Denis Dent: A Novel
by E. W. Hornung · English · Gutenberg #37598 · 435,116 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Denis Dent: A Novel
Author: E. W. Hornung
Illustrator: Harrison Fisher
Release date: October 2, 2011 [eBook #37598]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DENIS DENT: A NOVEL ***
Produced by Beginners Projects, Steven desJardins, and the
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DENIS DENT
[Illustration: "NAN" (Copyright, 1903, by Frank Leslie Publishing
House)]
DENIS DENT
A Novel
BY ERNEST W. HORNUNG
_Author of "The Amateur Cracksman,"
"Raffles," "No Hero," etc._
[Illustration]
_With a Frontispiece by_
HARRISON FISHER
NEW YORK . FREDERICK A.
STOKES COMPANY . PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1903_,
BY FRANK LESLIE PUBLISHING HOUSE
_Copyright, 1903_,
BY E. W. HORNUNG
_All Rights Reserved_
This edition published in January, 1904.
To P. M. MARTINEAU, Esq., J. P.
DEAR MR. MARTINEAU,
The little picture of the past attempted in this tale
owes more than one touch to your kindness. I only wish
that the whole were nearer the mark aimed at, and so
worthier to bear your name upon this page.
Yours very sincerely,
E. W. HORNUNG.
Reform Club,
October 27th, 1903.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SECOND OFFICER 1
II. SAUVE QUI PEUT 10
III. THE CASTAWAYS 18
IV. LOST AND FOUND 30
V. A TOUCH OF FEVER 37
VI. NEW CONDITIONS 48
VII. DENIS AND NAN 57
VIII. COLD WATER 70
IX. THE CANVAS CITY 79
X. THIEVES IN THE NIGHT 90
XI. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS 102
XII. EL DORADO 114
XIII. THE ENEMY'S CAMP 122
XIV. THE FIRST CLAIM 133
XV. A PIOUS FRAUD 146
XVI. A WINDFALL 158
XVII. HATE AND MONEY 168
XVIII. ROTTEN GULLY 178
XIX. NEW BLOOD 187
XX. THE JEWELER'S SHOP 196
XXI. THE COURIER OF DEATH 211
XXII. ATRA CURA 220
XXIII. BROKEN OFF 231
XXIV. DEATH'S DOOR 243
XXV. BEAT OF DRUM 251
XXVI. HOMEWARD BOUND 265
XXVII. THE GREAT GULF 277
XXVIII. NEWS OF BATTLE 289
XXIX. GUY FAWKES DAY 299
XXX. THE SANDBAG BATTERY 310
XXXI. TIME'S WHIRLIGIG 319
DENIS DENT
CHAPTER I
THE SECOND OFFICER
"Land ahead!"
The _North Foreland_ had been made advisedly snug for the night. In the
middle watch she was under her three lower topsails and fore topmast
staysail only. Not that it blew very hard, but the night was dark and
hazy, with a heavy swell. And it was the last night of the voyage.
At eight bells there had been a cast of the deep-sea lead, with the
significant result that the skipper had been the first to turn in;
gradually the excited passengers had followed his example, instead of
staying on deck to see the Otway light. The second mate had said there
would be no Otway that night, and what the second said was good enough
for most. The saloon skylight had become a clean-edged glimmer in the
middle of the poop, the binnacle a fallen moon; not a port-hole twinkled
on the rushing ink; and the surviving topsails, without visible stitch
or stick aloft or alow, hovered over the ship like gigantic bats.
Four persons remained upon the poop: the middy of the watch, tantalized
by muffled guffaws from the midshipmen's berth in the after-house; the
man at the wheel, in eclipse above the belt, with the binnacle light
upon one weather-beaten hand; and on the weather side, the second mate
in reluctant conversation with a big cigar that glowed at intervals into
a bearded and spectacled face, the smooth brown one of the young officer
sharing the momentary illumination.
"It's all very well," said the senior man, in low persistent tones, "but
if we don't have it out now, when are we to? You know what it will be
like to-morrow: we shall land first thing, and you'll be the busiest man
on board. As for the rules of the ship, if an owner can't use his
discretion he might as well travel by some other line."
The young fellow was smiling pleasantly as the other puffed again.
"Very good, Mr. Merridew! I don't object if the captain doesn't; and of
course I must tell you anything you want to know."
"Anything! My good young man, if I am to consider this matter for a
moment (which I don't promise) I must at least know everything that you
can tell me about yourself first; for what," continued Mr. Merridew,
taking the cigar from his teeth, "what do you suppose I know about you
at this moment? Absolutely nothing except that you seem to be a
first-class sailor, as they tell me you are, and a very nice fellow, as
I have found you for myself--aboardship; but of your shore-going record,
of your position in life at home, and of your people and their position,
to speak quite plainly, I know nothing at all."
Mr. Merridew delivered himself with a certain dispassionate unction, as
one who could do the judicial to a turn, and enjoy it. Yet his tone was
kindly, and the periods free from wilful offense.
"You may make your mind easy about my people. I have none," said the
sailor, bitterly. A fatherly hand found his shoulder on the word.
"My dear fellow! I am so sorry."
"You mean relieved."
"I mean what I say," said Mr. Merridew, removing his hand.
It was the young man's turn to apologize, which he did with much
frankness and more feeling.
"The truth is, sir, my parents have been dead for years; and yet they
are nearly everything to me still--they were all the world until this
voyage! My mother was Irish; her name would not be new to you, but it
will keep. It may not be necessary for you to know it, or anything more
about me, and in any case it can't alter me. But I am half-Irish through
my mother--though you wouldn't think it."
"I would think it," remarked Mr. Merridew, blowing at his cigar as at a
forge, until the red light found him looking wise through his
spectacles, but the officer with one eye on his sails and no perceptible
emotion in the other.
"My first name," he went on, "is as Irish as you like; it's Denis; and
you may say that I've been living up to it for once!"
"Denis!" repeated Mr. Merridew, with interest. "Well, I know that name,
anyhow; one of our partners--Captain Devenish's father--he's Denis
Devenish, you know."
"Indeed," said Denis Dent, and there was a strange light in his spare
eye. "Well, so much for my mother; my father was a Yorkshire dalesman,
as his father and his father's father were before him. I am the first of
them to leave the land."
"May I ask why?"
"It isn't our land any more. My father gave up everything to take my
mother abroad, when her life was despaired of in England, and when her
people--her own people--I can't trust myself to speak of them!"
And the young fellow turned abruptly aside, while Mr. Merridew puffed
and peered at a massive though clean-cut face, whose only Irish feature
was a pair of bright brown eyes, bold and resolute, yet quick to
laughter, if quicker still to fire.
The south-easter sang through the unseen rigging; the ship rushed a
fathom through the unseen sea. The second had a look at the compass,
and came climbing back to windward with his hands in his pea-jacket
pockets.
"And yet," said Mr. Merridew, flourishing his cigar, "and yet--you want
to marry my daughter!"
"If she will have me, sir," said the sailor, with an uncertainty on that
point in becoming contrast to his certainty of himself.
"But whether _I_ will or not."
"I never said that, Mr. Merridew. I should be very sorry to take up such
a position, I can assure you, sir."
"You would be sorry, but you would do it," retorted Mr. Merridew with
acumen. "You would do as your father evidently did before you."
"I hoped we had finished with my parents, sir."
"But they left you nothing, if I understand aright," rejoined Merridew,
changing his ground and his tone with some dexterity. "And you would
marry my daughter on the pay of a junior officer in the merchant
service."
"I never said that either. I have my captain's certificate, sir, as it
is."
The new tone was the tone to take. Mr. Merridew went so far as to give
his daughter her name.
"And Nan," said he, "might have ten thousand pounds for her marriage
portion. I don't say she would, but for all you know she might have
more. Her husband ought to bring at least as much into settlement, even
as a self-respecting man, don't you think? And yet you would make her a
merchant skipper's wife!"
The young man winced, as though for a flash he saw himself wholly in the
wrong. Then his face hardened--all but the Irish eyes--and it was the
face of a man who would justify himself with his life's blood. Impulse,
initiative, temerity, were in the eyes, indomitable endurance in their
solid setting.
"You take it for granted that I will never be anything more!" he
exclaimed. "But, sir, once a sailor isn't always one. I've got on well
at sea. I'd get on well on land--anywhere--at anything! You may smile. I
feel it in me. Mr. Merridew, it may seem what you please, but I'm pretty
young even for what I am now. Surely, surely, you would give me time--if
she would?"
It was the Irishman speaking, the Irish blood spurting out in words, and
Mr. Merridew distrusted the bulk of that race; but his cigar glowed
again upon a mouth and jaw that came of harder stock, and for the moment
his mind was illuminated too.
Here was this Denis Dent, not one young man, it struck him, but two
young men in one, each with a very name of his own. Dents from the
Dales, Denis from old Ireland! Mr. Merridew smiled through his
spectacles, pleased with his conceit, not altogether disposed to regard
it as such, but incontinently interested in a personality to which he
had been so clever as to supply the key. The heart of the discoverer
warmed toward his own. There was an attractiveness in Denis, a solid
worth in Dent. Denis might win the girl. Dent would deserve her. And
Denis Dent might have carried her own father with him, had he been the
only young man in the case, or even on the poop of the _North Foreland_
as she drove through the haze on the last night of her voyage.
But as the pair stood eye to eye, the pregnant pause between them was
interrupted by a loud and startling laugh, and a tall figure loomed
through the first gray tinge of approaching dawn. It was that of a young
man in a tasseled dressing-gown, with an ornate meerschaum pipe pendent
between the bushy black whiskers of the day.
"Well, if that doesn't take first prize for cheek!" cried he, and
lurched toward them in his slippers as one who had never found his
sea-legs.
"We are having a private conversation, Ralph," said Mr. Merridew in mild
rebuke.
"A private conversation that you could hear on the forecastle-head!"
jeered Ralph Devenish, who was full of liquor without being drunk. "I
suppose he's so proud of it he wants the whole ship to know!"
And the meerschaum pointed jerkily at Denis, who stood the heaving deck
as a circus rider stands a horse, his hands still deep in his pea-jacket
pockets.
"Captain Devenish," said he, "it's against the rules to speak to the
officer of the watch, but you shall speak civilly if you speak at all.
Otherwise I advise you to take yourself off the poop before you're put
off."
"By God!" snarled Devenish, "but you shall pay for that! Before one
owner to another owner's son, on the last night of the voyage! It's your
last in the Line, Mr. Officer of the Watch! And you dare to lay a hand
on me! Come on. You dare. I know your blustering breed, you damned
Jack-in-buttons!"
"And I know yours--you Devenishes! I know you too well to soil my hands
on any one of you!"
The concentrated bitterness of this retort had an opposite effect on
either hearer; one it stupefied, the other it flooded with a sudden
light; but Devenish was the first to find his tongue, and for the moment
there was none more foul before the mast. The deplorable torrent was
only stemmed by the startling apparition of a square little man in a
still more awful, because a more articulate and more righteous, rage.
"I'll teach you to break the rules of my ship! I'll teach you to curse
my officers, drunk or sober! Out of my sight, sir, or I'll have you in
irons before you're a minute older!"
"Come, come, Captain Coles," said Mr. Merridew, with dignity; "there has
been more provocation than you imagine; and this, you must remember, is
Captain Devenish."
"I don't care a dump if it's Devenish Merridew and Company lumped into
one!" roared the little skipper. "You can have your way ashore, but I
mean to have mine at sea; and as for your iron coffin of a ship, I'll be
thankful to come off her alive, let alone sailing in her again. No two
compasses alike, thirty-six hours since we got the sun, the darkest
night of the voyage, and Australia anywhere! Yet this is the night you
choose, you owners, to bully and browbeat my officers of the watch!"
But it was no longer the darkest night of the voyage, or even night at
all. The group stood visible and divisible in a cold gray haze. The
lower topsails were no longer detached from the ship; there was a misty
mast to each; and the ship was running dry-decked through the high
smooth seas.
It was at this moment that the haze lifted like breath from a mirror;
and a subtle new sound was just beginning to insinuate itself upon the
ear when the look-out man drowned it with his roar from the forecastle
head.
CHAPTER II
SAUVE QUI PEUT
Land was indeed ahead, and in the most appalling shape known to
seafaring man: at the last moment, the haze had lifted on a line of
jagged cliffs, already parallel with the foreyard, albeit by the muffled
thud of the breakers, not quite so near as it looked.
The _North Foreland_ was blessed with a commander who was at his best in
an emergency. Little Coles had turned in when he should have stayed on
deck, and was no more prepared for shipwreck than if such disasters were
unknown; but he rose to the occasion like a lark. His sharp voice
cracked like a whip from the break of the poop, and all hands, piped
from the forecastle, the petty officers' quarters, and the midshipmen's
berth, came running as though the words drew blood.
The spanker was set, with the mizzen and maintopmast staysail, and the
helm put down to bring her round; but there was no racing of the cliffs
to port. She stumbled a little in her stride; the fresh sails flapped;
but there was no getting her on the other tack, though the upper mizzen
topsail was pressed into the job.
The skipper waited a minute with compressed lips and fiery eye; then a
crackle of musketry from his weatherbeaten throat, and both anchors were
let go.
The port anchor had fifty fathoms of cable, the starboard anchor sixty
fathoms of chain; in anticipation of their holding, the sails were
clewed up, and a man sent into the chains with the lead, for she was
drifting inshore every moment. But the lead danced on smooth rock, where
the anchors trailed as readily as over ice; the captain had them both up
again, but that took longer than letting them go, and meanwhile half the
hands were aloft shaking out sail once more.
Coles was showing his resource at every point, and by this time had his
ship actually head to wind; in another minute she might have stood away
upon the port tack. But at this juncture time was wasted in an attempt
to sheet home the topsails, which failing, the buntlines of the mainsail
were let go, the port main tack got on board, and the sheet hauled aft.
The men were still upon the rope when the _North Foreland_ struck and
spilt them like the winners in a tug-of-war.
It was the horrible striking of an iron ship: a terrific crash under the
mizzen-chains, and there she quivered like a rat in a terrier's teeth.
And the devilish seas that had run with her, hunted with her, how they
fell on her now, and swept and trampled her from the moment she was
down!
The scene on deck, if it wanted the infinite horror of pitch darkness,
was only a degree less dreadful in a pearly dawn that left no doubt
about the situation. Every hatchway spouted crude humanity, shouting,
shoving, screaming, scolding, covering a chattering nakedness as it
gained the deck, and there struck silent at a glance. For nothing was
hid, nothing extenuated, for a single moment, to a single eye. There was
no learning the worst by humane degrees. It was patent at once to the
wildest and the calmest gaze. The sanguine soul was no more help to the
stunned community than the born pessimist; there was no chance for the
imagination either way.
They could see, every one of them, the towering cliffs--blind sides of
houses without an inch of pavement--the rollers running up to them
unbroken, for the better sport of leaping sky-high at the impact. They
could see her settling, see her bumping, see the top-hamper falling
about the deck. There was enough to feel and to hear. The eyes might
have been spared a little. Some shut them more than once, as when an
upper spar came down like an arrow, transfixing a sailor with incredible
neatness, and actually sticking upright through man and deck; but few
escaped the sight of blood, and none the dying scream. A worse sight was
in store. A steward with the stock of life-belts from the lazaretto
touched the captain's arm. And, checked in some hoarse tirade, the
valiant Coles stood first aghast and then abject in the sight of
passengers and crew--beaten man and broken reed.
The better part of valour was the only part he lacked. Not a boat in
davits; the whole fleet docked, inboard, on skids! And exactly six
life-belts to go round a ship's company of over a hundred souls!
The second mate was clearing away the port life-boat with five of the
hands, one blaspheming, another in tears, more than one vowing with
reason that they would all be drowned, and the young officer himself in
a consuming agony of his own. At the break of the poop, almost all this
time, stood a slender figure in a pink wrapper, between a bearded man in
spectacles and a man with bushy whiskers in incongruous silk and
tassels. Dent wondered why he did not lend a hand; no, on second
thoughts he knew, and cursed the fellow in his heart. He did not mean to
leave her side. He meant to have the rescuing of her. Trust a Devenish
to play his own game! Denis was too busy to look twice at the trio, but
he seemed to see them all the time, and the vision galled him to
insensate effort.
"Take your time, take your time," cried the chief officer, all red
hook-nose and ginger moustache, an oilskin bonnet fastened under his
chin. "The old man's done his part. He'll go down in her. The rest hangs
on you and me."
The chief met the responsibility with his own tap of cold profanity,
not unaccompanied by shrewd cuff and calculated kick, as he
superintended the clearing of the other life-boat. As for the skipper,
it seemed that he had recovered his mettle to meet fresh trouble further
aft; they could hear him firing oaths and threatening lead; but when
Denis looked he could not get his eyes past the two men at the break of
the poop, for at that moment they were lashing one of the six life-belts
about a forlorn little figure in pink.
The port life-boat was ready first, and the third mate busy marshaling
the women and children in a helpless, eager, hesitating, exasperating
throng; but Miss Merridew was still detained by her friends on the poop.
The gripes had been cut, and Denis himself had sent the last chock
flying with a savage kick. He and his crew of five were in the act of
hooking the tackles to the thwarts. The chief mate was shouting a timely
word of advice.
"When you get her launched, and filled, and stand away in her----"
But Denis did not hear what he was to do then, for at that instant a
green sea lifted the port life-boat clean over the side with all six
men.
Denis's next thought was that the water was warmer than he should have
supposed, and his next but one that somebody was bent on braining him;
he was hit about the head, not once but repeatedly; but as soon as he
could see he knew the reason, for a dim glimmer was all there was to
see. The boat was riding bottom upward. He had come up under her. It
was the thwart that had been belabouring him. He caught hold of it,
pulled as at a horizontal bar, came up like a cork, and easily wormed
half his person between thwart and bilge.
In this position Denis regained breath, immersed to the waist, but with
no lack of air, and a bilge-cork handy for fresh supplies, until the
real danger occurred to him. The capsized life-boat rode the rollers
like a cradle, but at any moment she might shatter herself against the
cliffs. It was hardly the work of one for Denis to dive from underneath
her at the thought. The cliffs, however, were still far enough away; of
the wreck he could see nothing for the swell; but it was now broad
daylight.
He went under the boat again, and in about five minutes she righted
herself for no apparent reason. Denis was nearly stunned in the process,
nor was the advantage otherwise unmixed. The boat had come up full, and
Denis had now to bale for his life.
So she floated upon the cliffs, until the big seas began to break, when
she instantly capsized again. This time he succeeded in scaling the
keel, only to be dislodged as his perverse ship righted herself once
more. But the tenacity of the Dents was now uppermost in Denis, if
indeed he had any other quality left, and he was back in the boat when
she eventually struck upon the cliff. The shock hurled him overboard for
the last time, yet was so much less terrific than he had anticipated,
that he sought and found the reason as he swam clear. A minute ago the
boat had been within a few fathoms of the full face of the cliffs; at
the last instant a mouth had opened, and all she had done was to cannon
off the perpendicular wall of a strait so narrow as to be practically
invisible from without.
It was comprehensible enough. The tide was setting through this tiny
channel. The derelict life-boat was not alone; packages bobbed between
the towering walls; a table came riding by on its top, three legs still
standing, as Denis trod water. And on the table he partly floated and
partly swam into a bay which stood to the channel as a flagon to its
neck.
It was semicircular in shape, surrounded by cliffs as lofty and
precipitous as those without, but mercifully provided with a sandy beach
at the upper end. The castaway breathed a hoarse thanksgiving at the
saving sight. His smarting eyes had risen involuntarily, and as they
rested on the heights, the sun lit up some heath and bracken that
overhung the edge a few feet like a table-cloth: thence downward it was
sheer for one or two hundred to the beach below. At the base a couple of
caves opened romantically upon the yellow sand, but there was no sun for
them yet, or for the dancing waves that bore Denis and his table finally
to the land.
There in an instant he was staggering and stumbling under the abnormal
weight of his dripping and exhausted body. A few yards he reeled, then
fell prone upon the warm sand, digging in his fingers to the knuckles,
thinking of no mortal but himself, thanking his God for preserving him
as though he had made the voyage alone. Indeed the long voyage on the
ship was temporarily blotted out of mind by the little one in the boat.
And he a lover! And his love as good as drowned before his eyes!--for
not a vestige of the ship had he seen since the original mishap to the
port life-boat. It was a terrible reflection to Denis for the rest of
his days--but at the time he did not think of her--did not even picture
a certain shade of pink and ask himself what it meant and must mean to
him till his dying day. He just lay and held on to the warm sand, foot
and finger, because the earth heaved under him as the sea had done for
thirteen weeks, and his vitality was very low.
Consciousness might have left him altogether; he always wanted to think
so, for then he could have forgiven himself; but he was never satisfied
on the point. He only knew it was a faint far cry that roused him in the
end. But faint as it was, and never so far away, that thin high cry
brought the half-dead man to his feet like a gunshot at the ear.
A bar of sunlight slanted through the narrow heads, and in the sun the
blue waves were tipped with gold, and across the gold and the blue a
black spar floated with some sodden and discoloured rags.
But Denis was in no doubt as to their shade.
CHAPTER III
THE CASTAWAYS
Denis had been a swimmer all his life; how he struck out now every
swimmer will know, though none so well as the happy few who have
themselves saved life. It is good to think that that noblest of human
instincts had its secret place even now in this glowing heart; that
Denis Dent would have given himself as unstintedly to the rescue of some
unknown person; yet surely the sacred flame alone could have fired those
spent members to the last pitch of redoubled endurance. The white left
arm, brown as a glove from the wrist down, flew over as white a shoulder
in flashing curves; the brown head dipped in the blue, to rise
spluttering and dripping a good yard further; but the yards were close
on two hundred from shore to spar, and when Denis came up with the
latter, it was his love, indeed, but she was already senseless.
They had tied her in a life-belt, and lashed the life-belt to a spar; in
time she would have been cast up on the warm sand, dead! She was not
dead yet; she should not die. Denis took the hem of her dear drenched
garment between his teeth, and swam in, if possible, more strenuously
than he had swum out, but with the breast stroke, and in twice the time.
At last she lay where he had lain, only in the sun. Already the sand was
gloriously hot to bare knees; and there was still a faint throbbing in
the inanimate wrist, though the eyelids lay leaden in a livid face.
Denis caught up his scattered clothes, raced behind a ti-tree thicket,
and put them on as hurriedly as he had plucked them off.
The thicket grew under the cliffs between the two caves, and Denis
delayed some seconds to fill his arms with branches before running back
to the girl.
Her pulse seemed stronger. He arranged some of the branches, but left
the sun beating on her feet. It was the month of October, and early
summer in Australia.
Sundry packages had already come ashore; there was the inevitable barrel
of salt junk; there was a box of soap, that Denis spurned, and another
box so similar that he left it to the last. Judge therefore of his joy
on eventually discovering that here was nothing less than a case of
Spanish brandy! He shrieked the good tidings to the girl. She did not
stir. He had to run back to her, and lift that leaden wrist once more,
before he could bear to open the box.
His sailor's knife was worth a thousand pounds to him in that hour; the
great blade made short enough work of the lid, but the heavy haft
knocked the neck off a bottle so prettily as to provide a measure with
the medicine. Denis filled the inverted neck as he ran, and was soon
spilling as much over the marble face as he managed to get between the
bloodless lips. Then, for the first time, fear came to him: he retreated
a little on his knees. The stuff had caught her breath, her eyelids
twitched, and as she coughed the marble flushed to flesh. She did not
quite open her eyes.
"I am so cold," she moaned; and the white feet were drawn up a very
little, but so stiffly, as though the whole body had been dragged with
them.
Denis's blood froze as he remembered some vague saying that the feet die
first; even in the hot sun these looked dead enough; they also must be
brought to life, and the arch enemy repulsed at every point, at any
sacrifice. In Denis, or rather in the Denis who was least a Dent, the
act would almost outstrip the thought; this was the Denis who was saving
his darling's life without time to realize what she was to him. Quicker
than thought he had tipped up the bottle itself, so that the brandy came
out in gulps, first over one pale foot and then the other. And now the
left, now the right, now with one hand apiece, and anon with both
together for one foot, did he chafe and rub, and rub and chafe, until
the little lead feet were such pink shells, but so warm, so warm that
the tears stood in his eyes. For he had been long enough at it to think
a little as he rubbed; but as yet it was otherwise with her; she could
only lie there with closed eyes, as meek and unashamed as any other
dying soul.
She was not going to die, however, unless Denis dropped dead first. When
he could leave her feet he had a turn at her hands, a much shorter
journey for the blood, and by the time they began to clasp his feebly
there was no more brandy left. Denis went for another bottle, and half
the next dose she swallowed properly; the rest she pushed toward him.
"To please me," she whispered: they were her first words, and it his
first drop.
Now she was lying with her eyes tight shut, but not in sleep. Her lips
moved, first in the faintest smile, then in more whispers.
"I remember--everything. I knew you would come to me. I knew it!"
He could only say her name.
"Nan! Nan! Nan!"
It was as though his heart had broken, it was so full. He had dared to
call her his, the other night under the awning; he never dreamed of
doing so now. His conception of honour forbade an endearment which she
could not repudiate if she would; his own delicacy deplored the vital
offices which had been thrust upon him. He had brought the life's blood
back to leaden limbs, but he had brought it back at an expense which he
already apprehended dimly. In her right senses she might have chosen
death. He had taken on himself to give her life, and now she would live
to love or loathe him.
Gentle birth and hard upbringing had produced in Denis an essential
delicacy underneath a somewhat bluff exterior; but he was not
self-conscious on either score. Qualm and pang came upon him as part of
the situation, almost as his deserts. He was not aware of any fine
feeling in the matter. He was full of feeling, but he did not know that
it was fine.
Presently he saw she was asleep, and when he bent to listen she was
breathing beautifully; he just touched one hand, with the strange new
awe he had for her, and it was warmer than his own. But now he was in a
new difficulty; he found time to appreciate his own exhaustion; a stiff
pull of brandy alone kept him from fainting, and he foresaw in alarm how
it would be. They would both lie sleeping where they were, the almost
tropical sun would beat down on them all day, and they might never see
another. The nearer cave was not twenty yards away. Denis went to it,
and it was lined with far finer sand than outside; he came back and
gazed a moment on the girl. She was very young, and so delicately made!
He knew that he could carry her, feeble though he now felt: if only it
did not wake her. He gathered her tenderly in his arms: he carried her
to the cave, he put her down on the cool fine sand, and all she did was
to smile on him in her sleep.
If only she would when she awoke!
Meanwhile a pillow she must have before Denis would lay his own head
anywhere, and he had seen some rushes in the thicket. He cut an armful,
and thin bundle by thin bundle he got the lot under her head at last.
Then there was the table. He caught sight of it along the beach, and
thought what a fine screen it would make for Nan. It kept him up another
ten minutes; but by that time, and thereafter, the sun might stream into
the cave, but not a fiery finger would it lay on Nan. So then Denis
measured his length at last, outside the screen, as a dog lies across
the door.
On finally awaking (for many times he dropped off again deliciously),
his first act was to listen on hands and knees; and since the sound he
could just hear was as peaceful as it was regular, his next was to go
outside and stick a rush upright in the sand. Its shadow was a short
finger pointing seaward, so that he knew it was about noon. The tide had
gone down. Denis walked to the edge of the surf, and there stood gazing
up at the cliff for many minutes. No; there was no way up that he saw or
could conceive. Yet the little beach was only as the lees in the flagon
of a bay. There was assuredly no way round.
It is fifty years since the wreck of the _North Foreland_ and the second
mate's extraordinary climb, but the scene of each remains an object of
interest to visitors at the station on the heights above, while the
minor incident is unfailing matter for conjecture, contention, and much
open incredulity. It has been handed down that the sailor himself failed
to identify the place within an hour of his alleged performance. The
tradition is so far true. Denis never pretended to know how he had
achieved the superhuman: had he been in a condition fully to appreciate
what he was doing, the chances are that he never would have made the
attempt. He did not mean to make it as it was. But with the brandy in
him (and little else) he had clambered a few feet to see whether the
thing was as impossible as it appeared. Of course, it was not; but
already it seemed safer to climb a little further than to drop at the
risk of broken bones; and so in a minute he found himself committed to
the ascent. The cliff had beetled by insidious degrees; all at once
there was nothing to be seen between his naked feet and the beach far
below; one foot was soon bleeding, and the drops falling clear into the
sand. To drop clear himself would have meant certain injury now; as well
break neck as leg, thought Denis, for all the use he would be to Nan
with either. So on and up he went, now flattened for breath against a
favourable slope, now swinging by the fingers from some ledge that
threatened to saw them to the bone, anon testing tuft or twig with his
life, yet all with so light a head that the protracted jeopardy was an
exhilaration almost to the last. According to Denis, it was just at the
top, when a bunch of bracken came up so slowly as to enable him to grasp
a stronger bunch in time, that his gorge rose with the roots.
Remains the undisputed fact that between one and two in the afternoon, a
lad on the station, whose boundary was these cliffs, saw an eerie figure
approaching through the yellow dust of a mob of sheep which he happened
to be driving at the time. It was this lad whom the papers mentioned as
Mr. James Doherty; but like Denis he was Irish only by descent, and not
for an instant did he imagine that he had seen the devil. He appeared to
be a very quick youth, who knew the bush, and a glance convinced him
that the ragged wretch had been lost in it and driven to some dreadful
extremity; for his face and hands were all bloody, and even his bare
feet incrusted with blood and dust. Moreover, his speech was slightly
indistinct, as is the case with men who are half-dead with thirst.
This lad Doherty was the first person in Australia to learn the fate of
the _North Foreland_, and the first to discredit the wild finish of the
wild man's talk.
"Why, there's stairs right down," he cried. "Over two hundred on 'em,
cut in the sandstone."
"What a silly lie," sighed Denis.
"Did you sample the caves?"
"One of them."
"Which one?"
"The one with the big mouth."
"Don't you tell me you never went into the other! It's a nat'ral
chimbley at the fur end, and the boss had it shoved right through, and
steps cut in the sandstone for bathing."
The sailor's bloodstains were cracking in a ghastly grin.
"So that won't do, old man," added Mr. Doherty, severely.
"Will these?"
And Denis lifted one naked foot after the other; the left sole showed a
purple bruise, the right a gash that still dripped as he held it up.
Mr. Doherty supposed that he must be the liar, but only allowed himself
to look confounded for the moment; the next, he was emptying his
water-bag, from which Denis had already enjoyed a deep pull, over the
wounds. The sheep had scattered right and left, but the horse stood
apparently fast asleep in the sun.
"Now up you jump," said Doherty. "He's as quiet as a cow."
Denis stared at him.
"Jump up? What for?"
"You're within a mile of the homestead. You struck the right track on
top."
"Oh, but I'm not going on," said Denis hastily. "I must go back
to--her."
"With them feet and without your tucker?"
And the lean brown lad stood with his bare arms akimbo, a stained statue
in a flannel shirt and moleskins.
"At once," said Denis. "I've wasted time enough; and if there are stairs
there's no difficulty. Go you back to the homestead, and tell them to
send down everything they can think of for a young lady. Food and
clothes; mind, she hasn't had a bite since dinner yesterday."
The young Australian doffed his wide-awake with a sweep.
"Why, mister!" he got out, but that was all. "I'm sorry I didn't call
you 'mister' before," he added, after the stare of an idolater. "I'll
never leave it out again!"
Denis was limping along only a few minutes later when the sound of a
gallop made him look round for the rider who had just left him; and the
same horse it was, but a different horseman, for whom the stirrups were
grotesquely short. In a few seconds he had bobbed and bounded into a
blue-eyed man with fair beard blowing and tanned face filled with humane
distress.
"Get on this horse," he cried, flinging himself off. "If you don't, I'll
carry you myself! There--let me give you a hand; my name's Kitto; this
is my run. Everything's following in the buggy, but here's a biscuit to
begin on; the beds will be made and aired by the time we get you both
back. But only two of you--only two!"
Mr. Kitto had a heart of gold, and wore it on his sleeve; rarer still
was a tact almost incongruous in that desolate spot. Not a question had
Denis to answer as the horse ambled under him and the squatter strode
alongside. But when they came to the mouth of a long stair tunneled
through the soft sandstone, it was Mr. Kitto who looked curiously at the
rude steep steps.
"Nobody has come up here," said he. "We had a dust-storm yesterday
before the wind went round, and the sand on these top steps is as it
drifted."
Denis could afford to smile.
"So you didn't believe it either."
"What's that? I could believe the side of a house of you, my brave
fellow!" cried Mr. Kitto. "I only mean that your companion hasn't found
her way up in your absence."
"Ah, if she could!" sighed Denis. "But she is so weak I am afraid we
shall have to carry her up between us."
The squatter smiled, but said nothing.
"If only she is no weaker--if only she has slept right through!" Denis
went on, and repeated himself all the way down; but at the base he
button-holed his guide.
"Do I look very awful, sir? Is my face as bad as my hands? Wait a bit,
then--stay where you are."
And his injured feet could still dance him down to the water's edge; but
he came stealing back, one index finger to his lips, signing with the
other to Mr. Kitto to let him go first; and the smile on the cleansed
face told that good man a tale.
The mouth of the greater cave was just as Denis had left it. He crept on
all fours between the table legs, and listened. There was no sound. He
leaped up and looked over.
The cave was empty.
CHAPTER IV
LOST AND FOUND
Mr. Kitto saw the ragged figure shoot from the cave as though propelled
by some unseen power within; and for one second he imagined the worst.
He was relieved when the shipwrecked sailor raised his voice.
"Nan! Nan!" he yelled. "Miss Merridew! Miss Merridew! Nan! Nan! Nan!"
The squatter, running up, alone interrupted him.
"She's gone!" cried Denis in terrible excitement. "Gone clean away--God
knows where! Look for yourself, if you like; with the sun pouring in you
can see to the very end. Do you think I would miss her if it were ten
times the size? See, there's where I left her lying; that was all the
pillow I could give her; you can almost see the shape of her head!"
And the hoarse voice broke piteously; but such a firm, kind hand had him
by the arm, that Denis bit his lips and blinked the tears back to their
source.
"Come, now," said Kitto, "there's nothing wonderful in this; the only
wonder is that we didn't expect it. Why should she have slept so much
longer than you? She had done far less; and they are tougher than you
think. She would wake up and find you flown----"
"Poor Nan! Poor Nan!"
"And having the vitality she must have, to say nothing of the pluck, you
wouldn't expect her to sit still and wait, would you?"
"I suppose not," said Denis, gloomily. "I only know I would have died to
save her what she must have gone through alone--alone."
"You have done your best to die for her," retorted Mr. Kitto, with his
kind smile. "Were her people on board with her?"
"Her father, yes; she has no one else."
"Then you may have to live for her," the older man said gravely. "So
don't commit any more of your follies, and above all don't make yourself
ill without a cause. She is probably trying to find her own way to the
station, and it's safe to be the wrong way."
"But you said no one had been up those stairs."
Mr. Kitto stood confounded in the sun.
"She may be about the beach somewhere," he said hurriedly. "After all,
it's not so little that you take in every cranny at a glance. Come and
let's look. There are all sorts of holes and corners under the cliffs,"
he added as they went, "where my children play hide-and-seek at picnics.
It's our favourite place for them; in fact, that's why I cut those
steps. No harm could come to her here."
But his voice had lost something of its cheery confidence, and in spite
of him it lost more as they sought together, but sought in vain. As for
Denis, there was an end to his lamentations; he was past that stage; but
his dumb eyes plumbed the pit.
"Can you cooey?" asked the squatter. "No, you're too hoarse; don't try.
But I can, like a blackfellow, thank God!" And he arched his sun-burned
hands about his mouth.
"Cooooooooo----eeeey!"
It was long enough and loud to reach the one top-gallant mast of the
_North Foreland_ that they descried between the heads, at a certain
stage of their wanderings, standing out of the waves for a monument to
those beneath: had a single sailor been clinging to it, he must have
heard so penetrating and so sustained a call: but from the lost one on
shore, as from the drowned multitude without the gateway of sparking
blue, not a sound, not a sign.
Doherty and another arrived with blankets, clothes, coffee, mutton,
damper, billy-can, everything that kind thought could send, with a sweet
message from her who sent them; but this fell on deaf ears. Denis would
touch nothing till she whom he had lost was found again; so the squatter
thrust him down into the sand, and between them they forced him to make
a meal. And being at last in a more reasonable frame, he would have
ended by putting on the shoes which he had cast off in the morning, and
forgotten or despised ever since; but now his feet were so swollen, he
could not get them on. But as for letting them send him back to the
station in the buggy, and leaving the search to them, as Mr. Kitto had
now the temerity to suggest, it was as much as Denis could do to hear
him out civilly.
The survivor went his own way after this, and it led him first to the
summit of the cliffs, to see for himself whether there was no trace up
there; for he had been incredulous on that point all along; but now so
many had been up and down that he had still only one man's word for the
absence of foot-marks in the beginning, and he roamed far afield in
vigilant circles. He had been lost himself but for a fire they made on
top of the cliff; and when he came shambling back to the brink, down
below there was quite a galaxy of lanterns moving in different
directions, a constellation of creeping stars. So they had not found her
yet; and now it was black night.
In the utter heart-break of the hour, and the last stage of physical
distress, Denis had half a mind to fling himself over and be done with
it all; but only half a mind, and not a hundredth part of the heart.
Instead, as he went down gingerly in the dusk, one painful step at a
time, he reviled himself from top to bottom for the unnecessary climb
which is not wholly credited to this day. It was already at the root of
everything in the climber's mind. Had he only explored the smaller
cavern, he had been back with succour in one hour instead of three.
Mr. Kitto meanwhile had made up his mind. "We shall never find her
alive," he whispered to his overseer, who arrived upon the scene a
little before Denis's return. "But for that poor fellow's sake we must
keep up the pretence a bit longer. I can see there was something between
them; and when we find her body it will probably kill him; and after all
every soul will have been lost. Did you know the bodies were beginning
to come ashore? There's a little chap I take to be the skipper: last to
leave and first to land."
"But you aren't looking for this girl among them?" the overseer
exclaimed aghast.
"Not yet; but it will come to that," whispered Kitto. "I cooeyed till I
was hoarse; that's why I can't raise my voice above a whisper now; and
all the rest of us are in the same box. Mark my words, it's a case of
suicide, and a fearful case: the poor thing was so terrified at her
position when she awoke and found herself deserted on this desert coast,
that it drove her clean out of her mind. I almost hope he won't live to
realize it was that--though he's the sort we want in this colony--if he
gave up the sea."
"Was there no tracking her?"
"Scarcely a yard from the mouth of the cave, and he doesn't know I did
that; the sand is so heavy outside. But the tracks I did find pointed
straight to the sea. I grant you there were not enough of them to mean
anything in themselves."
They chanced to be passing close to the ti-tree clump as they conversed.
Suddenly the overseer stood still.
"You've looked in there, I suppose?"
"In there? What would be the good? It's not above a dozen yards thick,
though so dense; if she were alive in there she'd have heard us long
ago; if she's dead she's in the sea. Why do you ask?"
"I thought I heard something. That was all."
They moved on a few yards.
"I say, Mr. Kitto, I do hear something! Listen, sir--listen to that!"
They heard the voice distinctly, faint and feeble though it was.
"I am dying!" it moaned. "_Oh, Denis, where are you?_"
Mr. Kitto almost choked.
"Thank God--but if she does die!" he croaked and whispered in one
breath. "We're coming! We're coming, my dear, dear young lady! But," in
his whisper, "who's that hobbling toward us--dot-and-carry-one? It's
Dent, man, it's Dent himself; go and tell him like a good fellow--only
don't raise too much hope." And deeply agitated, the squatter thrust his
lantern among the outer branches of the thicket.
In an instant came the faint voice, immeasurably stronger, and poignant
with a nameless agony:
"Take it away! Oh, take it way, or I must die--I must!"
Kitto flung his lantern far behind him: he had seen a terrified face
among the branches, a burning face that told him all.
"And you have been here all day!" he cried, but chiefly to himself, in
the inward glare of his enlightenment. "And I cooeying till I could
cooey no more!"
"I thought it was savages," the voice in the clump faltered
unconvincingly. "I--I never heard it before----"
"We have everything ready for you," continued Kitto, cheerily: "hot
coffee, plenty to eat, dry clothes, and our best bed when we get you to
it. Here, take this to go on with." His coat came off with the words,
and was thrust through the branches until he felt she had it. "Now I'll
get you the rest," he said, and was hurrying off.
"Wait! Wait!" she called to him, and even more strongly than in her last
alarm. "Where's Denis--Denis Dent? He was the second officer, and he
saved me, he alone. I must speak to him first ... to thank him ... while
I can!"
And her voice broke for him, as his had broken for her, but with more
reason than Nan Merridew could dream; for Denis was lying close at hand
on the beach, with the station overseer stooping over him.
CHAPTER V
A TOUCH OF FEVER
Denis awoke between clean sheets in the widest berth and the largest
cabin he had ever occupied: it was a matter of moments to realize that
he was really on land, for the bed still heaved a little as the beach
had done yesterday, or whenever it was he had been washed ashore. He
felt as though he had been asleep a week; he could not have imagined so
delightful a lassitude of limb and spirit. It was a small room without
pretense of paper upon its weather-board walls, but the toilet cover on
Denis's left was as snowy as the sheet under his chin, and a sunlit
blind flapped soothingly behind it. Silence reigned, but it was the
peculiarly drowsy hush of hot weather, only the deeper for its
innumerable tiny sounds: one could have heard that it was hot. But there
was so little on him, that little was so light, and so sweet a draught
blew through the room, that in his own person Denis felt deliciously
cool.
He tried to remember how he had come there, but the final stages were a
painful farrago. He beheld a bandage on either hand, and could feel one
on head and foot; but they led him too far back. He had an impression
of the stars as he lay upon the beach, and another of interminable steps
with a handbreadth of starry sky at the top, but there was something far
more important that he was seeking in his mind without avail. He
certainly had not found it when the blind was pushed aside by a
sun-burned face, which vanished instantly, to reappear with its
appertaining shirt and moleskins in the doorway opposite.
"Awake at last, mister!"
"Only just," said Denis, feebly, but with his first smile, and the lad
entered staring curiously.
"You couldn't look like that whilst we was seekin' her," said he, drily.
"Why, what's wrong now?"
Denis had shot upright in bed.
"Didn't we find her?" he cried. "Yes, yes, of course we did! I remember
now. I'm so grateful to you; that's exactly what I was trying to
remember. Well? Well? And how is she?"
"Right as the mail, mister, so they all say; but I haven't seen her
yet."
"You're sure they say so?"
"Sure as my name's Jimmy Dockerty."
Denis fell back with a whispered thanksgiving.
"What did you say your name was?" he asked presently.
"Dockerty," replied the boy. "Christian name of Jim."
"Well, Jim, I don't forget you. It was you I clapped eyes on first, and
I'm almost as glad to see you again. Where am I exactly?"
"Merinderie Station: the barricks."
"The what?"
"Where the parlour men camp," explained Mr. Doherty, darkly. "You've got
the tooter's room; he has his schoolroom next door."
"It's very quiet."
"They've all cleared out for the day, apuppus; and you ain't in the
house, you see, though nice and handy. But I'll have to go over to the
house, to tell 'em you've waked up. There was something ready for you
the moment you did. But, I say--mister!" And the boy stood wistfully
beside the bed.
"Well, Jim?"
"Ask for me to come back and set along of you! Say you feel lonely like,
and ask for me to look arter you, mister. You needn't take no notice of
me, and no more won't I say nothink, if you don't want."
"But I shall want, Jimmy. I shall want you to tell me heaps of things.
Go and say so for me, by all means; and bring me anything they like to
send, though a cup of tea is all I fancy."
But when a chop was sent in characteristic conjunction it was eaten with
its slice of damper, and so heartily as to exclude immediate
conversation.
"One thing at a time," said Denis, "and the next thing is a wash; but I
don't mean to get up yet a bit."
"I wouldn't," said the boy, removing the tray and flourishing a towel.
"The young lady, there ain't any signs of 'er either; I'll give you the
word when there is."
Meanwhile the subject nearest Denis's heart was the one on which he
could extract least information. Doherty did not warm to it as he did to
other topics. And yet Denis could not help liking the lad; in the first
place, the lad was openly enamoured of him, and the present Denis far
too languid a hero to object very strenuously to his worship. There was
nothing slavish about it; hardly a word was employed in its expression;
but in the pauses the boy's eyes would remain upon the man's, and once
he said he had been to see the place, and continued gazing at Denis and
his bandages with redoubled reverence. It appeared that many bodies had
been washed ashore, and Mr. Kitto with nearly all his men was down there
now. Mrs. Kitto was at the other bedside, and had sent word that she
preferred not to leave it in case her patient, who had been asleep many
hours, should wake and miss her. Doherty suddenly remembered the
message; it drove Denis back into yesterday's inferno, and he lay with
such a pained face that the boy darted in with his own details. It was
four o'clock in the afternoon: Denis had slept nineteen hours, but Miss
Merridew was beating him. And they were the only survivors; not another
soul had been saved.
Denis thought of the hundred souls on board, above all of Nan's father,
her all in this world, to whose loss she would awake now any moment. And
that was a thought which brought tears to the second mate's eyes, yet it
was one with several facets, and presently his eyes were shining in
quite a different way; then he caught himself, and little Jim saw the
marine bronze deepen on the heroic cheek. But at last it was Jim's turn,
for Denis turned to him as though impatient of himself.
"Now let's hear about you," he said. "How long have you been in
Australia, Jim?"
"Only since I was born, and a bit before, and ever after, amen!" said
Mr. Doherty; and the teeth displayed by his grin were certainly worthy
of an aboriginal.
"And how long is that?" asked Denis, smiling, too.
"I don't know. They say as I am a good seventeen, but I don't look it,
do I?"
"What! Don't know your own age?"
"Not to a year or two."
"Didn't your parents tell you?"
"I never had none, mister."
And Mr. Doherty grinned again.
"You don't remember, them?"
"That's what I mean. They were--I don't mind tellin' you, mister, though
I'd rather bite my tongue out than tell another soul on the place"--and
little Jim came sidling from his seat at the foot of the bed to an easy
distance from Denis's ear, a dead secret in his astute young face. "But
you'll think no worse of a cove," he went on, whispering, "and you won't
split either; so it's a bit of a relief to tell you--they was both old
hands."
"Old hands?"
"Lags!"
Now Denis understood. "Of course I don't think the less of you," he
said, gently; "we are what we make ourselves, at any rate there's no
credit in anything else we may be. I, for instance----"
But Denis had strength enough left to control his tongue, and his
parents' memory was too sacred for association with that of transported
felons, however little there might be to chose between their sons.
"It might be worse," the lad went on, with an elderly air the more
pathetic for its unconscious humour: "they was married at Parramatta
factory, and my mother let me know it when I was as high as this bed;
it's the one thing I recollect her by, keepin' on tellin' me that; but
'im I never see as I remember. Parramatta factory," he continued,
lifting his shrewd eyes once more, "was the place where they kep' the
women prisoners, up on the Sydney side in the convict days; you could go
and take your pick as long as you married her." The boy's stare grew
into a contemplative grin, and Denis prepared for a familiarity.
"There'll be need for you to go there," said Mr. Doherty.
Denis was not offended; either he was too stricken to be readily
ruffled, or the young monkey had a way with him. He only rolled his head
on the pillow, and questioned whether such an establishment existed
still.
"It doesn't," rejoined Jim; "but even if it did, eh? You're all right,
you see, so you can go on shaking your head till you loosen it! _I_
seen, whether or no, last night when you couldn't."
"I don't want to know what you saw," cried Denis, vehemently enough; and
lay quite agitated between the sheets.
"I suppose," the imp pursued, with a precocious union of tact and
tenacity, "you'll go and get married straight away, and never let us see
or hear from you again."
Denis set his teeth, not because the boy jarred, but at the gulf between
this fancy picture and the possibilities of the case as it now stood. It
was characteristic of him that for the first time they seemed
impossibilities. He had saved her life, and now they were alone in the
world, he and she: how could he trade on such things, how avoid the
suspicion of trying to trade on them? If only another had saved her! If
only others had been saved!
"Don't speak of it," he groaned. "I am far too poor."
"Too poor, are you?"
The boy had brightened.
"And she is too rich."
"Then what more do you want, mister?"
"What more? It should be the opposite way; we should both be one thing
or the other. Anything but as we are!"
There was a brief intermezzo of the tiny summer noises. The blind
flapped; a mosquito sang an ominous solo in the sick man's ear; from
without came the faint hacking of an axe at the wood-heap. Denis looked
up at last, and there sat Jim with a startlingly wise face upon his
narrow young shoulders.
"Do you know what I should do, if I was you, mister?"
"Well, what?"
"If I felt same as you," said Mr. Doherty, "I'd make a fortune same as
hers."
Denis smiled tolerantly; the urchin amused him.
"Well, and how would you do that?"
"I should go up to Ballarat, and peg out my claim, as sure as my name's
Jimmy Dockerty!"
"It would have to be a lucky one," said Denis, dryly, though not until
he had paused to think.
"Then it wouldn't be the only one," retorted Doherty, with the readiness
of their common race.
Denis could not help dallying with the idea.
"Have they been doing such good business up there, then?"
"Good! Why, haven't you heard? There's never been such doings as they've
had on Ballarat this year. I thought it was all over the world," the boy
added, with shining eyes.
"It may be," said Denis, "but I've been at sea since June, and it isn't
exactly in a sailor's line."
"Isn't it!" laughed Jimmy. "You wait till you see the empty ships in
Hobson's Bay! Some of 'em been stuck there since the last day of
January, when the fun began. Do you mean to say you never heard of the
big finds in Canadian Gully?"
"You tell me, Jimmy. I want to hear."
Denis was leaning on an elbow. Jimmy had long been on his feet.
"There were some coves had a claim in Canadian Gully, on Ballarat," the
boy began, a wild light in his face, a light that Denis had never seen
before. "They were doing well, but not too well, and they offered to
sell the hole for a matter of three hundred. Then one of them went down
and came up with a nugget weighing sixty-six ounces!"
"At how much the ounce?"
"About four guineas."
"Well, that wasn't quite the three hundred."
"Stop a bit!" cried Doherty, a perfect fever in his eyes, a fever as new
to Denis as the light upon the lad's face. "That was only the beginning
of it. Of course they wouldn't sell after that. And before night they'd
got a nugget of a hundred and twenty pounds. Troy weight--whatever that
is--perhaps you can turn it into the other pounds, for I can't."
Denis sat forward, pressing the lint upon his forehead with his hands.
When at length he looked up there was the same light beneath the
bandages, the same fever in the still blood-shot eyes, as Denis himself
had remarked in the face and eyes of his companion.
"Six thousand pounds!" he whispered almost aghast.
"Six thousand golden sovereigns!" shouted the lad, capering about the
room. "Think of that, mister, think of that! I had it read to me out of
the papers. I got it off by heart. It was one big, solid, yellow lump of
gold, and they had to carry it between them slung to a pole. It wasn't
the only one, neither; as they went tunneling on it stuck out of the
sides, like bunches of grapes--at twenty pound a berry! There was only
four on 'em in the party; they made their fortunes in less than no time;
and two on 'em was new chums, same as you'd be if you went up
and--and----"
"And what, boy?"
"And took me along with you!"
Denis only wondered that the little brown face, thrust so near him in
its eagerness, did not burst into actual flame; it never occurred to him
that his own was perhaps presenting the like phenomenon.
"You talk as though you'd been there already, Jimmy," said he.
"But I haven't. I'd only give my two ears to go. The boss won't let me.
He says I'm too young; and he's been such a jolly good boss to me, I
haven't the heart to go agin him, especially when he's promised me my
kit if I wait till the Noo Year. But I b'lieve he'd give 'em me
to-morrow, mister, if I was going up with you!"
It was a strange talk for Denis on the day after his deliverance, in the
bed where they had laid him more dead than alive, but the manner of its
ending was the strangest part of all. In the fever that was so new to
Denis, that he had a touch of it before he dreamed there was such a
disease, he not only forgot the perils through which he had passed, but
his every sense turned blunt by comparison with the intensely keen edge
put so suddenly on certain of his desires. He had not heard the voices
outside; neither had Doherty; and the feet upon the threshold fell upon
four equally deaf ears. It was not until Mr. Kitto opened the door, and
entered first, that the one looked round and the other up.
"Here," said the squatter, "is a gentleman whom I know you will be
heartily thankful to see again."
The gentleman stood forward with outstretched hands and a quivering lip.
It was John Merridew.
CHAPTER VI
NEW CONDITIONS
The following were the facts, as Denis grasped them by degrees.
Not many minutes had elapsed between the mishap to the port life-boat
and the resolution of the _North Foreland_ into so much wood and iron at
the bottom of the sea, with a single top-gallant mast standing out to
mark the place. But during those few minutes the minor disaster had
caused another.
The loss of the first boat augured ill for the rest; and, indeed, only
the chief officer's lived to salute the sun; but before it was launched,
Miss Merridew had been swept overboard through the little faith of her
own friends, who had lashed her life-belt to a fallen spar, only to give
a gratuitous handle to the next great wave.
It was Captain Coles whose last remembered act had been to prevent one
or both gentlemen from diving after her to their death--some said with
his revolver at their heads; and, as if because neither seemed to care
any longer for his life, these were the two male passengers to be saved.
They were dragged into the mate's boat. The boat was successfully
launched by a mixture of good management and better luck. But it was
entirely to the mate's credit that she immediately stood out to sea, and
so continued until picked up by a coasting vessel, which landed the
party in Melbourne before night. The post-haste journey to the landward
scene of the wreck, all that night and nearly all next day (it was a
matter of a hundred miles up and across country), was only such as any
father would have undertaken in the circumstances, and most men in Ralph
Devenish's position would have taken with him.
But Captain Devenish did not accompany Mr. Merridew to the little
outbuilding in which Denis lay; nor did Jim Doherty, or his master,
remain even so long as to see the older man take the bandaged hands,
tenderly, tremulously, in both of his.
The interview which followed was an affecting one; but Denis had done
too much, too recently, to take a very emotional view of his exploits.
In his heart he took little credit for them. It was not he who had saved
Nan Merridew's life, but a merciful God who had merely used him as His
tool; and while, perhaps, more thankful than he now knew for that
supreme preferment, the prostrate man was almost morbidly alive to its
disadvantages. Thus, when Mr. Merridew led the conversation back almost
to the point at which their last had been interrupted, it was Denis who
created the awkward silence. He was touched by the uncontrolled
revelation of a hard man's soft side, by the contrast between the
exceedingly deliberate and rather irritating voice that he remembered on
the poop, and the voice that still broke with very tenderness. But his
own voice was so much the more dispassionate, and apparently perverse.
"I unsay every word," said Mr. Merridew, for the second time, and more
pointedly than ever; for, even in his really generous emotion, he could
not help feeling that it was unsaying a great deal.
Denis nodded from his pillow, but only to signify that he heard. "You
are very kind," he answered at length, with no ironic intent; "too kind,
I almost think. You might live to regret it."
"No, no; never, never! Now I know what you are."
"I am a junior officer in the merchant service--with a captain's
certificate."
Mr. Merridew was genuinely pained. "Dent," said he, "I take back my
words twice over, and still you throw them in my teeth! Surely you must
see that everything is altered now?"
"But it might have happened to anybody else," urged Denis, with gentle
tenacity. "You should look at it in that way, Mr. Merridew. Suppose it
had been one of the stewards; for all you knew, or seemed prepared to
believe, I was no more eligible than they, the night before last. I have
been infinitely lucky--no, blessed, blessed!--but that's all. It
doesn't give me ten thousand pounds to put to hers."
Mr. Merridew jumped up from the bedside. It was partly with temper that
he was trembling now.
"Have you changed your mind already, Mr. Dent, or is all this so much
affectation on your part? Did you mean what you said to me that night
before we struck or did you not?"
"Every word of it," answered Denis, in a whisper that brought the other
back to his former position on the bed, only now he was peering into
eyes averted from his own.
"You do love her, don't you, Dent? I can see it--I can see it--whatever
you may say!"
Denis could only nod. His weakness had come upon him very suddenly. But
by an effort he was able to prevent it from rising to his eyes. And soon
he was sufficient master of himself to attend to what Mr. Merridew was
saying with so strange an eagerness of voice and manner.
"You must come back with us. That's what you must do. Melbourne's a
perfect pandemonium: street upon street of tents, teeming with the very
sweepings of the earth, and ship upon ship without a man on board. But
there's a fine clipper, the _Memnon_ by name, lying ready for sea at
Geelong, and we'll all go home in her together. She's bound to be
under-officered, and I suppose you would be happier so than as a
passenger; but let this voyage be your last. You said you were as good
a man ashore as at sea, if my memory serves me as well as yours. Well,
now I can believe you, and in you, as I shall show you--as I shall very
soon show you! I have no one to follow me in the firm, Denis--that's
your name, isn't it?--and you don't mind my calling you by it, do you?
But if you became my son, Denis ... can't you see ... can't you see?"
The man's tongue had run away with him, as the unlikeliest tongues will,
under strong emotional strain: so we prattle of our newly dead,
magnifying the good that we belittled in their lives. But here the
strain was far greater; for she who had been dead was alive again; and
this, this was her saviour, for whom nothing, not even the girl herself,
was now too good.
"There is one thing you have forgotten," said Denis, without withdrawing
his hand from the nervous grasp that now hurt considerably. "I had not
got my answer--the other night. And how can I press her for it now?
Don't answer yourself, sir, till you have thought it over, if I may ask
that much of you, alone; and then I know you will agree with me. She
ought not to be allowed to give me her answer now. And I--I ought to go
away without seeing her again--until I have really shown myself----" He
could not finish. His weakness and his sincerity were equally apparent:
deeply moved, the elder man took his leave, with but one more syllable,
and that to promise Denis, from the door, not to repeat a word of their
conversation to Nan.
But Denis had not said all that it was in him to say, for in the first
place he had not the heart, and in the next he was not too proud of his
latest resolve; but it was a resolve no less, and already it might have
been the resolve of his life.
"This is not the real man," he lay saying to himself. "The real man had
his say on the poop--and the sounder man of the two. I won't take
advantage of either of them. Let me make that money. I can, and I will.
Then she shall give me her answer--not before."
And yet he had an uneasy conscience about his new resolve, plausible as
it became in words; but the qualm only hardened it within him; and he
lay in the twilight with set teeth and dogged jaw, quite a different
Denis from the one who had leaned forward to listen to Jimmy Doherty,
but every inch a Dent.
Doherty came stealing back with the face of a conspirator; his worldly
wisdom did not as yet include a recognition of the difficulty of picking
up broken threads, even when they are threads of gold. Denis would not
promise to speak to Mr. Kitto, would hear no more, indeed, of Ballarat;
all he seemed to care to know now was what Captain Devenish was doing
with himself.
"Him with the whiskers?" said Jimmy. "I can't sight that gent!"
"What do you mean?"
"Beg yer pardon, mister, but I don't like him. He speaks to you like as
if you was a blessed dingo. That sort o' thing don't do out here; we
ain't used to it." And young Australia shook a sage old head.
"But what's he doing with himself, Jimmy?"
"Oh, lookin' at the papers an' things, an' yawnin' an' smokin' about the
place."
"And Mr. Merridew?"
"With the young lady. She ain't a-goin' to show up to-night, the young
lady ain't; and you can take that as gospel--for I had it from the
missus herself."
The boy's eyes were uncomfortably keen and penetrating. Denis got rid of
him, and lay thinking until it was nearly dusk. Then they brought him
his first solid meal; and presently Mrs. Kitto paid a visit to a giant
so refreshed that nothing would persuade him to keep his bed without a
break. He must have a breath of air: he was quite himself. So early
evening brought him forth in a pair of Mr. Kitto's slippers.
The very first person he saw was Ralph Devenish, reading by lamplight in
one of the many rude verandas which faced and flanked one another under
the bright Australian stars. Denis went limping up to him with
outstretched hand.
"I am glad to set eyes on you, Devenish," he said gravely.
"Really?" drawled the other, with light incredulity; but he could hardly
refuse the bandaged hand.
"Ralph Devenish," pursued Denis, chilled but undeterred, "I make no
apology for the sudden familiarity, partly because we've both been so
near our death, and partly because we're cousins. My mother was a
Devenish; you may open your eyes, but I would drop them if I came of the
stock that treated her as her own people did! I never meant to tell you,
for there can be no love to lose between your name and mine, but I
blurted it out in a rage just before we struck. I want to say that I'm
heartily ashamed of the expressions I made use of then; that I apologize
for them, and take them back."
"My good fellow," replied Devenish, with engaging candour, "I don't
recollect one of them; the fact is, I was a little drunk. As to our
relationship, that's very interesting, I'm sure; but it's odd how one
does run up against relations, in the last places you'd expect, too. I
can't say I remember your name, though; never heard it before, to my
knowledge. If there's been anything painful between your people and
mine, don't tell me any more about it, like a good feller."
"I won't," said Denis, secretly boiling over, though for no good reason
that he could have given. It certainly was not because Devenish
continued occupying the only chair, leaving the lame man to stand.
Denis was glad to have so whole a view of him as the lamplight and the
easy chair afforded. Save for the patent fact that his clothes had not
been made for him, the whiskered captain looked as he had looked on
board, a subtle cross between the jauntily debonair and the nobly bored.
As Denis watched he produced the same meerschaum that he had smoked all
the voyage, a Turk's head beautifully coloured, with a curved amber
mouthpiece, and proceeded to fill it from the same silken pouch.
"Another soul saved, you see!" said Ralph Devenish, as he tapped his
Turk affectionately; it was the acme of sly callousness, even if
intended so to appear. Denis turned away in disgust, but turned back for
a moment in his stride.
"Are you going home with the Merridews?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Devenish. "Are you?"
"I don't know," echoed Denis. "But I think--not."
"Really?" drawled Devenish. "Well, as a year's leave don't last forever,
I'm not so sure."
And as Denis saw the last of him under the lamp, he had not yet resumed
the filling of the Turk's head.
CHAPTER VII
DENIS AND NAN
Miss Merridew continued prostrate, yet so exempt from bodily mischief
that her case began to baffle all except the other woman, who had charge
of it.
Mr. Merridew allowed himself to be dissuaded from obtaining indifferent
medical advice at exorbitant cost, but his anxiety increased with his
perplexity, and was only allayed by his instinctive confidence in Mrs.
Kitto. That lady proved as practical and understanding as she was good
and kind. Yet even Mrs. Kitto was puzzled just at first. They had to
deal with one singularly reserved--who could lie for hours without
closing an eye or uttering a word--and the father's way was to force her
to say something, at the pain of his own passionate distress. But Mrs.
Kitto would bring in her sewing, of which she seemed to have a great
deal, and sit over it, also by the hour, in a quietude as grateful as
her sparing speech. She was very observant, however, and the one thing
that puzzled her only did so in the beginning. This was the anomaly
presented by a patient whose face was often in a burning fever while her
head and hand kept perfectly cool.
The wreck was never mentioned in the sick-room, nor did Nan guess that
an inquest on the bodies was held within a few yards of where she lay.
Yet it was she who eventually broke the ice.
"Is Mr. Dent still here?" she asked, but in a tone so magnificently
offhand that a less astute person than Mrs. Kitto would have detected
its anxiety as soon.
"He was this morning," replied Mrs. Kitto, smiling.
"Do you mean that he isn't now?" the girl demanded, half-rising on an
elbow.
"No. I think I should have heard of it if he had thought of leaving us
to-day."
Nan Merridew fell back upon her pillow.
"I wish he would go on board," she said petulantly, "if he is going."
"On board?" queried Mrs. Kitto; and she set down her work.
"Isn't he to be one of the officers on the ship we are all going home
by?"
"I didn't know of it," said Mrs. Kitto, with equal embarrassment and
surprise.
"But he is," declared the girl, with all an invalid's impatience. "I
understood that from papa the day he came; he had spoken to the agents,
or he was going to speak to them, and Denis--I mean Mr. Dent--was to
have the best berth they could give him. I do wish he would go on board.
I--I almost wish he hadn't saved my life!"
And she tossed her face to the wall, for it was burning as it had burned
so often since her deliverance.
"It's meeting him again," said Mrs. Kitto to herself; "and she does care
for him, or she would mind less." It made it all the harder to ask
aloud, "Did your father say he had succeeded, dear?"
"We have never mentioned Mr. Dent again," said Nan to that, quite
haughtily.
"Because I don't think he's sailing in the _Memnon_ at all," continued
Mrs. Kitto, gently. "I think he's going to the diggings instead."
"Going where?" the girl asked after a pause. The first sentence was all
that she had heard.
"To Ballarat or Bendigo--to make his fortune."
"I hope he'll succeed," said Nan, after a pause; but her voice was a
sweet bell jangled, and an hour went before she turned her face from the
wall. It was still red, but there was a subtle difference in the shade.
And in the hazel eyes, which were the most obvious of Miss Merridew's
natural attractions, there was a crude, new light.
"I am going to get up," said she.
Mrs. Kitto proved not unprepared for the announcement; it appeared that
all her needlework had been for Nan, and now it was as though the last
stitch had just been put into everything. It was all a surprise to the
girl, who had not given the matter a thought. She was to get a fresh
outfit at Geelong, before the ship sailed, but Mrs. Kitto insisted on
sending her so far equipped by herself. And the dress which the kind
soul had been so busy altering was almost the last remnant of her own
trousseau, and some years behind the fashion.
In point of fact it was what used to be called a "double robe" of
lavender cashmere; and it was trimmed with braid of the same colour, but
the braid was a shade darker than the rest, and its criss-cross pattern
as unlovely in its way as the voluminous skirts it was intended to
adorn. But the fabric was soft and fine, and the delicate tint happened
to suit Nan Merridew, who had a singularly clear and pale skin, and dark
gold ringlets almost the colour of her eyes. For she was of the type
dear to the pre-Raphaelites, with rather more flesh and blood, and a
much more conspicuous spirit of her own, perhaps a little too
conspicuous when Nan reappeared in the sunlight, with quite another
light in her eyes, on the fourth day after the wreck.
It was near the close of a radiant afternoon, and Mr. Merridew was
absent for the day; but Captain Devenish had been seen strolling toward
the cliffs, and Nan thought that she would stroll after him in spite of
the direction. No one must think of accompanying her; she would so enjoy
finding the way for herself. To this Mrs. Kitto pretended to make no
objection, but expressed a belief that Mr. Dent was with Captain
Devenish, thinking she had named the last deterrent. On the contrary, it
only decided Nan to go quickly; and go she did with that peculiar light
stronger than ever in her eyes.
Now the way led through a belt of young pines, by which the station was
almost surrounded, and in the middle of them Nan met a man in moleskins
and a red shirt. Him she was approaching with downcast eyes, as one who
must regard her curiously, when his voice thrilled her at close
quarters.
"Nan! And you'd have passed me without a word!"
Denis was standing in her path, a common wide-awake drooping from one
hand, the other reaching out for hers.
"I didn't recognize you," she said, scarcely touching his hand. "And I
was looking for Captain Devenish--can you tell me where he is?"
"He has gone down to bathe," replied Denis with some reluctance. To
bathe where a ship's company had been drowned that week! No wonder Nan
winced. "Can't you spare me a few minutes instead?" he added as she was
about to turn.
"Oh, yes, if you wish it."
"Of course I wish it!" exclaimed Denis. His shoulders looked very square
under the coarse red flannel; but they were heaving, too.
Nan was her own mistress on the spot. "I couldn't know," said she. "You
see, you never sent me any message--not one word."
"I shall tell you why."
"And then I understood you were going to the diggings."
"So I am," said Denis. His voice was preternaturally deep and vibrant.
She looked up at him with the odd light in her eyes.
"And why haven't you gone yet?"
"I wanted to see you first."
"That was very kind."
"To tell you why I was going at all--to tell you everything, Nan, if you
will let me--if you aren't determined to misunderstand me before I open
my mouth!"
Their eyes were together now, his dark with passion, in hers a certain
softening of the unlovely light that hurt him more than her tone: and
her eyes were the first to fall, to wander, to espy a stump among the
pines.
"I must sit down," she faltered. "It's my first appearance, and I tire
directly. But I'm not too tired to listen to you--I want to."
Yet already a change had come over her, and either she was physically
weaker or else softer at heart than she had been but a minute before. At
all events she took his arm to the stump, which was one of several in a
little clearing lit and checkered by the slanting sun. And she sat there
almost meekly in his sight, while Denis planted a foot upon one of the
other stumps and said what he had to say with bare arms folded across a
moleskinned knee.
"In the first place," he began, "I saved your life."
Nan's smouldering spirit was in flames upon the word, and her face
caught its fire.
"And you remind me of it!" she cried in red scorn. "Is it the sort of
thing one forgets? Is it a thing to thank you for like any common
service, and are you the one to put the words in my mouth?"
Denis did not wince.
"I am wrong," he said, quietly. "In the first place, I asked you to
marry me; it was only in the second place, and before you had time to
give me an answer, that I was so unfortunate as to save your life."
"Unfortunate!"
"Most unfortunate to be the one to save you, Nan, because if it had been
any one else it would have made no difference between us; as it is it
makes all the difference in the world."
"I don't understand," she said, trembling because she was beginning to
understand so well. "I only know how brave you were--how brave!"
And she raised her sweet face without restraint, for now she was
thinking of nothing but his bravery.
"Most men are that at a pinch," said Denis, with a twitch of his red
shirt: "but I was luckier than most. I won't make too light of it. I can
swim. But you don't suppose I was the only strong swimmer on board. And
which of the rest, I should like to know, wouldn't have made as good use
of my chance?"
"But it wasn't only the swimming!" the girl cried without thinking, to
break off with her bent face in its besetting fever.
"If you mean the climbing," he continued equably, "there was still less
merit in that, for it was absurdly unnecessary, as you probably know,
besides which I was full of Spanish brandy at the time. Not that I'm
ashamed of that," added Denis with the absolute candour of the dales. "I
believe that brandy was the saving of us both; but it was another piece
of pure luck."
Nan said nothing for a minute. She was trying to see his hands, and he
showed her with a shrug the only finger that was still in rags. His
wounds had not been serious; he was scarcely walking lame; the scratches
had skinned over on his face. She could look in it again, steadfastly,
simply; she was even beginning to like it better between a wide-awake
and an open throat than in the spruce cap and collar of the voyage. Her
own scarlet she had conquered in a tithe of the time it had often taken
her in secret: it was not so dreadful to be with him after all. And if
he loved her nothing mattered: not even her long agony in the ti-tree
thicket. Yet he had hurt her by belittling himself, and by something
else of which his last words reminded Nan.
"But you don't look on it as luck. You aren't a bit glad you saved my
life!" And her eyes fell once more, if this time not involuntarily.
"Glad!" he cried out. "Gladness is no word for my feeling about
that--for what I feel every moment of every hour."
"Yet you wish it had been some one else."
"I don't!"
"But you said you did, Denis."
"Well, and I have felt it, too, when I couldn't send you a single
message--couldn't make a single sign--for fear you should think--for
fear you should misunderstand!"
Nan had not raised her eyes again; his tone made it difficult now. He
was leaning toward her, almost bending over her, and yet his foot clung
to the pine-stump as though by conscious effort of the will, and his
face was a fight between set jaw and yearning eyes. But Nan could not
see his face; she could only see the sunlight and the shadows in the
lavender skirts that spread about her as she sat, and a few inches of
hard yellow ground beyond. She was beginning to believe in his love, to
understand his position before he explained it to her, to see the end of
her own doubts. His halting voice was more eloquent than many words.
And yet for words she was constrained to probe.
"So you determined to go up to the diggings?"
"I did."
"And to leave me?"
"Nan, I must."
His voice reconciled her more and more.
"Must you, Denis?"
"To make some money, Nan dear! And I will make it--I will--I will!"
She felt that he would. His voice only stirred her now.
"And then?" she asked.
"And then," he cried, "and then I sha'n't mind pressing you for an
answer to what I dared to ask you on the _North Foreland_."
There was a silence in the little clearing among the young pines. Only
near at hand the hum of insects, and in the distance a cloud of
cockatoos shrieking the sun into the sea, and the sea itself faintly
booming upon the base of the sandstone cliffs. Before either spoke there
was indeed one other sound, but it fell on ears doubly deaf; for Nan had
flung back her dark-gold ringlets in a way of hers, and from the bold
pose of her head none could have imagined the warm bloom upon her
cheeks, or the tender film that dimmed the hazel eyes.
"Suppose I prefer to give you your answer first?"
"Nan! Nan! I would have you think it over, and over, and over again!"
"But suppose I refused you after all?"
"I would sooner that than be accepted in haste and--and repented of--you
know!"
It was as though he was maintaining his balance for a bet, and near the
end of his endurance even so. Nan watched him with a smile touched by
the last beams of the setting sun, but as she rose the red glory beat
full upon her.
"Very well!" said she. "Then if you won't come to me for your answer, I
must bring it to you."
Night falls like an assassin in that country, but the purple tints were
only beginning when in his very ear she implored him not to leave her
any more, and he held her closer, but said he must. It would not be for
long. Others were growing rich in a day; he would make one more. He knew
it; something told him; and again, something else told her.
Yet she was vexed with herself for her impulsive appeal against a
decision to which she had felt reconciled but the moment before; and
vexed with him for scarcely listening to her appeal, unpremeditated as
it was, unreasonable as it might be. He might have wavered; she would
not have had him yield. His resolution was fine, heroic; she only
wondered whether it was quite human, and wondering, lost the thread of
his defense.
"Think, think!" he urged. "Think what it would be for me to go home in
this ship and marry you as I am, on my poor captain's certificate and
nothing else; and then, only think, if I followed in a few months with a
few thousand of my own behind me! You may say I ought to have thought
of this before. But I did. I told your father so a few minutes before
the wreck. I wanted you to wait for me--I was selfish enough for that
from the beginning!"
The disparaging epithet pricked Nan to interrupt him and take it on
herself. But Denis persisted without a smile.
"Darling, I am selfish about it still; for if I am not worth waiting
for, I am not worth having; but if you can wait only a few months--not a
day more than a year--I will come to you as I should come if it is to
be--but come I will, rich or poor, if I am alive! Nan, darling, I have
everything to gain, only these few months to lose; but I will gain all
the world in them. I will, I will, I will!"
She could not but be infected with his confidence, his enthusiasm, and
his ideal. There in the dusk were the eager Irish eyes glistening and
burning into hers, but there also was the strong north-country jaw set
for success as the needle to the pole. And yet--and yet--she was weeping
on his shoulder as the purple turned to deepest blue.
"I could have helped you, dearest," came her broken whispers. "But no,
not here. It's an awful country. It will break my heart to think of you
in it. I thought, if you loved me ... after all we have been through ...
you would never, never leave me again! But, dearest, I do believe in
you, and I will wait, for you know best."
So after all it was a brave face, bright as her will could make it,
though still wet with tears, that she held away from him, for Denis to
look upon it for the first time as his own. But it was a very terrible
face that hovered over the same spot but a minute later, when Ralph
Devenish came crashing through the young pines to curse the very ground
where they had stood, and the sea that had not swallowed one or both.
CHAPTER VIII
COLD WATER
The Merridews sailed for England about the middle of October. They had
been less than a fortnight on dry land; and it was with a heavy and
uneasy heart that Denis watched their new vessel to a speck from the
highest point commanding Corio Bay.
With all his candour, there were one or two things that he could not
hide from himself, but that he had hidden from the girl to whom he was
now engaged. He was a very young man. He loved adventure for its own
sake, and though he had been through much, he felt to the very bone that
he was only on the threshold of an exciting and successful career. There
could scarcely have been a more sanguine temperament, or a character
with more right to one. But the young man's confidence in himself was
neither blind nor overweening, and in his heart he was under no illusion
as to his own motives. It grieved his soul to see the ship sailing away
with all he loved on earth, yet he knew how bitterly he would have felt
sailing in her, with never a sight of Bendigo or of Ballarat. Then he
was inordinately independent. It was in the blood. He must make his own
way. And here he was frank, yet not so frank as to tell his Nan that her
father had definitely offered to put him in a position to make his way
quietly at home; and the father was not so incontinent.
A little incident had contributed to Denis's depression; and he was not
one to make much of little incidents. But the first person he had
encountered on the _Memnon_, when he had gone on board to see the last
of them, was another survivor of the _North Foreland_--a diseased being
named Jewson, who had shipped in her as chief steward, only to be
disrated for an incompetent sot before the voyage was a month old. The
disrating had been largely due to the second officer, who did not
hesitate to ask the fellow in what capacity he saw him now.
"Captain Devenish's servant," was the answer, with a grin that maddened
Denis, but it was the fact that rankled. He had said no more. It was too
late; and the man had been saved, he deserved a fresh start; but that
Devenish, of all people, should give him one, in that vessel of all
vessels! It was a sign of more than Denis had time to realize until
Corio Bay lay blue and bare at his feet, and the tiny sail on the
horizon had vanished forever from his view.
He sat in the sun with his face hidden in his hands. His heart had
filled with prayer, his eyes with tears; he dug his knuckles into them,
and missed the bloodstone signet-ring that he had worn since his
father's death. There had been no time for an engagement ring, but Nan
was to wear this one until they met again. And she had given him one of
hers--a ruby, a diamond, and a sapphire--that jammed in the middle of
his little finger nail; but he was to wear it day and night about his
neck instead, on a tiny lanyard that she had plaited for it out of her
own warm hair. Denis could not trust himself to look at it yet; he could
only press the ring to his heart until it hurt, as holy sinners press
the scapular, but that was enough to nerve him. He could even smile as
he remembered the absurd injunction which had accompanied this sweet
talisman. Still smiling he looked down again through the sunshine upon
the empty bay; but now the first thing Denis saw was a separate shadow
on the grass.
"Cheer up, mister! All board! It's getting on for fifty knots to
Melbourne, and the Lord knows how many bells!"
Jimmy Doherty was standing over him, and his dark skin beamed as he
rolled the nautical phrases on his tongue. Denis got up without a smile.
"Don't remind me of the sea, Jimmy; help me to forget about it. And as
for Melbourne, we shall never see it to-night."
"Sha'n't we though!"
"What! Fifty miles between midday and midnight?"
"It's not so much, and I've got us a lift half-way."
"But we can't afford that, Jimmy."
A shifty grin from Doherty betrayed a sort of guilty pride in his
arrangements.
"I've got it for love, mister, from a hawker as only wishes he was
a-goin' all the way, for the honour and glory o' carryin' a gent that's
done what you've done and got himself in all the papers."
Denis was divided between natural satisfaction and annoyance.
"Very well, Jimmy, and I congratulate you; but, once and for all, never
another word about that unless you're asked! We're mates now, remember;
I might as well brag of it myself. Besides--but it's a bargain, isn't
it?"
Mr. Doherty said he supposed it must be; but for once his spirit was
under a cloud, for he had appointed himself sole minstrel of his hero's
praises, foreseeing both honour and profit in the employment; but on
reflection the embargo only made him think the more of Denis, and his
first care was to whisper it in the hawker's ear.
The hawker was waiting with his wagon outside an inn in Moorabool
Street, and Denis was relieved to find the man less palpably impressed
by his exploit than Jimmy had represented him. He was a little flint of
a fellow, sharp but surly, who accepted an eight-penny glass of porter
with a nod and drained it without removing his eyes from the sailor's
face. But in a mile or so his tongue loosened, as the trio sat abreast
under the wagon's hood, and the scattered buildings of the budding town
melted into the unbroken timber of the bush track.
"So you're bound for the diggings, are you?" said the hawker. "And what
may you think of doing when you get there?"
"Well," said Denis, to enter into the man's humour, "we did think we
might dig."
"Oh, dig!" said the hawker, and relapsed at once into his former
taciturnity.
"What would you do, then?" inquired Denis, nudging Doherty, who, though
he had plenty to say when they were alone, was a respectful listener
before a third person.
"Bake!" said the hawker, without a moment's hesitation.
"Bake?" echoed Denis in amused dismay.
"It's four-and-six the half-loaf at this moment," said the hawker. "Same
price as a quarter of sheep. On the diggings, that is. Yes, sir, I'd
bake, that's what I'd do, if I had my time over again, and capital
enough to make a start."
"And if you hadn't enough?"
"If I hadn't enough, and if they were full-handed in all the publics,
and I couldn't get a job in any o' the stores, and the Commissioner
wouldn't give me one, and if I could borrow a license, beg some tools,
and steal enough to eat, well, I might have another dig myself. But not
till I'd tried everything else. You've heard what they got in Canadian
Gully, I suppose?"
"I have," said Denis.
"So had I," said the hawker.
"And what did you get?"
"Not enough to eat bread on; not one in a thousand does. But you go and
have your try. You may have a bit of luck in the end, and manage to
bring your bones away with the flesh on 'em, like me. That's the most I
can wish you, and it's hoping for the best. But you take my advice, and
when the luck turns, never wait for it to turn again. You get rid of
your claim for what it'll fetch; mine fetched what you see--a hawker's
wagon, horses, and whole stock-in-trade. I just jumped in and drove
away, and he jumped into my claim. And I will say I'm doing better at
this game than I was at that."
"And how is he doing?"
"I don't know," said the hawker, "and I don't care."
"Prices must be good," remarked Denis.
"Among the middlings," said the hawker with a sidelong glance at
Doherty, who, however, was looking the other way. "I can let you have a
nice pair o' boots for a five-pound-note, and a spare shirt like what
you've got on for thirty bob. But it's not what it was when I came out
last year. I wouldn't come into the hawking business if I were you; you
could get twenty-five bob a day as a carpenter, and three-pound-ten to
four pound a week at bullock-driving. But I'd rather be a labourer on
the roads, with two crown certain a day, and wood, water, and tent
supplied, than peg out another claim."
Denis had heard enough. He was not easily discouraged, but he found it a
relief to turn his attention to the scenery. They were intersecting a
forest of rather stunted trees, all blown one way by the wind, which
made music of a peculiar melancholy among their branches. Doherty said
the trees were she-oaks, answering Denis's question with great zeal.
Similarly Denis learned the names of the various parrots that perched by
the flock amid the dull green foliage, or fled from tree to tree with a
whirr and a glint of every colour in the rainbow. Then a pond must be
called a water-hole, it seemed--a beck a creek, and the curly-bearded
aboriginals blacks or blackfellows--but not niggers. It was the earliest
and most elementary stage of Denis's colonial training, and he would
have relished it if only for his mentor's intense satisfaction in his
task, to say nothing of a capacity to teach not inferior to the will.
But the hawker had a last word left, which he kept, as though by
demoniac design, for one of their glimpses, depressing enough to Denis
as it was, of the sparkling sea never many miles distant on their
right.
"Ah!" said the hawker, pointing with his whip, "if I'd been one hour
earlier in Geelong, I'd have sold lock, stock, barrel an' ammunition for
a berth in that ship that cleared out for Old England this forenoon.
Ship from Melbourne you can't get. It was a chance in a hundred, and I'd
have given all I have for it, as you will for such another before you've
seen half as much as me."
It was about three in the afternoon, at a place called Wyndham, that the
pair took their leave of this dispassionate pessimist, with as little
regret as may be supposed, and found themselves afoot for the last
twenty miles. And almost from the first step Doherty was loud in his
denunciation of every word the hawker had uttered, not one of which was
Denis to believe for an instant. But there was no Denis left to embrace
this view; the leave-taking of the morning and the hawker in the
afternoon had reduced him between them to unmitigated Dent, a dogged
fellow ready for the worst, though more than ever bent upon the best.
"There are two sides to everything, and give me the dark side first,"
said he; "besides, a lift for nothing is a lift for nothing. But what's
that you've got in your pack, Jim?"
"What's what?" asked Doherty, changing colour as he trudged.
"There's a box of some sort showing through your outer blanket."
"Oh, that's my revolver."
"Your revolver! You hadn't one this morning. Who's given it to you?"
demanded Denis.
"No one," the boy confessed. "I bought it from the hawker while you were
on the ship."
"And how much did you give for this?" asked Denis, as they squatted by
the roadside, with a neat oak case open between them, and a great
five-chambered Deane and Adams twinkling in the sun.
"Ten guineas, mister."
"Ten guineas! More than half the wages you drew from the station, for a
second-hand revolver? He didn't say it was first-hand, did he?"
"No, but he said it was worth more."
Denis sprang impatiently to his feet.
"Well, it may save our lives, and then it will be," said he. "But I like
your notion of a lift for love!"
CHAPTER IX
THE CANVAS CITY
The travelers had been variously advised as to their best road to
Melbourne from a certain point; but what they did (by pure accident) was
to come out on the Williamstown promontory and get a second lift (by
sheer luck) in a boat just leaving for the Sandridge side. They were
even luckier than they knew. The gain in mileage was very considerable.
And there was sun enough still upon the waters for them to see with
their own eyes the derelict sail of all nations and of every rig,
swinging forlornly with the turning tide, their blistered timbers
cracking for some paint, and all hands at the diggings.
But the sun was sinking when the two friends landed at Liardet's Jetty,
and came at once by the Sandridge Road to the first thin sprinkling of
the tents which formed the Melbourne of those days. The track ran in
ruts through sand and dust as fine as tooth-powder; they trudged beside
it over scanty grass, with here and there a star-shaped flower without
the slightest scent. Gum-trees of many kinds, some with the white bark
peeling from their trunks, others smooth and leafless as gigantic bones,
made amends with their peculiar aroma. There was a shrill twittering of
the most unmusical birds, the croak of bullfrogs from a neighbouring
lagoon, a more familiar buzz of flies, a tinfoil rustle of brown grass
at every step. Once the grass rustled before Denis's foot came down, and
in a second he had stamped the life out of his first snake--a long black
fellow with a white waistcoat and pink stripes. Doherty held it up in
horror.
"That's not the way to kill a snake," said he. "Jump out of the road if
you haven't a stick. It's lucky for you that you came down on his right
end, or he'd have been up your leg like a lamplighter, and in a few
minutes you'd 'a' been as stiff as him. Poisonous? I believe you,
mister! You thank your stars, and don't do it again."
And Denis went on with a cold coating to an active skin, but without a
syllable until Doherty drew his attention to a marquee under the trees,
with a brass plate stitched to the canvas; and when they got near enough
to read the legend it was ESTABLISHMENT FOR YOUNG LADIES, in tremendous
capitals; there was even a blackboard nailed to a blue gum, with benches
fixed to stumps, and every accessory but the young ladies themselves.
Denis was prepared to meet them two-and-two in the next glade, but the
multiplication of tents soon put this one out of his head, and their
infinite variety became apparent as they drew together into streets.
There were canvas cones, canvas polygons, canvas in every figure
defined by Euclid and in more that baffle definition. A cricket tent had
a publican's sign swinging from an overhanging branch. A red lamp
surmounted the nearer of two uprights which carried a pole with a sheet
stretched across it; the doctor crawled out of this his surgery, and lit
up with a brawny arm, as the travelers passed. Denis thought it still
quite light, but when they came to the first bricks and mortar, as it
seemed but a few yards further, there was just enough rose in the dusk
for good eyes to glean from the notice-board in front of the house that
its three rooms and its strip of yard were to let at L400. And in
another minute it was night.
An unpleasant feature of these canvas streets was that slops and refuse
were hurled into the middle of them, while cast-off clothing literally
lined the sides; but as a light twinkled at one tent, and a fire blazed
up outside the next, the picturesque contrasts afforded by the firelit
faces, the inconceivable jumble of grades and races, blinded Denis to
all else. Now it was a drayman with a single eye-glass, now a gentle
face at the wash-tub and a diamond flashing through the suds. The
peoples might have been shot by the shovelful from their respective
soils; yellow Yankee, gross German, suspicious Spaniard, sunny Italian,
burly Dane and murderous Malay, there they all were, so many separate
ingredients newly flung into the pot. A noticeable link was the
hook-nosed Jew who spoke every language and hailed from every clime.
And either there were more Chinamen even than Europeans, or their blue
breeches and their beehive hats brought them oftener to the eye. But the
usually drunken blackfellow and his invariably degenerate gin were
already becoming scarce in their own land.
Denis and Jim drifted with this cosmopolitan crowd across a bridge, into
a region of fewer tents, better lights, more weather-board walls, and
not a few of bricks and mortar. A veranda where a free fight was raging
turned out to be that of the General Post Office; the flag flying over
it celebrated the arrival of an English mail, and it was for their
letters that the poor folk fought. One shook himself clear with his
letter in his hand, and an indescribable look of happiness on his face,
as Denis looked on enviously. In an innkeeper's yard hard by, the horses
of a bullock-team scratched the panels of a resplendent brougham; and
though this was evidently the fashionable quarter, judging by the
numbers of regular shops, the gutters were swollen to such rivers that
in places drays acted as ferry-boats across them. In some of the shop
windows the things were marked VERY DEAR to tempt the plutocratic
plebeian; but in nearly all there was a legend which went to one head at
least--the legend of GOLD BOUGHT IN ANY QUANTITY.
"There must be plenty going after all," said Denis, "or you wouldn't see
that at every turn."
Doherty agreed without enthusiasm; it was what he had always held; but
the surface excitement of his years was not proof against a ravenous
appetite, whereas Denis could have gone on and on without a bite. Yet
they were really in search of modest fare, and were actually
reconnoitring a large and flaring shanty, which rather chilled the
frugal blood in Denis, when a choice harangue was poured into them from
the veranda; and there sat a gorilla of a man, his shirt half-hidden by
his beard, dipping a pannikin in a bucket between his knees, and
spilling the contents as he waved it to the pair.
"Come in, ye cripples!" roared he. "Come and have a pannikin o'
champagne with ole Bullocky, or by the hokey you'll be stretched out
stiff!"
And with that the true gorilla fell to pelting them with the empty
champagne bottles that surrounded him, until Denis cried a truce and led
the way in, laughing, under a storm of drunken banter from the
successful digger and his friends.
"A new chum, I see!" said Bullocky, rolling an unsteady eye over Denis
when he had handed him the pannikin. "Another blessed 'Jack ashore,' by
the cut of ye; deserting orf'cer, I shouldn't wonder! All the more
reason listen me: none of your damn quarter-deck airs here, you know.
There ain't no blessed orf'cers aboard this little craft. We're all in
the cuddy or afore the mast--w'ich you please--so you can just sweat all
the notions you ever had. And if you don't empty that there pannikin
down your own gullet----"
A huge fist finished the sentence with a terrifying shake, as Denis was
in the act of handing the tin mug to the open-mouthed Doherty.
"We haven't had our supper yet," he explained. "It's dangerous stuff on
empty stomachs."
"Not had your suppers?" thundered Bullocky; a lurch took him to the
tap-room door, where he gave the order in a roar. "Now you drink up," he
went on, with ferocious hospitality, as another lurch brought him back.
"It cost five pounds a bottle, and if it ain't good enough for scum like
you, I'll stretch the two of ye stiff till your grub's ready."
And the genial brute bellowed with laughter until the veranda shook, and
flinging off a wideawake garnished with an ostrich feather, stuck his
great head into the bucket of champagne and drank like his betters of
the field. As a result, Denis and Jim had their meal in peace, for it
was but lukewarm mutton and sodden duff, and while they ate, one of his
friends informed them that "Bullocky" was the short for Bullock Creek,
Bendigo, of which the great man was patron sinner, having made several
fortunes there that year, and spent them in the way they saw. "Which
isn't so bad," added his friend, who did discredit to a better class,
"for a gentleman from over the way."
Denis asked him what he meant.
"An old hand from Van Diemen's Land," the man answered in a despicable
undertone. And Denis felt inclined to tell the old hand, who now
returned to crown his hospitality by forcing a nugget apiece upon the
two beginners.
"But it must be worth fifty pounds!" exclaimed Denis, in vain protest,
as he handled his.
"Fifty smacks in the mouth!" thundered Bullocky preparing to administer
them. "You ain't on your dam' quarter-deck now!"
"Very well," said Denis, "we'll keep them for luck, rather than come to
blows about it; and we really must thank you----"
"You dare!" interrupted Bullocky, with another flourish of his hairy
fist. "It's no more'n wot I'd do for any other scum with all their
troubles ahead on 'em. I ain't got no troubles fore nor aft; I'm Lord
God o' Bullock Creek, I am, and I ain't done with you yet; you come
along o' me."
So saying, he led the way toward certain sounds of revelry which had
begun to fill the lulls between his detonations. And in a marquee
crowded with diggers, and reeking with the fumes from pipe and pot, the
trio were in time for the last lines of a song from a buffoon on the
platform at one end:
"And when you think it's all serene--
Pop goes the weasel!"
It was the latest song from England, and was vociferously encored; but
not for the first time, it seemed, and the mountebank would only bow and
scrape. In an instant the rank air was yellow with flying orange-peel.
But Bullocky handed Jim a nugget to throw for him, which Mr. Doherty
discharged with such effect that it hit the performer on one leg and
sent him hopping round the stage on the other, until the nature of the
projectile was discovered, and the song given yet again. At its close
the plutocrat's party were accorded a table in front, and more drink
ordered to Denis's embarrassment. "Careful, Jimmy," he contrived to
whisper, and received a reassuring kick under the table by way of reply.
A poor painted girl, with a voice that had some little sweetness left,
and a pathos all its own, came next with a song just old enough to have
associations for some of those who heard. It was, however, a sweet song
in itself, and in a few bars a hush had fallen on the audience; even
Bullocky sat back in his chair, his huge beard leveled at the singer.
"You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette;
There's no one left to love me now, and you too will forget;
But my heart will be with you wherever you may go--
Can you look me in the face and say the same, Jeannot?
When you wear the jacket red, and the beautiful cockade,
Oh! I fear you will forget all the promises you made.
With a gun upon your shoulder and a bayonet by your side,
You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride--
You'll be taking some proud lady and be making her your bride!"
So it ran; and Denis caught himself pressing his dear new amulet to his
heart. He was so saddened that he did not see Bullocky until he heard
him roar, "No, he won't, my dear! I'll stretch him stiff and stark if he
do!" at which one behind gave a laugh, and so brought that formidable
fist within an inch of his nose, while with the other paw the gorilla
dashed away a tear that ought to have filled a wineglass. Denis lost
half the next verse in watching him. Bullocky was now sprawling across
the table, his great face hidden in the hirsute folds of his powerful
arms.
"Oh! if I were King of France, or still better Pope of Rome,
I'd have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home.
All the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might,
Why, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight--
Yes, let them who make the quarrel be the only ones to fight!"
Bullocky's shoulders were heaving with vinous sobs. He did not join in
the tempest of applause, and before the last verse had been repeated his
emotions reached their anti-climax in a sounding snore. Denis gave
Doherty a nod, and they deserted under cover of the final furore.
Near the exit of the marquee a degenerate sailor reeled into them; and
it shocked Denis slowly to identify the blurred features of his late
shipmate, the chief officer of the _North Foreland_. It was but a week
since he had given evidence as clear as it was creditable at the inquest
in Mr. Kitto's wool-shed.
"Seen you come in," said the mate. "Thought you was in blue water by
this time."
"How so?" asked Denis.
"Homeward bound," hiccoughed the mate.
"I'm not going home yet," said Denis. "I'm going to try my luck on the
diggings first."
The chief swayed incredulous. "Thought that was all plain sailin'?" said
he. "Thought you was to go home with 'em, an' marry her at t' other end
if not at this? Well, well, you might just as well have taken my
advice!"
"What advice?" asked Denis, coldly.
"It was just as you was swep' overboard," explained the mate. "You
didn't hear it; and if you had it wouldn't've been no use without the
boat; but I was goin' to tell you to stand out to sea like I did; and
you might as well, don't you see? Drawn your pay at the agent's yet?" he
added as Denis was turning away.
"Not yet; that's what I've come for; but I only got here to-night."
"Ah," said the chief, "I have! I wish I was you!" And Denis left him
with the tears in his eyes.
Outside the marquee a crowd had collected, and with reason, for in the
centre stood a blacksmith with a shod horse whose four hoofs he was
displaying in turn; and it was shod with pure gold, which he rubbed with
a leather until the horseshoes shone again in the glare of the naked
flame that lit the entrance to the booth. Denis knew it must be
Bullocky's steed, and they had not to ask a question to gather that it
was.
"How about the dark side now?" whispered Doherty, slipping an arm
through his hero's as they walked away.
CHAPTER X
THIEVES IN THE NIGHT
Where they were to sleep was now the question. Doherty, who had still
some sovereigns in his pocket, was strongly in favour of good beds at
any reasonable price; but this did not commend itself to the son of the
dales, whose hard head was always less sanguine for the day than for the
far event. Dent was to draw his due next day; he was not very certain
how much there would be to draw. He had assured Mr. Merridew that he had
plenty of money, when he was really at his last gold piece. The
squatter, on the other hand, had insisted on giving each adventurer a
pair of blankets with his blessing; with these in tight rolls about
their shoulders, they had made their march; and Denis now announced his
intention of sleeping under a tree in his as soon as he had found the
bed for Doherty. Their first quarrel nearly ensued. The boy had to shed
a tear before Denis would hear of anything different; and then they had
to find their tree.
After a fright from a spurred police cadet with drawn sabre, who
threatened the pair with a five-pound fine apiece for attempting their
ablutions in the Yarra, back they went across the river to the
chartered squalors of Canvas Town; but instead of keeping as before to
the main streets of tents, struck off at a tangent for the nearest open
country. And this led them through worse places still; now wading
knee-deep in baleful filth, and now through its moral equivalent in the
most rampant and repulsive form. In these few dark minutes they saw much
misery, more selfishness, and very little decency indeed. Jim slipped
his hand through Denis's arm with a timidity that spoke volumes in his
case; and Denis drew his deepest breath that day when the lights lay all
behind them, save a single camp-fire far ahead in the bush.
Dent and Doherty were wandering toward this light, neither actually
intending to go so far, nor yet knowing quite how far they would go,
when a mild voice hailed them from under just such a tree as should have
met their needs.
"I say," it said, "you fellows!"
"Hullo?" cried Denis, stopping in his stride.
"Steady!" returned the voice in an amused undertone. "Mum's the word--if
you don't mind coming nearer."
The pair stole up to the tree. A slight young man stood against the
trunk in the shaded starlight; it was his voice that conveyed his youth;
they could barely see him at arm's length.
"Thanks awfully," he went on. "I have no idea who you are, but I should
like awfully to shake hands with you; unfortunately, I haven't a hand
at liberty--feel."
What Denis felt was a coil of rope, and another, and another, as he ran
his hand up and down.
"Tied up!" he whispered.
"And robbed," added the complacent young man.
"Of much?" asked Denis, getting out his knife.
"Only the result of five months' hard labour on Bendigo; only my little
all," the young man murmured with a placid sigh. "But it might be worse:
they sometimes truss you up with all your weight on your neck, and then
you can't make yourself heard if you try. Isn't there a fire somewhere
behind me?"
"A good way off there is."
"It's not so far as you think. I heard them light it. But it would be
just as well not to let them hear us."
"Why shouldn't they?" asked Denis, as he worked a flat blade between the
young man's middle and the rope; whereupon Doherty put in his first word
in an excited whisper.
"Don't you savvy? They're the blokes what done it, mister!"
"Exactly," said the mild young man. "And that's about all I know of
them, though I've been in their company all day. But my name is Moseley;
you might make a note of it, in case anything happens. My father's
Rector of Much Wymondham, in Silly Suffolk--as you might expect from his
imbecile son."
"I don't see where the imbecility comes in, much less what can happen
now," said Denis, encouragingly; as he spoke, he loosened the severed
coil, and the late captive stumbled stiffly into the open.
"I ought to be ashamed to own it," he went on in whispers, squatting in
the grass to bend his limbs in turn, "but I met these chaps on the way
into town--with my poor little pile, heigho!--and took them for father
and son, as they professed to be. I thanked Providence for putting me in
such respectable hands, and stuck to them like a leech till they lured
me out here to camp with the result you found. As for nothing happening
now, they swore they'd murder me if I uttered a sound; they've camped
within earshot to be handy for the job; and I give them leave to do it,
if I don't get even with them now."
Doherty rubbed his hands in glee; but Denis was quite unprepared for
this spirited resolution, voiced as it was in the spiritless tone which
distinguished the other young man; and he asked Moseley whether he was
armed.
"I should be," was the reply, "but they took my pistol with my pile,
confound them."
"Then how on earth do you propose to get even with them?"
"Oh, I may wait till the blackguards are asleep; I shall steal a squint
on them presently, and then decide. But don't you fellows bother to
stay. I'm awfully obliged to you as it is."
It did not require this generous (and evidently genuine) discharge to
retain their services to the death. In Denis the Celt had long been
uppermost, and, like Doherty, he was in a glow for the glowing work.
Apart from that, Denis was rather fascinated by the rueful humour and
the chuckle-headed courage of a temperament at once opposite and
congenial to his own.
"Either we stand by you, Moseley," he muttered, "or we all three run for
it; and I'll be shot if we do that just yet! Luckily, one of us can
supply the firearm, and the other can use it if the worst comes to the
worst."
Doherty was already at his pack. The polished oak case shone in the
starlight like a tiny tank, until the lid stood open and its contents
gave a fitful glitter. Wadded bullets, percussion caps and a powder-horn
had baize-lined compartments to themselves; in their midst lay a
ponderous engine with a good ten inches of barrel. Denis was some time
capping and loading it in all five chambers, while one companion watched
with languid interest, and the other in silent throes of triumph.
A minute later they were all three creeping on the fire, like Indian
scouts. The two rascals sat over it still. One had his back turned to
the advancing enemy; and it was so broad a back that they caught but
occasional glimpses of his vis-a-vis, who had a rather remarkable face,
pale, shaven, and far more typical of the ecclesiastic than of the
footpad.
"That's the dangerous one," whispered Moseley. "The other beggar's twice
his age."
"Wait, then," said Denis--"what a hawk he looks! Hadn't we better work
right round and take them in his rear?"
"As you like," said Moseley, light-heartedly.
And they had decided on this when quite another decision was rendered
imperative by the younger robber suddenly bounding into the air and
flinging something from him with an oath. For one cold instant the three
imagined they were caught. They had halted unwisely, where there was
little cover, some fifty yards from the fire and perhaps a hundred yards
from Moseley's tree. It became immediately apparent that there was only
one thing to be done.
"Why, it's more than half silver!" the rascal shouted, white with rage.
"It's a cursed fake; he's got the rest somewhere else--I'll hack his
head off for this!"
A clump of bushes lay nearer the fire than the crouching trio. "Run for
them!" whispered Denis, and led the way with his nose between his knees.
They reached the cover just in time. The man passed within a yard of
them. His mate remained squatting over the fire.
"Now you take this," said Denis, handing Jimmy a length of the cut rope
which he had brought with him, "and you this," giving Moseley the Deane
and Adams. "Now both follow me--like mice--and do exactly what I tell
you."
So they crept up to the fire in the formation of an isosceles triangle.
"Where are you? Where's your tree? If you don't answer I'll carve your
head off!" they heard one ruffian threatening with subdued venom in the
distance; his voice was at its furthest and faintest when Denis leaped
on the other from behind and nipped an enormous neck with all ten
fingers.
"I'm not going to choke you, but you'll be shot dead if you make one
sound. Here, Moseley, stick it to his ear. You understand, do you? One
sound. There, then; now you'll be gagged. Jimmy, the rope."
Denis felt rather sorry for his man as he went to work; he was such an
elderly miscreant, so broad and squat (rather than obese), as one who
had been pressed like a bale of wool. But he held his peace with stolid
jowl until gagged by a double thickness of the rope that soon held him
hand and foot.
"Now for your mate," said Denis. As he spoke, the fellow could be heard
shouting that their bird was flown; thereupon the three withdrew behind
trees. "And remember," said Denis, who went last with the revolver, "if
you make a sign to send him back you'll be the first."
They had not a minute to wait. Their second victim came back cursing
their first for sitting so unmoved over the fire. Denis peeped and saw
the lean, ascetic face advancing white-hot with passion; in the last ten
yards he stopped, suspicious, but not yet of the truth, for the untended
fire had declined to a mere red and white remnant in his absence.
"Good God, man, are you dead?" he cried, and then came running at the
thought. At the same instant Denis stepped from behind his tree.
"Throw up your hands before I fire!"
And up they both went, but one barked and flashed on the way, and the
ball whispered in Denis's ear as he took deliberate aim and shot the
scoundrel down.
"Take care!" he shouted to the others, rushing up. "I aimed low. He
isn't dead. Don't trust him an inch!"
But the man had been drilled through the sciatic nerve, and he leaped
where he lay like a landed fish. He had let fall the pistol in his pain,
and Moseley had the pleasure of picking up his own.
"Has anybody any brandy?" asked Denis, for the wounded man looked
ghastly, writhing in the starlight, and he was bearing his torments
without a word; but when Moseley produced a flask, and Denis held it to
him, the unbeaten brute only seized the opportunity of snatching at the
revolver in his other hand.
"The blackguard!" piped Doherty, as Denis disengaged without a shot.
"I'd finish him for that!"
"No, you wouldn't, Jimmy; but if he wants to grin and bear it, why, he's
welcome--till they come for him! Come on, Moseley," added Denis, as that
placid person characteristically took his time, under the gagged man's
nose, over his stolen belongings. But in a few moments the three were
off at the double, and in a few more the contents of a third revolver
followed them without effect.
"I expected that," said Denis as they ran. "But what a fine villain! Not
a word in his pain. Educated man, I should say."
"Mean to put the police on 'em to-night or in the morning?" called
Moseley, with languid interest, as he jogged along last.
"Not at all," said Denis.
"Not at all?" panted Doherty.
"We want to get to the diggings, not to cool our heels in this nice
place. We've winged one and taught them both a lesson, and wasted quite
enough time on such carrion as it is."
They were now in full view of the lights of Canvas Town. Moseley, far
behind, petitioned for a more civilized pace in the most strenuous tone
the others had yet heard from him. And while they waited Denis returned
the revolver to its rightful owner.
"I'm heartily ashamed of myself, Jimmy," said he: "first I blame you for
buying the one thing we want more than another, and then I take it from
you and use it myself! But the credit's every bit of it yours; but for
you those villains would have gone scot-free with this fellow's fortune;
but for you he would be a poor man to-night, and he's got to know it. I
hope you recovered everything?" added Denis, as Moseley came up with
them at his leisure, and all three proceeded toward the lights.
"I don't know," was the reply. "I ought to have thirty-eight pound,
twelve and six, but there's over a pound of it in silver, and you didn't
give me time to count it."
A few paces were covered in silence; then Denis gave a grim little
laugh. "So we've all risked our lives for thirty-eight pounds odd!"
"It was my all," said Moseley, rather hurt. "I never said it was much,
and never asked you to risk your lives."
Denis took his arm with a heartier laugh.
"My dear fellow, we weren't going to let you risk yours alone, and I
wouldn't undo it if I could. It wasn't a question of amount, either; if
you had told us the figure it would have made no difference. But you did
say it was your pile, you know, that you were taking back to England!"
"It wasn't much of one, certainly," the other admitted on reflection,
with his own ingenuous candour. "I am not so sure, now, that it would
have paid my passage home. I never thought of that before. So you two
are going up to the diggings, just as I come down?" he added rather
wistfully, after a pause.
"We start to-morrow if we can."
"Much capital, may I ask?"
"Not much more than half your pile between us, I'm afraid."
"It needs more capital than you'd think," said Moseley, in a pensive
way.
"I dare say."
And Denis sighed.
"Ballarat or Bendigo?"
"I thought of tossing for it."
They were back again on the foul fringe of the sail-cloth suburb.
Moseley stood still in the mud. And the bright southern stars discovered
a pleasing diffidence in a wholly amiable face.
"Have you really no choice?" he asked.
"Absolutely none."
"Well, then, I hardly know how to put it," stammered Moseley; "but I've
some experience, if I haven't much to show for it; and if Ballarat would
do for you--I should be sorry to turn up again in Bendigo; I'm afraid I
did pretend I'd done a little better there--but Ballarat's really the
place, and if you could do with a third--well, there's my poor little
pile, it would go into the pool, and--well I don't mind saying I should
be proud, after the way you've stood by me to-night."
"So should I!" cried Denis, seizing Moseley's hand. His warm heart was
touched. "So would Jimmy," he added, for the lad was standing aloof as
he always would when they were three. "It's the natural thing, and your
experience will be more valuable than even your money, not that we can
take more than your share of that. Come, laddie, and give him your hand
on it, too; and then for the best three beds we can afford, and three
good glasses of ale to seal the partnership."
Doherty turned to Denis rather quickly when he had shaken the new
partner's hand. "You see," he said, "it is a case of beds, after all!"
But his tone was reproachful rather than triumphant, as though Denis
might have listened to him before.
CHAPTER XI
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The firm of Dent, Moseley, and Doherty, gold-diggers, was formally
established next day, in a clump of trees a few miles out of Melbourne.
Denis had experienced no difficulty in obtaining his paltry dues from
the shipping agents, but even so he and Doherty could not muster twenty
pounds between them. Moseley, on the other hand, was for putting in
nearly double this amount, and yet only receiving his one-third of the
profits. He argued that but for the others he would have had nothing to
put in at all. It was long before Denis would listen to him, and Doherty
took no part in the discussion. But eventually a compromise was agreed
upon, and thus entered by Denis in a new pocketbook purchased for the
nonce:--
October, 19, 1853. L s. d.
Dent and Doherty Cash 19 12 10
Moseley " 19 14 6
" Loan to Company 18 10 0
----------
L57 17 4
----------
This pocketbook, with its blue-lined sheaf of glorious possibilities,
represented Denis's one disbursement in Melbourne beyond bed, board, and
the glasses of beer overnight. A rigid economy was his watchword; they
must walk to Ballarat; so let their packs be light, and if kits were
dearer on the diggings, they would still have saved.
Doherty agreed with every word; but as they resumed their journey, and
Moseley fell a few paces behind, he reminded Denis of the nuggets which
Bullocky had forced upon them at the inn.
"I said we'd keep them for luck," replied Denis; "but, of course, I
could only speak for myself; you must do what you like with yours."
"I do what you do," said the boy.
"And you both do well!" added Moseley, catching them up. "I'm all in
favour of a fetish; that's what I never had on Bendigo. But
nuggets--decoy nuggets--set a nugget to catch a nugget, eh? That's a
fetish and a half! I suppose they're only little bits of things? Do you
mind letting me see them?"
When he did see them, he changed his tune.
"Good heavens! But these must be over a pound between them, if not
getting on for three figures in the other kind of pounds; do you mean to
say you had these given you? I say, I'm not sure that my affection for a
fetish would hold out against one of these."
"Well, mine will," said Denis, smiling with set teeth. "I don't turn
presents into money, Moseley, till the devil drives!"
"But who on earth made you such presents as these?"
"Oh, a rough diamond with a beard to his middle, and a voice like a
bull, who did his best to stand on his head in a bucket of champagne."
"By Jove! I believe it must have been old Bullocky himself."
"It was. Do you know him?"
"Know him? No one was ever yet on Bendigo without knowing old Bullocky;
he's cock of the walk in Ironbark Gully, finds gold every time, by a
sort of second sight, as some of these chaps find water. Why, the first
time I ever saw him he was sitting picking nuggets out of a lump of
earth like plums from a pudding!"
And Moseley beguiled a mile or more with tales of the great gorilla; he
had, indeed, a very passable gift of anecdote, and an easy, idle,
fanciful wit which made up in rarer qualities what it lacked in
brilliance and virility. He had not a foul or an unkind word in his
vocabulary; and Denis had been too long at sea to undervalue either
merit. Moseley was not only a gentleman, but a man of refinement and no
little charm, whose companionship might well be prized by such another
at that wild end of the earth. And yet Denis forgot to listen as one
entertaining tale led light-heartedly to another, for it was only the
humours of the life that Moseley seemed to have absorbed.
"But I might as well save my breath," said Moseley, with more truth than
he supposed. "It's bound to be the same on Ballarat, only more of it;
the one thing I can promise you is plenty of compensation if the fetish
doesn't do his duty."
Denis smiled without replying. "I suppose you don't know what sort of
soil it is at Ballarat?" he asked at length.
"At Ballarat?" cried Moseley, greatly amused. "Why, my dear fellow, I
couldn't tell you what sort it was at Bendigo!"
"But you were digging there five months."
"Digging, exactly; not studying the soil."
"They seemed to you to find it anywhere, did they?"
"Anywhere and everywhere, my dear fellow! Are you a geologist, Dent?"
The question came after a pause.
"Not as yet," said Denis; and Doherty, who had no notion what a
geologist was, glanced at him sidelong as at one who could soon be it or
anything else he chose.
So the time passed, and the miles were mounting up when Moseley, who
ought to have known the way to a certain point, found that he had
overshot it by as many miles again. It was a trying moment for the
height and heat of the afternoon; but so savage was the mild Moseley
with himself, so unusually animated with his contrition, that Denis
slapped him on the back, and they turned back laughing to an inn where
they had drunk beer a couple of hours before. This beer-drinking was an
extravagance resented by Denis, yet not a point on which he cared to
oppose the man who had contributed so freely to the common fund. Nothing
could have been more wholesome for active young fellows, but their beer
alone cost them eight and threepence the first day, bread three and six,
billy-can two and six, tea and sugar two and six, and their beds at this
inn six shillings. One pound two and nine-pence for the first nine
miles.
Denis did not grumble, but in his heart he resented the beds almost as
much as the beer; there was more to be said for them, however,
especially in a country teeming with desperate characters; and the beds
at least were cheap, few travelers breaking their journey so near its
beginning or its end. Denis, however, sat late in the bar, listening to
the conversation of all and sundry who stopped to drink, and learning
much in an unobtrusive way: he had never in his life been quite such a
Dent, so canny, so calculating, and so cool. As a first step toward the
accomplishment of his great resolve, he had already overcome the
romantic spirit of its inception; thus the next night, at Bacchus Marsh,
he thought nothing of foregathering with an odious little man, who
consulted Denis as to the best place to get a "white 'igh 'at and a
diamond ring" immediately on landing in London, but who gave him much
valuable information in return. And the night after that, when they were
fifty miles from Melbourne, there was a landlord with gold-dust sticking
to the palms of his hands, who only needed plying with his own liquor to
talk by the hour. By this time Moseley was keeping them all back with a
sore heel; and the nearer the diggings, the greater each day's expenses;
but Denis no longer grudged the money, for he was gaining much that
money could not buy.
Often they were overtaken and left behind by more dashing adventurers,
aggressively mounted and armed, and what was more galling, once or twice
by swifter pedestrians than themselves; but Moseley preferred hobbling
with his companions to boarding the scarlet coach which passed them,
pitching like a ship on its leather springs. The partners met with no
moving accident on the road. Rumours of bushrangers were never followed
by their appearance. It was not the less delightful to meet the Ballarat
gold-escort coming down, in its sparkling cordon of sabres and lace, for
it made the braver show in those sombre wilds, and left a reassuring
sense of law and order in its yellow wake.
The fourth night they camped out but ten miles from the diggings, where
they hoped to arrive by noon next day; but the blister on Moseley's heel
broke and bled, and though either Denis or Jim carried his pack
thereafter, while the other gave him an arm, the last and most exciting
stage of their journey was also the slowest. The deep-cut bullock-track
led them all morning by open flat and shallow gully, between low hills
timbered like an English park; from noon on, as the track converged with
others, the party received more than one cheery invitation to drain a
pannikin of tea at wayside encampments; but even the lame man would not
stop again, and the light in his eyes was as bright as any. The three
drew close together as they walked. It was as though each made it a
point of honour neither to lead by an inch nor to keep the others back;
it was also as though all three had lost their tongues and found new
eyes, for the gold-light was in them all.
"Hush!" exclaimed Denis, stopping suddenly.
A deep though distant hum came to their ears, faintly at first, but in a
steady boom as they stooped and listened without a breath between them.
"It's like the streets of London, from the docks, after a voyage,"
whispered Denis, raising a puzzled face a little.
"It's a creek," said Doherty. "I never knew they had a creek like that."
"Nor I."
And as one man they turned to Moseley, to stand upright on the spot; for
so he was standing, and grinning at them both from ear to ear.
"That's not traffic, nor yet a creek," said he. "It was the same when
you got near Bendigo. It's the gold in the cradles. It's the gold!"
The broad brown track rose before them, scored by a myriad wheels,
backed by hard blue sky. In an instant they were racing skyward between
the ruts. Jimmy had given a whoop, and Moseley his light-hearted laugh,
but Denis led without a word until the deep hum had risen to a rumble.
Then he looked round, and Jimmy passed him with a yell. Moseley was
running very lame. Denis waited for him.
"Jump on my back!" said he. "I won't leave you, and I can't wait."
"You certainly can't carry me."
"We'll see."
"Then you sha'n't."
"Come on!"
And Denis was soon staggering in Doherty's steps, a lean shin protruding
from the crook of either arm, a good ten stone upon his back. As he
stumbled on, in the last hundred yards, the rumble resolved itself into
the roar of ten thousand cradles rocking as one. And on the hill's crest
Doherty stood waving his wideawake against the blue.
Denis reeled up to him, breathing hard, with Moseley still protesting on
his back. But for the next few minutes it might have been a bronze group
that crowned the hill.
Under their eyes, in a single smooth green basin of the sere and wooded
ranges, were the tents and earthworks of all nations, joined for once in
unnatural war upon the earth that bore them. White were the tents of
that unparalleled encampment, gleaming coolly in the sun, and pitched in
patches like the scent from a paper-chase; and for every tent there was
a red-lipped shaft, with men like ants crawling out and in, and muddy
pools here and there between the heaps, with more ants busy at their
brim. Here a few cradles rocked, like great square-toed shoes; but they
blackened either bank of the yellow stream that picked its way between
the tents and the ant-heaps of gravel and of clay; and thence the noise,
as of a giant foundry, which could be heard a mile away. The squeak of a
windlass was a variation at closer quarters; the deeper claims were thus
distinguished; the deepest of all had windsails, too, that rose from the
earth like tall ghosts, with lantern jaws and arms like fins.
"Anything like Bendigo?" whispered Doherty to the seasoned digger, who
was standing between the other two.
"More compact," replied Moseley. "And not half the trees."
"This must be Black Hill Flat, this open ground on our right," said
Denis. "And that should be Bakery Hill over there on the left."
His tone made the others look from the landmarks indicated to Denis
himself; and he was consulting a dirty bit of cardboard.
"What have you got there?" asked Moseley, edging up to him.
"A map, a map!" cried Jimmy, who had run round to his other side.
"Where on earth did you get hold of that, Dent?"
"Aha!" chuckled Denis. "I suppose you don't remember the man I told you
about at Bacchus Marsh, who wanted the white hat and the diamond ring?
He gave it to me, and I'd rather have it than the fifty pounds he said
he'd give for his ring! I make that the Gravel Pits right ahead across
the stream; you can see the sun on the pools of water; they say it's the
wettest bit on the diggings. And you see the trim tent to the right on
the green mound? That's Commissioner's Flat, where we shall go first
thing on Monday morning for our licenses."
"You've been here before," said Moseley, with an amused shake of the
head. "You were here last voyage--don't tell me!"
"My last voyage was to Calcutta," said Denis, laughing as they walked
on; "but if you like I was here most nights on the way up, more
especially the one we spent at Bacchus Marsh."
The first pair of diggers actually at work in their hole thrilled Denis
none the less, and it was he who led the way to have a better look at
them. They were quite close to the road on Black Hill Flat, which was an
attractive part for new hands, with fewer claims and more trees than
there seemed to be further on. These men's tent stood out of the grass
like a roof in a flood; and beyond the tent a red night-cap bobbed above
ground, as one man plied the pick while the other leaned on the shovel
awaiting his turn. The new chums halted at a respectful distance, but
the man with the shovel made them welcome with a friendly oath, and
chatted good-humouredly in the Tyneside tongue as they all stood looking
down into the hole.
"You'd bettaw come and peg out alongside of us," he said. "We come from
Newcassel, and we're new chums ourselves."
"And why did you choose this place?" asked Denis.
The man with the shovel gave a happy-go-lucky shrug.
"Howt!" said he. "One pudding's as good as anothaw until you eat it;"
and Moseley added, "Quite true," with an experienced nod.
"But we'd gotten a good account o' 't," put in the man with the red
night-cap, burying his pick in the upper earth, and scrambling out of
the hole with its aid. "The wash-dirt's close to top, an' dry as a
slag-heap; what's more, a parcel of Frenchmen have made their fortunes
here this very year; an' it's a queer thing if we can't do as well as
them beggaws."
The man with the shovel was now doing his part below ground with great
vigour. Shovelfuls of a hard conglomerate of quartz, ironstone, sand
and clay, were flying in all directions. As the newcomers withdrew,
Moseley took Denis by the arm.
"We might find a worse place to camp: what do you say to that gum-tree
further on toward the hill? I tell you what--I'll borrow an axe from
these chaps, and cut fire-wood and tent-poles if you two will go for
some rations and a dozen yards of canvas. It'll be dark in another hour;
don't be much longer, and you'll find a fire on, and everything ready
for pitching the tent."
"We don't want to settle on the first place we come to," said Denis,
between dubiety and a natural attraction to the spot.
"Or anywhere else, in a hurry," agreed Moseley; "but we've got to spend
the night somewhere, and a quiet Sunday while we look about us; and for
that I don't think you could do better."
So the site of their first encampment came to be selected; it was marked
by a solitary and rather stately blue gum-tree, of which Denis took due
note as Doherty and he regained the track.
CHAPTER XII
EL DORADO
On the road they fell in with a long-legged digger, in the muddy
remnants of a well-cut pair of trousers, which telescoped into top-boots
of a more enduring excellence; the man was further distinguished by a
certain negligent finesse of beard and moustache, a very quiet blue eye,
and a voice as quiet when he stopped in his stroll to address the pair.
"Surfacing, I suppose?" said he, with a slight but sufficient indication
of the Tynesiders' claim.
"I beg your pardon?" said Denis, out of his depth at once.
"I ought to beg yours," the tall man responded, opening his blue eyes a
little wider, and regarding Denis with quiet interest. "I merely saw you
come away from that claim over there, and I take rather an interest in
Black Hill Flat. That is it, you know."
Denis nodded.
"You aren't a new chum, then?" the other added, smiling over the term.
"Oh, yes, I am. This is our first sight of the diggings."
"Then it's no use asking you a technical question; but surfacing, of
course, means going no deeper than the surface--some ten or twenty feet,
don't you know. Very few do go deeper, and I am not sure that it would
pay on this flat."
Denis explained that the Tynesiders had only got about five feet down.
"So many of them give it up at that," said the tall man, with a faint
smile, and would have gone on with the least little nod; but Denis
quickly asked him how deep he would go himself and what he thought of
Black Hill Flat.
"I'm a deep-sinker," was the reply; "but if I wasn't, and was one of a
party, there's nowhere I would sooner try my luck than over there. The
drawback is than you can't go very near the water, because the lead
doesn't; so you have a long way to carry your wash-dirt, and it wants
three or four to keep the pot boiling. On the other hand that's what
keeps off the average digger, who's the most impatient person in the
world, and so you have the place more or less to yourself. Still, of
course, the fewer there are to seek the longer they will take to find,
unless some one is very fortunate. A lucky man, though," said the tall
digger, looking back toward the Tynesiders' camp--"a lucky man with two
hard-working mates might make his fortune there as soon as anywhere."
"Didn't some Frenchmen?" asked Denis, remembering what he had heard at
the claim.
"Ah, that was on the hill, and quartz; how they crushed it I can't
conceive; for the ordinary man it would be more ruinous than deep
sinking, which is saying a great deal."
The tall digger was turning away again, with rather more of a smile, but
Denis's eager face detained him a little longer.
"Then which do you recommend," asked Denis, "surfacing or deep-sinking?"
"Oh, come," laughed the other, "I'll be shot if I recommend either! It
depends on yourself and your resources. One's quick and cheap and easy,
but nearly all a matter of luck; the other's far slower and more
expensive, but also far surer for a man of intelligence, as I can see
you are. If you go in for surfacing, you might give Black Hill Flat a
trial; but I shouldn't tackle it less than three strong."
And with a last good-humoured and yet distant nod, a mixture of courtesy
and condescension alike inbred, the tall man went his way, as it might
have been down Pall Mall--at the same pace, and with the same
carriage--in his deplorable trousers and his long-suffering top-boots.
"I wonder who he is," said Doherty, on whom the still blue eyes had not
rested for a moment.
"I wonder where he is," returned Denis, "and how much good he's doing
there." Nor would he discuss the man, with Doherty, as a man at all, but
only as the most superior digger thus far within their ken. It was
nevertheless a new type to Denis; he did not belong to it himself,
neither did Moseley, nor yet Ralph Devenish with all his airs. But it
was as a digger of transparent parts that the tall man returned to a
mind from which the general impression soon blotted the particular.
The general impression on the banks of the Yarrowee was a strident chaos
in extreme tints. The rocking of the countless cradles made a
distracting chorus at close quarters. The vividness of the picture
helped to daze a newcomer. The sky was bright blue overhead; the mud on
all sides was the very brightest mud; the tiny patches of green were as
bright as emeralds. Grass and mud sparkled with a rank dew of empty
bottles. Nearly everything was wet and glistening in the level sunlight.
The hairy miners shone with their own moisture and their own sunshine of
enthusiasm, for the gold-light lit up every face. Nor was it an ignoble
face as Denis saw it over and over again. It was full of the hearty
virile hope that expanded his own soul. And it was every vivid tint of
red and brown, as the mud was every bright shade of brown and yellow;
and to each red face there was a redder shirt, and to every red shirt a
pair of moleskin trousers, often snow-white, never the less picturesque
for the clots of splendid mud that plastered and spattered it. For to
Denis the mud was gold at first sight, molten gold that should have
nipped off his foot when he sank ankle deep in it, as it was liquid gold
that wound in and out among the tents, and was seen piecemeal through
the strings of moleskin legs and rocking cradles, between the banks of
the Yarrowee.
The famous cradle really was like a great wooden boot on rockers; the
ankle was a raised and perforated tray into which they threw a bucketful
of earth and then a balerful of water; the foot was a trough which
received the muddy fluid and its precious sediment. As Denis watched the
operation for the first time, he imagined the gold-dust pouring through
the perforations like pepper from a caster; yet all that was ultimately
taken out of the toe of the cradle, and good-naturedly thrust under the
new chums' noses in the hollow of a horny palm, would have been a small
helping of salt. Denis could have taken his hat off to it, nevertheless,
and in another moment Doherty did throw his into the air.
"Not a bad tub," the digger had informed them. "Very near an ounce, I'll
wager, or four good quid while you've been watching."
Some claims were so near the water that the newcomers saw exactly how
the labour was divided in parties of three. One man was busy in the
hole, digging and filling bucket after bucket; another carried the
buckets to and fro, emptying the full one into the tray of the cradle;
the third did the rocking and supplied the water. The deeper claims were
crowned by a windlass mounted on a framework of logs; and Denis supposed
it was a fourth man who stood thereon to raise and lower the buckets.
But nothing was more fascinating to watch than the most primitive
operation of all, namely the use of the tin wash-pan by certain old
diggers who still preferred it to the cradle: there was downright
legerdemain in the whirlpool of earth and water that they made in a mere
hand-basin, but especially in the way they got rid of both, slop by
slop, until only the gold-dust tinkled in the tin.
The pair picked their way between the heaps of mud and gravel known as
the Gravel Pits. They walked up to Commissioner's Flat, and saw the
Commissioner himself, in his gold-lace cap, seated at a table in his
tent, like an ordinary general in the field. On the table were a pair of
scales that Denis undertook to trouble before long. "Those are what they
weigh it with," he whispered to Doherty; and they watched a happy miner
go in with a leathern bag and come out gloating over his receipt. This
was the most populous part of the diggings. There was some speaking
sight or some striking face at every turn. All the men were bearded like
the pard; they might have lost a nugget while they scraped a chin; and
the community seemed devoid of women. On one claim, however, a whole
family were at work, the father digging, the mother rocking as she
nursed her babe, an elder infant toddling with its share of grist, the
eldest pouring water into the mill.
As man and boy wandered and looked on, oblivious of their errand, the
day's work ended as by a miracle at six o'clock to the minute. Perhaps
they had missed some warning shot or signal in their absorption; it
certainly was as though a second Big Ben had clanged the hour from which
no man might rock a cradle or fill a tub. One minute the cradles roared
their loudest; then, a lull that grew into a widespread human hum; and
within a quarter of an hour, a thousand crackling fires, each with its
wreath of bluish smoke, its steaming pot for the centre of the firelit
circle. The bewildered pair had meanwhile set about their business by an
effort; and it tided them into a world of yellow and translucent tents,
a simple world presently enlivened by blurting cornets, squeaking
fiddles, and the ubiquitous concertina.
It was a Saturday night, and the scene was very like a gigantic fair;
here was a small, ill-lighted tent, sibilant with the suppressed
excitements of sly grog; but here, there, and everywhere were large,
well-lighted, over-crowded store-tents, with flags flying honestly
against the stars. Yet even in these a Hogarth might have reveled.
Diggers of the stamp of Bullocky pitched bank-notes right and left, nor
ever counted the change; or instead of change, lengths of calico or bars
of soap were tossed across the counters. Yet Denis had managed at last
to get more or less of what was wanted at comparatively reasonable
prices. He paid only eighteen pence a yard for thirteen yards of canvas,
three shillings for a pound of cheese, tenpence a pound for potatoes,
and four-and-sixpence for a hindquarter of mutton. He was struggling out
of the tent, holding the meat aloft, with Doherty at his heels, when a
cold thrill ran down him. Two other men were struggling in, and the four
met so fairly as to block each other's way. One of the newcomers had a
grayish beard badly dyed, and little eyes under a peaked cap; the other
was smoking a meerschaum pipe with a Turk's face, as unmistakable as his
own, yet Denis had to hear him speak before he could believe his eyes.
"Well met, Dent! I suppose I'm about the last person you expected to see
here, eh?"
"You are."
"Why, I passed you on the road, man, passed you in the coach, and you
never saw us! I changed my mind before the pilot left us; didn't see why
you should do all the fortune-making, Dent, my boy; so here I am." And
the bold eyes of Ralph Devenish gleamed with a sudden malice that
pierced the man's gay crust, while those of his companion seemed
smaller, closer, and yet merrier than before.
"Good!" said Denis, looking his cousin steadily in the face. "I hope we
may both make our fortunes, Devenish--and then go home together in the
same ship!"
CHAPTER XIII
THE ENEMY'S CAMP
Ralph Devenish was the eldest son of doting parents who had done their
duty by him according to their lights. They were well-to-do folk, though
the homely epithet would have insulted the blood which was their boast;
they were not, however, really wealthy, and they had the vast family of
their generation. It was therefore something of a sacrifice to send
Ralph to his public school, and a distinct one to support his subsequent
commission in the Guards. It is true that the sacrifice fell principally
upon a long line of younger brethren, who could scarcely have filled the
parental eye less if they had stood all their lives in Indian file
behind the first-born. But many was the time the father paid some debt
with hardly a murmur, or the mother pinched herself to make
surreptitious additions to the gay lad's allowance; for man and boy he
was the first consideration in their minds, and consequently the sole
consideration in his own.
In return this criminal couple had a brilliant and successful son, who
was a favourite wherever he went, especially among strangers, and who
fraternized to their satisfaction with the more direct issue of
families almost as old as their own; the only disappointment was that
Ralph was nearing his thirties without having married into one or other
of them. It was time, for many reasons, that he made the marriage that
was only to be expected of him, and settled down. The marriage that was
only to be expected of Ralph Devenish declined in brilliance as the
years went on; but the prospect finally resolved itself into no
regrettable alliance with a beautiful and charming girl, who was also
quite a little heiress in her way. Then Ralph and Nan had known each
other all their lives. The families were allied in business. There was
nothing in the world against the inferior family, except that invidious
juxtaposition. It was therefore a sound choice, if it was nothing more.
Yet Ralph became a company officer without getting engaged even to Nan
Merridew. Some said she had refused him. Mr. and Mrs. Devenish could
afford to smile. Nevertheless, the attachment became obvious on his side
and not on hers. Then Ralph had an illness at Portman Street; it
developed into a malignant typhus which nearly killed him; and the
shattered officer was given a year's leave in which to recruit from the
day he got about again. It seemed certain that this episode would bring
matters to a crisis; and when the convalescent was ordered a health
voyage in one of the firm's vessels, and Mr. and Miss Merridew
accompanied him, it was quite understood that the engagement would be
announced on their return.
Nan alone did not so understand it; and in exceptional circumstances
already set forth, her father was the next to relinquish an idea which
he had cherished as much as anybody. Devenish, however, was naturally no
prey to the sentiment to which he attributed his reverse in one quarter
and its acceptance in the other. He had never regarded it as a defeat,
and he was certainly not the man to do so as he saw the last of Denis
against an Australian sky from the _Memnon's_ poop. On the contrary, the
gallant Ralph had never been nearly so much in love as with the ardent
and disheveled girl, nobly careless of appearances, who wept and waved
within a few feet of him until the last.
His tact, however, was not equal to his passion, and it was a breach of
tact that sent Ralph Devenish ashore with the pilot.
"Ah, well!" he had said at last. "He has the best of it, after all!"
"What do you mean?" cried Nan, as she turned on him with fiery tears,
but not one in her voice.
"He has all the fun of the fair," replied Devenish, lightly. "They say
it's the biggest fair ever held on earth."
"You mean the gold-fields, I suppose?"
"Yes. I shouldn't blame him for wanting to have his fling on them."
"I don't understand you," said the girl, very coldly. "Pray who is
blaming him?"
"Well, Dent is rather in Mr. Merridew's bad books for insisting on
staying out, you know; and I thought he might be in yours, too."
"Did you, indeed! Then let me tell you I am proud of him--for what he
has done, and for what he's going to do. But if he were here now,
standing in your shoes, though I would give anything to have him here, I
should still be ashamed of him in my heart!"
Devenish winced, and his dark, clear skin was stained a deeper shade; as
for Nan, she was so heated that every tear had dried upon her angry
blushes.
"If you are thinking of me," he said, "you certainly aren't thinking of
what you are saying, or you would remember that a year's leave is a
year's leave."
"And that yours isn't up till May," she added with ironic levity. "It's
no business of mine, of course; only you shouldn't start comparisons
between the man who stays and the man who turns back."
"I am also in less need of money," he told her through his teeth.
"Money!" she cried in unrestrained contempt. "I wasn't thinking of the
money--I was thinking of the fun and adventure and romance that would
have enticed every man worth calling a man, once he had got so
far--except you!"
"From their sweethearts even!" he hissed out, with a devilish nod--"from
the girls they pretend they want to marry!"
Nan was stung in her turn; and hers was a poisonous sting. The blood
drained from her face. It was some moments before she could speak.
"That is their business," she whispered at last. "At all events you know
what I should have thought of Denis if he hadn't stayed; but if you want
to know what I think of him now, you shall." And with trembling lips,
before Ralph, before the man at the wheel, before the officer and the
midshipman of the watch, Miss Merridew kissed the bloodstone signet ring
upon the third finger of her left hand. That was what happened on the
_Memnon_ while Denis watched her dipping out of sight.
What happened next was that Devenish nearly knocked his servant, Jewson,
from top to bottom of the companion hatch; the man just managed to
clutch the rail, and was called roughly into his master's cabin
forthwith.
"Sorry I upset you, Jewson, but you should have got out of my way. You
were listening, of course?"
"I couldn't help hearing that last, sir."
"No, I suppose the whole ship heard that. Nice, isn't it?"
"I know what I'd do in your place, sir."
Devenish looked fiercely into the cunning, elderly face, with the dyed
beard and the foxy eyes.
"You do, do you?"
"I do, sir; but don't look at me like that, Captain Devenish, sir, or I
shall never dare to tell you. There's something else I'd as lief tell
you first; but how can I when you look like giving me a horse-whipping
if I so much as open my mouth?"
"Go on, you old humbug," said Ralph, relaxing a little; "give me some
brandy and water, and let's have it."
Jewson gave him the brandy and water first. Ralph took a gulp, and
nodded for the news.
"Well, sir, you see what he give her; but do you know what she give
him?" asked Jewson, in a vile undertone, half-gloating, half-afraid.
"No. What?"
"Another ring."
"He's not wearing it."
"That's just it; he is, round his neck. And what do you suppose he's
wearing it on?"
"Out with it."
"It's one of her own rings," said Jewson, bringing his small eyes so
close together that they seemed to touch. "And he's wearing it round his
neck on a lanyard she made him out of her own hair!"
Ralph's comment did him some credit.
"You brute!" he said at last.
"Captain Devenish, sir, it's the four gospels."
"But you've been listening to them too."
"I couldn't help it, sir; really I couldn't. She only give it 'im to-day
when he come aboard to bid good-bye. They went into the after saloon,
and I was only in here with the door open. I couldn't help hearing every
word."
And the wretch displayed his obvious longing, with the cunning light in
the little eyes and the grin amid the dyed hair on the wizened face; but
with all his faults Ralph Devenish was still something of a gentleman,
and, Nan notwithstanding, even more of a man.
"You will never dare to repeat one of them," said he. "If you ever do,
and I hear of it, you will get what you yourself suggested just now.
That'll do, Jewson; not another word about that."
The old steward accepted his rebuff with aplomb.
"Very well, sir. Of course my feelings ain't like a gentleman's; a
gentleman wouldn't expect it. But this I do promise, never to tell
anybody if I don't tell you. And now, sir, I should like to tell you, if
I may make so bold, what I'd do in your place."
"If it amuses you, by all means."
"It does, sir; but it'd amuse me more if you'd do it, and there's time
enough still. I'd take Miss Merridew at her word, and ashore I'd go with
the pilot, and to Ballarat by the first coach!"
Ralph sipped his brandy on the settee. It was finished before he spoke.
"I should never make my fortune there," he said.
"You might if you took me with you. I was in Californy in 'forty-nine.
And I'd cook for ye," added the steward, his face shining with its
least evil light; "I'd cook as not many can in Australia, let alone the
diggings. That's what I used to ship as; but it's heart-breaking work at
sea."
"If I did make my pile," added Ralph, shrewdly, "it wouldn't alter
matters one way or the other."
"Perhaps not. But you'd be able to see whether he made his!"
That was all Jewson said; that was all Devenish heard. But the words
were spoken with so subtle an intonation that the tantalizing prospect
held out sounded the most solid satisfaction in the world; and they
turned the scale. Captain Devenish's portmanteaux were not even
unstrapped; within a few hours he had bag and baggage aboard the pilot's
cutter, with Nan's last ironic wishes ringing unkindly in his ears, and
the chief steward of the _North Foreland_, whom the second mate had been
instrumental in disrating, at his elbow. The next day but one they
passed Denis and his companions on the Ballarat Road, and had pegged out
a claim in the palpitating heart of the Gravel Pits before the week was
out.
The encounter in the crowded tent was not a solitary experience of the
kind in Ralph's case; being a public-school boy, he had not been an hour
on the diggings before he recognized an old schoolfellow. It was,
indeed, the old schoolfellow who first recognized Ralph Devenish; but
that was not Ralph's fault. Nigger Rackham was the very fellow whom his
old friends would have expected to find up to the bare neck in
wash-dirt, but perhaps the last whom they would have looked for in
spruce uniform at the head of a jingling mob of mounted troopers. He
came of an old West Indian stock, thickly tinctured with native blood,
and had been expelled from school for a hearty, natural blackguard who
was only good at games. His present employment suggested extensive
reformation, but that impression was soon removed over a bottle of
brandy in Rackham's tent, and the pair cracked another in Ralph's on the
Saturday night.
"You ought to join us," says Rackham. "Talk of me being out of my
element! I'm more in mine than ever you'll be in yours as a licensed
miner. You've neither the turn nor the patience, as I remember you; and
what do you want with a few extra thousand, which is all you'll make
with the luck of the devil?"
"They will come in very useful when I get back to town. You breathe
money in the Guards, Nigger."
"But you won't make enough to feel the difference. I know you won't.
You're not the sort. Whereas, if you were to join us, I could promise
you the best sport on earth, better than fox-hunting, and plenty of it."
"What's that, Nigger?"
"Digger-hunting!" says Rackham, his white teeth gleaming in a grin, his
bright eyes brighter than ever in his cups. "You look upset: we won't
hunt you; but you want to be one of them, and I want you to be one of
us."
"But how and why do you hunt them, Nigger?"
"To see their licenses; half of them don't take a license out; you did,
because your man knows the ropes. But of course I wouldn't have let an
old chum get into trouble."
"But what trouble can it get you into?"
"If you're caught digging without a license on you, whether you have it
elsewhere or no," said Rackham, with a gleam and a glitter from his
negroid teeth and eyes, "you may get run down and run in, and shut up in
the Logs till all's blue. The Logs is the camp lock-up. You sha'n't see
the inside of 'em--unless you want, out of curiosity--but that's what
happens to the ordinary digger-devil. I've had a fine fellow chained up
to a tree all night for his cheek. I rather like 'em like that. But when
they don't go to ground in their claims, and break for the bush with you
after them, boot and saddle, spurs and sabre, then you know what hunting
is!"
"It seems a bit unfair," said Devenish, blowing a reflective cloud from
the Turk's head.
"Unfair as you like," says Rackham under his breath, "but the best fun
going! I'd rather put up one well-nourished digger than all the foxes in
Leicestershire; but there you are, and now you know, not that it applies
to you; only, if you should happen to make any enemies (and they're a
precious rough crowd to do with), you pass the word and I'll do the
rest for the sake of old times."
Devenish coloured a little, and looked to see whether Jewson was within
earshot outside the tent; and he was; but just then a diversion was
caused by a pistol-shot in the distance, then another, and then so many
more, both far and near, that it was as though battle and murder were
taking place on no small scale.
"You'd better empty yours, too," said Rackham, pointing to Ralph's
revolver in answer to his look. "Some do it most nights, but every
mother's son does it on Saturday night, to load up again and start the
week with fresh powder and shot. Now's your time, old fellow, while the
night's young and your hand steady; then fill up my can, for to-morrow's
the Day of Rest!"
The brandy had been obtained at a sovereign the bottle from one of the
numerous sly-grog tents at which a digger-hunting constabulary was
delighted to wink. But neither Devenish nor Rackham was a drunkard; they
were merely congenial and convivial spirits whose incongruous
environment promoted a mutual warmth. And the guardsman's contribution
to the common fusillade, which still continued, was heard with the rest
not a mile away, in the other new tent on Black Hill Flat, where Moseley
was making the like explanations to his equally inexperienced comrades,
and the redoubtable Deane and Adams was duly emptied in its turn.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FIRST CLAIM
Moseley had amused himself, in the absence of his mates, by pegging out
a supposititious claim, twenty-four feet by eighteen, just to let them
see what they might expect between them elsewhere. He was much
astonished, and withal as elated as his easy nature would permit, at
Denis's decision in the morning. Denis found the pegs almost in the
shadow of the blue gum-tree, beneath which they had pitched their tent,
and he declared that they could not possibly do better. The tall digger
was duly quoted on the possibilities of Black Hill Flat. Its merits as a
residential quarter were already obvious. The Tynesiders' camp was the
nearest, and it was not within speaking distance. As for Moseley, it
entirely suited him to settle down with the least trouble and delay, in
the first peaceful spot; and the party spent a happy Sunday in
re-pitching the tent and carefully arranging the whole encampment.
The day was an experience in itself. It was kept wonderfully holy, for
that community, in those wilds. Dent and Doherty took a morning walk; it
did not interest Moseley, who had also volunteered to cook. But Denis
was much struck and a little touched to meet the string of Sunday
promenaders, all in their best and cleanest, as at home, and to realize
that the average digger was a really law-abiding creature after all.
Outside every tent the Sunday dinner smoked or hissed on fires all but
invisible in the strong sunlight; one or two had been turned into canvas
church or chapel, and a familiar hymn, heard in passing, was only the
more moving for the gruff voices which groaned it forth. On one point
Denis satisfied himself: not a hand was put to the cradle or the spade;
and so peaceful was the impression left in his heart, that not even
Moseley's cooking, which was very disappointing, could spoil an hour of
that first auspicious Sabbath.
The gold license at that time cost thirty shillings; it had to be
renewed monthly at the same tariff, and it carried with it as many
vexatious restrictions as were ever put in print on document of the
sort. But the three new diggers, who were the first to obtain theirs on
the Monday morning, did not wait to read the regulations. Two of them
rushed back through the heat to Black Hill Flat, where Doherty had
turned the first sod, and Denis many more, before Moseley rejoined them
at his leisure.
Rather more than a foot's depth of black soil was soon turned up, and
then rather less than another foot of reddish-coloured clay, much harder
to work upon; by the time he was through this layer, Denis perspired
freely, and was inclined to be irritable with Moseley, who was for
"trying a tub" already, and seemed for once to have Jimmy with him.
"The wash-dirt's from six to twelve feet down," Denis objected.
"Everybody says so; and we shall hardly get as far to-day. Besides,
where's the cradle to try your tub in? I thought we would pick one up
this evening."
"We might have tried some in a tin," said Moseley, who, like many a mild
being, had no slight gift of opposition. "The way to paddock is to keep
on trying it all the way down. That's what we used to do on Bendigo."
"What's paddocking?"
Moseley smiled, though with perfect amiability.
"Do you mean to say you don't know?"
"I wasn't on Bendigo."
"Well, it's the most superficial form of surfacing. But I'm not set on
it," added Moseley, with obvious sincerity. "I only thought as it was
cold tack for dinner, and three of us can't work at the hole, it would
be something for me to do; but it really doesn't matter."
"My dear fellow, of course do as you like," urged Denis, as Moseley's
tone made him critical of his own. "You're the experienced man, after
all, and we're mates, not skipper and mate. Try a tinful by all means."
"No; on second thoughts, it's a long way to the water; but I'll tell you
what I might do," said Moseley, brightening. "I might go and buy the
Long Tom while you two work at the hole. That's a thing I could do, for
it won't be the first I've bought."
Denis felt constrained to consent to this, but with misgivings, for his
comrades' notions of economy were not his own. It was Moseley who had
bought the pick and shovel, of their neighbours from Newcastle, with
other articles of which the Tynesiders had duplicates, on the Saturday
night, when, for all he knew, Denis might have returned with those very
purchases; and the canny north-countrymen had found a customer after
their own shrewd hearts. Now the fellow said he would not be gone an
hour, which augured another incontinent bargain; and Denis dug on grimly
into an eighteen-inch layer of stones and sand. He was not particularly
pleased with Jimmy either; the little fool had looked so confoundedly
eager at the prospect of a premature test, so ridiculously disappointed
when Denis put his foot on it. However, he had not said a word, nor did
he now that they were alone, which was more unusual. He merely looked on
rather wistfully, because Denis would do all the work; but presently he
began looking even more wistfully toward the tent; for a long hour had
doubled itself, and still Moseley did not return, and still Denis
wielded pick and shovel by untiring turns.
At last came Moseley, strolling with a huge cigar, and a box of them
under one arm, but no cradle.
"I've got it," said he. "It'll be here directly; a couple of Chinamen
are bringing it slung on a bamboo pole. I got it you for thirty bob. But
look here what I have brought--a box of the best--but they're out of my
private pocket, and better not ask the price."
That day they got down four or five feet, and tried two or three tubs
toward evening, walking over half a mile with each, first and last, and
extracting altogether one pennyweight of gold precisely, or about four
shillings sterling. And the expenses of the party to this date were L18
10s.
The first week's record was bad enough to make them laugh and too bad to
continue. Washing everything after the second day, they had exactly half
an ounce of gold dust by next Saturday night, while their further
expenses amounted to several pounds. Everything but meat was at a fancy
price, and in the beginning some new appliance was wanted every day.
Denis held out against the dearer items as long as he could in decency,
but it did not grow easier to restrict the partner who had contributed
the lion's share of capital. The second week realized three ounces (L12
1s. 6d.), and cost less, though Moseley insisted on laying in fifty
pounds of flour as a bargain for L2 15s. Denis for one, however, refused
to be comforted by the second week. It was not bad, but to him a total
and immediate failure would have been more acceptable than the prospect
of a run of such insignificant success. The second week raised neither
high hopes nor a laugh; the third began better, with an ounce on the
Monday, but dropped at once to three or four pennyweight a day. This was
worse than Moseley had done on Bendigo, and he was soon advocating a new
claim on some lead that held good to the water's edge; but Denis was not
so readily deterred, much less since at the outset he had invented a
contrivance which reduced to a minimum the natural disadvantages of the
flat, in the shape of a hand-barrow to hold as much wash-dirt as
half-a-dozen tubs, and so save as many journeys to and from the river.
It was only a couple of saplings with a few feet of canvas nailed
across, which it took two to carry when full, but nobody happened to
have thought of it before, and it was a success when nothing else
succeeded.
These beginners had begun badly in every other way. There was really
nothing romantic in the life as they found it. It was only fascinating
to the spectator, or to the exceptionally successful performer. They had
ceased to be spectators with the turning of their own first sod. There
were many discomforts in the life. Moseley was quite an infamous cook,
yet it was the one direction in which he exerted himself at all. He was
still rather amusing, and would have been a capital companion in
triumphant times, but Denis was no longer easily amused. Doherty was
also disappointing; he had not been the same bright boy since Canvas
Town. Denis himself was seen to have a temper, and not unknown to lose
it; but they had drifted into a belt of unromantic experience not
innocent of the actively abominable. One morning Denis woke itching; and
in the leaden light he thought it was oatmeal on the rolled blanket
which was his only pillow; but minute movements betrayed a nauseating
form of life; in a word, the whole of his scanty bed-clothes were most
thoroughly fly-blown. The day went in boiling them in salt and water,
which carried the offense to heaven, and during this horrid task Denis
did talk of pastures new, which Moseley at once went to seek. After a
discreet interval he returned with glowing accounts of a disused hole
near at hand on the Native Youth, and before sundown the three started
off with ropes and spars to place across the top for a preliminary
descent; luckily one of them threw down a log to stand on, the bottom
being under water; for in another instant the pit was more alive than
Denis's blankets, but with writhing bodies and red eyes enough to
furnish forth a reptile house. Denis cut a slip from one of the spars,
penciled the word SNAKES on both sides, and planted it like a rose-label
as close as possible to the brink of this dreadful hole. Nor was the
unfortunate day complete until they had tried a tub at the old place
without getting a grain. It was the twelfth of November--in all fitness
a Friday--and this is its candid record.
Moseley began to talk seriously of throwing the whole thing up. It was
plain that he regretted his second innings on the gold-fields, yet he
was not the man to desert his mates, and this soon became the greatest
embarrassment of all. There was much that was lovable in Moseley. He was
the cheeriest member of the party, and in happier circumstances might
have been its life and soul. As it was, some ready conceit would often
turn aside that wrath which indolence and inefficiency were peculiarly
calculated to excite in Denis; yet Moseley was naturally indolent, and
his inefficiency seemed nothing less than catholic. He might have been a
genius, but if so it was at nothing that counted on the diggings. There
he was unstable, indecisive, happy-go-lucky, a trifler, a
procrastinator; hopelessly unpractical himself, and what was much more
tiresome, a consistent caviller at the practical in others. His equally
consistent good-humour was his saving merit; it also made him in a sense
incorrigible, for one must be more of a brute than Denis could ever have
been to blame with any bitterness a man who was at all times
unaffectedly prepared to blame himself. There was, however, one occasion
upon which even Denis felt inclined to say exactly what he felt and
rather more. He had at last written a letter, and on returning from the
creek with Doherty, had found it gone from the rack which a few stitches
had made in the canvas over the place where he laid his head.
"Where's my letter?" he asked at once. His tanned face was pale as well
as blank.
"It's gone," replied Moseley, with a reassuring nod.
"Gone! Who sent it?"
"I did, with one of my own. I say, I hope I haven't done wrong, Dent?
It's English mail day, you know, and I thought you'd forgotten it."
"I knocked off early on purpose to take it myself."
"I'm awfully sorry, Dent, but I happened to see that it was already
stamped."
"It's all right, Moseley," said Denis, conquering his displeasure, "and
of course I'm really very much obliged to you, though I came back on
purpose to post it myself. It was very good of you to trouble."
Moseley was beginning to look embarrassed, and not merely because he had
meant well and done ill. He had not taken so very much trouble after
all, and he was too good a fellow to retain more credit than his due.
"There was an old soldier came along," said Moseley, colouring: "not a
bad old chap, but a bit of a gossip; he had a look down the hole, and
asked how we were doing, and drank a pannikin of tea. As he was going to
the post-office, and offered to post my letter for me, I let him take
them both."
Denis could hardly believe his ears.
"You gave my letter to a strange digger?"
"And my own with it, Dent."
"A man you'd never set eyes on before?"
"I certainly never had; but we had quite a long chat first, and he
seemed a decent soul enough. I saw no reason to distrust him, at any
rate. I know what you're saying to yourself," added Moseley, as Denis
smiled sardonically; "but I've been more careful since the lesson I had
the night we met. Even if I'm still the worst judge of character in the
world, what object could anybody have in tampering with simple letters
like ours?"
The ingenuous question gave Denis an idea.
"What was the fellow like--to look at?" he asked in his turn.
"Oh, just a respectable elderly man, not much of the old soldier about
him, but the diggings must be crawling with them, and how many look the
part?"
"Then how do you know he was one?"
"He told me, of course."
"Had he a beard?"
"That goes without saying." Moseley and Denis were each growing one.
"But was his beard dyed?"
"No--gray."
"It should be gray," said Denis, grimly. "Did he tell you which diggings
he came from?"
"Sailor's Gully."
Denis breathed again. He knew that Devenish and Jewson were at the
Gravel Pits. He had really no reason to connect the man who had taken
the letters with the man whom he had in mind; and further questioning
finally relieved him of the idea, partly because Moseley was
unconsciously anxious to make the best of his emissary. But the
altercation had stirred the emotions of both young men; neither spoke in
his natural voice; each resembled an unpleasing portrait of himself. So
much had been said, however, that it was an opportunity for saying more.
"You know, Dent," Moseley went on, "I've had enough of the whole thing.
I made a mistake when I turned back with you, instead of taking the
first ship home as I had intended."
Denis said nothing. The sentiment expressed was too identical with his
own. Doherty reduced the considerate distance to which he had withdrawn,
and there was no doubt he was beginning to listen.
"But I hadn't written to say I was going home," continued Moseley, "so
I'm expecting my money at Christmas. It won't be much--thirty
pounds--but it's sure. You see, my father wasn't so sanguine as I was
when I came out, and he's allowing me sixty pounds a year."
Moseley smiled a little sadly. Doherty drew a few steps nearer. Denis
had become a picturesque study in sympathy, framed in the opening of the
tent.
"I wish I could persuade you to come home with me after Christmas!"
said Moseley, wistfully enough.
Doherty looked tragically at Denis, but could have flung up his
wide-awake at the way Denis shook his head without a word.
"Then I'll be shot if I go either!" cried Moseley, with a noble tremor
in his voice.
"My dear fellow!" urged Denis, while Doherty spun round on his heel.
"No," said Moseley, "you stood by me, and I'll stand by you as long as
you stay on Ballarat. It's no use talking, because I won't listen to a
word. You went through fire for me, Dent--you both did--and I'd go
through fire and water for you! And look here, Dent, I'll never do
another silly thing, and I'll work harder and cook better--you mark my
words!"
They were such as neither listener had ever heard from him before; but,
Doherty was no longer listening with any interest, and Denis was too
much affected to perceive that the humourist of the party was surpassing
himself when least intending it. All he could do was to drop his two
hands on Moseley's shoulders, and shake him affectionately until the
fellow smiled.
"But what about the thirty pounds, when it comes?" asked Denis, with
presence of mind and some sudden eagerness.
Moseley's face lit up with the sacred flame of loyalty.
"It goes into the Company!" said he. "I'll back you with my last stiver
as long as you stay on Ballarat!"
CHAPTER XV
A PIOUS FRAUD
So the little Company continued its existence, and on Black Hill Flat,
because Denis was more and more against sinking a second hole until
there was no more gold to be got out of the first. It was like his
thoroughness and tenacity of character, but was inconsistent with his
original attitude as a digger. A moderate success was of no use to him;
it must be a small fortune, or it might as well be nothing at all. So it
had been in the beginning, and it was obviously still the case. Yet
there was no shifting Denis while there was a pennyweight to the tub,
and once there was nearly an ounce, and one day in November yielded two
ounces four pennyweight. He was further fortified by the opinion of one
whom he instinctively regarded as an expert. Passing with Moseley
through Rotten Gully, on the Old Eureka Lead, to look at one of the many
sites which his companion fancied in these days, Denis became much more
interested in a very well-built hut in juxtaposition to an evidently
deep hole with a capital windlass atop. A fellow with trim whiskers and
an expression of splendid disgust was turning the handle, and as they
watched a very muddy digger came up standing in the pail, from which he
stepped with as much daintiness as a lady with a dress to spoil. "Thank
you," said this one in an off-hand way to the other, but Denis he
favoured with a stare, followed by the shortest of nods, for it was the
deep-sinker who had recommended Black Hill Flat.
"Did you try the Flat?" said he.
"I've been trying it ever since," returned Denis, and soon added with
what result. He was furthermore able to answer one or two technical
questions in such a way as to interest the deep-sinker, who seemed quite
struck with the simple device of the hand-barrow.
"Well," said he, as the partners were taking their leave, "I can't help
my opinion, and I've got it still. I believe there's gold on Black Hill
Flat, and plenty of it; what's more, it's the sort of nice dry place
where it should be pretty near the surface, if it's there at all. But,
of course, you might prick about for a year without finding it. I'm
sorry I said so much about the place the other day; if I hadn't I'd give
you another piece of advice now, and that would be to take your time and
go in for deep sinking. You're too good a man for surfacing.
Good-afternoon to you, and better luck." And he ducked into his hut with
a last least nod.
The upshot of this conversation, and of another between Denis and
Moseley upon the obvious quality of the deep-sinker, was that Moseley
went "pricking about" the flat while Denis persisted in the old hole,
and Jim Doherty oscillated between the pair. Nothing more came of it.
Moseley was a poor digger, who scarcely pricked skin-deep. He soon went
back to his evil cooking, which, however, had been less evil since the
little scene with Denis. His chops oftener hit a medium between the
blue-raw and done-to-a-rag extremes; but his bread would still have
murdered a dyspeptic, and the lean but hungry Doherty was laid up for
forty-eight hours after one of Moseley's duffs. Denis himself little
knew how many of his sleepless nights he owed to the same devastating
cause; and on Black Hill Flat he slept the sleep of the lost.
Early to bed was the digger's natural law, but if Denis kept it he would
be wide awake by the smallest hours, and so lie tossing till the Flat
was astir. He found it a lesser evil to sit up late over a lonely
camp-fire, and beguiled these vigils with congenial employment. He was
making a new map of the diggings. This one was in ink on a clean piece
of cardboard cut to fit the jacket pocket. It grew out of odd scraps
marked in pencil on Denis's walks abroad; some of the latter were taken
on purpose during these very sleepless nights. So the map was his own,
correct or incorrect, and it was made on his own plan. It was largely
geological. There were the depths of sinkings where Denis could
ascertain them, and the various leads flowed in rivers of bold red ink,
which made up for any lack of academic accuracy by a rather stimulating
appeal to the imagination. But that was to come; as yet it was a spy's
map, which even Jimmy had not seen.
And sometimes when it had been put away for the night, and there was
enough fire still to kick into a redder glow, or a great white moon in
the sky, then Denis would loosen the shirt that he buttoned higher than
most, and there was the little ring his Nan had given him, the
red-white-and-blue of its ruby, diamond, and sapphire, twinkling and
glittering as it had in the light of day upon her finger; and there was
the lanyard of her beloved hair; and it, too, shone as though still upon
her sunny head: and so he thought she told him she was well. But what
had he to tell her? He had stayed behind to do something that was not
yet fairly begun, and already two months were up. There were times when
Denis did not regret the letter which might never arrive. Its unredeemed
tale had cost him much in the unvarnished telling on which his nature
insisted; what if it were to cost him as much again in her sight? There
could be, after all, but one excuse for his separate existence at
Ballarat. And when he realized this, it was a hard, dark face that Denis
turned to great white moon or little red fire; it was dark with disgust
of self and circumstance; it was harder than ever with a determination
which had never wavered.
After one such night in the middle of December, the beginning of the
end came quite quietly and naturally at the following evening's meal.
Moseley had received his remittance, days before it was due, and, as
Denis said, it could not have come at a better time. At this the moneyed
partner had looked up from his platter in somewhat anxious inquiry.
"Because I'm going to take your advice," explained Denis, "and give
in--and clear out!"
"Home to England?" cried Moseley, while Doherty stayed the hand that
held a loaded fork.
Denis shook his head, and Moseley's face fell a little; but Doherty sat
munching with a satisfaction as solid as the morsel in his mouth.
"Eureka?" inquired Moseley, putting a brave face on it.
"No."
"Canadian Gully?"
"No."
"The Gravel Pits?"
"No, thank you."
"I know!" chimed in Doherty. "Sailor's Gully!"
"No, Jimmy."
"Little Bendigo, then?"
"No."
Jimmy said he gave it up. But Moseley had an idea.
"Not the other Bendigo, Dent?"
Denis smiled. "From what you've always said," he went on, "it's the
better diggings of the two."
"I believe it is," said Moseley, doubtfully.
"Not quite so over-run and overdone, you know."
"No; that is so, I'm sure; but--but, I say, Dent, I don't want to show
my face there again, I don't really!" said Moseley, with a manifold
anxiety more droll than he supposed. "You may laugh," he went on,
smiling himself, "but I didn't commit a crime there, though you might
think it. I didn't even tell a lie. But I did pretend that I had done
pretty well. I let them think I was on the point of sailing,
cock-a-hoop, for England home and beauty!"
"And so you are," said Denis at length. He spoke very quietly, but with
a conviction that turned Moseley's blushes to an almost passionate glow.
Yet in an instant the loyal creature was fighting his heart's desire.
"I don't want to desert you," he said. "I don't--and won't!"
"Then you keep us here."
"I don't want to do that either. Yet you see my position about Bendigo?"
And his troubled glance included Doherty, whose brown face was also awry
with mixed feeling.
"We see it perfectly, my dear fellow," Denis answered; "and if we ever
have another mate" (Doherty looked up quickly), "may he be half as
staunch as you! We have done our best, but so far we've made a mess of
it. You had had enough in October, and you've wasted these two months on
our account out of the sheer goodness of your heart; my dear Moseley,
you sha'n't waste another week. You've tried Bendigo, and we haven't;
you go home with as good a conscience as you leave us, and in three or
four months I shall follow you."
And they really parted in three or four days, and at a point not very
much further than that from which they had first beheld the tents and
mud-heaps of Ballarat; only Jimmy looked his last on them with a sigh,
and even he had recovered his spirits when it came to clasping hands.
But all three had light hearts at the end, and shoulders to match; for
they had sold their entire kit at the very fair figure of L11 3s. They
had also cash in hand to the tune of L2 11s. 6d., so that the
Bendigonians had nearly L10 as their share, to take with them to the new
field, but as Denis said, at least a hundred pounds' worth of experience
to put to it. He it was who had kept the accounts, all through, and he
who would not hear of Moseley's generous but unfair proposals at the
end. It may be added that the Company's debt to the latter had been
duly, if not forcibly, discharged; but after all, they had taken some
thirteen ounces of gold out of the maligned hole on Black Hill Flat, and
sold the same for over L50.
Denis and Jim stood without speaking while Moseley hurried away from
them down the Melbourne road; but it may have been that their hands
ached more from his than did their hearts. When he had waved his
wideawake at the bend, and they theirs for the last time, it is certain
that from that moment the original pair were more to each other than
they had been for two wearisome months. They had almost as much to say
as if they had been separated for the same period. But it was not
Moseley that they discussed; it was their own new prospects, ways, and
means. Nor had Denis long to wait for Mr. Doherty's earlier manner,
which got up like a breeze in the free expression of his opinion that
ten pounds was not enough to "see" them to Bendigo, "let alone starting
of us when we gets there."
"Perhaps it isn't," said Denis, slackening a stride which had lacked
something since the parting of the ways. "Let's sit down under that
gum-tree and talk about it. If you are right," continued Denis, paring a
slab of tobacco when they were duly seated, "it might be better to turn
back to Ballarat instead of going on to Bendigo."
The matter-of-fact tone in which Denis made this startling suggestion
betrayed him to Doherty without more ado. "You meant to do it all
along!" said he.
"It was the only way to do it," returned Denis, rubbing his tobacco
between both palms, "without hurting anybody's feelings. Now he need
never know. He had a heart of gold, Jimmy, but it was the only kind we
should have got with him; and that's the last word about him now he's
gone, poor chap! Back he goes to Silly Suffolk, and back we go to
Ballarat with nine-pound-three between us! But no more nice dry games on
Black Hill Flat, or anywhere else where the chances are big and the
certainties next to nothing; we're going to sink deep and wet and dirty,
Jimmy; and we're not going to sink on chance again."
Jimmy's eyes were wide open in all senses at once.
"Sink deep on nine-pound-three, mister? And you've been studyin' the
'ole game all this time?"
"There's this," said Denis, producing Bullocky's nugget. "I believe you
still have its fellow."
"And many's the time I've thought of it," cried Jimmy; "but you said we
was to keep them forever--for luck!"
"A lot of luck they've brought us," said Denis; "on the other hand, I've
learned a lot since then, and even now I don't propose to part with them
altogether. No, but since the devil drives we must raise our fresh
capital on them, and so let them bring us luck after all. If they do we
can soon redeem them; and I mean them to, Jimmy, this time. Come a bit
nearer: I've something to show you," continued Denis, drawing out his
new map. "I've made this at odd times, some of it when you and Moseley
were fast asleep. I don't say it's accurate, but it's given me a better
grasp of the diggings as a whole than ever I had before, and I should
like it to do the same for you. You see the double lines straggling from
top to bottom like a bit of loose tape?"
"Yes."
"That's the Yarrowee."
"And the little squares sprinkled all over?"
"Fancy tents."
"And the blots in between?"
"The holes belonging to them."
"And the centipedes, or whatever they are?"
"The Seven Hills of Ballarat, Jimmy! Bakery Hill, Specimen Hill, and all
the rest."
"And the hanks of red ink in between the hills, twisting all over the
place, under half the tents and holes; you must have put 'em in first,
mister; they look like rivers of blood. I'm blessed if I know what else
they do look like!"
"They're rivers of gold, Jimmy, and I did put them in first."
Jimmy looked
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