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.

“Well, sir, she went ashore to see a friend,” says Blunt, looking at the sky and then at the earth.

“What friend?”

“The—the prisoner, sir.”

“And she saw him, I suppose?”

“Yes, but I thought I'd better tell you, sir,” says Blunt.

“Of course; quite right,” returned the other; “you had better start at once. It's no use waiting.”

“As you wish, sir. I can sail to-morrow morning—or this evening, if you like.”

“This evening,” says Frere, turning away; “as soon as possible.”

“There's a situation in Sydney I've been looking after,” said the other, uneasily, “if you could help me to it.”

“What is it?”

“The command of one of the Government vessels, sir.”

“Well, keep sober, then,” says Frere, “and I'll see what I can do. And keep that woman's tongue still if you can.”

The pair looked at each other, and Blunt grinned slavishly.

“I'll do my best.” “Take care you do,” returned his patron, leaving him without further ceremony.

Frere found Vickers in the garden, and at once begged him not to talk about the “business” to his daughter.

“You saw how bad she was to-day, Vickers. For goodness sake don't make her ill again.”

“My dear sir,” says poor Vickers, “I won't refer to the subject. She's been very unwell ever since. Nervous and unstrung. Go in and see her.”

So Frere went in and soothed the excited girl, with real sorrow at her suffering.

“It's all right now, Poppet,” he said to her. “Don't think of it any more. Put it out of your mind, dear.”

“It was foolish of me, Maurice, I know, but I could not help it. The sound of—of—that man's voice seemed to bring back to me some great pity for something or someone. I don't explain what I mean, I know, but I felt that I was on the verge of remembering a story of some great wrong, just about to hear some dreadful revelation that should make me turn from all the people whom I ought most to love. Do you understand?”

“I think I know what you mean,” says Frere, with averted face. “But that's all nonsense, you know.”

“Of course,” returned she, with a touch of her old childish manner of disposing of questions out of hand. “Everybody knows it's all nonsense. But then we do think such things. It seems to me that I am double, that I have lived somewhere before, and have had another life—a dream-life.”

“What a romantic girl you are,” said the other, dimly comprehending her meaning. “How could you have a dream-life?”

“Of course, not really, stupid! But in thought, you know. I dream such strange things now and then. I am always falling down precipices and into cataracts, and being pushed into great caverns in enormous rocks. Horrible dreams!”

“Indigestion,” returned Frere. “You don't take exercise enough. You shouldn't read so much. Have a good five-mile walk.”

“And in these dreams,” continued Sylvia, not heeding his interruption, “there is one strange thing. You are always there, Maurice.”

“Come, that's all right,” says Maurice.

“Ah, but not kind and good as you are, Captain Bruin, but scowling, and threatening, and angry, so that I am afraid of you.”

“But that is only a dream, darling.”

“Yes, but—” playing with the button of his coat.

“But what?”

“But you looked just so to-day in the Court, Maurice, and I think that's what made me so silly.”

“My darling! There; hush—don't cry!”

But she had burst into a passion of sobs and tears, that shook her slight figure in his arms.

“Oh, Maurice, I am a wicked girl! I don't know my own mind. I think sometimes I don't love you as I ought—you who have saved me and nursed me.”

“There, never mind about that,” muttered Maurice Frere, with a sort of choking in his throat.

She grew more composed presently, and said, after a while, lifting her face, “Tell me, Maurice, did you ever, in those days of which you have spoken to me—when you nursed me as a little child in your arms, and fed me, and starved for me—did you ever think we should be married?”

“I don't know,” says Maurice. “Why?”

“I think you must have thought so, because—it's not vanity, dear—you would not else have been so kind, and gentle, and devoted.”

“Nonsense, Poppet,” he said, with his eyes resolutely averted.

“No, but you have been, and I am very pettish, sometimes. Papa has spoiled me. You are always affectionate, and those worrying ways of yours, which I get angry at, all come from love for me, don't they?”

“I hope so,” said Maurice, with an unwonted moisture in his eyes.

“Well, you see, that is the reason why I am angry with myself for not loving you as I ought. I want you to like the things I like, and to love the books and the music and the pictures and the—the World I love; and I forget that you are a man, you know, and I am only a girl; and I forget how nobly you behaved, Maurice, and how unselfishly you risked your life for mine. Why, what is the matter, dear?”

He had put her away from him suddenly, and gone to the window, gazing across the sloping garden at the bay below, sleeping in the soft evening light. The schooner which had brought the witnesses from Port Arthur lay off the shore, and the yellow flag at her mast fluttered gently in the cool evening breeze. The sight of this flag appeared to anger him, for, as his eyes fell on it, he uttered an impatient exclamation, and turned round again.

“Maurice!” she cried, “I have wounded you!”

“No, no. It is nothing,” said he, with the air of a man surprised in a moment of weakness. “I—I did not like to hear you talk in this way—about not loving me.”

“Oh, forgive me, dear; I did not mean to hurt you. It is my silly way of saying more than I mean. How could I do otherwise than love you—after all you have done?”

Some sudden desperate whim caused him to exclaim, “But suppose I had not done all you think, would you not love me still?”

Her eyes, raised to his face with anxious tenderness for the pain she had believed herself to have inflicted, fell at this speech.

“What a question! I don't know. I suppose I should; yet—but what is the use, Maurice, of supposing? I know you have done it, and that is enough. How can I say what I might have done if something else had happened? Why, you might not have loved me.”

If there had been for a moment any sentiment of remorse in his selfish heart, the hesitation of her answer went far to dispel it.

“To be sure, that's true,” and he placed his arm round her.

She lifted her face again with a bright laugh.

“We are a pair of geese—supposing! How can we help what has past? We have the Future, darling—the Future, in which I am to be your little wife, and we are to love each other all our lives, like the people in the story-books.”

Temptation to evil had often come to Maurice Frere, and his selfish nature had succumbed to it when in far less witching shape than this fair and innocent child luring him with wistful eyes to win her. What hopes had he not built upon her love; what good resolutions had he not made by reason of the purity and goodness she was to bring to him? As she said, the past was beyond recall; the future—in which she was to love him all her life—was before them. With the hypocrisy of selfishness which deceives even itself, he laid the little head upon his heart with a sensible glow of virtue.

“God bless you, darling! You are my Good Angel.”

The girl sighed. “I will be your Good Angel, dear, if you will let me.”

CHAPTER VI. MR. MEEKIN ADMINISTERS CONSOLATION.

Rex told Mr. Meekin, who, the next day, did him the honour to visit him, that, “under Providence, he owed his escape from death to the kind manner in which Captain Frere had spoken of him.”

“I hope your escape will be a warning to you, my man,” said Mr. Meekin, “and that you will endeavour to make the rest of your life, thus spared by the mercy of Providence, an atonement for your early errors.”

“Indeed I will, sir,” said John Rex, who had taken Mr. Meekin's measure very accurately, “and it is very kind of you to condescend to speak so to a wretch like me.”

“Not at all,” said Meekin, with affability; “it is my duty. I am a Minister of the Gospel.”

“Ah! sir, I wish I had attended to the Gospel's teachings when I was younger. I might have been saved from all this.”

“You might, indeed, poor man; but the Divine Mercy is infinite—quite infinite, and will be extended to all of us—to you as well as to me.” (This with the air of saying, “What do you think of that!”) “Remember the penitent thief, Rex—the penitent thief.”

“Indeed I do, sir.”

“And read your Bible, Rex, and pray for strength to bear your punishment.”

“I will, Mr. Meekin. I need it sorely, sir—physical as well as spiritual strength, sir—for the Government allowance is sadly insufficient.”

“I will speak to the authorities about a change in your dietary scale,” returned Meekin, patronizingly. “In the meantime, just collect together in your mind those particulars of your adventures of which you spoke, and have them ready for me when next I call. Such a remarkable history ought not to be lost.”

“Thank you kindly, sir. I will, sir. Ah! I little thought when I occupied the position of a gentleman, Mr. Meekin”—the cunning scoundrel had been piously grandiloquent concerning his past career—“that I should be reduced to this. But it is only just, sir.”

“The mysterious workings of Providence are always just, Rex,” returned Meekin, who preferred to speak of the Almighty with well-bred vagueness.

“I am glad to see you so conscious of your errors. Good morning.”

“Good morning, and Heaven bless you, sir,” said Rex, with his tongue in his cheek for the benefit of his yard mates; and so Mr. Meekin tripped gracefully away, convinced that he was labouring most successfully in the Vineyard, and that the convict Rex was really a superior person.

“I will send his narrative to the Bishop,” said he to himself. “It will amuse him. There must be many strange histories here, if one could but find them out.”

As the thought passed through his brain, his eye fell upon the “notorious Dawes”, who, while waiting for the schooner to take him back to Port Arthur, had been permitted to amuse himself by breaking stones. The prison-shed which Mr. Meekin was visiting was long and low, roofed with iron, and terminating at each end in the stone wall of the gaol. At one side rose the cells, at the other the outer wall of the prison. From the outer wall projected a weatherboard under-roof, and beneath this were seated forty heavily-ironed convicts. Two constables, with loaded carbines, walked up and down the clear space in the middle, and another watched from a sort of sentry-box built against the main wall. Every half-hour a third constable went down the line and examined the irons. The admirable system of solitary confinement—which in average cases produces insanity in the space of twelve months—was as yet unknown in Hobart Town, and the forty heavily-ironed men had the pleasure of seeing each other's faces every day for six hours.

The other inmates of the prison were at work on the roads, or otherwise bestowed in the day time, but the forty were judged too desperate to be let loose. They sat, three feet apart, in two long lines, each man with a heap of stones between his outstretched legs, and cracked the pebbles in leisurely fashion. The double row of dismal woodpeckers tapping at this terribly hollow beech-tree of penal discipline had a semi-ludicrous appearance. It seemed so painfully absurd that forty muscular men should be ironed and guarded for no better purpose than the cracking of a cartload of quartz-pebbles. In the meantime the air was heavy with angry glances shot from one to the other, and the passage of the parson was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered fashionable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering. Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line—his back to the cells, his face to the gaol wall. This was the place nearest the watching constable, and was allotted on that account to the most ill-favoured. Some of his companions envied him that melancholy distinction.

“Well, Dawes,” says Mr. Meekin, measuring with his eye the distance between the prisoner and himself, as one might measure the chain of some ferocious dog. “How are you this morning, Dawes?”

Dawes, scowling in a parenthesis between the cracking of two stones, was understood to say that he was very well.

“I am afraid, Dawes,” said Mr. Meekin reproachfully, “that you have done yourself no good by your outburst in court on Monday. I understand that public opinion is quite incensed against you.”

Dawes, slowly arranging one large fragment of bluestone in a comfortable basin of smaller fragments, made no reply.

“I am afraid you lack patience, Dawes. You do not repent of your offences against the law, I fear.”

The only answer vouchsafed by the ironed man—if answer it could be called—was a savage blow, which split the stone into sudden fragments, and made the clergyman skip a step backward.

“You are a hardened ruffian, sir! Do you not hear me speak to you?”

“I hear you,” said Dawes, picking up another stone.

“Then listen respectfully, sir,” said Meekin, roseate with celestial anger. “You have all day to break those stones.”

“Yes, I have all day,” returned Rufus Dawes, with a dogged look upward, “and all next day, for that matter. Ugh!” and again the hammer descended.

“I came to console you, man—to console you,” says Meekin, indignant at the contempt with which his well-meant overtures had been received. “I wanted to give you some good advice!”

The self-important annoyance of the tone seemed to appeal to whatever vestige of appreciation for the humorous, chains and degradation had suffered to linger in the convict's brain, for a faint smile crossed his features.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “Pray, go on.”

“I was going to say, my good fellow, that you have done yourself a great deal of injury by your ill-advised accusation of Captain Frere, and the use you made of Miss Vickers's name.”

A frown, as of pain, contracted the prisoner's brows, and he seemed with difficulty to put a restraint upon his speech. “Is there to be no inquiry, Mr. Meekin?” he asked, at length. “What I stated was the truth—the truth, so help me God!”

“No blasphemy, sir,” said Meekin, solemnly. “No blasphemy, wretched man. Do not add to the sin of lying the greater sin of taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain. He will not hold him guiltless, Dawes. He will not hold him guiltless, remember. No, there is to be no inquiry.”

“Are they not going to ask her for her story?” asked Dawes, with a pitiful change of manner. “They told me that she was to be asked. Surely they will ask her.”

“I am not, perhaps, at liberty,” said Meekin, placidly unconscious of the agony of despair and rage that made the voice of the strong man before him quiver, “to state the intentions of the authorities, but I can tell you that Miss Vickers will not be asked anything about you. You are to go back to Port Arthur on the 24th, and to remain there.”

A groan burst from Rufus Dawes; a groan so full of torture that even the comfortable Meekin was thrilled by it.

“It is the Law, you know, my good man. I can't help it,” he said. “You shouldn't break the Law, you know.”

“Curse the Law!” cries Dawes. “It's a Bloody Law; it's—there, I beg your pardon,” and he fell to cracking his stones again, with a laugh that was more terrible in its bitter hopelessness of winning attention or sympathy, than any outburst of passion could have been.

“Come,” says Meekin, feeling uneasily constrained to bring forth some of his London-learnt platitudes. “You can't complain. You have broken the Law, and you must suffer. Civilized Society says you sha'n't do certain things, and if you do them you must suffer the penalty Civilized Society imposes. You are not wanting in intelligence, Dawes, more's the pity—and you can't deny the justice of that.”

Rufus Dawes, as if disdaining to answer in words, cast his eyes round the yard with a glance that seemed to ask grimly if Civilized Society was progressing quite in accordance with justice, when its civilization created such places as that stone-walled, carbine-guarded prison-shed, and filled it with such creatures as those forty human beasts, doomed to spend the best years of their manhood cracking pebbles in it.

“You don't deny that?” asked the smug parson, “do you, Dawes?”

“It's not my place to argue with you, sir,” said Dawes, in a tone of indifference, born of lengthened suffering, so nicely balanced between contempt and respect, that the inexperienced Meekin could not tell whether he had made a convert or subjected himself to an impertinence; “but I'm a prisoner for life, and don't look at it in the same way that you do.”

This view of the question did not seem to have occurred to Mr. Meekin, for his mild cheek flushed. Certainly, the fact of being a prisoner for life did make some difference. The sound of the noonday bell, however, warned him to cease argument, and to take his consolations out of the way of the mustering prisoners.

With a great clanking and clashing of irons, the forty rose and stood each by his stone-heap. The third constable came round, rapping the leg-irons of each man with easy nonchalance, and roughly pulling up the coarse trousers (made with buttoned flaps at the sides, like Mexican calzoneros, in order to give free play to the ankle fetters), so that he might assure himself that no tricks had been played since his last visit. As each man passed this ordeal he saluted, and clanked, with wide-spread legs, to the place in the double line. Mr. Meekin, though not a patron of field sports, found something in the scene that reminded him of a blacksmith picking up horses' feet to examine the soundness of their shoes.

“Upon my word,” he said to himself, with a momentary pang of genuine compassion, “it is a dreadful way to treat human beings. I don't wonder at that wretched creature groaning under it. But, bless me, it is near one o'clock, and I promised to lunch with Major Vickers at two. How time flies, to be sure!”