CHAPTER XXXII
A MARRIAGE MARKET
One morning, when Tom was busy in his pantry, a tearful voice advised him that he was wanted in the study at once. The woman vanished as he turned; the kitchen door slammed upon her sobs; and in the study Tom found his master in a towering rage.
“You profess some gratitude towards me, I believe?” said Daintree, with a biting ceremony of voice and manner.
“Not more than I feel—not half as much!”
“Then you are the exception, and now’s your chance of showing what you say you feel. I’m going to ask a favour of you, Thomas.”
“You shouldn’t put it so, sir. I love to serve you.”
“Then go to Parramatta factory and choose a wife!”
Tom twitched all over, and stood very still without a word. The other covered him with an ugly eye.
“So even your gratitude has its limits!” he sneered. “Another time I should protest a little less, if I were you!”
“You ask the one impossible thing,” replied Tom, with a groan.
“Pardon me; I did not ask it,” rejoined Daintree, whose blacker moods inspired him with a perfect genius for picking quarrels. “Though you have not honoured me with your confidence, it may relieve you to hear that I haven’t the least desire to tamper with your loyalty to some lady unknown. I ask you to choose a wife—not to marry her.”
“I don’t understand you, sir,” said Tom respectfully.
“You will if you condescend to listen. The woman Fawcett says we shall require another servant here. I don’t believe a word of it; the ladies are bringing their own maid with them; but this idle, impudent, ungrateful woman holds a pistol to my head and threatens to desert me at this juncture if I don’t get her a girl. I’ve had her here bullying me for the last half-hour, and this is the hole that I’m in: either the Fawcetts leave me this day month—when I shall want them most—or I must apply for a convict woman, and God knows what kind they’ll send me! Now, if you applied for a wife you’d have your pick and choose a decent one; and, as I say, there’s no earthly reason why you should ever marry her.”
“Surely it would be unfair not to,” objected Tom, who would have used a stronger adjective to anybody else.
“Unfair on the girl? Not at all; you simply let her off a blind bargain, and she gains good wages and a comfortable home. The girl comes out of it deuced well; the officials are none the wiser and none the worse; while I have the advantage of your selection instead of theirs.”
“I might make a bad choice—”
“Oh, if you want to keep out of it,” cried Daintree, “keep out of it, and refuse me the first favour I’ve ever asked you to do me. I shall know better than to ask another; only, in future, let me hear less of your gratitude till you’ve some to show.”
Tom consented without further words. He disliked the plan as cordially as he resented the outrageous tone adopted by Daintree; but he would submit to both sooner than deny the man to whom he owed more than he could even yet realise. And, after all, a certain irritability on Daintree’s part was only natural in his present anxiety and suspense; while it was now sufficiently clear that the little conspiracy would indeed do no harm to anybody. On the other hand, the arch-conspirator was himself a magistrate; and there was something startling in the crafty and cold-blooded way in which he set about circumventing those very regulations which it was his duty and his practice to enforce. To Tom this was yet another of those gratuitous revelations which both hurt and shamed him, even as he feared that they would hurt and shame the poor bride before long.
Meanwhile the necessary letters, in which the convict applied for a wife and the master undertook to support her, were written, the one with secret abhorrence, the other with a sinister gusto. Next day Tom received his order to the matron of the factory to supply him with a wife; and started, in the early morning following, on an errand which his whole soul repudiated.
All the way there he had an uneasy feeling that he was about to commit himself beyond his bargain, that Daintree was disingenuous even with him. How could he trust a man who gloried in a trick? He bore a letter to the matron from that cunning hand. It was sealed, and filled him with suspicion until an enclosure rustled as the matron thrust it into her pocket.
“You are to take her back with you,” said the woman, having read her letter, “and to be married from your master’s house. Very good; I don’t object, I’m sure. But you’re just too late for first choice; this young man was five minutes before you.”
First choice! The whole business sickened Tom before it began. He had found the matron in the charming garden of the factory; as yet he had seen nothing of the other side; but the matron now led him and the earlier applicant (an ill-favoured, freckled fellow who took care to keep in front of Tom) through a passage and out into a spacious courtyard. It was a dazzling forenoon; a slanting sun raked the yard from end to end. One extremity, indeed, was in hard, black shadow; and here some scores of women and infants were huddled together, in a group that cried for a yet thicker veil.
Sad as it was, however, to see the coarse and brazen women with their sickly, wrinkled, base-born children, the children they had been sent back there to bear, it was sadder still to hear the shrill oaths of the mothers mingling with as many innocent cries. A hateful volley greeted the appearance of the two men, to one of whom his worst experience seemed a bagatelle of horror beside this repulsive scene. Here was neither discipline nor fear, but lost faces and shameless tongues openly trading on their immunity from the lash. And yet women were wheeling barrows in the distance; women were breaking stones within the walls; and in that ghastly group were mothers as bald as their babes—their shaven heads corresponding with fifty stripes upon a male. Tom had writhed and sunk and hardened among the men; whip-cord and iron stirred his blood no more, but it ran cold enough in the factory yard at Parramatta.
“What ails you?” cried the matron, seeing him shudder and hang back. “Why, bless the man, does he think he’s got to choose from that lot? No, no, it’s only the first class we let marry, and that’s the third. Hi! there,” she sang out to an assistant; “turn out the women of the first class!”
And in another minute, with shuffling shoes, fluttering gowns and cackling tongues, over a hundred girls swarmed out of the building amid the jeers of those already in the yard. The matron and her assistant then formed them into two long lines; and so they stood, like competing cattle in a show. And Tom stood by, hanging his head, and blushing for them and for himself.
“Your turn first,” said the matron to the other applicant. “Just step down the lines and take your pick.”
The fellow did so with alacrity, and Tom saw him peering and leering at the girls, and actually shaking his red head in their faces, until he came to one that took his fancy. Her he beckoned from the rank—a bold, bright hussy—and they whispered, but only for a moment. And this time it was the woman who shook her head.
“Too many freckles for me,” she called out saucily. “I’ll hang on for the other one!”
So the convict went on; and tested another, in order to reject her and be even with them; while in those two long ranks, one hung back here and there to ten who put themselves forward, like boys who know the answer in a class.
Tom had forgotten Daintree, and plucked the matron by the sleeve; he had told her it was no use, he could never go through that, when the woman showed she was not listening to a word. He followed her fixed gaze; and there was the freckled convict importuning an upstanding young woman, who tossed her black mop, and would have nothing to say to him.
“Well, look at that!” exclaimed the matron. “There’s a girl who hasn’t been in the first class a week, and she gets an offer and turns up her nose at it. May she never get another!”
Tom had looked; and it was Peggy O’Brien, with her hair cut short like a boy’s.
It appeared that the man would not take his answer, he was at her still, and Tom advanced between the lines. “One at a time—it’s not your turn!” cried out the matron; but at that moment a deep flush dyed Peggy’s face, her neighbours laughed derisively, and Tom rushed in amid the protests of the matron and a ribald outcry from the mothers in the shade.
“It’s Tom!” gasped Peggy.
“What’s he saying?” cried Tom.
“Never you mind,” said the man. “First come, first served; you wait till I’ve done!”
Tom ignored him and looked to Peggy.
“He won’t take ‘no,’” she said; “an’ I’d have no thruck wid ’m to save me immorthal soul!”
“Will you with me, Peggy? Will you with me?”
The girl went white to the lips; he took her hand, and eyed his fellow, whose freckles jumped out through his pallor, and whose hands were fists that dared not strike. Tom would have reasoned with the man, only the latter was now set upon by a bevy of obstreperous Amazons not lightly to be shaken off.
There was none among them would have looked at Tom with such a fine fellow standing by; nor was there a man in all his senses who would take up with Peggy, if he but knew what they could tell him. So (in effect) cried the girls who fell upon the one man left, and fought for him, and scratched for him, and mauled him in their efforts to hug him to their hearts; for the spice of excitement introduced by Tom had turned their light heads; and it was from a pandemonium of his own making that he had meanwhile led Peggy apart.
“You’ll come with me, won’t you, Peggy?”
“Yes, Tom, if you want me.” And a humid light was in the sweet Irish eyes.
“Then come to the matron, and I’ll have you out of this hole in half a jiffy!”
But the matron was otherwise engaged; and when a degree of order had been restored, and the competition for the remaining male had been decided by his capitulation to an Amazon of vast physique; and when the brawlers had been banished indoors with threats of shaved heads and solitary cells, then the good lady would have given much to pack Tom off wifeless for his pains. Not so much, however, as had lain between the leaves of Daintree’s letter. So by noon Peggy O’Brien was a comparatively free woman. Alas! she was an unutterably happy one.
Her arm stole within Tom’s as he drove: he had neither the courage nor the heart to tell her the truth outright. It was a cruel position for them both; he glanced with horror at her radiant face; and again he noticed her hair.
“Where’s it all gone to, Peggy?” he asked, pointing to the short strong locks. “What have you done with it?”
They had reached the outskirts of Parramatta; new buildings were springing up in every direction, and Peggy jerked her head towards some scaffoldings.
“Is it where me hair’s gone?” she said with a laugh. “Mebbe there’s some of ’t there!”
“Where, Peggy?”
“In them new buildin’s, like as not. An’ didn’t ye hear they strengthen the morthar wid the hair of the women’s heads. ’Tis thrue, then, in Parramatta. An’ ’tis mighty kind they think themselves to give us the razor instid o’ the cat—but where’s their bricks an’ morthar if they bet us?”
“They used that glorious hair for bricks and mortar!”
His praise of it was dearer far than her possession; she coloured with pride and happiness as she told him it happened long ago, when first she came there.
“But why did it happen?” he asked indignantly. “What could you have done to deserve such treatment?”
She hesitated, and squeezed his arm.
“Nat Sullivan came—”
“Nat Sullivan!”
“An’ I was to swear whether or not you were one of the bushrangers; so you may think what I swore; an’ he said I was a liar, an’ I struck ’m in the face wid me open hand; an’ they shaved me for that!”
Tom felt miserable; she had suffered for him all along; how could he tell her he was deceiving her now, and had no intention of marrying her at all? Not one word of that had passed her modest lips, yet the pressure of her homely hand was eloquent with love and joy. What could he do? What could he say? For miles he never opened his lips: they were tight-shut when she glanced at him, and his face so wretched, that at last she could bear it no longer.
“What is it, dear?” she asked him tenderly. “Is it how ye can make such as me your wedded wife? Because ye needn’t, Tom dear, if ye think betther not. ’Twouldn’t take all that to make me happy!”
Then, in a burst, he told her of his master’s plan, and how he had entered into it against his own better judgment, because that master had plucked him from the jaws of death and from the gates of hell; and how, from the moment he saw Peggy, his only thought was to do for her what his master had done for him.
“My one idea,” he said, “was to get you out of that horrible place. I give you my word I never thought of anything else. But—”
Her sweet eyes had fallen. There were tears on her lashes. Claire was dead to him, so what else mattered? Better be true to the living than to the dead!
“but I do now!” he cried through his teeth. “Yes, Peggy, I mean it now! I hate such trickery, I’ll have no hand in it. I applied for a wife, and by the Lord I’ll marry her too—if—why—”
She had withdrawn her arm, and was shaking her bent black head.