For the Term of His Natural Life Part 42

"Nonsense, Poppet," he said, with his eyes resolutely averted.

"No, but you have been, and I am very pettish, sometimes. Papa has spoiled me. You are always affectionate, and those worrying ways of yours, which I get angry at, all come from love for me, don't they?"

"I hope so," said Maurice, with an unwonted moisture in his eyes.

"Well, you see, that is the reason why I am angry with myself for not loving you as I ought. I want you to like the things I like, and to love the books and the music and the pictures and the--the World I love; and I forget that you are a man, you know, and I am only a girl; and I forget how n.o.bly you behaved, Maurice, and how unselfishly you risked your life for mine. Why, what is the matter, dear?"

He had put her away from him suddenly, and gone to the window, gazing across the sloping garden at the bay below, sleeping in the soft evening light. The schooner which had brought the witnesses from Port Arthur lay off the sh.o.r.e, and the yellow flag at her mast fluttered gently in the cool evening breeze. The sight of this flag appeared to anger him, for, as his eyes fell on it, he uttered an impatient exclamation, and turned round again.

"Maurice!" she cried, "I have wounded you!"

"No, no. It is nothing," said he, with the air of a man surprised in a moment of weakness. "I--I did not like to hear you talk in this way--about not loving me."

"Oh, forgive me, dear; I did not mean to hurt you. It is my silly way of saying more than I mean. How could I do otherwise than love you--after all you have done?"

Some sudden desperate whim caused him to exclaim, "But suppose I had not done all you think, would you not love me still?"

Her eyes, raised to his face with anxious tenderness for the pain she had believed herself to have inflicted, fell at this speech.

"What a question! I don't know. I suppose I should; yet--but what is the use, Maurice, of supposing? I know you have done it, and that is enough.

How can I say what I might have done if something else had happened?

Why, you might not have loved me."

If there had been for a moment any sentiment of remorse in his selfish heart, the hesitation of her answer went far to dispel it.

"To be sure, that's true," and he placed his arm round her.

She lifted her face again with a bright laugh.

"We are a pair of geese--supposing! How can we help what has past? We have the Future, darling--the Future, in which I am to be your little wife, and we are to love each other all our lives, like the people in the story-books."

Temptation to evil had often come to Maurice Frere, and his selfish nature had succ.u.mbed to it when in far less witching shape than this fair and innocent child luring him with wistful eyes to win her. What hopes had he not built upon her love; what good resolutions had he not made by reason of the purity and goodness she was to bring to him? As she said, the past was beyond recall; the future--in which she was to love him all her life--was before them. With the hypocrisy of selfishness which deceives even itself, he laid the little head upon his heart with a sensible glow of virtue.

"G.o.d bless you, darling! You are my Good Angel."

The girl sighed. "I will be your Good Angel, dear, if you will let me."

CHAPTER VI. MR. MEEKIN ADMINISTERS CONSOLATION.

Rex told Mr. Meekin, who, the next day, did him the honour to visit him, that, "under Providence, he owed his escape from death to the kind manner in which Captain Frere had spoken of him."

"I hope your escape will be a warning to you, my man," said Mr. Meekin, "and that you will endeavour to make the rest of your life, thus spared by the mercy of Providence, an atonement for your early errors."

"Indeed I will, sir," said John Rex, who had taken Mr. Meekin's measure very accurately, "and it is very kind of you to condescend to speak so to a wretch like me."

"Not at all," said Meekin, with affability; "it is my duty. I am a Minister of the Gospel."

"Ah! sir, I wish I had attended to the Gospel's teachings when I was younger. I might have been saved from all this."

"You might, indeed, poor man; but the Divine Mercy is infinite--quite infinite, and will be extended to all of us--to you as well as to me."

(This with the air of saying, "What do you think of that!") "Remember the penitent thief, Rex--the penitent thief."

"Indeed I do, sir."

"And read your Bible, Rex, and pray for strength to bear your punishment."

"I will, Mr. Meekin. I need it sorely, sir--physical as well as spiritual strength, sir--for the Government allowance is sadly insufficient."

"I will speak to the authorities about a change in your dietary scale,"

returned Meekin, patronizingly. "In the meantime, just collect together in your mind those particulars of your adventures of which you spoke, and have them ready for me when next I call. Such a remarkable history ought not to be lost."

"Thank you kindly, sir. I will, sir. Ah! I little thought when I occupied the position of a gentleman, Mr. Meekin"--the cunning scoundrel had been piously grandiloquent concerning his past career--"that I should be reduced to this. But it is only just, sir."

"The mysterious workings of Providence are always just, Rex," returned Meekin, who preferred to speak of the Almighty with well-bred vagueness.

"I am glad to see you so conscious of your errors. Good morning."

"Good morning, and Heaven bless you, sir," said Rex, with his tongue in his cheek for the benefit of his yard mates; and so Mr. Meekin tripped gracefully away, convinced that he was labouring most successfully in the Vineyard, and that the convict Rex was really a superior person.

"I will send his narrative to the Bishop," said he to himself. "It will amuse him. There must be many strange histories here, if one could but find them out."

As the thought pa.s.sed through his brain, his eye fell upon the "notorious Dawes", who, while waiting for the schooner to take him back to Port Arthur, had been permitted to amuse himself by breaking stones.

The prison-shed which Mr. Meekin was visiting was long and low, roofed with iron, and terminating at each end in the stone wall of the gaol. At one side rose the cells, at the other the outer wall of the prison. From the outer wall projected a weatherboard under-roof, and beneath this were seated forty heavily-ironed convicts. Two constables, with loaded carbines, walked up and down the clear s.p.a.ce in the middle, and another watched from a sort of sentry-box built against the main wall. Every half-hour a third constable went down the line and examined the irons.

The admirable system of solitary confinement--which in average cases produces insanity in the s.p.a.ce of twelve months--was as yet unknown in Hobart Town, and the forty heavily-ironed men had the pleasure of seeing each other's faces every day for six hours.

The other inmates of the prison were at work on the roads, or otherwise bestowed in the day time, but the forty were judged too desperate to be let loose. They sat, three feet apart, in two long lines, each man with a heap of stones between his outstretched legs, and cracked the pebbles in leisurely fas.h.i.+on. The double row of dismal woodp.e.c.k.e.rs tapping at this terribly hollow beech-tree of penal discipline had a semi-ludicrous appearance. It seemed so painfully absurd that forty muscular men should be ironed and guarded for no better purpose than the cracking of a cartload of quartz-pebbles. In the meantime the air was heavy with angry glances shot from one to the other, and the pa.s.sage of the parson was hailed by a grumbling undertone of blasphemy. It was considered fas.h.i.+onable to grunt when the hammer came in contact with the stone, and under cover of this mock exclamation of fatigue, it was convenient to launch an oath. A fanciful visitor, seeing the irregularly rising hammers along the line, might have likened the shed to the interior of some vast piano, whose notes an unseen hand was erratically fingering.

Rufus Dawes was seated last on the line--his back to the cells, his face to the gaol wall. This was the place nearest the watching constable, and was allotted on that account to the most ill-favoured. Some of his companions envied him that melancholy distinction.

"Well, Dawes," says Mr. Meekin, measuring with his eye the distance between the prisoner and himself, as one might measure the chain of some ferocious dog. "How are you this morning, Dawes?"

Dawes, scowling in a parenthesis between the cracking of two stones, was understood to say that he was very well.

"I am afraid, Dawes," said Mr. Meekin reproachfully, "that you have done yourself no good by your outburst in court on Monday. I understand that public opinion is quite incensed against you."

Dawes, slowly arranging one large fragment of bluestone in a comfortable basin of smaller fragments, made no reply.

"I am afraid you lack patience, Dawes. You do not repent of your offences against the law, I fear."

The only answer vouchsafed by the ironed man--if answer it could be called--was a savage blow, which split the stone into sudden fragments, and made the clergyman skip a step backward.

"You are a hardened ruffian, sir! Do you not hear me speak to you?"

"I hear you," said Dawes, picking up another stone.