CHAPTER XXIII
THE COURT-HOUSE
The nearest magistrate was an Anglo-Indian of the name of Strachan, another employer of convict labour on a large scale, and a disciplinarian second only to Dr. Sullivan himself. The two were close friends, and indispensable to each other in certain ways. Both, in fact, were magistrates; but no magistrate was competent to deal judicially with his own offending convicts, and thus an interchange of mutual favours was kept up between the pair.
They would meet on Mondays at the courthouse situated midway between their respective strongholds, and at this courthouse Dr. Sullivan would oblige Mr. Strachan by sentencing any servant of the latter to as many lashes as his master liked, while Mr. Strachan was only too glad to do the same for Dr. Sullivan. So great was the mutual convenience, that either potentate was delighted to hold a special inquiry, in any exceptional case, to oblige the other; and one was held accordingly in the forenoon following Tom’s assault upon his master’s son.
A mounted messenger was despatched to Mr. Strachan, who sent back word that he would be at the court-house as soon after twelve o’clock as possible. And he arrived within a few minutes of Dr. Sullivan, his red-bearded overseer, and the culprit, who had spent the night in heavy irons, which he still wore.
The doctor led his brother-magistrate aside, and Tom, raising his lack-lustre eyes for once, watched them walking arm-in-arm in the sunlight for several minutes before entering the courthouse. Ginger stood by and told the constables the kind of man Tom was. Tom heard him without a word or a look. The constables agreed that, whatever else he was, he was evidently a sulky brute. Tom heard them too, but sat doggedly in the strong sunlight, with sullen eyes upon the two magistrates, whom he instinctively knew to be deciding his fate before the case began. Not a word had he spoken since the irons had been clamped upon his limbs, and clasped about his soul.
Not a word did he speak in the justice-room within. His attention, however, was engaged at the outset by the extremely moderate tone in which the charge was preferred against him. Dr. Sullivan, put on his oath, gave a perfectly true account of what he had himself seen and heard in the small hours of that morning. He even admitted, in response to a question from the Bench, his impression that his son was the first to raise a hand; and added, of his own accord, a hope that that circumstance would be taken into due consideration on his servant’s behalf.
Tom could hardly believe his ears. He was still lost in wonder at this extraordinary intercession, on the part of Dr. Sullivan of all men, when Mr. Strachan addressed him in a tone no less clement and benign.
“You are charged,” said he, “with a very grave offence, which you do not attempt to deny. In the ordinary course I should feel compelled to commit you to another Court, and your lightest punishment would be a term in the chain-gang, even if you were not sent straight away to Norfolk Island. It is your good fortune, however, to have been assigned to a humane and merciful master, who has spoken for you as I am bound to say I should not have done in his place. He has magnanimously made the most of the one slender point that might be urged in your favour. He has begged me to deal with you here and now. He is generously anxious to give you another chance, of which, for your own good, I would exhort you to take grateful advantage. Meanwhile, you have not me to thank, but Dr. Sullivan entirely, for the ridiculously inadequate punishment which I am about to order you. You will be taken into the yard, and you will receive fifty lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails.”
At these words Tom turned very white, and opened his lips as if to speak, but shut them tight without a syllable. His dogged eyes gleamed, his handcuffs rattled, and his leg-irons clanked together as the constables took him by either arm and led him, without a murmur, from the room.
“Did I say too much?” asked Mr. Strachan, biting at a cheroot, when the magistrates were left alone.
“Not one word,” replied the doctor, cordially. “I am infinitely obliged to you for saying what you did—for the constables’ benefit, particularly. They seemed to see nothing wrong.”
Mr. Strachan shook his head “It was distinctly irregular, doctor. A clearer case for quarter sessions I have never heard.”
“Perhaps not; but then I should have lost a most competent groom; and now, thanks to you, I shall keep him.”
“Are you sure he will be worth keeping after this?” asked the Anglo-Indian, sucking at his cheroot, which was but a shade darker than his withered face.
“Worth keeping? He will be better worth it than before. It does them good.”
“That is not my invariable experience,” said Mr. Strachan, shaking his head again.
“But it is mine,” cried the doctor. “They are never any good until they feel your power. They never feel your power until they have first felt the lash:” And he emphasised the sentiment by giving the table a cut with his cane.
“I have not always found it so,” maintained the other. “In your place I should have let that man go to quarter sessions. There are the makings of a desperate criminal in him, or I’m much mistaken.”
Dr. Sullivan flushed and brightened beneath his white hairs, like a man on his mettle. “Desperate criminal?” he repeated eagerly. “He’s one already, my dear sir; and all the better! We’ll see what we can do to tame him. We’ll see what we can do to break his spirit! You know what my son says, Strachan? He never was bested by a convict yet; it would never do for him to remain bested by this one; and that’s another reason why he mustn’t slip through our fingers just yet. No; we shall show him who are his masters; we shall bend or break his spirit as I bend—”
He sprang up, with his bamboo cane, and rushed to the door, as a sudden outcry arose in the yard. At the door, however, even Dr. Sullivan paused aghast.
“Strachan —Strachan!” he cried. “Good heavens! You were right! Look here!”
What had happened will be the better understood when it is explained that the court-house was not a house at all, but a mere ring of weather-board huts, of which the justice-room was one, the lock-up another, the constables’ quarters a third, and a store and a stable a fourth and fifth. The yard thus formed was furthermore enclosed by a brushwood fence, broken only between the stables and the justice-room, where there was a gate instead; and, in the very centre of this open space, blotting the edge of the deep sky, and scoring the dazzling earth with shadows like scars, stood that worse than gallows, at which men were beaten into brutes, and brutes into devils, week after week throughout the year.
A sergeant and two constables formed the garrison of this lodge of law and order in the wilderness. The sergeant was an emancipist; and of the trio, only one had come to the country on his own account. The third was actually a convict at this very time, and a glaring ruffian into the bargain. Originally a butcher-boy (who had robbed his master in the City Road), he still smacked of the slaughter-house, with his raw red face and cruel eye; and on this young felon devolved the congenial task of administering the lash.
In such hands was Tom led to the triangles, with a white face, but quickened eyes. The ticket-of-leave overseer was also of the party, filling his pipe and grinning to himself between his flaming whiskers, like a man prepared to enjoy the thing thoroughly. The sergeant, however, made him stand back a little, though with a wink, as he touched the culprit on the shoulder.
“Come, my lad,” said the sergeant, confidentially, “it needn’t hurt you, when all’s said and done!”
Tom looked at him in faint astonishment.
“We ain’t obliged to lay it on that thick,” pursued the sergeant, in the same confidential tone. “It’s all left to us. It needn’t hurt him, need it, mates?”
“Not if he comes up to the mark; but he won’t—no fear!” said the ex-butcher, who had got the cat, and was practising with it upon the woodwork of the whipping-frame.
“We’ll ask him,” said the sergeant. “We’ll give him the chance. Will you come up to the mark, my son, or will you take it hot?”
Tom looked at his inquisitors with a sullen, puzzled expression, and chanced to see the overseer, at a little distance, shaking his head and touching his pockets.
“Not got any?” cried the sergeant.
“You ask him,” returned Ginger.
“Gut no money?” said the sergeant. “That’s what we mean by coming up to the mark, you know.”
“A pound apiece,” suggested the free constable. “That’d soften the job.”
He stared at them in dogged defiance.
“I told you so,” said the butcher, throwing down the cat. “Let’s truss him up.”
“Even a pound between us—” the sergeant had said, when the butcher began to grumble, and Tom’s lip to curl; and this settled it.
“Up with him!” cried the sergeant. “We’ll teach you to sneer at us, my game-cock! Stop a bit, though. His legs won’t stretch in these here irons. Who the blazes put them on?” And the zealous officer knelt himself to unfasten a pair of anklets, coupled by a short but massive chain, and employed quite illegally by Dr. Sullivan on his farm.
A pair of figure-eight handcuffs had been locked upon Tom’s wrists at the same time; but both his wrists and his hands were small, and during the night he had found that he could slip out of these at any moment. He was out of them now before a soul dreamt of it—so slyly did he stand to have the shackles off his feet.
The heavy-handled scourge lay on the ground; its raw-faced wielder was half-way out of his coat; the other constable was talking to Ginger in the shade; the sergeant had undone the second anklet, and was just rising from his knees with the pair.
Next moment he was on his back in the dust: and Tom was planted before the triangles, with the scourge caught up by the thongs in his two hands, and the heavy handle whirling round his head.
The butcher rushed at him with one sleeve still in his coat; and received the butt-end of his pet instrument full upon the forehead, where a great green wart sprang out as if by magic, even as he reeled away. It was at this there arose the outcry which brought Dr. Sullivan to the justice-room door; and the sight that staggered even him was the sight of his groom, with the blood all flown from his face to his eyes, gnashing his white teeth, and whirling that thick oak handle round a head of wavy yellow hair. Tom had not improved in looks since his arrival in New South Wales. But at that moment there was a fineness in his ferocity, a sublimity in his despair, which, were not lost upon both the gentlemen now watching from the door. Mr. Strachan, for one, beheld a fellow-man fighting for a manhood that was more to him than life, against a degradation worse than death; and he wished himself back at his farm.
Not so Dr. Sullivan, whose consternation lasted but a moment. The next, he was in the thick of it, rallying the constables, flourishing his cane, and leading a rush which made the rebel slip beneath the triangles and take to his heels. The pack followed, all but Dr. Sullivan, who now fell back, with the sun glistening on his white hair, and a gnarled hand shading his eyes.
Tom plunged between the lock-up and the store, and ran round the fence to the left, like a rat in a ring, but it was too high for him at every point. The pack doubled, and had hemmed him in, when he swerved and was through them, leaving Ginger on the ground with redder whiskers than before. The Anglo-Indian, at the justice-room door, was irresistibly reminded of his youth at Rugby, and had an old cry in his throat, when he recollected himself and gulped it down in time. The convict was rushing straight for the outlet between stables and justice-room. The pack were at his heels; in front of him the gaunt old doctor stood his ground like a grenadier, with his bamboo cane, and the open gate and a tethered horse beyond.
Mr. Strachan stood petrified by sheer curiosity as to what would happen next; it never occurred to him to interfere.
He thought the doctor must give way. The doctor did no such thing; he stood fast with his cane as though it had been a sabre; and Tom, whirling his weapon still, whirled it high into the sky, and bowed to the doctor because he could not strike him down. As he bowed, the bamboo slashed his shoulder, and would have cloven him to the ribs had it been steel; next instant he was overpowered; and they dragged him back to the triangles, as Dr. Sullivan turned to his brother-magistrate with a heightened colour and sparkling eyes.
“A hundred!” cried the doctor, in his most dictatorial voice.
“A hundred what?” asked Mr. Strachan.
“Lashes!” said the doctor, wiping his forehead with a red silk handkerchief. “You can’t give him less after this. I’d like to make it two! But we needn’t haul him in again to hear it. Just give the order out here.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Strachan, nervously. “I decline to give it at all.”
“Decline to order him another fifty for a bloodthirsty outrage like this?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You must have taken leave of your senses!” cried the domineering doctor. “Or is it that you sympathise with the man who felled my son?”
Mr. Strachan turned a deeper yellow.
“You know me better than that, Dr. Sullivan!” he cried hotly. “Sympathise with a convict! It’s not that at all. It’s because it’s irregular. I doubted whether it was a case for summary jurisdiction in the beginning. I know it isn’t now. And I’ll have no more to do with it.”
“You won’t? Then I will!” said Dr. Sullivan. “I’ll take the responsibility upon myself!”
“I won’t be a party to any further irregularity,” said Strachan, “and it’s a clear case for quarter sessions, if ever there was one. That’s my only point. The man deserves it, of course.”
Yet he retired into the justice-room and shut the door, but failed to shut out the rasping sound of Dr. Sullivan’s voice, exultantly doubling the sentence, and crying to the ex-butcher to lay on the whip-cord as he had never laid it on before.
“Trust me!” came the reply through the open window. “Look at my forehead, sir. I’ll cut his bowels out for that!”
Mr. Strachan sprang up and shut the window with a bang. He was strangely shaken. Many were the floggings he had ordered, or inspired, and even witnessed, without a qualm. There was a something in this man’s face that had appealed to him and troubled him from the first. As he shut the window there was a something else in the white sheen of the doomed nude back over yonder that made him feel instinctively there was the remnant of a gentleman, tied up for whipping like a cur. And this conviction made the Anglo-Indian, who was the remnant of a gentleman himself, more uncomfortable than he had felt for years.
He turned his back on the window and sat down, listening against his will, in the very chair from which he had delivered pre-arranged judgment. He heard it once, and winced and twitched his shoulders, as though the stroke had fallen on them. He heard it again. He began mumbling the end of a new cheroot and listening to the flies on the window-pane, whose buzzing had suddenly become very loud. But louder yet were those horrible sounds outside; and even more horrible was the exultant croak of the old doctor at regular intervals between the sounds.
“Comb your lashes, my good man!” his rasping voice kept crying. “Comb those lashes—comb those lashes!”
Strachan found himself counting them, with that striking face still before him, and those desperate eyes waiting upon his as they had waited here while he was delivering his mealy-mouthed address; and looking at him as they had looked for one moment when he was done. A white stare of incredulity, a flash of reproach, another of contempt, and a back turned disdainfully with a shrug. That was all—but it had burnt the magistrate at the time—it would burn him in the retrospect ever after.
To stop counting he put his thumbs in his ears (always with an eye on the door so that none should surprise him in that position), but “Comb those lashes!” came to them still, and then he began listening for another voice and a different cry. He listened for these in positive terror, with the perspiration dripping from his nose, and his ears moaning like the sea beneath both thumbs. However, no voice reached them but that of the savage old doctor, crying out about the lashes up to the end. Then came a pause. Mr. Strachan made sure it was a pause, dried his face, put his thumbs in his arm-holes, and tilted back his chair. His features were sufficiently composed when Dr. Sullivan strode into the room with a deeply dissatisfied air.
“Well?” drawled Mr. Strachan.
“Not a sound!” growled the doctor. “Not a moan; but I’ll break his spirit yet! I’ll break him, or I’ll know the reason why!” And he ground what teeth he had, and wiped his wrinkled forehead with the red silk handkerchief.
“Bravo!” cried Mr. Strachan.
Dr. Sullivan looked up sharply, but took this expression of enthusiasm to himself, as a tribute to that indomitable and ferocious will which was his pride.
“You know me, Strachan,” said he. “What I say I mean; and if you’d backed me up just now, and stopped outside, you’d know why I say it. Not—one—solitary—groan! But I’ll break him yet; upon my soul I believe