In the Roaring Fifties Part 27

At that moment recollection flashed upon Jim. He recalled the adventure with Long Aleck in the Bourke Street bar, and the robbery of Brigalow, the gold-buyer, at Diamond Gully. His hand was upon Ryder again: he gazed at him with a new apprehension.

'Sit,' he said. Ryder seated himself on a stump by the side of the young man, and Jim continued:

'You say Miss Woodrow noticed a strong resemblance between us. Others have remarked it.'

'I am not surprised. There is no difference in our faces but that which years have made.'

'It was in Melbourne on the night of my arrival. I was attacked in a bar by a man who mistook me for Solo.'

The brothers looked into each other's eyes for some little time, Jim anxiously, Ryder with no appearance of concern in his strong, handsome face.

'I am the man they call Solo.'

'Solo the robber!' Instinctively Jim had moved back from the other, but Ryder took no notice of the action.

'My boy,' he said, 'there are two kinds of men--the active criminal and the pa.s.sive. I am fairly active.'

'But the blind folly of it--here, where fortunes are made so easily!'

'Are they? You have had a bit of luck. There are thousands on the rushes who do not make tucker. In any case I could not afford to place myself directly under the supervision of the troopers. Not that I had any weak desire to earn an honest living, by the way.'

'What are you hoping for? Where is it all leading?' Jim felt an emotion of despair.

'Perhaps you would rather hear no more to-night.'

'I must hear all. For G.o.d's sake, speak!'

'I have been in h.e.l.l. For fifteen years I remained in the convict prisons. It might have been fifteen centuries, an eternity. Everything beyond is so distant that my youth seems a mere dot in the perspective.'

Ryder was talking in a clear, even, unemotional voice.

'I cannot hope to give you anything approaching a true idea of the horror of that life. I know I can only faintly comprehend it myself now. Taken from happiness, a comparative boy, I was plunged into a state of absolute torment, an existence of brutalizing labour, ceaseless cruelty, and blackest infamy. I herded with men who had degenerated from criminals into brutes under the influence of the infamous system. Those fifteen years served to burn out of me most of the fine emotions and sentiments on which civilized men pride themselves, and then, during the blackest year of all, a wild craving to preserve something of humanity arose within me. That was my salvation. I had always before me the hope of escape. I fought now cease to retain some qualities of clean manhood, that I might appear amongst fellow as a man, and not like one of the lowering monsters by whom I was surrounded--men upon whose every feature and limb were stamped the repulsive brands of the lag. During that first period I maintained an att.i.tude of fierce revolt, then, recognising my helplessness, I brought cunning into play, and practised dissimulation night and day. This saved me in some measure, but the ghastly life continued year after year, and I was thirty-eight before a reasonable chance of escape presented itself. My plans had been perfected, and when the opportunity came I seized it, with the resolution of a man for whom there was only one alternative to liberty--death.'

Jim never took his eyes from Ryder's; he sat as if fascinated by the ivory-pale face of his companion.

'I had one friend in Hobart Town, a freed convict named Wainewright. He provided me with the clothes of a gentleman. The beard I wore, and which has since served me as a disguise in my many enterprises, was given to me in the first place by Wainewright. To perfect that beard and destroy every semblance of artificiality, I had worked at it for three years in the cunning, patient way old prisoners toil at such a task. Wainewright helped me to get to the mainland, and I was safe, with a forged ticket-of-leave in my pocket in case the marks of the chains should be discovered by prying official eyes.'

'Did you make any effort to live honestly?' asked Jim.

'Almost my first action on reaching the neighbour hood of Melbourne was to bail-up a prominent resident, whom I robbed. That act afforded me absolute joy. He was a decent, orderly citizen, a pillar of the State, a powerful upholder of the law. No robbery I have since committed has given me quite the same delight. I stole then because I needed money. I rob now because I am a keen sportsman, and that is the particular sport I affect.

Possibly you would not appreciate the pleasure of the game; you have not had the humbug of the world eaten out of your heart with live flame.

Having wilfully exposed itself to me, and translated my respect for it into a magnificent hatred, society cannot reasonably expect to find me docile. I prey upon society.'

'It will avenge itself.'

'True, it may. Robbery under arms is a hanging matter, but I have graduated in a marvellous school for cunning, and have perfect confidence.'

'Yet you place yourself in my hands. What can the ties of blood count for between us two? For as long as I can remember I've thought of you only as something evil hovering over the door, silencing the home, darkening life.'

'I counted on finding in you a mind not wholly at variance with my own.

What those two women told me gave me some insight into your character. I perceived that at least the flame had scorched the bloom from your soul.'

'Here I am a new man. I have known happiness, I have tasted love, and made friends with good men. Here I can live!'

Ryder looked at him closely. 'You must tell me of your life,' he said--'

the life in Chisley after my supposed hanging. No, no; not now. Go to your tent and sleep.'

'Sleep! I shall not sleep.'

'Think over what I have told you.'

'There is more behind?' 'There may be.'

'You think I will join you?'

'In my present career? No. For the time being, let us say no more. I need not ask you to be silent. Meet me here to-morrow night at nine. While you are thinking, bear always in mind the fact that Peter Cannon is there '--he pointed in the direction of Stony's tent--' a living man.

Good-night.'

The reminder was well timed; pity stirred warmly in Jim's heart again, and he offered his hand.

'So long,' he said, dropping into the vernacular of mates.h.i.+p.

Ryder took his hand with no demonstration of emotion. 'So long,' he replied.

XVI

BURTON found his mate gloomy and taciturn all next day, a condition so remarkable in Done that it gave Mike some little concern, but he made no comment; and Jim was too absorbed in the strange, new development in his life to discover his friend's uneasiness. Ryder's story brought Jim's youthful sufferings back to him with painful vividness; it awakened some animosities he had thought dead, and he recognised, though shrinking from the idea with actual terror, in Ryder's att.i.tude towards his kind the frame of mind into which he was drifting when he broke away from Chisley and its a.s.sociations. Remembering well his own heart up to the time when human interests and sympathies began to awaken kindred emotions within him, he understood that the resemblance between himself and his brother was as close on the moral side as it was on the physical, but with Ryder the demoralizing influences had worked their utmost. How like their sufferings had been! differing only in degree; but his own sufferings looked pale and fanciful now beside those of his brother. His afflictions were of the spirit only. He and Ryder were of a supersensitive race and every soul-pang he endured had been augmented a thousand times in his brother's case, and driven in by the prison cell, the leg-irons, the loathsome a.s.sociations, the animalizing toil in the quarries--the las.h.!.+

Jim had heard enough of the infamy of the system to understand, if not the worst, sufficient to make his skin creep at the thought of it. He realized to what state of heart and mind Ryder had been driven, knowing how he himself had developed under the stress of comparatively trivial wrongs, and the whole man ached with sympathy. It required a strong effort to restrain his inclination to tears, a weakness of the flesh he had surprised in himself before now.

And Ryder had suffered all this, knowing himself to be guiltless of the crime of which he was convicted. Stony was there in his tent. If Jim had known where to find his brother he would have gone to him in the morning, prompted by the generous affection that had sprung in his heart, feeling that Ryder might be won over by new friends.h.i.+ps and new interests. It seemed to him that the wholesome effects worked in his case might be repeated in that of his brother, forgetting their disparity in years. The change had come to him while he was yet little more than a boy; Ryder was a man in middle life, and no longer capable of youth's saving enthusiasms.

Jim was early for the appointment, but Ryder was already at the rendezvous, seated on the log, smoking, and apparently deriving placid enjoyment from his cigar. The young man's greeting was warm, but the elder showed no emotion. If any liking for Jim existed in him it was carefully hidden away. Throughout their previous meeting he had borne himself with seriousness, as if something of importance to him were at stake; to-night he was in a wholly different humour, more like the man who had encountered Jim in Mary Kyley's bar.

'Are we to consider the relations.h.i.+p established?' he said.

'I am quite convinced,' answered Jim. 'I have not doubted it from the moment you declared yourself.'

'You are much too confiding, my boy. As an impostor I might have gathered all these details from the real Richard Done.'

'With what object?'

'Well, I have an object, an ulterior motive. I want you to share a large fortune with me.'

Jim laughed. 'You may pick up a large family of brothers on those terms,'

he said.

'You will do. Is it a bargain?'