The Rogue's March/Chapter 41
CHAPTER XLI
"FOR LONDON DIRECT"
The Sydney papers of the year 1838 contain no reference to the extraordinary scenes enacted at the Pulteney Hotel on the first Saturday of the month of October. They do not report the removal of a magistrate of the Colony to its best and most private madhouse—some from a sense of journalistic charity—others for reasons which the late Nicholas Harding’s bankers might even now disclose. The curious, however, may still look up the advertisement which Lady Starkie read aloud from the Herald within an hour of the events described. It blew a trumpet for—
THE FINE FAST-SAILING SHIP
FLORENTIA
FOR LONDON DIRECT
and the call found a grateful echo in two young hearts, now so light, and now so heavy, that it was an act of mercy to stir them in this way. The Florentia was described as even then loading at the quay; it seemed as though they might all sail away from that beautiful and accursed land within a week. As a matter of history, however, the Florentia did not complete her cargo until the New Year; no other homeward-bound ship was ready before her; and much happened on shore meanwhile.
Tom Erichsen, having voluntarily confessed the part he had borne in the Castle Sullivan outrage, fell ill as a man can be just as the road to joy and freedom lay smooth and clear before him: he was in a raging delirium when the free pardon arrived from Governor Gipps, together with an order for the convict’s absolute release. It seemed he was about to be released indeed. Long weeks he lingered, battling indomitably; and what hand coaxed him back to light and life, and whose prayers availed, but the loving hand and the passionate prayers of the girl who only lived now to make him forget the past? Meanwhile her father was not idle. Nicholas Harding was useless in a sick-room, and his money could not save Tom’s life. But there were other things that it could do, combined with the natural energy and the practical ability which were also his. Turn again to those old Sydney papers. They will not tell you who instigated the inquiry, found the witnesses, paid their expenses and indeed threw his money right and left in the good cause. But they do recount the ruin of the most glaring and atrocious slave-drivers the Colony contained; they do report the several litigations by which that most desirable end was achieved; nor, to their eternal credit, does a single sheet take the side of the Sullivans of Castle Sullivan. The name still lingers in Colonial annals; it is still strong in all humane and honest nostrils; but of Dr. Sullivan and his ruffianly son all traces have been lost.
Not the least telling witness against them was one who certainly could not be accused of extravagant sympathy with the felonry. Major Honeybone enjoyed himself enormously in Sydney, both at the courthouse and elsewhere; he and Nicholas Harding became perfect cronies during the weary days of Tom’s convalescence.
“Gadzooks, sir, he gave me more trouble than any three men in the gang,” the major would say; “but I knew him for a gentleman at bottom, and I might have known him for an innocent man. They take it worst, gadzooks! Stockades like mine must be a living hell to ’em, though I say it! I’d like to shake his hand and tell him I’m sorry for this and that.”
But Major Honeybone was not permitted to see the invalid; and indeed he quitted Sydney rather precipitately in the end. The plucky veteran had asked a question of Lady Starkie, as her ladyship long afterwards confided to Claire, with an obviously pleasurable indignation, on the Florentina's poop.
Nor was it until the long and soothing homeward voyage was half over that the convalescent was vouchsafed an answer to certain questions which he had tired of asking in his illness. What had brought Nicholas Harding to New South Wales? He must have sailed but a few days after Claire. What had he found out in those few days, since the discovery of Daintree’s crime still came as a surprise to him? Tom never forgot the night when at last he was told; the trade-wind sang steadily through the rigging; every sail was set and drawing; the motion was an imperceptible rhythm; and a monstrous moon made a shimmering path from the horizon to the vessel’s side.
“You never saw the woman who took Claire’s jewellery?” said Nicholas Harding. “It is to her we owe it that my girl is not a madman’s wife! The woman was naturally a spy; she had spied upon her mistress, but on Daintree also; and to Claire she had cause to be grateful, as Claire will tell you if you ask her. The very night after she sailed in the Rosamund this woman came to my house. She had fallen very low; death seemed to me to have set its seal upon her; but she had information which she would only sell, until I told her where Claire had gone, and whom she was to marry. Then and there it all came out. I must say there was no huckstering then! The wretched woman seemed genuinely distressed. She told me”—Harding wiped his mouth, and his voice trembled—” she told me my daughter was gone to be a murderer’s wife!”
“Yet you did not know of it?”
“I did not know about Blaydes. That made the second!”
“His second murder?” gasped Tom.
“Or manslaughter—call it what you will. The first was the worst: it was— fratricide! There were two brothers; James was the younger. Out shooting, one day, when they were both mere lads, he shot a dog dead in his passion. The brother abused him; in an instant he also was shot through the heart. It was brought in an accident, but the family knew what it was. They drummed him out, they refused to see his face again; he was as much transported as any felon in New South Wales, with as good a cause. We never knew why his family would have nothing to do with him: why, for instance, the very flowers he laid upon his mother’s grave were summarily returned to him. It seemed inhuman, but I think it was very human now! God help me, I thought it was only the ordinary wild-oats, made too much of. But I was at fault, grievously at fault! Bitterly I regret it; bitterly I shall rue it till my dying day!”
Nicholas Harding was deeply moved; he was indeed a different man. In a hoarse voice he described the horrors of the interminable outward voyage, the perpetual dread of being too late, the nightly nightmare of Claire married to a criminal lunatic, if not dead already by his hand.
“Crime and madness,” said he, “are in their blood. I found that out too. The mother was a saint, but I discovered she had died in an asylum; the father is sane, but you know his reputation. He had denied me an interview before. I forced myself upon him now. And he admitted the perfect truth of the story I had heard. You ask how that woman came to know of it? Well, so did I. As I told you, she had sunk as low as possible; it seems she made a practice of asking her companions whether they knew aught of the Daintrees, because she suspected our guest of some shameful secret (but never of killing Blaydes), and she had always the thought of repaying Claire the good turn of which Claire must tell you. Well, at last—call it chance or fate, or what you will—but at last she hit upon a trail that led to the truth. She discovered an old gamekeeper who had actually seen the deed, and been pensioned to keep it secret, but blabbed it in his dotage. And then she came to Avenue Lodge.”
Once his tongue was loosed, and it was seen that the subject excited the convalescent much less than had been feared, Mr. Harding would speak of it with apparent freedom. Yet the case had aspects which he sedulously shunned. And towards the end of the voyage he became visibly troubled and depressed; but at last one chilly northern night, when the Western Islands had been left astern, he took Tom by the arm, and his hand trembled.
“Erichsen,” said he, “I was once your enemy. I am now your friend; in the near future I am to be something more; and I cannot face it a humbug and a hypocrite. You remember those letters you gave me back without a question? I have waited for that question all these months. That you have never asked it, that alone shows what you are! It makes it the harder to have to tell you the kind of man I was. But I have made up my mind that you shall know.”
And he confessed that he had been guilty enough of the bribery all but brought home to him, and yet not more guilty than a hundred others, many of them in higher places, as he said with perfect truth but little bitterness. The voyage out had purged him of self-esteem and arrogance; the homeward voyage was rearing better qualities in their place.
“Yes, it was a true bill!” he sighed. “True also that my money had silenced the witness who refused to speak—true that I made it worth his while to go to prison. But letters had passed between us. Blaydes got hold of them. He was on his way to me with those letters in his pocket—to sell them to me for a fancy price—when he met his death. Do you recollect the first lawyer who came to see you about the defence?” Tom started, but said he did remember.
“He came from me. And he not only assumed your guilt—as I fear we had all assumed it—but he wanted to know where you had put what you had taken out of the dead man’s pockets. You were only to tell him that to secure the best defence money could obtain; instead of telling him you threw him out of your cell. You were quite right! I was well served. After two years, Erichsen, I tell you that I am sorry—sorry!”
Tom implored him to say no more. There was more, however, that must be said.
“Before your trial,” continued Harding, “I was almost mad with anxiety. Every hour I expected those letters to be found. Daintree knew well enough what was the matter; the letters were in his own possession; but he obtained my confidence, wormed it out of me one night, and from that hour my soul was not my own. He began by dragging me to your trial—”
“He told me you dragged him there!”
“It was the other way about. I am ashamed to say it, but it was the other way about! I want to hang myself when I think of that time! I remember him taunting me by saying I ought to sympathise with you, because I deserved to stand in the dock myself. He who had done the murder for which he saw you condemned! I feel sure he only kept the receipt in order, if necessary, to use the letter that was written on the other side.”
“No, no,” said Tom. “I prefer to believe he was always thinking of some way of proving my innocence, by means of the receipt, without incriminating himself. It would have been in keeping with his character. He had a kind heart in many things, and I wish we were leaving him in his quiet grave instead of in an asylum. I cannot help feeling grateful to him even now. He gave me back my manhood and my liberty, even if it was he who first took them away; above all, he gave me back Claire!”
There was one addition to the homeward-bound party who must not be forgotten: this was a man-servant with a withered arm, who grew grey and ultimately died in Thomas Erichsen’s service. His was the second death among those passengers of the Florentia whose fate concerns this chronicle. Lady Starkie was the first to go. Nicholas Harding followed in the same year as his namesake of All the Russias. The next and last—it seems but the other day—was Claire, his daughter, a loving and beloved wife, and a mother whose children miss and mourn her daily, though most of them have children of their own. Peace to her white hairs and true and tender heart! It is beating somewhere for them still.
But a little while ago, this story might have left them still together—the bent old man with the thoughtful eye and the many wrinkles—the white-haired, sweet-faced, motherly woman. Yet then their story had not been told, for there is that in it which Thomas Erichsen never would tell his wife. He never told how they tried to cut his heart out with the lash; he never told her how nearly they succeeded. And still, when he thinks of that, is he grateful to the long-dead maniac to whom he owed so various a debt.
It is the old man’s pleasure to hear and read of the noble Colony sprung miraculously from the cruel dust and ashes of sixty years ago; he has never revisited it. In the Old Country he has lived and he will die. Less fortunate than Claire, his lot is that harder one of the last to go. But his life has been always brave, and he neither fears nor courts his death.
THE END