Quite the—hem!—the ivy
and the oak, dear leddies. Ah, in our fallen nature, what sweet spots—I
think this is the gate.”

A smart convict servant—he had been a pickpocket of note in days
gone by—left the clergyman to repose in a handsomely furnished
drawing-room, whose sun blinds revealed a wealth of bright garden flecked
with shadows, while he went in search of Miss Vickers. The Major was out,
it seemed, his duties as Superintendent of Convicts rendering such
absences necessary; but Miss Vickers was in the garden, and could be
called in at once. The Reverend Meekin, wiping his heated brow, and
pulling down his spotless wristbands, laid himself back on the soft sofa,
soothed by the elegant surroundings no less than by the coolness of the
atmosphere. Having no better comparison at hand, he compared this
luxurious room, with its soft couches, brilliant flowers, and opened
piano, to the chamber in the house of a West India planter, where all was
glare and heat and barbarism without, and all soft and cool and luxurious
within. He was so charmed with this comparison—he had a knack of
being easily pleased with his own thoughts—that he commenced to turn
a fresh sentence for the Bishop, and to sketch out an elegant description
of the oasis in his desert of a vineyard. While at this occupation, he was
disturbed by the sound of voices in the garden, and it appeared to him
that someone near at hand was sobbing and crying. Softly stepping on the
broad verandah, he saw, on the grass-plot, two persons, an old man and a
young girl. The sobbing proceeded from the old man.

“’Deed, miss, it’s the truth, on my soul. I’ve but jest come back to yez
this morning. O my! but it’s a cruel trick to play an ould man.”

He was a white-haired old fellow, in a grey suit of convict frieze, and
stood leaning with one veiny hand upon the pedestal of a vase of roses.

“But it is your own fault, Danny; we all warned you against her,” said the
young girl softly. “Sure ye did. But oh! how did I think it, miss? ‘Tis
the second time she served me so.”

“How long was it this time, Danny?”

“Six months, miss. She said I was a drunkard, and beat her. Beat her, God
help me!” stretching forth two trembling hands. “And they believed her, o’
course. Now, when I kem back, there’s me little place all thrampled by the
boys, and she’s away wid a ship’s captain, saving your presence, miss,
dhrinking in the ‘George the Fourth’. O my, but it’s hard on an old man!”
and he fell to sobbing again.

The girl sighed. “I can do nothing for you, Danny. I dare say you can work
about the garden as you did before. I’ll speak to the Major when he comes
home.”

Danny, lifting his bleared eyes to thank her, caught sight of Mr. Meekin,
and saluted abruptly. Miss Vickers turned, and Mr. Meekin, bowing his
apologies, became conscious that the young lady was about seventeen years
of age, that her eyes were large and soft, her hair plentiful and bright,
and that the hand which held the little book she had been reading was
white and small.

“Miss Vickers, I think. My name is Meekin—the Reverend Arthur
Meekin.”

“How do you do, Mr. Meekin?” said Sylvia, putting out one of her small
hands, and looking straight at him. “Papa will be in directly.”

“His daughter more than compensates for his absence, my dear Miss
Vickers.”

“I don’t like flattery, Mr. Meekin, so don’t use it. At least,” she added,
with a delicious frankness, that seemed born of her very brightness and
beauty, “not that sort of flattery. Young girls do like flattery, of
course. Don’t you think so?”

This rapid attack quite disconcerted Mr. Meekin, and he could only bow and
smile at the self-possessed young lady. “Go into the kitchen, Danny, and
tell them to give you some tobacco. Say I sent you. Mr. Meekin, won’t you
come in?”

“A strange old gentleman, that, Miss Vickers. A faithful retainer, I
presume?”

“An old convict servant of ours,” said Sylvia. “He was with papa many
years ago. He has got into trouble lately, though, poor old man.”

“Into trouble?” asked Mr. Meekin, as Sylvia took off her hat.

“On the roads, you know. That’s what they call it here. He married a free
woman much younger than himself, and she makes him drink, and then gives
him in charge for insubordination.”

“For insubordination! Pardon me, my dear young lady, did I understand you
rightly?”

“Yes, insubordination. He is her assigned servant, you know,” said Sylvia,
as if such a condition of things was the most ordinary in the world, “and
if he misbehaves himself, she sends him back to the road-gang.”

The Reverend Mr. Meekin opened his mild eyes very wide indeed. “What an
extraordinary anomaly! I am beginning, my dear Miss Vickers, to find
myself indeed at the antipodes.”

“Society here is different from society in England, I believe. Most new
arrivals say so,” returned Sylvia quietly.

“But for a wife to imprison her husband, my dear young lady!”

“She can have him flogged if she likes. Danny has been flogged. But then
his wife is a bad woman. He was very silly to marry her; but you can’t
reason with an old man in love, Mr. Meekin.”

Mr. Meekin’s Christian brow had grown crimson, and his decorous blood
tingled to his finger-tips. To hear a young lady talk in such an open way
was terrible. Why, in reading the Decalogue from the altar, Mr. Meekin was
accustomed to soften one indecent prohibition, lest its uncompromising
plainness of speech might offend the delicate sensibilities of his female
souls! He turned from the dangerous theme without an instant’s pause, for
wonder at the strange power accorded to Hobart Town “free” wives. “You
have been reading?”

“’Paul et Virginie’. I have read it before in English.”

“Ah, you read French, then, my dear young lady?”

“Not very well. I had a master for some months, but papa had to send him
back to the gaol again. He stole a silver tankard out of the dining-room.”

“A French master! Stole—”

“He was a prisoner, you know. A clever man. He wrote for the London
Magazine. I have read his writings. Some of them are quite above the
average.”

“And how did he come to be transported?” asked Mr. Meekin, feeling that
his vineyard was getting larger than he had anticipated.

“Poisoning his niece, I think, but I forget the particulars. He was a
gentlemanly man, but, oh, such a drunkard!”

Mr. Meekin, more astonished than ever at this strange country, where
beautiful young ladies talked of poisoning and flogging as matters of
little moment, where wives imprisoned their husbands, and murderers taught
French, perfumed the air with his cambric handkerchief in silence.

“You have not been here long, Mr. Meekin,” said Sylvia, after a pause.

“No, only a week; and I confess I am surprised. A lovely climate, but, as
I said just now to Mrs. Jellicoe, the Trail of the Serpent—the Trail
of the Serpent—my dear young lady.”

“If you send all the wretches in England here, you must expect the Trail
of the Serpent,” said Sylvia. “It isn’t the fault of the colony.”

“Oh, no; certainly not,” returned Meekin, hastening to apologize. “But it
is very shocking.”

“Well, you gentlemen should make it better. I don’t know what the penal
settlements are like, but the prisoners in the town have not much
inducement to become good men.”

“They have the beautiful Liturgy of our Holy Church read to them twice
every week, my dear young lady,” said Mr. Meekin, as though he should
solemnly say, “if that doesn’t reform them, what will?”

“Oh, yes,” returned Sylvia, “they have that, certainly; but that is only
on Sundays. But don’t let us talk about this, Mr. Meekin,” she added,
pushing back a stray curl of golden hair. “Papa says that I am not to talk
about these things, because they are all done according to the Rules of
the Service, as he calls it.”

“An admirable notion of papa’s,” said Meekin, much relieved as the door
opened, and Vickers and Frere entered.

Vickers’s hair had grown white, but Frere carried his thirty years as
easily as some men carry two-and-twenty.

“My dear Sylvia,” began Vickers, “here’s an extraordinary thing!” and
then, becoming conscious of the presence of the agitated Meekin, he
paused.

“You know Mr. Meekin, papa?” said Sylvia. “Mr. Meekin, Captain Frere.”

“I have that pleasure,” said Vickers. “Glad to see you, sir. Pray sit
down.” Upon which, Mr. Meekin beheld Sylvia unaffectedly kiss both
gentlemen; but became strangely aware that the kiss bestowed upon her
father was warmer than that which greeted her affianced husband.

“Warm weather, Mr. Meekin,” said Frere. “Sylvia, my darling, I hope you
have not been out in the heat. You have! My dear, I’ve begged you—”

“It’s not hot at all,” said Sylvia pettishly. “Nonsense! I’m not made of
butter—I sha’n’t melt. Thank you, dear, you needn’t pull the blind
down.” And then, as though angry with herself for her anger, she added,
“You are always thinking of me, Maurice,” and gave him her hand
affectionately.

“It’s very oppressive, Captain Frere,” said Meekin; “and to a stranger,
quite enervating.”

“Have a glass of wine,” said Frere, as if the house was his own. “One
wants bucking up a bit on a day like this.”

“Ay, to be sure,” repeated Vickers. “A glass of wine. Sylvia, dear, some
sherry. I hope she has not been attacking you with her strange theories,
Mr. Meekin.”

“Oh, dear, no; not at all,” returned Meekin, feeling that this charming
young lady was regarded as a creature who was not to be judged by ordinary
rules. “We got on famously, my dear Major.”

“That’s right,” said Vickers. “She is very plain-spoken, is my little
girl, and strangers can’t understand her sometimes. Can they, Poppet?”

Poppet tossed her head saucily. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why shouldn’t
they? But you were going to say something extraordinary when you came in.
What is it, dear?”

“Ah,” said Vickers with grave face. “Yes, a most extraordinary thing.
They’ve caught those villains.”

“What, you don’t mean? No, papa!” said Sylvia, turning round with alarmed
face.

In that little family there were, for conversational purposes, but one set
of villains in the world—the mutineers of the Osprey.

“They’ve got four of them in the bay at this moment—Rex, Barker,
Shiers, and Lesly. They are on board the Lady Jane. The most extraordinary
story I ever heard in my life. The fellows got to China and passed
themselves off as shipwrecked sailors. The merchants in Canton got up a
subscription, and sent them to London. They were recognized there by old
Pine, who had been surgeon on board the ship they came out in.”

Sylvia sat down on the nearest chair, with heightened colour. “And where
are the others?”

“Two were executed in England; the other six have not been taken. These
fellows have been sent out for trial.”

“To what are you alluding, dear sir?” asked Meekin, eyeing the sherry with
the gaze of a fasting saint.

“The piracy of a convict brig five years ago,” replied Vickers. “The
scoundrels put my poor wife and child ashore, and left them to starve. If
it hadn’t been for Frere—God bless him!—they would have died.
They shot the pilot and a soldier—and—but it’s a long story.”

“I have heard of it already,” said Meekin, sipping the sherry, which
another convict servant had brought for him; “and of your gallant conduct,
Captain Frere.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Frere, reddening. “We were all in the same
boat. Poppet, have a glass of wine?”

“No,” said Sylvia, “I don’t want any.”

She was staring at the strip of sunshine between the verandah and the
blind, as though the bright light might enable her to remember something.
“What’s the matter?” asked Frere, bending over her. “I was trying to
recollect, but I can’t, Maurice. It is all confused. I only remember a
great shore and a great sea, and two men, one of whom—that’s you,
dear—carried me in his arms.”

“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Meekin.

“She was quite a baby,” said Vickers, hastily, as though unwilling to
admit that her illness had been the cause of her forgetfulness.

“Oh, no; I was twelve years old,” said Sylvia; “that’s not a baby, you
know. But I think the fever made me stupid.”

Frere, looking at her uneasily, shifted in his seat. “There, don’t think
about it now,” he said.

“Maurice,” asked she suddenly, “what became of the other man?”

“Which other man?”

“The man who was with us; the other one, you know.”

“Poor Bates?”

“No, not Bates. The prisoner. What was his name?”

“Oh, ah—the prisoner,” said Frere, as if he, too, had forgotten.

“Why, you know, darling, he was sent to Port Arthur.”

“Ah!” said Sylvia, with a shudder. “And is he there still?”

“I believe so,” said Frere, with a frown.

“By the by,” said Vickers, “I suppose we shall have to get that fellow up
for the trial. We have to identify the villains.”

“Can’t you and I do that?” asked Frere uneasily.

“I am afraid not. I wouldn’t like to swear to a man after five years.”

“By George,” said Frere, “I’d swear to him! When once I see a man’s face—that’s
enough for me.”

“We had better get up a few prisoners who were at the Harbour at the
time,” said Vickers, as if wishing to terminate the discussion. “I
wouldn’t let the villains slip through my fingers for anything.”

“And are the men at Port Arthur old men?” asked Meekin.

“Old convicts,” returned Vickers. “It’s our place for ‘colonial sentence’
men. The worst we have are there. It has taken the place of Macquarie
Harbour. What excitement there will be among them when the schooner goes
down on Monday!”

“Excitement! Indeed? How charming! Why?” asked Meekin.

“To bring up the witnesses, my dear sir. Most of the prisoners are Lifers,
you see, and a trip to Hobart Town is like a holiday for them.”

“And do they never leave the place when sentenced for life?” said Meekin,
nibbling a biscuit. “How distressing!”

“Never, except when they die,” answered Frere, with a laugh; “and then
they are buried on an island. Oh, it’s a fine place! You should come down
with me and have a look at it, Mr. Meekin. Picturesque, I can assure you.”

“My dear Maurice,” says Sylvia, going to the piano, as if in protest to
the turn the conversation was taking, “how can you talk like that?”

“I should much like to see it,” said Meekin, still nibbling, “for Sir John
was saying something about a chaplaincy there, and I understand that the
climate is quite endurable.”

The convict servant, who had entered with some official papers for the
Major, stared at the dainty clergyman, and rough Maurice laughed again.

“Oh, it’s a stunning climate,” he said; “and nothing to do. Just the place
for you. There’s a regular little colony there. All the scandals in Van
Diemen’s Land are hatched at Port Arthur.”

This agreeable chatter about scandal and climate seemed a strange contrast
to the grave-yard island and the men who were prisoners for life. Perhaps
Sylvia thought so, for she struck a few chords, which, compelling the
party, out of sheer politeness, to cease talking for the moment, caused
the conversation to flag, and hinted to Mr. Meekin that it was time for
him to depart.

“Good afternoon, dear Miss Vickers,” he said, rising with his sweetest
smile. “Thank you for your delightful music. That piece is an old, old
favourite of mine. It was quite a favourite of dear Lady Jane’s, and the
Bishop’s. Pray excuse me, my dear Captain Frere, but this strange
occurrence—of the capture of the wreckers, you know—must be my
apology for touching on a delicate subject. How charming to contemplate!
Yourself and your dear young lady! The preserved and preserver, dear
Major. ‘None but the brave, you know, none but the brave, none but the
brave, deserve the fair!’ You remember glorious John, of course. Well,
good afternoon.”

“It’s rather a long invitation,” said Vickers, always well disposed to
anyone who praised his daughter, “but if you’ve nothing better to do, come
and dine with us on Christmas Day, Mr. Meekin. We usually have a little
gathering then.”

“Charmed,” said Meekin—“charmed, I am sure. It is so refreshing to
meet with persons of one’s own tastes in this delightful colony. ‘Kindred
souls together knit,’ you know, dear Miss Vickers. Indeed yes. Once more—good
afternoon.”

Sylvia burst into laughter as the door closed. “What a ridiculous
creature!” said she. “Bless the man, with his gloves and his umbrella, and
his hair and his scent! Fancy that mincing noodle showing me the way to
Heaven! I’d rather have old Mr. Bowes, papa, though he is as blind as a
beetle, and makes you so angry by bottling up his trumps as you call it.”

“My dear Sylvia,” said Vickers, seriously, “Mr. Meekin is a clergyman, you
know.”

“Oh, I know,” said Sylvia, “but then, a clergyman can talk like a man,
can’t he? Why do they send such people here? I am sure they could do much
better at home. Oh, by the way, papa dear, poor old Danny’s come back
again. I told him he might go into the kitchen. May he, dear?”

“You’ll have the house full of these vagabonds, you little puss,” said
Vickers, kissing her. “I suppose I must let him stay. What has he been
doing now?”

“His wife,” said Sylvia, “locked him up, you know, for being drunk. Wife!
What do people want with wives, I wonder?”

“Ask Maurice,” said her father, smiling.

Sylvia moved away, and tossed her head.

“What does he know about it? Maurice, you are a great bear; and if you
hadn’t saved my life, you know, I shouldn’t love you a bit. There, you may
kiss me” (her voice grew softer). “This convict business has brought it
all back; and I should be ungrateful if I didn’t love you, dear.”

Maurice Frere, with suddenly crimsoned face, accepted the proffered
caress, and then turned to the window. A grey-clothed man was working in
the garden, and whistling as he worked. “They’re not so badly off,” said
Frere, under his breath.

“What’s that, sir?” asked Sylvia.

“That I am not half good enough for you,” cried Frere, with sudden
vehemence. “I—”

“It’s my happiness you’ve got to think of, Captain Bruin,” said the girl.
“You’ve saved my life, haven’t you, and I should be wicked if I didn’t
love you! No, no more kisses,” she added, putting out her hand. “Come,
papa, it’s cool now; let’s walk in the garden, and leave Maurice to think
of his own unworthiness.”

Maurice watched the retreating pair with a puzzled expression. “She always
leaves me for her father,” he said to himself. “I wonder if she really
loves me, or if it’s only gratitude, after all?”

He had often asked himself the same question during the five years of his
wooing, but he had never satisfactorily answered it.

CHAPTER II. SARAH PURFOY’S REQUEST.

The evening passed as it had passed a hundred times before; and having
smoked a pipe at the barracks, Captain Frere returned home. His home was a
cottage on the New Town Road—a cottage which he had occupied since
his appointment as Assistant Police Magistrate, an appointment given to
him as a reward for his exertions in connection with the Osprey mutiny.
Captain Maurice Frere had risen in life. Quartered in Hobart Town, he had
assumed a position in society, and had held several of those excellent
appointments which in the year 1834 were bestowed upon officers of
garrison. He had been Superintendent of Works at Bridgewater, and when he
got his captaincy, Assistant Police Magistrate at Bothwell. The affair of
the Osprey made a noise; and it was tacitly resolved that the first “good
thing” that fell vacant should be given to the gallant preserver of Major
Vickers’s child.

Major Vickers also prospered. He had always been a careful man, and having
saved some money, had purchased land on favourable terms. The “assignment
system” enabled him to cultivate portions of it at a small expense, and,
following the usual custom, he stocked his run with cattle and sheep. He
had sold his commission, and was now a comparatively wealthy man. He owned
a fine estate; the house he lived in was purchased property. He was in
good odour at Government House, and his office of Superintendent of
Convicts caused him to take an active part in that local government which
keeps a man constantly before the public. Major Vickers, a colonist
against his will, had become, by force of circumstances, one of the
leading men in Van Diemen’s Land. His daughter was a good match for any
man; and many ensigns and lieutenants, cursing their hard lot in “country
quarters”, many sons of settlers living on their father’s station among
the mountains, and many dapper clerks on the civil establishment envied
Maurice Frere his good fortune. Some went so far as to say that the
beautiful daughter of “Regulation Vickers” was too good for the coarse
red-faced Frere, who was noted for his fondness for low society, and
overbearing, almost brutal demeanour. No one denied, however, that Captain
Frere was a valuable officer. It was said that, in consequence of his
tastes, he knew more about the tricks of convicts than any man on the
island. It was said, even, that he was wont to disguise himself, and mix
with the pass-holders and convict servants, in order to learn their signs
and mysteries. When in charge at Bridgewater it had been his delight to
rate the chain-gangs in their own hideous jargon, and to astound a
new-comer by his knowledge of his previous history. The convict population
hated and cringed to him, for, with his brutality, and violence, he
mingled a ferocious good humour, that resulted sometimes in tacit
permission to go without the letter of the law. Yet, as the convicts
themselves said, “a man was never safe with the Captain”; for, after
drinking and joking with them, as the Sir Oracle of some public-house
whose hostess he delighted to honour, he would disappear through a side
door just as the constables burst in at the back, and show himself as
remorseless, in his next morning’s sentence of the captured, as if he had
never entered a tap-room in all his life. His superiors called this
“zeal”; his inferiors “treachery”. For himself, he laughed. “Everything is
fair to those wretches,” he was accustomed to say.

As the time for his marriage approached, however, he had in a measure
given up these exploits, and strove, by his demeanour, to make his
acquaintances forget several remarkable scandals concerning his private
life, for the promulgation of which he once cared little. When Commandant
at the Maria Island, and for the first two years after his return from the
unlucky expedition to Macquarie Harbour, he had not suffered any fear of
society’s opinion to restrain his vices, but, as the affection for the
pure young girl, who looked upon him as her saviour from a dreadful death,
increased in honest strength, he had resolved to shut up those dark pages
in his colonial experience, and to read therein no more. He was not
remorseful, he was not even disgusted. He merely came to the conclusion
that, when a man married, he was to consider certain extravagances common
to all bachelors as at an end. He had “had his fling, like all young men”,
perhaps he had been foolish like most young men, but no reproachful ghost
of past misdeeds haunted him. His nature was too prosaic to admit the
existence of such phantoms. Sylvia, in her purity and excellence, was so
far above him, that in raising his eyes to her, he lost sight of all the
sordid creatures to whose level he had once debased himself, and had come
in part to regard the sins he had committed, before his redemption by the
love of this bright young creature, as evil done by him under a past
condition of existence, and for the consequences of which he was not
responsible. One of the consequences, however, was very close to him at
this moment. His convict servant had, according to his instructions, sat
up for him, and as he entered, the man handed him a letter, bearing a
superscription in a female hand.

“Who brought this?” asked Frere, hastily tearing it open to read. “The
groom, sir. He said that there was a gentleman at the ‘George the Fourth’
who wished to see you.”

Frere smiled, in admiration of the intelligence which had dictated such a
message, and then frowned in anger at the contents of the letter. “You
needn’t wait,” he said to the man. “I shall have to go back again, I
suppose.”

Changing his forage cap for a soft hat, and selecting a stick from a
miscellaneous collection in a corner, he prepared to retrace his steps.
“What does she want now?” he asked himself fiercely, as he strode down the
moonlit road; but beneath the fierceness there was an under-current of
petulance, which implied that, whatever “she” did want, she had a right to
expect.

The “George the Fourth” was a long low house, situated in Elizabeth
Street. Its front was painted a dull red, and the narrow panes of glass in
its windows, and the ostentatious affectation of red curtains and homely
comfort, gave to it a spurious appearance of old English jollity. A knot
of men round the door melted into air as Captain Frere approached, for it
was now past eleven o’clock, and all persons found in the streets after
eight could be compelled to “show their pass” or explain their business.
The convict constables were not scrupulous in the exercise of their duty,
and the bluff figure of Frere, clad in the blue serge which he affected as
a summer costume, looked not unlike that of a convict constable.

Pushing open the side door with the confident manner of one well
acquainted with the house, Frere entered, and made his way along a narrow
passage to a glass door at the further end. A tap upon this door brought a
white-faced, pock-pitted Irish girl, who curtsied with servile recognition
of the visitor, and ushered him upstairs. The room into which he was shown
was a large one. It had three windows looking into the street, and was
handsomely furnished. The carpet was soft, the candles were bright, and
the supper tray gleamed invitingly from a table between the windows. As
Frere entered, a little terrier ran barking to his feet. It was evident
that he was not a constant visitor. The rustle of a silk dress behind the
terrier betrayed the presence of a woman; and Frere, rounding the
promontory of an ottoman, found himself face to face with Sarah Purfoy.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “Pray, sit down.”

This was the only greeting that passed between them, and Frere sat down,
in obedience to a motion of a plump hand that twinkled with rings.

The eleven years that had passed since we last saw this woman had dealt
gently with her. Her foot was as small and her hand as white as of yore.
Her hair, bound close about her head, was plentiful and glossy, and her
eyes had lost none of their dangerous brightness. Her figure was coarser,
and the white arm that gleamed through a muslin sleeve showed an outline
that a fastidious artist might wish to modify. The most noticeable change
was in her face. The cheeks owned no longer that delicate purity which
they once boasted, but had become thicker, while here and there showed
those faint red streaks—as though the rich blood throbbed too
painfully in the veins—which are the first signs of the decay of
“fine” women. With middle age and the fullness of figure to which most
women of her temperament are prone, had come also that indescribable
vulgarity of speech and manner which habitual absence of moral restraint
never fails to produce.

Maurice Frere spoke first; he was anxious to bring his visit to as speedy
a termination as possible. “What do you want of me?” he asked.

Sarah Purfoy laughed; a forced laugh, that sounded so unnatural, that
Frere turned to look at her. “I want you to do me a favour—a very
great favour; that is if it will not put you out of the way.”

“What do you mean?” asked Frere roughly, pursing his lips with a sullen
air. “Favour! What do you call this?” striking the sofa on which he sat.
“Isn’t this a favour? What do you call your precious house and all that’s
in it? Isn’t that a favour? What do you mean?”

To his utter astonishment the woman replied by shedding tears. For some
time he regarded her in silence, as if unwilling to be softened by such
shallow device, but eventually felt constrained to say something. “Have
you been drinking again?” he asked, “or what’s the matter with you? Tell
me what it is you want, and have done with it. I don’t know what possessed
me to come here at all.”

Sarah sat upright, and dashed away her tears with one passionate hand.

“I am ill, can’t you see, you fool!” said she. “The news has unnerved me.
If I have been drinking, what then? It’s nothing to you, is it?”

“Oh, no,” returned the other, “it’s nothing to me. You are the principal
party concerned. If you choose to bloat yourself with brandy, do it by all
means.”

“You don’t pay for it, at any rate!” said she, with quickness of
retaliation which showed that this was not the only occasion on which they
had quarrelled.

“Come,” said Frere, impatiently brutal, “get on. I can’t stop here all
night.”

She suddenly rose, and crossed to where he was standing.

“Maurice, you were very fond of me once.”

“Once,” said Maurice.

“Not so very many years ago.”

“Hang it!” said he, shifting his arm from beneath her hand, “don’t let us
have all that stuff over again. It was before you took to drinking and
swearing, and going raving mad with passion, any way.”

“Well, dear,” said she, with her great glittering eyes belying the soft
tones of her voice, “I suffered for it, didn’t I? Didn’t you turn me out
into the streets? Didn’t you lash me with your whip like a dog? Didn’t you
put me in gaol for it, eh? It’s hard to struggle against you, Maurice.”

The compliment to his obstinacy seemed to please him—perhaps the
crafty woman intended that it should—and he smiled.

“Well, there; let old times be old times, Sarah. You haven’t done badly,
after all,” and he looked round the well-furnished room. “What do you
want?”

“There was a transport came in this morning.”

“Well?”

“You know who was on board her, Maurice!”

Maurice brought one hand into the palm of the other with a rough laugh.

“Oh, that’s it, is it! ‘Gad, what a flat I was not to think of it before!
You want to see him, I suppose?” She came close to him, and, in her
earnestness, took his hand. “I want to save his life!”

“Oh, that be hanged, you know! Save his life! It can’t be done.”

“You can do it, Maurice.”

“I save John Rex’s life?” cried Frere. “Why, you must be mad!”

“He is the only creature that loves me, Maurice—the only man who
cares for me. He has done no harm. He only wanted to be free—was it
not natural? You can save him if you like. I only ask for his life. What
does it matter to you? A miserable prisoner—his death would be of no
use. Let him live, Maurice.”

Maurice laughed. “What have I to do with it?”

“You are the principal witness against him. If you say that he behaved
well—and he did behave well, you know: many men would have left you
to starve—they won’t hang him.”

“Oh, won’t they! That won’t make much difference.”

“Ah, Maurice, be merciful!” She bent towards him, and tried to retain his
hand, but he withdrew it.

“You’re a nice sort of woman to ask me to help your lover—a man who
left me on that cursed coast to die, for all he cared,” he said, with a
galling recollection of his humiliation of five years back. “Save him!
Confound him, not I!”

“Ah, Maurice, you will.” She spoke with a suppressed sob in her voice.
“What is it to you? You don’t care for me now. You beat me, and turned me
out of doors, though I never did you wrong. This man was a husband to me—long,
long before I met you. He never did you any harm; he never will. He will
bless you if you save him, Maurice.”

Frere jerked his head impatiently. “Bless me!” he said. “I don’t want his
blessings. Let him swing. Who cares?”

Still she persisted, with tears streaming from her eyes, with white arms
upraised, on her knees even, catching at his coat, and beseeching him in
broken accents. In her wild, fierce beauty and passionate abandonment she
might have been a deserted Ariadne—a suppliant Medea. Anything
rather than what she was—a dissolute, half-maddened woman, praying
for the pardon of her convict husband.

Maurice Frere flung her off with an oath. “Get up!” he cried brutally,
“and stop that nonsense. I tell you the man’s as good as dead for all I
shall do to save him.”

At this repulse, her pent-up passion broke forth. She sprang to her feet,
and, pushing back the hair that in her frenzied pleading had fallen about
her face, poured out upon him a torrent of abuse. “You! Who are you, that
you dare to speak to me like that? His little finger is worth your whole
body. He is a man, a brave man, not a coward, like you. A coward! Yes, a
coward! a coward! A coward! You are very brave with defenceless men and
weak women. You have beaten me until I was bruised black, you cur; but who
ever saw you attack a man unless he was chained or bound? Do not I know
you? I have seen you taunt a man at the triangles, until I wished the
screaming wretch could get loose, and murder you as you deserve! You will
be murdered one of these days, Maurice Frere—take my word for it.
Men are flesh and blood, and flesh and blood won’t endure the torments you
lay on it!”

“There, that’ll do,” says Frere, growing paler. “Don’t excite yourself.”

“I know you, you brutal coward. I have not been your mistress—God
forgive me!—without learning you by heart. I’ve seen your ignorance
and your conceit. I’ve seen the men who ate your food and drank your wine
laugh at you. I’ve heard what your friends say; I’ve heard the comparisons
they make. One of your dogs has more brains than you, and twice as much
heart. And these are the men they send to rule us! Oh, Heaven! And such an
animal as this has life and death in his hand! He may hang, may he? I’ll
hang with him, then, and God will forgive me for murder, for I will kill
you!”

Frere had cowered before this frightful torrent of rage, but, at the
scream which accompanied the last words, he stepped forward as though to
seize her. In her desperate courage, she flung herself before him. “Strike
me! You daren’t! I defy you! Bring up the wretched creatures who learn the
way to Hell in this cursed house, and let them see you do it. Call them!
They are old friends of yours. They all know Captain Maurice Frere.”

“Sarah!”

“You remember Lucy Barnes—poor little Lucy Barnes that stole
sixpennyworth of calico. She is downstairs now. Would you know her if you
saw her? She isn’t the bright-faced baby she was when they sent her here
to ‘reform’, and when Lieutenant Frere wanted a new housemaid from the
Factory! Call for her!—call! do you hear? Ask any one of those
beasts whom you lash and chain for Lucy Barnes. He’ll tell you all about
her—ay, and about many more—many more poor souls that are at
the bidding of any drunken brute that has stolen a pound note to fee the
Devil with! Oh, you good God in Heaven, will You not judge this man?”

Frere trembled. He had often witnessed this creature’s whirlwinds of
passion, but never had he seen her so violent as this. Her frenzy
frightened him. “For Heaven’s sake, Sarah, be quiet. What is it you want?
What would you do?”

“I’ll go to this girl you want to marry, and tell her all I know of you. I
have seen her in the streets—have seen her look the other way when I
passed her—have seen her gather up her muslin skirts when my silks
touched her—I that nursed her, that heard her say her baby-prayers
(O Jesus, pity me!)—and I know what she thinks of women like me. She
is good—and virtuous—and cold. She would shudder at you if she
knew what I know. Shudder! She would hate you! And I will tell her! Ay, I
will! You will be respectable, will you? A model husband! Wait till I tell
her my story—till I send some of these poor women to tell theirs.
You kill my love; I’ll blight and ruin yours!”

Frere caught her by both wrists, and with all his strength forced her to
her knees. “Don’t speak her name,” he said in a hoarse voice, “or I’ll do
you a mischief. I know all you mean to do. I’m not such a fool as not to
see that. Be quiet! Men have murdered women like you, and now I know how
they came to do it.”

For a few minutes a silence fell upon the pair, and at last Frere,
releasing her hands, fell back from her.

“I’ll do what you want, on one condition.”

“What?”

“That you leave this place.”

“Where for?”

“Anywhere—the farther the better. I’ll pay your passage to Sydney,
and you go or stay there as you please.”

She had grown calmer, hearing him thus relenting. “But this house,
Maurice?”

“You are not in debt?”

“No.”

“Well, leave it. It’s your own affair, not mine. If I help you, you must
go.”

“May I see him?”

“No.”

“Ah, Maurice!”

“You can see him in the dock if you like,” says Frere, with a laugh, cut
short by a flash of her eyes. “There, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Offend me! Go on.”

“Listen here,” said he doggedly. “If you will go away, and promise never
to interfere with me by word or deed, I’ll do what you want.”

“What will you do?” she asked, unable to suppress a smile at the victory
she had won.

“I will not say all I know about this man. I will say he befriended me. I
will do my best to save his life.”

“You can save it if you like.”

“Well, I will try. On my honour, I will try.”

“I must believe you, I suppose?” said she doubtfully; and then, with a
sudden pitiful pleading, in strange contrast to her former violence, “You
are not deceiving me, Maurice?”

“No. Why should I? You keep your promise, and I’ll keep mine. Is it a
bargain?”

“Yes.”

He eyed her steadfastly for some seconds, and then turned on his heel. As
he reached the door she called him back. Knowing him as she did, she felt
that he would keep his word, and her feminine nature could not resist a
parting sneer.

“There is nothing in the bargain to prevent me helping him to escape!” she
said with a smile.

“Escape! He won’t escape again, I’ll go bail. Once get him in double irons
at Port Arthur, and he’s safe enough.”

The smile on her face seemed infectious, for his own sullen features
relaxed. “Good night, Sarah,” he said.

She put out her hand, as if nothing had happened. “Good night, Captain
Frere. It’s a bargain, then?”

“A bargain.”

“You have a long walk home. Will you have some brandy?”

“I don’t care if I do,” he said, advancing to the table, and filling his
glass. “Here’s a good voyage to you!”

Sarah Purfoy, watching him, burst into a laugh. “Human beings are queer
creatures,” she said. “Who would have thought that we had been calling
each other names just now? I say, I’m a vixen when I’m roused, ain’t I,
Maurice?”

“Remember what you’ve promised,” said he, with a threat in his voice, as
he moved to the door. “You must be out of this by the next ship that
leaves.”

“Never fear, I’ll go.”

Getting into the cool street directly, and seeing the calm stars shining,
and the placid water sleeping with a peace in which he had no share, he
strove to cast off the nervous fear that was on him. That interview had
frightened him, for it had made him think. It was hard that, just as he
had turned over a new leaf, this old blot should come through to the clean
page. It was cruel that, having comfortably forgotten the past, he should
be thus rudely reminded of it.

CHAPTER III. THE STORY OF TWO BIRDS OF PREY.

The reader of the foregoing pages has doubtless asked himself, “what is
the link which binds together John Rex and Sarah Purfoy?”

In the year 1825 there lived at St. Heliers, Jersey, an old watchmaker,
named Urban Purfoy. He was a hard-working man, and had amassed a little
money—sufficient to give his grand-daughter an education above the
common in those days. At sixteen, Sarah Purfoy was an empty-headed,
strong-willed, precocious girl, with big brown eyes. She had a bad opinion
of her own sex, and an immense admiration for the young and handsome
members of the other. The neighbours said that she was too high and mighty
for her rank in life. Her grandfather said she was a “beauty”, and like
her poor dear mother. She herself thought rather meanly of her personal
attractions, and rather highly of her mental ones. She was brimful of
vitality, with strong passions, and little religious sentiment. She had
not much respect for moral courage, for she did not understand it; but she
was a profound admirer of personal prowess. Her distaste for the humdrum
life she was leading found expression in a rebellion against social
usages. She courted notoriety by eccentricities of dress, and was never so
happy as when she was misunderstood. She was the sort of girl of whom
women say—“It is a pity she has no mother”; and men, “It is a pity
she does not get a husband”; and who say to themselves, “When shall I have
a lover?” There was no lack of beings of this latter class among the
officers quartered in Fort Royal and Fort Henry; but the female population
of the island was free and numerous, and in the embarrassment of riches,
Sarah was overlooked. Though she adored the soldiery, her first lover was
a civilian. Walking one day on the cliff, she met a young man. He was
tall, well-looking, and well-dressed. His name was Lemoine; he was the son
of a somewhat wealthy resident of the island, and had come down from
London to recruit his health and to see his friends. Sarah was struck by
his appearance, and looked back at him. He had been struck by hers, and
looked back also. He followed her, and spoke to her—some remark
about the wind or the weather—and she thought his voice divine. They
got into conversation—about scenery, lonely walks, and the dullness
of St. Heliers. “Did she often walk there?” “Sometimes.” “Would she be
there tomorrow?” “She might.” Mr. Lemoine lifted his hat, and went back to
dinner, rather pleased with himself.

They met the next day, and the day after that. Lemoine was not a
gentleman, but he had lived among gentlemen, and had caught something of
their manner. He said that, after all, virtue was a mere name, and that
when people were powerful and rich, the world respected them more than if
they had been honest and poor. Sarah agreed with this sentiment. Her
grandfather was honest and poor, and yet nobody respected him—at
least, not with such respect as she cared to acknowledge. In addition to
his talent for argument, Lemoine was handsome and had money—he
showed her quite a handful of bank-notes one day. He told her of London
and the great ladies there, and hinting that they were not always
virtuous, drew himself up with a moody air, as though he had been
unhappily the cause of their fatal lapse into wickedness. Sarah did not
wonder at this in the least. Had she been a great lady, she would have
done the same. She began to coquet with this seductive fellow, and to hint
to him that she had too much knowledge of the world to set a fictitious
value upon virtue. He mistook her artfulness for innocence, and thought he
had made a conquest. Moreover, the girl was pretty, and when dressed
properly, would look well. Only one obstacle stood in the way of their
loves—the dashing profligate was poor. He had been living in London
above his means, and his father was not inclined to increase his
allowance.

Sarah liked him better than anybody else she had seen, but there are two
sides to every bargain. Sarah Purfoy must go to London. In vain her lover
sighed and swore. Unless he would promise to take her away with him, Diana
was not more chaste. The more virtuous she grew, the more vicious did
Lemoine feel. His desire to possess her increased in proportionate ratio
to her resistance, and at last he borrowed two hundred pounds from his
father’s confidential clerk (the Lemoines were merchants by profession),
and acceded to her wishes. There was no love on either side—vanity
was the mainspring of the whole transaction. Lemoine did not like to be
beaten; Sarah sold herself for a passage to England and an introduction
into the “great world”.

We need not describe her career at this epoch. Suffice it to say that she
discovered that vice is not always conducive to happiness, and is not,
even in this world, so well rewarded as its earnest practice might merit.
Sated, and disappointed, she soon grew tired of her life, and longed to
escape from its wearying dissipations. At this juncture she fell in love.

The object of her affections was one Mr. Lionel Crofton. Crofton was tall,
well made, and with an insinuating address. His features were too strongly
marked for beauty. His eyes were the best part of his face, and, like his
hair, they were jet black. He had broad shoulders, sinewy limbs, and small
hands and feet. His head was round, and well-shaped, but it bulged a
little over the ears which were singularly small and lay close to his
head. With this man, barely four years older than herself, Sarah, at
seventeen, fell violently in love. This was the more strange as, though
fond of her, he would tolerate no caprices, and possessed an ungovernable
temper, which found vent in curses, and even blows. He seemed to have no
profession or business, and though he owned a good address, he was even
less of a gentleman than Lemoine. Yet Sarah, attracted by one of the
strange sympathies which constitute the romance of such women’s lives, was
devoted to him. Touched by her affection, and rating her intelligence and
unscrupulousness at their true value, he told her who he was. He was a
swindler, a forger, and a thief, and his name was John Rex. When she heard
this she experienced a sinister delight. He told her of his plots, his
tricks, his escapes, his villainies; and seeing how for years this young
man had preyed upon the world which had deceived and disowned her, her
heart went out to him. “I am glad you found me,” she said. “Two heads are
better than one. We will work together.”

John Rex, known among his intimate associates as Dandy Jack, was the
putative son of a man who had been for many years valet to Lord Bellasis,
and who retired from the service of that profligate nobleman with a sum of
money and a wife. John Rex was sent to as good a school as could be
procured for him, and at sixteen was given, by the interest of his mother
with his father’s former master, a clerkship in an old-established city
banking-house. Mrs. Rex was intensely fond of her son, and imbued him with
a desire to shine in aristocratic circles. He was a clever lad, without
any principle; he would lie unblushingly, and steal deliberately, if he
thought he could do so with impunity. He was cautious, acquisitive,
imaginative, self-conceited, and destructive. He had strong perceptive
faculties, and much invention and versatility, but his “moral sense” was
almost entirely wanting. He found that his fellow clerks were not of that
“gentlemanly” stamp which his mother thought so admirable, and therefore
he despised them. He thought he should like to go into the army, for he
was athletic, and rejoiced in feats of muscular strength. To be tied all
day to a desk was beyond endurance. But John Rex, senior, told him to
“wait and see what came of it.” He did so, and in the meantime kept late
hours, got into bad company, and forged the name of a customer of the bank
to a cheque for twenty pounds. The fraud was a clumsy one, and was
detected in twenty-four hours. Forgeries by clerks, however easily
detected, are unfortunately not considered to add to the attractions of a
banking-house, and the old-established firm decided not to prosecute, but
dismissed Mr. John Rex from their service. The ex-valet, who never liked
his legalized son, was at first for turning him out of doors, but by the
entreaties of his wife, was at last induced to place the promising boy in
a draper’s shop, in the City Road.

This employment was not a congenial one, and John Rex planned to leave it.
He lived at home, and had his salary—about thirty shillings a week—for
pocket money. Though he displayed considerable skill with the cue, and not
infrequently won considerable sums for one in his position, his expenses
averaged more than his income; and having borrowed all he could, he found
himself again in difficulties. His narrow escape, however, had taught him
a lesson, and he resolved to confess all to his indulgent mother, and be
more economical for the future. Just then one of those “lucky chances”
which blight so many lives occurred. The “shop-walker” died, and Messrs.
Baffaty & Co. made the gentlemanly Rex act as his substitute for a few
days. Shop-walkers have opportunities not accorded to other folks, and on
the evening of the third day Mr. Rex went home with a bundle of lace in
his pocket. Unfortunately, he owed more than the worth of this petty
theft, and was compelled to steal again. This time he was detected. One of
his fellow-shopmen caught him in the very act of concealing a roll of
silk, ready for future abstraction, and, to his astonishment, cried
“Halves!” Rex pretended to be virtuously indignant, but soon saw that such
pretence was useless; his companion was too wily to be fooled with such
affectation of innocence. “I saw you take it,” said he, “and if you won’t
share I’ll tell old Baffaty.” This argument was irresistible, and they
shared. Having become good friends, the self-made partner lent Rex a
helping hand in the disposal of the booty, and introduced him to a
purchaser. The purchaser violated all rules of romance by being—not
a Jew, but a very orthodox Christian. He kept a second-hand clothes
warehouse in the City Road, and was supposed to have branch establishments
all over London.

Mr. Blicks purchased the stolen goods for about a third of their value,
and seemed struck by Mr. Rex’s appearance. “I thort you was a swell
mobsman,” said he. This, from one so experienced, was a high compliment.
Encouraged by success, Rex and his companion took more articles of value.
John Rex paid off his debts, and began to feel himself quite a “gentleman”
again. Just as Rex had arrived at this pleasing state of mind, Baffaty
discovered the robbery. Not having heard about the bank business, he did
not suspect Rex—he was such a gentlemanly young man—but having
had his eye for some time upon Rex’s partner, who was vulgar, and
squinted, he sent for him. Rex’s partner stoutly denied the accusation,
and old Baffaty, who was a man of merciful tendencies, and could well
afford to lose fifty pounds, gave him until the next morning to confess,
and state where the goods had gone, hinting at the persuasive powers of a
constable at the end of that time. The shopman, with tears in his eyes,
came in a hurry to Rex, and informed him that all was lost. He did not
want to confess, because he must implicate his friend Rex, but if he did
not confess he would be given in charge. Flight was impossible, for
neither had money. In this dilemma John Rex remembered Blicks’s
compliment, and burned to deserve it. If he must retreat, he would lay
waste the enemy’s country. His exodus should be like that of the
Israelites—he would spoil the Egyptians. The shop-walker was allowed
half an hour in the middle of the day for lunch. John Rex took advantage
of this half-hour to hire a cab and drive to Blicks. That worthy man
received him cordially, for he saw that he was bent upon great deeds. John
Rex rapidly unfolded his plan of operations. The warehouse doors were
fastened with a spring. He would remain behind after they were locked, and
open them at a given signal. A light cart or cab could be stationed in the
lane at the back, three men could fill it with valuables in as many hours.
Did Blicks know of three such men? Blicks’s one eye glistened. He thought
he did know. At half-past eleven they should be there. Was that all? No.
Mr. John Rex was not going to “put up” such a splendid thing for nothing.
The booty was worth at least £5,000 if it was worth a shilling—he
must have £100 cash when the cart stopped at Blicks’s door. Blicks at
first refused point blank. Let there be a division, but he would not buy a
pig in a poke. Rex was firm, however; it was his only chance, and at last
he got a promise of £80. That night the glorious achievement known in the
annals of Bow Street as “The Great Silk Robbery” took place, and two days
afterwards John Rex and his partner, dining comfortably at Birmingham,
read an account of the transaction—not in the least like it—in
a London paper.

John Rex, who had now fairly broken with dull respectability, bid adieu to
his home, and began to realize his mother’s wishes. He was, after his
fashion, a “gentleman”. As long as the £80 lasted, he lived in luxury, and
by the time it was spent he had established himself in his profession.
This profession was a lucrative one. It was that of a swindler. Gifted
with a handsome person, facile manner, and ready wit, he had added to
these natural advantages some skill at billiards, some knowledge of
gambler’s legerdemain, and the useful consciousness that he must prey or
be preyed on. John Rex was no common swindler; his natural as well as his
acquired abilities saved him from vulgar errors. He saw that to
successfully swindle mankind, one must not aim at comparative, but
superlative, ingenuity. He who is contented with being only cleverer than
the majority must infallibly be outwitted at last, and to be once
outwitted is—for a swindler—to be ruined. Examining, moreover,
into the history of detected crime, John Rex discovered one thing. At the
bottom of all these robberies, deceptions, and swindles, was some lucky
fellow who profited by the folly of his confederates. This gave him an
idea. Suppose he could not only make use of his own talents to rob
mankind, but utilize those of others also? Crime runs through infinite
grades. He proposed to himself to be at the top; but why should he despise
those good fellows beneath him? His speciality was swindling,
billiard-playing, card-playing, borrowing money, obtaining goods, never
risking more than two or three coups in a year. But others plundered
houses, stole bracelets, watches, diamonds—made as much in a night
as he did in six months—only their occupation was more dangerous.
Now came the question—why more dangerous? Because these men were
mere clods, bold enough and clever enough in their own rude way, but no
match for the law, with its Argus eyes and its Briarean hands. They did
the rougher business well enough; they broke locks, and burst doors, and
“neddied” constables, but in the finer arts of plan, attack, and escape,
they were sadly deficient. Good. These men should be the hands; he would
be the head. He would plan the robberies; they should execute them.

Working through many channels, and never omitting to assist a
fellow-worker when in distress, John Rex, in a few years, and in a most
prosaic business way, became the head of a society of ruffians. Mixing
with fast clerks and unsuspecting middle-class profligates, he found out
particulars of houses ill guarded, and shops insecurely fastened, and “put
up” Blicks’s ready ruffians to the more dangerous work. In his various
disguises, and under his many names, he found his way into those upper
circles of “fast” society, where animals turn into birds, where a wolf
becomes a rook, and a lamb a pigeon. Rich spendthrifts who affected male
society asked him to their houses, and Mr. Anthony Croftonbury, Captain
James Craven, and Mr. Lionel Crofton were names remembered, sometimes with
pleasure, oftener with regret, by many a broken man of fortune. He had one
quality which, to a man of his profession, was invaluable—he was
cautious, and master of himself. Having made a success, wrung commission
from Blicks, rooked a gambling ninny like Lemoine, or secured an
assortment of jewellery sent down to his “wife” in Gloucestershire, he
would disappear for a time. He liked comfort, and revelled in the sense of
security and respectability. Thus he had lived for three years when he met
Sarah Purfoy, and thus he proposed to live for many more. With this woman
as a coadjutor, he thought he could defy the law. She was the net spread
to catch his “pigeons”; she was the well-dressed lady who ordered goods in
London for her husband at Canterbury, and paid half the price down, “which
was all this letter authorized her to do,” and where a less beautiful or
clever woman might have failed, she succeeded. Her husband saw fortune
before him, and believed that, with common prudence, he might carry on his
most lucrative employment of “gentleman” until he chose to relinquish it.
Alas for human weakness! He one day did a foolish thing, and the law he
had so successfully defied got him in the simplest way imaginable.

Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, John Rex and Sarah Purfoy were
living in quiet lodgings in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury. Their
landlady was a respectable poor woman, and had a son who was a constable.
This son was given to talking, and, coming in to supper one night, he told
his mother that on the following evening an attack was to be made on a
gang of coiners in the Old Street Road. The mother, dreaming all sorts of
horrors during the night, came the next day to Mrs. Skinner, in the
parlour, and, under a pledge of profound secrecy, told her of the dreadful
expedition in which her son was engaged. John Rex was out at a pigeon
match with Lord Bellasis, and when he returned, at nine o’clock, Sarah
told him what she had heard.

Now, 4, Bank-place, Old Street Road, was the residence of a man named
Green, who had for some time carried on the lucrative but dangerous trade
of “counterfeiting”. This man was one of the most daring of that army of
ruffians whose treasure chest and master of the mint was Blicks, and his
liberty was valuable. John Rex, eating his dinner more nervously than
usual, ruminated on the intelligence, and thought it would be but wise to
warn Green of his danger. Not that he cared much for Green personally, but
it was bad policy to miss doing a good turn to a comrade, and, moreover,
Green, if captured might wag his tongue too freely. But how to do it? If
he went to Blicks, it might be too late; he would go himself. He went out—and
was captured. When Sarah heard of the calamity she set to work to help
him. She collected all her money and jewels, paid Mrs. Skinner’s rent,
went to see Rex, and arranged his defence. Blicks was hopeful, but Green—who
came very near hanging—admitted that the man was an associate of
his, and the Recorder, being in a severe mood, transported him for seven
years. Sarah Purfoy vowed that she would follow him. She was going as
passenger, as emigrant, anything, when she saw Mrs. Vickers’s
advertisement for a “lady’s-maid,” and answered it. It chanced that Rex
was shipped in the Malabar, and Sarah, discovering this before the vessel
had been a week at sea, conceived the bold project of inciting a mutiny
for the rescue of her lover. We know the result of that scheme, and the
story of the scoundrel’s subsequent escape from Macquarie Harbour.

CHAPTER IV. “THE NOTORIOUS DAWES.”

The mutineers of the Osprey had been long since given up as dead, and the
story of their desperate escape had become indistinct to the general
public mind. Now that they had been recaptured in a remarkable manner,
popular belief invested them with all sorts of strange surroundings. They
had been—according to report—kings over savage islanders,
chiefs of lawless and ferocious pirates, respectable married men in Java,
merchants in Singapore, and swindlers in Hong Kong. Their adventures had
been dramatized at a London theatre, and the popular novelist of that day
was engaged in a work descriptive of their wondrous fortunes.

John Rex, the ringleader, was related, it was said, to a noble family, and
a special message had come out to Sir John Franklin concerning him. He had
every prospect of being satisfactorily hung, however, for even the most
outspoken admirers of his skill and courage could not but admit that he
had committed an offence which was death by the law. The Crown would leave
nothing undone to convict him, and the already crowded prison was
re-crammed with half a dozen life sentence men, brought up from Port
Arthur to identify the prisoners. Amongst this number was stated to be
“the notorious Dawes”.

This statement gave fresh food for recollection and invention. It was
remembered that “the notorious Dawes” was the absconder who had been
brought away by Captain Frere, and who owed such fettered life as he
possessed to the fact that he had assisted Captain Frere to make the
wonderful boat in which the marooned party escaped. It was remembered,
also, how sullen and morose he had been on his trial five years before,
and how he had laughed when the commutation of his death sentence was
announced to him. The Hobart Town Gazette published a short biography of
this horrible villain—a biography setting forth how he had been
engaged in a mutiny on board the convict ship, how he had twice escaped
from the Macquarie Harbour, how he had been repeatedly flogged for
violence and insubordination, and how he was now double-ironed at Port
Arthur, after two more ineffectual attempts to regain his freedom. Indeed,
the Gazette, discovering that the wretch had been originally transported
for highway robbery, argued very ably it would be far better to hang such
wild beasts in the first instance than suffer them to cumber the ground,
and grow confirmed in villainy. “Of what use to society,” asked the
Gazette, quite pathetically, “has this scoundrel been during the last
eleven years?” And everybody agreed that he had been of no use whatever.

Miss Sylvia Vickers also received an additional share of public attention.
Her romantic rescue by the heroic Frere, who was shortly to reap the
reward of his devotion in the good old fashion, made her almost as famous
as the villain Dawes, or his confederate monster John Rex. It was reported
that she was to give evidence on the trial, together with her affianced
husband, they being the only two living witnesses who could speak to the
facts of the mutiny. It was reported also that her lover was naturally
most anxious that she should not give evidence, as she was—an
additional point of romantic interest—affected deeply by the illness
consequent on the suffering she had undergone, and in a state of pitiable
mental confusion as to the whole business. These reports caused the Court,
on the day of the trial, to be crowded with spectators; and as the various
particulars of the marvellous history of this double escape were detailed,
the excitement grew more intense. The aspect of the four heavily-ironed
prisoners caused a sensation which, in that city of the ironed, was quite
novel, and bets were offered and taken as to the line of defence which
they would adopt. At first it was thought that they would throw themselves
on the mercy of the Crown, seeking, in the very extravagance of their
story, to excite public sympathy; but a little study of the demeanour of
the chief prisoner, John Rex, dispelled that conjecture. Calm, placid, and
defiant, he seemed prepared to accept his fate, or to meet his accusers
with some plea which should be sufficient to secure his acquittal on the
capital charge. Only when he heard the indictment, setting forth that he
had “feloniously pirated the brig Osprey,” he smiled a little.

Mr. Meekin, sitting in the body of the Court, felt his religious
prejudices sadly shocked by that smile. “A perfect wild beast, my dear
Miss Vickers,” he said, returning, in a pause during the examination of
the convicts who had been brought to identify the prisoner, to the little
room where Sylvia and her father were waiting. “He has quite a tigerish
look about him.”

“Poor man!” said Sylvia, with a shudder.

“Poor! My dear young lady, you do not pity him?”

“I do,” said Sylvia, twisting her hands together as if in pain. “I pity
them all, poor creatures.”

“Charming sensibility!” says Meekin, with a glance at Vickers. “The true
woman’s heart, my dear Major.”

The Major tapped his fingers impatiently at this ill-timed twaddle. Sylvia
was too nervous just then for sentiment. “Come here, Poppet,” he said,
“and look through this door. You can see them from here, and if you do not
recognize any of them, I can’t see what is the use of putting you in the
box; though, of course, if it is necessary, you must go.”

The raised dock was just opposite to the door of the room in which they
were sitting, and the four manacled men, each with an armed warder behind
him, were visible above the heads of the crowd. The girl had never before
seen the ceremony of trying a man for his life, and the silent and antique
solemnities of the business affected her, as it affects all who see it for
the first time. The atmosphere was heavy and distressing. The chains of
the prisoners clanked ominously. The crushing force of judge, gaolers,
warders, and constables assembled to punish the four men, appeared cruel.
The familiar faces, that in her momentary glance, she recognized, seemed
to her evilly transfigured. Even the countenance of her promised husband,
bent eagerly forward towards the witness-box, showed tyrannous and
bloodthirsty. Her eyes hastily followed the pointing finger of her father,
and sought the men in the dock. Two of them lounged, sullen and
inattentive; one nervously chewed a straw, or piece of twig, pawing the
dock with restless hand; the fourth scowled across the Court at the
witness-box, which she could not see. The four faces were all strange to
her.

“No, papa,” she said, with a sigh of relief, “I can’t recognize them at
all.”

As she was turning from the door, a voice from the witness-box behind her
made her suddenly pale and pause to look again. The Court itself appeared,
at that moment, affected, for a murmur ran through it, and some official
cried, “Silence!”

The notorious criminal, Rufus Dawes, the desperado of Port Arthur, the
wild beast whom the Gazette had judged not fit to live, had just entered
the witness-box. He was a man of thirty, in the prime of life, with a
torso whose muscular grandeur not even the ill-fitting yellow jacket could
altogether conceal, with strong, embrowned, and nervous hands, an upright
carriage, and a pair of fierce, black eyes that roamed over the Court
hungrily.

Not all the weight of the double irons swaying from the leathern thong
around his massive loins, could mar that elegance of attitude which comes
only from perfect muscular development. Not all the frowning faces bent
upon him could frown an accent of respect into the contemptuous tones in
which he answered to his name, “Rufus Dawes, prisoner of the Crown”.

“Come away, my darling,” said Vickers, alarmed at his daughter’s blanched
face and eager eyes.

“Wait,” she said impatiently, listening for the voice whose owner she
could not see. “Rufus Dawes! Oh, I have heard that name before!”

“You are a prisoner of the Crown at the penal settlement of Port Arthur?”

“Yes.”

“For life?”

“For life.”

Sylvia turned to her father with breathless inquiry in her eyes. “Oh,
papa! who is that speaking? I know the name! the voice!”

“That is the man who was with you in the boat, dear,” says Vickers
gravely. “The prisoner.”

The eager light died out of her eyes, and in its place came a look of
disappointment and pain. “I thought it was a good man,” she said, holding
by the edge of the doorway. “It sounded like a good voice.”

And then she pressed her hands over her eyes and shuddered. “There,
there,” says Vickers soothingly, “don’t be afraid, Poppet; he can’t hurt
you now.”

“No, ha! ha!” says Meekin, with great display of off-hand courage, “the
villain’s safe enough now.”

The colloquy in the Court went on. “Do you know the prisoners in the
dock?”

“Yes.” “Who are they?”

“John Rex, Henry Shiers, James Lesly, and, and—I’m not sure about
the last man.” “You are not sure about the last man. Will you swear to the
three others?”

“Yes.”

“You remember them well?”

“I was in the chain-gang at Macquarie Harbour with them for three years.”
Sylvia, hearing this hideous reason for acquaintance, gave a low cry, and
fell into her father’s arms.

“Oh, papa, take me away! I feel as if I was going to remember something
terrible!”

Amid the deep silence that prevailed, the cry of the poor girl was
distinctly audible in the Court, and all heads turned to the door. In the
general wonder no one noticed the change that passed over Rufus Dawes. His
face flushed scarlet, great drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and his
black eyes glared in the direction from whence the sound came, as though
they would pierce the envious wood that separated him from the woman whose
voice he had heard. Maurice Frere sprang up and pushed his way through the
crowd under the bench.

“What’s this?” he said to Vickers, almost brutally. “What did you bring
her here for? She is not wanted. I told you that.”

“I considered it my duty, sir,” says Vickers, with stately rebuke.

“What has frightened her? What has she heard? What has she seen?” asked
Frere, with a strangely white face. “Sylvia, Sylvia!”

She opened her eyes at the sound of his voice. “Take me home, papa; I’m
ill. Oh, what thoughts!”

“What does she mean?” cried Frere, looking in alarm from one to the other.

“That ruffian Dawes frightened her,” said Meekin. “A gush of recollection,
poor child. There, there, calm yourself, Miss Vickers. He is quite safe.”

“Frightened her, eh?” “Yes,” said Sylvia faintly, “he frightened me,
Maurice. I needn’t stop any longer, dear, need I?”

“No,” says Frere, the cloud passing from his face. “Major, I beg your
pardon, but I was hasty. Take her home at once. This sort of thing is too
much for her.” And so he went back to his place, wiping his brow, and
breathing hard, as one who had just escaped from some near peril.

Rufus Dawes had remained in the same attitude until the figure of Frere,
passing through the doorway, roused him. “Who is she?” he said, in a low,
hoarse voice, to the constable behind him. “Miss Vickers,” said the man
shortly, flinging the information at him as one might fling a bone to a
dangerous dog.

“Miss Vickers,” repeated the convict, still staring in a sort of
bewildered agony. “They told me she was dead!”

The constable sniffed contemptuously at this preposterous conclusion, as
who should say, “If you know all about it, animal, why did you ask?” and
then, feeling that the fixed gaze of his interrogator demanded some reply,
added, “You thort she was, I’ve no doubt. You did your best to make her
so, I’ve heard.”

The convict raised both his hands with sudden action of wrathful despair,
as though he would seize the other, despite the loaded muskets; but,
checking himself with sudden impulse, wheeled round to the Court.

“Your Honour!—Gentlemen! I want to speak.”

The change in the tone of his voice, no less than the sudden loudness of
the exclamation, made the faces, hitherto bent upon the door through which
Mr. Frere had passed, turn round again. To many there it seemed that the
“notorious Dawes” was no longer in the box, for, in place of the upright
and defiant villain who stood there an instant back, was a white-faced,
nervous, agitated creature, bending forward in an attitude almost of
supplication, one hand grasping the rail, as though to save himself from
falling, the other outstretched towards the bench. “Your Honour, there has
been some dreadful mistake made. I want to explain about myself. I
explained before, when first I was sent to Port Arthur, but the letters
were never forwarded by the Commandant; of course, that’s the rule, and I
can’t complain. I’ve been sent there unjustly, your Honour. I made that
boat, your Honour. I saved the Major’s wife and daughter. I was the man; I
did it all myself, and my liberty was sworn away by a villain who hated
me. I thought, until now, that no one knew the truth, for they told me
that she was dead.” His rapid utterance took the Court so much by surprise
that no one interrupted him. “I was sentenced to death for bolting, sir,
and they reprieved me because I helped them in the boat. Helped them! Why,
I made it! She will tell you so. I nursed her! I carried her in my arms! I
starved myself for her! She was fond of me, sir. She was indeed. She
called me ‘Good Mr. Dawes’.”

At this, a coarse laugh broke out, which was instantly checked. The judge
bent over to ask, “Does he mean Miss Vickers?” and in this interval Rufus
Dawes, looking down into the Court, saw Maurice Frere staring up at him
with terror in his eyes. “I see you, Captain Frere, coward and liar! Put
him in the box, gentlemen, and make him tell his story. She’ll contradict
him, never fear. Oh, and I thought she was dead all this while!”

The judge had got his answer from the clerk by this time. “Miss Vickers
had been seriously ill, had fainted just now in the Court. Her only
memories of the convict who had been with her in the boat were those of
terror and disgust. The sight of him just now had most seriously affected
her. The convict himself was an inveterate liar and schemer, and his story
had been already disproved by Captain Frere.”

The judge, a man inclining by nature to humanity, but forced by experience
to receive all statements of prisoners with caution, said all he could
say, and the tragedy of five years was disposed of in the following
dialogue:- JUDGE: This is not the place for an accusation against Captain
Frere, nor the place to argue upon your alleged wrongs. If you have
suffered injustice, the authorities will hear your complaint, and redress
it.

RUFUS DAWES I have complained, your Honour. I wrote letter after letter to
the Government, but they were never sent. Then I heard she was dead, and
they sent me to the Coal Mines after that, and we never hear anything
there.

JUDGE I can’t listen to you. Mr. Mangles, have you any more questions to
ask the witness?

But Mr. Mangles not having any more, someone called, “Matthew Gabbett,”
and Rufus Dawes, still endeavouring to speak, was clanked away with, amid
a buzz of remark and surmise.

The trial progressed without further incident. Sylvia was not called, and,
to the astonishment of many of his enemies, Captain Frere went into the
witness-box and generously spoke in favour of John Rex. “He might have
left us to starve,” Frere said; “he might have murdered us; we were
completely in his power. The stock of provisions on board the brig was not
a large one, and I consider that, in dividing it with us, he showed great
generosity for one in his situation.” This piece of evidence told strongly
in favour of the prisoners, for Captain Frere was known to be such an
uncompromising foe to all rebellious convicts that it was understood that
only the sternest sense of justice and truth could lead him to speak in
such terms. The defence set up by Rex, moreover, was most ingenious. He
was guilty of absconding, but his moderation might plead an excuse for
that. His only object was his freedom, and, having gained it, he had lived
honestly for nearly three years, as he could prove. He was charged with
piratically seizing the brig Osprey, and he urged that the brig Osprey,
having been built by convicts at Macquarie Harbour, and never entered in
any shipping list, could not be said to be “piratically seized”, in the
strict meaning of the term. The Court admitted the force of this
objection, and, influenced doubtless by Captain Frere’s evidence, the fact
that five years had passed since the mutiny, and that the two men most
guilty (Cheshire and Barker) had been executed in England, sentenced Rex
and his three companions to transportation for life to the penal
settlements of the colony.

CHAPTER V. MAURICE FRERE’S GOOD ANGEL.

At this happy conclusion to his labours, Frere went down to comfort the
girl for whose sake he had suffered Rex to escape the gallows. On his way
he was met by a man who touched his hat, and asked to speak with him an
instant. This man was past middle age, owned a red brandy-beaten face, and
had in his gait and manner that nameless something that denotes the
seaman.

“Well, Blunt,” says Frere, pausing with the impatient air of a man who
expects to hear bad news, “what is it now?”

“Only to tell you that it is all right, sir,” says Blunt. “She’s come
aboard again this morning.”

“Come aboard again!” ejaculated Frere. “Why, I didn’t know that she had
been ashore. Where did she go?” He spoke with an air of confident
authority, and Blunt—no longer the bluff tyrant of old—seemed
to quail before him. The trial of the mutineers of the Malabar had ruined
Phineas Blunt. Make what excuses he might, there was no concealing the
fact that Pine found him drunk in his cabin when he ought to have been
attending to his duties on deck, and the “authorities” could not, or would
not, pass over such a heinous breach of discipline. Captain Blunt—who,
of course, had his own version of the story—thus deprived of the
honour of bringing His Majesty’s prisoners to His Majesty’s colonies of
New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, went on a whaling cruise to the
South Seas. The influence which Sarah Purfoy had acquired over him had,
however, irretrievably injured him. It was as though she had poisoned his
moral nature by the influence of a clever and wicked woman over a sensual
and dull-witted man. Blunt gradually sank lower and lower. He became a
drunkard, and was known as a man with a “grievance against the
Government”. Captain Frere, having had occasion for him in some capacity,
had become in a manner his patron, and had got him the command of a
schooner trading from Sydney. On getting this command—not without
some wry faces on the part of the owner resident in Hobart Town—Blunt
had taken the temperance pledge for the space of twelve months, and was a
miserable dog in consequence. He was, however, a faithful henchman, for he
hoped by Frere’s means to get some “Government billet”—the grand
object of all colonial sea captains of that epoch.