CHAPTER XXVIII
THE OUTER DARKNESS
The stockade smouldered in the midst of a hard-baked plain, that was as brown as shoe-leather, and as devoid of any sort or kind of vegetation as though it were shaved every morning with some monstrous razor. Trees there were in the distance, marking more than half the sky-line, as though the place had been shaved especially for the stockade; but not a solitary bush was within reach. And the sight of the trees whose leaves they never heard, and whose shade they never felt, was one more torment to those of the eighty prisoners who still lifted their heads to look so far; the majority, however, let their dull eyes redden by the day together on those few hard and blinding yards which might chance to occupy their picks and shovels from five in the morning till the going-down of the sun.
All day they laboured in chains beneath the barrels and bayonets of the military. In the evening, when they returned to the stockade, loaded muskets and fixed bayonets showed them the way. Even in the stockade itself, fixed bayonets and loaded muskets gave them their supper. Thereafter they were locked up for the night in so many small boxes, lined with ledges something more spacious than book-shelves; on these ledges they lay down, as close as mummies in catacombs, until it should be five o’clock once more; and perhaps, after a time, the only sound would be the clank of his fetters as this man or that turned over, in the magnificent space of eighteen inches that was allotted to each.
It was the same stockade of which Erichsen had seen the outside on his way to Castle Sullivan in the early part of December; he saw the inside by the end of February, when Strachan gave him six months of it for absconding, and by so doing made open enemies of the Sullivans. They wanted to have the breaking of Tom’s spirit all to themselves, and tried to dictate another fifty lashes and the convict’s return to service; but this time Strachan was firm, passing, indeed, the most merciful sentence possible in the circumstances.
The six months began on Wednesday, the last of February, in the year 1838.
First they took his name and made an inventory of his marks, scars and the colour of his eyes and hair; then they cropped the latter, and shaved off the yellow stubble which had lately hidden the hollow cheeks and softened the haggard jaw. And it was an old man’s face that saw itself with sunken eyes in the barber’s glass.
Next they took away his farm-labourer’s clothes, which were not branded, and put him in a Parramatta frock and trousers, which were. And now they clasped round his body a green-hide belt, from which depended, in front, a heavy chain that became two heavy chains at about the level of the knees; and the two chains ended in still heavier rings round either ankle; and the whole made a capital Y upside down. In this harness it was impossible to walk, though with practice you might waddle; and it was never struck off, for a single instant, on any pretext whatsoever.
They now presented him with a spoon all to himself; his knife and fork, his pannikin and his mess-kit, he was to share with five other felons.
Lastly they showed him his eighteen inches, where he passed the intolerable night in wondering why he had not given himself up as the Italian’s understudy; and in wondering, even more, why he still would not do so if it were all to come over again—for he knew he would not. Indeed, one of the most dreadful features of this present phase was the tenacity with which the poor wretch found himself clinging to life in each emergency, despite all his cooler longings for the end. He longed for that more than ever, but he saw now that death must come to him. He might sink to murder; to self-murder he could never stoop.
Or so he thought at the beginning of this term of broiling days and fetid nights, with foul company and heavy irons common to both. The combined effect of all these things will presently be seen. Meanwhile such feelings as were left him were still tolerably keen; and it was with a real thrill that, towards the end of the first week, he woke up at his work to hear the others hooting, and turned round to see Nat Sullivan once more riding down the line.
The thrill became a shiver: the blue eyes were fixed on Tom, the great lip was thrust out at him, and before Tom the rider reined up.
“You villain!” said Mr. Nat, with inexpressible malignancy of voice and look. “You villain—I’ve found you out!”
A line of red eyes blinked and watered in the sun, then fell with a glimmer of interest from the scowling horseman to the prisoner accosted. Tom had already piqued such attention as his new companions were in the habit of bestowing upon any fellow-creature: for few there were who joined that morose and fierce crew with the stamp of such moroseness and ferocity already on them. Those few were crabbed old hands, but here was raw youth, and yet in three long days they had not heard his voice. Nor did they now. Tom moistened his palms, and took a new grip of his pick—but that was not all. He was seen to tremble, and he nearly pinned his own foot to the ground. What was it he had done and been found out in, this cub whose teeth were always showing, but whose voice was never heard?
A perspiring sentry strolled up, his once red swallowtail coat hanging open upon his naked chest, and his white trousers sticking to his legs; he was the only one whose curiosity went the length of a word.
“What’s he been doing of?” said the sentry, wetting his hand on his chest to cool his musket-stock. “We’ve only ’ad ’im ’ere these three days.”
“You won’t have him many more,” said Sullivan. “The hangman will have him.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Look at him trembling!”
“I see.”
“He’ll tremble in the air before long!”
Tom bent over his pick. There was more hooting here, but whether at himself or at his enemy Tom neither knew nor cared. He wished to appear very busy and regardless; he was really intent upon Nat’s shadow under his pick; wondering whether he could possibly spring so far forward in his chains and get such a swing as to bury the pick in the substance instead. But this was never known. When the hooting subsided, the noise of light wheels approaching took its place, and Nat Sullivan turned round in his saddle.
The military man who debased himself by the charge of this iron-gang was a major of gunners, too fat for service, and too gouty to sustain his distended body on his legs; he therefore superintended operations from a bath-chair, in which a blue-jacketed mess-man had to trail him about the works. Major Honeybone had recognised Nat, and had ordered the mess-man to hurry to the spot, but not to seem in a hurry. The major was himself a sufficiently hard and cantankerous man, but some sense of justice he had, and he considered Castle Sullivan one of the angriest plague-spots in a plague-spotted land. The present occasion filled him, therefore, with the greatest glee. He had long desired an opportunity of giving one or other of the Sullivans a piece of his mind, and here was young Sullivan trespassing on the works.
“Go slower,” said the major, making up his mind what to say, and not to say it all at once, as Mr. Nat turned in his saddle. Their greeting was in consequence not uncivil, though the major blandly ignored the coarse, ringed hand obtruded by the other.
“You heard of the outrage the other night at Castle Sullivan?” began Mr. Nat.
“By bushrangers?” observed Major Honeybone.
“By bushrangers; only one of them escaped; and there he is!” roared Nat, pointing savagely at Tom.
“Really?” remarked the major, wilfully unmoved. “Dear me! It was from you he came here—like half my gang—for absconding, I understood?”
“We didn’t know it then.”
“That he was one of the bushrangers?”
“Yes.”
“But you know it now?”
“We do so!”
“Dear me!” again remarked the major, whose expression was rendered inscrutable by the rich shade of the gigantic umbrella without which he rarely ventured abroad. His small, shrewd eyes glanced from the visitor to Tom, who was still looking down, and fidgeting with his pick, the speaking image of sullen guilt. More repulsive to the major was the gloating ruffian in the saddle; but he signed to the sentry to take away Tom’s pick, and then favoured the other with a slow, contemplative stare.
“A very singular thing, I’m sure,” he resumed, with a sarcastic intonation that punctured even Nat’s thick skull. “Very singular indeed. Upon my word, Mr. Sullivan,” exclaimed the major, “I find it difficult to believe what you say!”
“Sir!”
“Or, if you like, to understand it.”
“If you will allow me to say the rest, and to say it elsewhere—”
“No, sir. Here!” cried Major Honeybone. “Here or nowhere, which you please. This man absconds one night—so I gather—and the next night you are attacked by bushrangers. This man is found the morning after that, and I understand you to suggest he was one of the band that attacked you. Yet you never recognised him at the time! Come now, did none of you?”
“Not then; but he threatened my sister and a female whom we have since returned, and Miss Sullivan remembers hearing him call the female by her name. Now this man and that woman kept company,” snarled Nat, in a perfect flame of rage and spite; “and Miss Sullivan will swear he called the woman by her name. He fell in with the thieves when he absconded, it’s perfectly clear; he was the very man to join them in an attack on his own masters, even if he didn’t instigate it. Join in it he did. I can prove it. Though not one of the original gang is left alive, I can prove—”
“What about that Italian fellow?” interrupted the major; and Tom held his breath.
“He wasn’t in it. I believe he’s dead, and they put this Erichsen in his clothes. His horse was found a few miles beyond where they found this man, and now his coat has been discovered with Erichsen’s knife in the pocket. Yes, you may wince!” cried this good hater. “You shall swing for it yet!”
“Kindly confine your remarks to me,” said the major sternly. “You’ll have to prove the knife was his, and that won’t prove everything. Never heard such a story in my life! You’ll have to strengthen it up a bit if you mean to make a case. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing at all,” said Nat ungraciously.
“Then why the deuce do you come to me?”
“I didn’t. I was on my way to your superiors.”
Major Honeybone turned to the sentry.
“Cock your piece,” said he, “and shoot his horse if he attempts to go till I’ve done with him. Now, you Sullivan,” continued the major, “perhaps you didn’t know you were trespassing when you came on these works? But you were, and you’ll stop on ’em now till I’ve done with you. You came to gloat over the man you’ve hounded here, to tell him you’d hound him to the gallows, did you? To laugh at him, eh? Gadzooks, sir, the boot’s on the other leg this time! The whole chain-gang is laughing at you; and you may frown upon ’em as much as you like, but if you touch one you’ll be in irons yourself in two minutes. I know you, sir. We know all about both of you here. Half the men who come here have been driven here by you and your father. Silence in the gang! Go on to Sydney and tell them anything you like about the man you mean to hang. But, gadzooks! you don’t get him out of this—no, and the Governor himself sha’n’t have him out of this until he knows on whose word he’s acting! Go to my superiors; they’ll never listen to your clumsy yarn; if they do, I’ll send down to Sydney myself to tell ’em what I know of you and yours. And Castle Sullivan will be swept into the sea, and you—you slave-driver—you’ll be where these men are now! Be off, sir. I hate the sight of you! Sentry, let him go.”
About the middle of this tirade Nat had been ready with a retort as virulent; but the concluding sentences were too much even for his hard nerves and sturdy ruffianism. Muttering something unintelligible about an “outrage,” and “reporting” Major Honeybone, he put spurs to his horse and galloped off, leaving nothing worse behind him than a look. It was such a look as might be seen any day, any moment even, in an iron-gang; yet Tom never forgot the cruel eyes, the low lip, the murderous scowl, nor the peculiarly bestial whole which they made on that occasion. The convicts cursed and cheered him in derision; and, when he was gone, were given to understand by the major that if they ever did it again he should treat the lot of them as they would be treated at Castle Sullivan—to fifty lashes all round.
“Only I give you fair warning,” said he, “and you don’t catch me break my word either way!”
The major was a man who liked a little opposition for the sake of putting it down, which he never failed to do with the highest hand; but he had his chain-gang in such an exemplary state of broken-spirited subjection that the iron will within that flabby body was growing rusty from disuse. The impudence of young Sullivan was consequently a godsend to this born martinet. It gave him an appetite, and it made him sleep. Furthermore, it fixed his eye on Erichsen, and to some extent his thoughts also. The major was harsh by habit but impartial to the core. He did not believe a syllable of Nat Sullivan’s story; but why had Erichsen so taken it to heart? He alone had neither cursed nor cheered; the major was puzzled, but kept watch.
“Fancy he’s a gentleman,” said Honeybone, in a day or two; and he made inquiries.
The result of the inquiries was the information that Erichsen usually sulked; but when he was in a bad temper, he was more blasphemous than any man in the gang; when in a good one he was more foul.
“He is a gentleman—hem!—was,” said the cocksure major. “Only it’s the old story: the further they have to fall, the lower they sink. Poor devil—poor devil!” And old Honeybone sighed, for he had sunk a little too; and if his conscience was clear of crime, it was more or less saturated with sin, of which the perfume was not a little stale and sickly. Whether from that cause or another, the fat major found himself taking a more human interest in this prisoner than in most. “So that’s the most profane tongue in the stockade!” he would think whenever he looked at Tom. “So that’s the foulest mouth!”
It was not; but Tom was educated, and had an educated man’s sense of emphasis and of selection. His bad things stuck—that was all.
But if those superlatives were not literally justified, others were, and before Tom had been six weeks in chains he had shown a temper as insubordinate, an audacity as brazen, and a callousness as shocking as anything of the sort which the major had yet encountered in his present capacity. It was the reaction from the sulky spirit in which the convict had begun his term. For two whole weeks he broke no rules, but in the next four he was three times flogged.
On the first occasion he knocked down the scourger when it was all over, and so brought it all over again; on the last, the major addressed him from his chair, as the convict positively swaggered from the triangles, with his fetters clanking and his shoes squelching at every step.
“You want to try Norfolk Island,” said the major, “but you sha’n’t.”
Tom shook his head with an ugly sneer.
“The gallows, then,” said the major, “is your game; but you’re not going to get there either. I can show you as good sport as you’ll show me, and we’ll see who wins the game!”
It was nothing else to the combative major. He was growing younger for the exercise; he began to get about again on his legs. His only regret was for a palpably fine young fellow gone so utterly to the bad; for the rest, he found poor Tom as stimulating for some weeks as Nat Sullivan had proved on the occasion described. Nat, by the way, had returned to Castle Sullivan, ignobly crestfallen, but not so intoxicated as to ride by the stockade again in daylight. The major’s superiors had confirmed that officer’s opinion, and Peggy O’Brien, examined on her oath in Parramatta factory, had perjured herself for Tom in the most illusive and convincing manner. The Principal Superintendent had made a note of the affair; but there was no case, as Nat was pretty plainly told, and Major Honeybone heard no more of him for some time.
As a matter of fact, the bones of the Italian had also been discovered; but, as there were no clothes upon them, and the native dogs had left little else, they were never identified. So Tom was safer, for the moment, than he supposed. Meanwhile he had become a sort of hero among his degraded fellows; not the most popular sort, however, for enthusiasm is difficult in heavy fetters. Besides, he never tried to be popular.
He might have been, after knocking down the scourger. The man was a convict himself, who received 1s. 9d. a day for his unnatural services. It was the butcher over again, only this caitiff had eighty others always there to loathe him, and every hand could have shaken Tom’s for that well-aimed blow. But the very next day they discovered he would as soon turn on them as on their common enemy.
The incident brought to light an interesting fact, and it happened on Tom’s third Sunday in the stockade. About half the gang were incarcerated in the common mess-shed, idling, yarning, cursing and proceeding as fast as possible with that mutual corruption which was the chief fruit of this particular branch of secondary punishment. Tom was of the number, a conspicuous unit. It was the dawn of his prominence. He was in one of those good tempers alluded to already. Everybody was listening; those who could laugh still laughed now; and if he had a guardian angel, surely, surely, she must have been weeping then, more bitterly than when he fought for the bushrangers at Castle Sullivan and put a bullet through a troopers arm.
Suddenly something, an association, a reminiscence, a forgotten picture, made him want to weep himself; he was past that, however, and went back into the sulks instead. A new diversion being required, one was provided by the discovery of a young convict, a mere lad, writing a letter in a dark corner on the floor. On being detected, the lad first blushed, and then offered to read them what he had written; whereupon he opened his lips and a ribald stream poured forth, but meandered, slackened, faltered and was soon cut short.
“He’s making it up as he goes along,” cried several. “He never wrote that at all.”
“We’ll see what he did write,” said one who was at hand, cuffing the lad, and snatching the unfinished letter.
With a cry and an uncouth chime from his irons, the young convict attempted to retain his property. It tore in his hand, and a dozen more held him down while the possessor dragged his chains on to one of the long, rude tables, and stood up to read the letter in a silence broken only by the protests of the wretched writer.
“‘My ever dear mother and father,’” the brute brawled out, “‘I received your kind and welcome letter on the 31st of January, and happy was I to read the delightful letter which I received from you that day.’ Ahem! can’t he pitch it in? ‘O, how ’appy I am to ’ear that you are so comfortable and well. O, my dear mother and father, I ’ope my brothers and sisters will mind what you say to them better than ever I done, for you see what it is to be ’eadstrong.’ ’Eadstrong, eh? Stop a bit; now we’re coming to it! ‘O, my dears, I ’ope you will make yourselves as comfortable as you can, for perhaps I never may see you again in this world; but I ’ope I shall in the next, where I ’ope to be a comfort to you all, so God bless you all, my dears, for ever—’”
He got no further; nor had many attended to the last sentences. The lad’s unavailing protests had ended in veritable wailing and gnashing of teeth; it was this that had aroused Tom from his lethargy, and he also was now upon the table, clanking down the length of it to where the reader stood.
One or two mistook his intentions. “That’s it— you read it,” said they; but the most of them read Tom’s face.
“Give me that letter,” he said sternly, halting before the man.
“Give who it?” roared the other. “Oh, it’s you, eh?” he added, and seemed in doubt.
“Lads,” cried Tom, seizing his opportunity, “this is going a step too far, don’t you think? We all of us had friends once—in another world as it seems to me—but if any of us like to remember we had them, surely it’s that man’s business and not ours? He’s a better man than most of us, and his letter’s the last thing that we should meddle with. We wouldn’t have done it once, and we won’t now.” His temperate tone surprised himself; but it merely showed how every sensibility had lost its edge. Two months ago he would have argued such a point with his ready hands.
Meanwhile the reader had decided not to fight, being an insufficient number of inches bigger and broader than Tom, and having still in his ears the thud with which the scourger fell. But neither was he going to give in like a man, because men were scarce in those heavy irons. Accordingly he retained the letter a little longer, before handing it to Tom with a mocking bow.
“We won’t, won’t we?” he sneered. “Well, as it ’appens, we won’t, for more of that rot I couldn’t read if I was paid. But you look out, my special! If you’ve come ’ere to give yourself airs, we’ll soon learn ye. It’s lucky for you I’m in such a good temper, or you’d have gone off this table a bit different, you blighted young upstart!”
Tom had in fact taken his chains in his hands and jumped off: it was when he was on the ground, with his back turned, that the direct abuse was hurled. Others sided with the speaker and added their maledictions to his; yet the group about Butter (for so the poor lad was called) dispersed at Tom’s approach, and he returned the letter to its writer with a look that might have made his guardian angel dry her tears, for after many days there was kindness in his eyes once more.
“Here, Butter,” he said; “take it—and for God’s sake not a word! You’re a better man than I am, or you wouldn’t have written at all. There—shut up. Gratitude, forsooth! If you must show some, don’t set me thinking.”
But the lad’s emotions were aroused too thoroughly to be soon allayed. They had the corner now to themselves, and he was crying like a girl. Tom envied him his tears.
“Read it through,” sobbed the young fellow, forcing the torn letter upon his champion; and to please him Tom perused it from beginning to end.
A while ago it would have made him laugh and cry; now he read it unmoved, save by his own indifference. It contained a touching lie, describing the writer as being still very happy with the master who months since had sent him to the iron-gang. The rest was a wondrous jumble … “and I inform you that snaiks is very bad in this country. We ofttimes see from 14 to 15 feet long. Parrots is as thick as crows in your country, kangaroos too, and it is night here when it is day there, but Arthur Smith, I do not know where he is. Mutton is 4d. lb, beef—” But he had written no further, and Tom said, “Thank you, Butter; it should make them happy,” as he returned the letter. He felt that he ought to be touched, and he was not. His heart seemed turned to stone, when suddenly he felt it quicken.
The lad had simply said, “My name isn’t Butter; it’s Butterfield.”
“A Yorkshireman? You talk like one!” cried Tom, with a most painful flash of memory. Once more he was a lucky, hopeful, penitent sinner, in a sweet-smelling waggon, on a night in spring; with Blaydes’s watch ticking no warning in his pocket, and with a vivid mental picture of Blaydes himself smiling wistfully across the stile, beside which he was even then lying dead.
“Ay,” said young Butterfield, “poor old Yarkshire! I doubt I’ll never see it again. My folks have left there an’ all.”
Tom had more flashes. He was getting used to them now.
“Where did they move to?”
“A little place they call Hendon; an’ it was me that drove ’em there by getting into trouble! Oh, it was me disgraced them all, and drove them away!”
Tom let him talk, but said little more in return. It was Jonathan Butterfield’s son. How it brought all that back to him! True, it was not a year ago, but it seemed a lifetime. It was terrible to think of the little time and the stupendous change. Tom Erichsen saw himself as he had been and as he was, and the mental vision hurt him more than the material one which the stockade barber had shown him in a glass. He could not tell Butterfield that he had known his father. Nothing was to be gained by telling him; it would lead to his telling more, and how could he speak of things of which the mere thought was become torture so refined and so exquisite?
His eighteen inches were a very rack that night. He was thinking of Claire for the first time in many weeks. She would hold him guilty still. How could she do otherwise? His sweet friend held him guilty when he was innocent, and his enemy the major held him innocent when guilty. Oh, the irony, the biting irony, that had made a worse man of him when he was bad enough already! All the foul night he lay tossing in his noisy chains; his wild eyes were never closed. Yet once the thought stole over him, had he been worthy of Claire when she loved him, would all this ever have been? And after that he lay quieter—his heart knew why.