"Not yet, my boy," she said. "I am all alone. I should have had a dull week, but I knew you were enjoying yourself with your old friend at Garoopna. A great party there, I believe?"
"I am glad to get home, mother," he said. "We were very jolly at first, but latterly Sam Buckley and Cecil Mayford have been looking at one another like cat and dog. Stay, though; let me be just; the fierce looks were all on Cecil Mayford's side."
"What was the matter?"
"Alice Brentwood was the matter, I rather suspect," he said, getting off his horse. "Hold him for me, mother, while I take the saddle off."
She did as requested. "And so they two are at loggerheads, eh, about Miss Brentwood? Of course. And what sort of a girl is she?"
"Oh, very pretty; deuced pretty, in fact. But there is one there takes my fancy better."
"Who is she?"
"Ellen Mayford; the sweetest little mouse----Dash it all; look at this horse's back. That comes of that infernal flash military groom of Jim's putting on the saddle without rubbing his back down. Where is the bluestone?"
She went in and got it for him as naturally as if it was her place to obey, and his to command. She always waited on him, as a matter of course, save when Tom Troubridge was with them, who was apt to rap out something awkward about Charles being a lazy young hound, and about his waiting on himself, whenever he saw Mary yielding to that sort of thing.
"I wonder when Tom will be back?" resumed Charles.
"I have been expecting him this last week; he may come any night. I hope he will not meet any of those horrid bushrangers."
"Hope not either," said Charles; "they would have to go a hundred or two of miles out of their way to make it likely. Driving rams is slow work; they may not be here for a week."
"A nice price he has paid!"
"It will pay in the end, in the quality of the wool," said Charles.
They sat in silence. A little after, Charles had turned his horse out, when at once, without preparation, he said to her,--
"Mother, how long is it since my father died?"
She was very much startled. He had scarcely ever alluded to his father before; but she made shift to answer him quietly.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen!" he said.
"Then he has been dead eighteen years. He died just as you were born.
Never mention him, lad. He was a bad man, and by God's mercy you are delivered from him."
She rose and went into the house quite cheerfully. Why should she not?
Why should not a handsome, still young, wealthy widow be cheerful? For she was a widow. For years after settling at Toonarbin, she had contrived, once in two or three years, to hear some news of her husband. After about ten years, she heard that he had been reconvicted, and sentenced to the chain-gang for life; and lastly, that he was dead.
About his being sentenced for life, there was no doubt, for she had a piece of newspaper which told of his crime,--and a frightful piece of villany it was,--and after that, the report of his death was so probable that no one for an instant doubted its truth. Men did not live long in the chain-gang, in Van Diemen's Land, in those days, brother.
Men would knock out one another's brains in order to get hung, and escape it. Men would cry aloud to the judge to hang them out of the way! It was the most terrible punishment known, for it was hopeless.
Penal servitude for life, as it is now, gives the very faintest idea of what it used to be in old times. With a little trouble I could tell you the weight of iron carried by each man. I cannot exactly remember, but it would strike you as being incredible. They were chained two and two together (a horrible association), to lessen the chances of escape; there was no chance of mitigation for good conduct; there was hard mechanical, uninteresting work, out of doors in an inclement climate, in all weathers: what wonder if men died off like rotten sheep? And what wonder, too, if sometimes the slightest accident,--such as a blow from an overseer, returned by a prisoner, produced a sudden rising, un-preconcerted, objectless, the result of which were half a dozen murdered men, as many lunatic women, and five or six stations lighting up the hill-side, night after night, while the whole available force of the colony was unable to stop the ruin for months?
But to the point. Mary was a widow. When she heard of her husband's death, she had said to herself, "Thank God!" But when she had gone to her room, and was sat a-thinking, she seemed to have had another husband before she was bound up with that desperate, coining, forging George Hawker--another husband bearing the same name; but surely that handsome curly-headed young fellow, who used to wait for her so patiently in the orchard at Drumston, was not the same George Hawker as this desperate convict? She was glad the convict was dead and out of the way; there was no doubt of that; but she could still find a corner in her heart to be sorry for her poor old lover,--her handsome old lover,--ah me!
But that even was passed now, and George Hawker was as one who had never lived. Now on this evening we speak of, his memory came back just an instant, as she heard the boy speak of the father, but it was gone again directly. She called her servants, and was telling them to bring supper, when Charles looked suddenly in, and said,--"Here they are!"
There they were, sure enough, putting the rams into the sheep-yard. Tom Troubridge, as upright, bravelooking a man as ever, and, thanks to bush-work, none the fatter. William Lee, one of our oldest acquaintances, was getting a little grizzled, but otherwise looked as broad and as strong as ever.
They rode into the yard, and Lee took the horses.
"Well, cousin," said Tom; "I am glad to see you again."
"You are welcome home, Tom; you have made good speed."
Tom and Charles went into the house, and Mary was about following them, when Lee said, in so low a tone, that it did not reach the others,--"Mrs. Hawker!"
She turned round and looked at him, she had welcomed him kindly when he came into the yard with Tom, and yet he stood still on horseback, holding Tom's horse by the bridle. A stern, square-looking figure he was; and when she looked at his face, she was much troubled, at--she knew not what.
"Mrs. Hawker," he said, "can you give me the favour of ten minutes'
conversation, alone this evening?"
"Surely, William, now!"
"Not now,--my story is pretty long, and, what is more, ma'am, somebody may be listening, and what I have got to tell you must be told in no ear but your own."
"You frighten me, Lee! You frighten me to death."
"Don't get frightened, Mrs. Hawker. Remember if anything comes about, that you have good friends about you; and, that I, William Lee, am not the worst of them."
Lee went off with the horses, and Mary returned to the house. What mystery had this man to tell her, "that no one might hear but she"?--very strange and alarming! Was he drunk?--no, he was evidently quite sober; as she looked out once more, she could see him at the stable, cool and self-possessed, ordering the lads about: something very strange and terrifying to one who had such a dark blot in her life.
But she went in, and as she came near the parlour, she heard Charles and Tom roaring with laughter. As she opened the door she heard Tom saying: "And, by Jove, I sat there like a great snipe, face to face with him, as cool and unconcerned as you like. I took him for a flash overseer, sporting his salary, and I was as thick as you like with him.
And 'Matey,' says I, (you see I was familiar, he seemed such a jolly sort of bird), 'Matey, what station are you on?' 'Maraganoa,' says he.
'So,' says I, 'you're rather young there, ain't you? I was by there a fortnight ago.' He saw he'd made a wrong move, and made it worse. 'I mean,' says he, 'Maraganoa on the Clarence side.' 'Ah!' says I, 'in the Cedar country?' 'Precisely,' says he. And there we sat drinking together, and I had no more notion of its being him than you would have had."
She sat still listening to him, eating nothing. Lee's words outside had, she knew not why, struck a chill into her heart, and as she listened to Tom's story, although she could make nothing of it, she felt as though getting colder and colder. She shivered, although the night was hot. Through the open window she could hear all those thousand commingled indistinguishable sounds that make the night-life of the bush, with painful distinctness. She arose and went to the window.
The night was dark and profoundly still. The stars were overhead, though faintly seen through a haze; and beyond the narrow enclosures in front of the house, the great forest arose like a black wall. Tom and Charles went on talking inside, and yet, though their voices were loud, she was hardly conscious of hearing them, but found herself watching the high dark wood and listening to the sound of the frogs in the creek, and the rustle of a million crawling things, heard only in the deep stillness of night.
Deep in the forest somewhere, a bough cracked, and fell crashing, then all was silent again. Soon arose a wind, a partial wandering wind, which came slowly up, and, rousing the quivering leaves to life for a moment, passed away; then again a silence, deeper than ever, so that she could hear the cattle and horses feeding in the lower paddock, a quarter of a mile off; then a low wail in the wood, then two or three wild weird yells, as of a devil in torment, and a pretty white curlew skirled over the housetop to settle on the sheepwash dam.
The stillness was awful; it boded a storm, for behind the forest blazed up a sheet of lightning, showing the shape of each fantastic elevated bough. Then she turned round to the light, and said,--
"My dear partner, I had a headache, and went to the window. What was the story you were telling Charles, just now? Who was the man you met in the publichouse, who seems to have frightened you so?"
"No less a man than Captain Touan, my dear cousin!" said Tom, leaning back with the air of a man who has made a point, and would be glad to hear "what you have to say to that, sir."
"Touan?" repeated Mary. "Why, that's the great bushranger, that is out to the north; is it not?"
"The same man, cousin! And there I sat hob and nob with him for half an hour in the 'Lake George' public-house. If Desborough had come in, he'd have hung me for being found in bad company. Ha! ha! ha!"
"My dear partner," she said, "what a terrible escape! Suppose he had risen on you?"
"Why I'd have broken his back, cousin," said Tom, "unless my right hand had forgot her cunning. He is a fine man of his weight: but, Lord, in a struggle for life and death, I could break his neck, and have one more claim on Heaven for doing so; for he is the most damnable villain that ever disgraced God's earth, and that is the truth. That man, cousin, in one of his devil's raids, tore a baby from its mother's breast by the leg, dashed its brains out against a tree, and then--I daren't tell a woman what happened." [Note: Tom was confusing Touan with Michael Howe.
The latter actually did commit this frightful atrocity; but I never heard that the former actually combined the two crimes in this way.]