The Rogue's March/Chapter 30
Part III
MASTER AND MAN
CHAPTER XXX
“THE NOBLE UNKNOWN”
Tom crawled into the vehicle as though those heavy chains still dangled about his legs. Nothing was so strange as the sudden cessation of the horrid jingle which had marked and mocked every movement of his body for four whole months. He felt quite lost without it, and he clambered into the curricle without a word. Daintree cracked his whip, and that was the sole sound from either of them in the first half-hour of keen and starlit freedom.
“Feel cold, Erichsen?”
“No.”
“Because you can have my coat if you do. My things are thicker. Only say the word.”
He said nothing; such gratitude as he felt in his degraded heart was not yet so poignant as to need expression; it was a very vague, dull sense at present. But Daintree understood: he had simply to sit next that silent, aged, callous figure to understand all.
They drove on to Maitland, where they supped handsomely and lay all night. In the morning Tom was well and warmly clothed at the best store in the township. And that day the difference was that he kept turning to look over his shoulder, and this at shorter intervals as the day wore on.
“Is anything following us?” said Daintree once.
“Not yet,” said Tom.
“Not yet! Why, what do you expect?”
“What I deserve,” said Tom; and Daintree had the wisdom not to press him upon this or any other point. He knew what was alleged against Erichsen at Castle Sullivan. He had heard the story from the Principal Superintendent. He began to think there might be some truth in it after all.
Next morning he was sure. They had put up at an unusually comfortable roadside inn, where Tom had a very excellent room, yet he came down with wild, unrested eyes and twitching fingers.
“It’s no use!” he bitterly exclaimed.
“Haven’t you slept?”
“Not a wink. I heard them coming all-night long—heard them coming with the chains. Oh, take me back! They have made me the guilty man they said I was when I wasn’t. I deserve everything now!”
And a second day of terror he spent in the curricle, looking backward hour after hour; but when that also passed over, and still nothing happened, he began to think that either Butter was mistaken, or the major incredulous, or his enemies of another mind now that he was gone. At all events he took heart of grace, and at last thanked Daintree for what he was doing: without asking, however, why he was doing it.
On the third forenoon the spires and windmills of Sydney fringed the sky; then they mounted a hill, and there was the harbour sparkling above the roofs of the convict city.
“We had better drop the ‘Erichsen’ now,” said Daintree, as they drove up to the turnpike gate. “I suggest that ‘Thomas’ will suffice both for Christian name and surname. I think it would be preferable for the present. What say you?” Tom consented with perfect readiness and indifference; and he looked behind him for the last time, as much as to say what was the only thing on earth about which he was not as indifferent as the dead.
They drove down Brickfield Hill, over the spot where Nat Sullivan had tumbled off his horse, and past the notorious inn where he had lain; it flourished still. And still the doleful felon music filled the air, striking more staccato in this crisp weather than six months since in the heavy heat; but it struck to Tom’s heart no more. On the quay there was a crowd, and a fresh shipload of convicts disembarking, but Tom felt no pity for them either. And now, when his indignation was aroused, it was by the lounging laziness of a road-gang, whose overseers were smoking and chatting with the convicts, while the latter moved neither hand nor foot, and the sentries yawned at their posts.
“They want the major there,” said Tom grimly. “He’d have that peck of stones about their ears if they stood looking at it much longer!”
Daintree turned and regarded him with a particularly pleased and kindly smile; then Tom knew that he had just volunteered his first remark since leaving the stockade; and he thought he knew with what sympathetic patience his first voluntary remark had been waited for, though he only now suspected this from Daintree’s smile. His heart swelled a little. They put up at an inn, and he made himself more useful to his new master than he had been yet.
The bungalow was some few miles out, upon the delightful woody shores of Rose Bay; they drove on there in the afternoon; and the greenwood dipping beyond the post and rails of the Old Point Piper Road, the lush meadows dipping beyond that, and the azure arm of the harbour seen through the one and above the other, were all a very wonderful change after that terrible plateau of the past four months. Nor had they any feature in common with the detested region of Castle Sullivan. Tom had seen nothing like this up-country. To crown all, the bungalow lay bathed in the richest sunset when they reached it, and Rose Bay deserved that name indeed, for its sunlit waters appeared to be dimpled with wet rose-leaves from strand to strand. It was as though Nature herself were trying to soften that frozen heart and to welcome Tom Erichsen to this haven of peace.
An old man came out to see to the horses, a somewhat younger woman stood in the mellow light upon a wide verandah. Daintree greeted them with an air—almost the first he had permitted himself in Tom’s company. With another, however, he took Tom’s hand and expressed characteristically the hope that the threshold of his house would prove to be also that of a new life for Tom.
“You have left the past behind you, Thomas,” said he, “and all your enemies with it. Rest assured of that. If they follow you here they’ll have me to deal with—I can promise them they have laid their last finger on you. No, there’s a brighter future ahead of you, I trust; and always recollect—I am your friend.”
“I suppose you are,” said poor Tom in reply; he could believe and feel but little even yet.
“You suppose I am?” cried Daintree, looking rather queerly at Tom. “You shall dine at my table,” he then exclaimed. “You shall have all your meals with me! Mrs. Fawcett, lay a place for Thomas—and show him his room.”
It was a little room, certainly, but an incredibly pleasant one; the window almost overhung the bay; and the bed was a white feast for bloodshot eyes.
“Dinner’s ready; don’t you spoil it, young man, by keeping master waiting,” said Mrs. Fawcett; and then over her shoulder as she went, “My word, but you’re a lucky one!”
Perhaps he required telling so; it was all so difficult to believe, so impossible to understand. But bewilderment had not yet given place to curiosity.
He was, however, beginning to realise that he had fallen from the cruellest into the kindest hands on earth, when, returning to the verandah, he encountered the kind man, with a gleaming eye and a set face quite inconsistent with that impression. A fox-terrier, indifferently bred, with one ear up and one down, but the most eager eyes, had wildly welcomed Daintree while Daintree was welcoming Tom; this little dog he was now dragging savagely along by its collar.
“Won’t come into my study!” explained Daintree, in a voice of amazing fury. “Once I thrashed him in there, so now he thinks he won’t come in; but he shall—he shall—he shall!” Dr. Sullivan himself, in dealing with a recalcitrant convict, could have employed no more ferocious tone.
The dog was dragged within a yard of the door it would not enter, then released, and it did not run away. Daintree now went within, and called and whistled to the dog; but there it stood, bristling all over, and yet wagging its tail with immense energy, as if to proclaim its anxiety to please in any other way, but enter that room it could not. Nor was it until Daintree rushed out in his rage that the little dog turned tail and ran away. And again he caught it, and again and again the same thing happened, the man vowing the dog should give in, the dog still wagging his tail and still disobeying; the dinner growing cold on the table; and Tom viewing the whole petty, pitiable exhibition with the most irritating pain and disenchantment. It made his heart sick to see this man of all men in such a passion about so small a thing; in a little he was all but foaming at the mouth; and at last, when he caught up a heavy ivory paper-knife and belaboured his dog with that, the spectacle hurt Tom more than any flogging he had witnessed in the iron-gang. It was not only that his feeling for men was numbed while his feeling for animals remained quick: here was the one man living whom he wished to honour and to admire, and the honour and the admiration were sickening at their birth.—
The beating did no good whatever; then Daintree turned on his heel with such a face that Tom took the dog in his arms. He heard a drawer unlocked in the room. When his master reappeared the paper-knife was no longer in his hand; a pistol was there instead.
“Where’s the dog?” he cried.
“Here,” said Tom, showing him.
“Put it down. I’m going to shoot him. I’ll have no stubborn beasts here!”
“Have you had this one long, sir?”
“From a puppy,” said Daintree, cocking his pistol. “Come, put him down, or we’ll never get any dinner to-night.”
“No,” said Tom firmly. “You’ll be sorry for it afterwards; you will be vexed with me for standing by and letting you do such a thing in your heat.”
The other gasped, but never said a word.
“If the dog is no good to you, give him to me,” continued Tom. “Don’t shoot him, sir. Not that I believe you meant it!” And to show his belief he dropped the terrier; whereupon Daintree hesitated, but presently retreated to his room without a word.
The dog was spared. They sat down at last to cool dishes that should have been hot, and their mutual ardour had suffered with the viands. Daintree was very solemn and very stiff, his hapless companion quite certain that he had given mortal and everlasting offence. But the incident was never referred to again. And Tom soon forgot the solitary occasion upon which his champion displayed himself in so sinister a light.
Not that the other lights were all rose-coloured. The man had foibles innumerable, and in their way as extraordinary as his inexplicable kindness to Tom. This continued and increased, and yet there was a something ostentatious, vainglorious, egotistical, even in his kindest acts. Tom hated himself for seeing it, but there it was. It became the more noticeable as Tom himself grew more regenerate, and so made fewer demands upon the other’s consideration. And then the gloomy vanity of the man! His literary pretensions! His solemn belief in himself and all he did!
“Heaven knows he has done enough for me!” sighed Tom, quite ashamed. “I must try to see nothing else; but what I can’t help seeing shall never, never, never make any difference to my regard for him.”
Tom wanted to get to work at once, in the house, in the garden, anywhere and at anything, but the other would not hear of it for days. He was to rest and forget, and to enjoy his life. They made excursions together in the curricle or in Daintree’s boat. Tom would have been almost happy if he only could have given his kind companion the heart-whole admiration which the latter took for granted. And his inability in that respect was so real a grief to him, he could have wept at it and at the other’s kindness put together; but there was still not a tear in his heart; he often wondered, was there any heart left in his body? What he deemed his ingratitude seemed sometimes to prove that there was not.
There were qualities he could honestly admire in Daintree, but they were not those qualities upon whose possession Daintree most prided himself. He was a man of iron nerve and will. That was undoubted. One day, in a squall near the Heads, he handled the boat with magnificent coolness and skill, when Tom thought they must both have gone to the sharks: when they landed safe and sound, he inflicted so many of his poems upon Tom, whom the salt breezes had overcome with drowsiness, that the pantry and the knives to clean seemed preferable to such nightly ordeals. Tom asked to be put into livery and to work at once. He insisted upon it; and gained his point through the accidental touch of “livery.”
They drove into Sydney next day with specimens of the family crest, which Tom was to bear on every button. Daintree being a magistrate, a cockade was duly included in the order; and for a time the master was in high feather at the prospective display. But it recalled family troubles ere long; and all the way home he talked dismally of himself as an “exile like Byron—my literary second-self.” Somebody had once called him “own brother to Byron”; he never tired of quoting the phrase; he was destitute of humour, and made Tom blush for him, where he would have shaken with laughter at another.
His contrariety was unique. Not only was he a good magistrate spoilt, through neglecting the Bench for his desk, but an old athlete who bragged about the poetry he could not write instead of about the races he had really won. On the top of his bookshelf stood the row of tarnished silver cups, and his proud eye climbed no higher than the volume or two of mediocre verse underneath. He made little enough of his genuine triumphs, his real abilities; but he would talk with bated breath of a few stanzas which often rhymed as false as they rang. Once Tom cleaned the cups when Daintree was out, and he flew into something very like a rage when he came in and saw them; he was the most unaccountable of men.
“Still he is the kindest,” was Tom’s reflection on the top of that conclusion; and the same night he not only made another of his poor attempts at thanking Daintree for all that he was doing and had done; he at last put the question which seemed to mark a stride in his slow and up-hill return from brute to man. And yet, even now, it was no very sincere curiosity, but rather an uncomfortable feeling that he ought to seem curious, which prompted him to say:—
“I can’t understand your kindness to me! Why did you begin it; why do you go on? I wonder what made you take an interest in me at the start!”
Wonder was the word, for wonder he did, but keenly inquisitive he was not; and the stride was shorter than it had looked.
“I believed in your innocence,” replied Daintree with deliberation. “That was all.”
“I can’t think why! You were the only one. Yet you knew nothing about me, it seems?” And still his tone was that of purely impersonal speculation.
Daintree took the cheroot from between his teeth.
“I knew something about Blaydes,” said he.
“Ah!”
“Not much; very little, in fact; but that little was pretty bad. I knew what an infernal blackguard he was, and I felt sure there must be more ruined men than one upon his track. You remember that point in the defence?”
Tom jumped up. “Don’t remind me of it,” he cried. “The very barrister disbelieved in me! And it doesn’t interest me now, it only hurts; don’t speak of it, if you please.”
“Oh, very well,” said Daintree; “only that point was suggested by me.”
“You?” exclaimed Tom in an altered voice. “Ah, but what don’t I owe to you? More than I can ever realise or believe; everything—everything—and yet I refuse to speak of it to you of all men! You see how ungrateful I am; you see what they’ve made of me among them! Oh, sir, forgive me; have patience with me, and I may be grateful yet. Give me time, and I shall thank you as I cannot now!”
“You shall not,” rejoined Daintree firmly; “you were quite right, and we’ll speak of all this no more. Good heavens!” he cried out, “how do you know my motives were so pure? What if it was a mere whim—and not altogether my own? At all events, I take no credit for it; and never you thank me again, do you hear? You’ll offend me if you do. You will indeed!”—
He spoke earnestly, nervously, and without a trace of affectation or egotism. Nor did Tom remember a single foible, as he looked in the handsome, dark, inscrutable face, and took his benefactor by both hands.
“God bless you!” he whispered. “Do you know what I used to call you in my heart when I had one? My Noble Unknown! Well, you are nobler even than I thought; do you know what you are doing? You’re giving me my heart back, little by little! I shall be grateful yet!”
He went to the door, but would stand there gazing at his friend. So long he stood, with burning eyes that seemed to ache for tears; but at length he was gone, and Daintree sat alone with a cold cheroot between his fingers.