Some Persons Unknown

"He!" exclaimed the martinet. "What do I care what he hears? Let him listen and take heed."

"But I care," insisted the lady in an imploring voice. "I take an interest in the poor fellow. I am sorry for him. He has been telling me all about his trouble."

"Trouble!" sneered the major. "That's what they all call it. What's his name?"

"Whybrow."

"Not Whybrow the forger?"

"Yes."

"Then all I can say, my dear lady," cried the major in his most pompous manner, "is that I sincerely hope you have brought no plate or valuables to this accursed country; if you have I beg of you to let me take them to my bank to-morrow. Whybrow might hesitate to cut your throat – I doubt if he has the pluck for one thing – but he'll rob you as sure as you stand there. I remember his case very well. A more accomplished villain has never been transported. He'd rob a church, so you may be quite sure he'll rob you; it's only a question of time and opportunity."

Mrs. Astley turned on her heel, took a few quick steps towards the house, turned again and rejoined her neighbour.

"Has he ever got into trouble out here?" she demanded. "Has he once been up before you or any one of your brother magistrates? Is there anything at all against him but the single offence for which he was transported?"

"Not that I know of," admitted the other with a shrug; "but he's a clever man, he would naturally behave pretty well."

"So well that you didn't even know he was in the settlement; yet you are ready, for that one crime in the past, to credit him with any villainy present or to come! Oh, can you wonder that men grow worse out here, if that is all you expect of them? If you treat your convicts like dogs, whip them like dogs, and never credit them with a single remnant of their native manhood, how can you expect ever to make them into the men they were? Yet what is this country for, if not to give the wicked and the weak another chance, a fresh start? Oh, I have no patience with your view, sir, that once a villain is always one; I have heard it on all sides of me since I landed; but I tell you it is abominable – hateful – inhuman – immoral!"

Major Blacker bowed his head. His eyes could not conceal their admiration; the fire in hers was a revelation to him; he had sought a woman and found a queen, and the falseness (to his mind) of her premiss took not a whit from his delight.

"Madam," said he, pointing with his cane to the subject of this argument, who had drawn up the boat and was carrying in the oars; "madam, I am only sorry for one thing. I am only sorry I am not yonder gardener, with you for my champion and defender! I withdraw every word I have said. Assigned to you, I can well believe that the greatest rogue in the settlement would soon become an honest man!"

"It depends so entirely on us," cried the widow, never heeding the compliments in her enthusiasm. "Oh, I think we have so much to answer for! In his last place he was treated horribly; it was up the country; no, I must not mention names, only I know from Whybrow that the chain-gang was rest and peace after what he had gone through at that man's hands. It was from a chain-gang he came to me. He has been nearly three years in the colony. He was transported for seven. Oh, don't you think it would be possible to get him his ticket this summer?"

The major felt a warm hand upon his arm; the major saw eyes of liquid blue, lit with enthusiasm, and gazing appealingly into his own. They had reached the cottage, and were standing in a tiny morning-room filled with flowers and heavy with their scent. The major felt younger than ever.

"I could try," he said, "but I fear it wouldn't be much good. Four years' servitude is the limit. I'm afraid we shouldn't have much chance."

"Try!" said the widow. "It would be an act of humanity, and one for which I should feel personally grateful all my life."

The major tried, and won the gratitude without achieving the result desired. Perhaps he did not try quite so hard as he pretended, and perhaps in time the widow detected in him a lukewarmness for the cause upon which she had set her unreasonable heart; at all events the major failed to make the quick advance he had counted upon in Mrs. Astley's affections. At the end of the summer their friendship was still nothing more, and the convict gardener still a convict gardener. As neighbours, the pair would read together the Pickwick numbers as they came and play an occasional game of cribbage in the major's verandah; but as sure as that veteran uttered a sentimental word touching his lonely condition or hers (and the one involved the other), so surely would the widow rise and beg him to escort her home. Nor did the view from the Old Point Piper Road soften her at all with its sparkling moonlit brilliance. Yet it was here, early in the following summer, that the gallant old fellow, after an extra half-bottle with his dinner, at last declared himself.

Mrs. Astley heard him with an expressionless face turned towards the harbour; but ere he finished, the moonlight that strewed those waters with shimmering gems had found two also in her eyes.

"I cannot," she cried. "I loved my husband – I love him still – I shall never marry again!"

"But so did I love my sainted wife," protested the major; "yet I would marry to-morrow. I consider it no disrespect to the dead; on the contrary, it is the highest compliment we can pay them, as showing so happy an experience of wedlock that we would fain repeat it. Not that I have thought so always," he added hastily, to quell a look which made him uncomfortable.

"I don't believe you think so now," replied the candid widow. "You not only mean less than you say; you feel less; and must forgive me, for you may not know it yourself, but a woman is never deceived. Think it over and you will agree with me; but never, never let us speak of this again. It hurts me to hurt you – and I like you so much as a friend!"

As for Thomas Blacker, the first plunge had completely sobered him, and he bitterly repented that indiscretion of the table which had led him into a declaration as premature as it had been also unpremeditated. As a soldier, however, he took no kindlier to retreat for the mere fact of deploring his advance; retreat, indeed, was out of the question: and the major's further protestations were pitched in a key calculated to acquit him of a charge which rankled, being true.

"Your answer I accept, and can bear," he retorted with dignity, "but not your misjudgment of my feelings. That would be cruel – if you were capable of cruelty. Permit me at least to say that it shows an ignorance of my real nature which cuts me to the quick. I have expressed myself but poorly if you can still doubt my readiness to devote my life to you – ay, or to lay it down if need be for your sake! There is nothing I would not do for you. The lightest service I should esteem my privilege."

The widow laughed, but not unkindly; on the contrary, her hand slid through the major's arm with her words, as if to sheath their edge.

"There was one thing you once promised to do for me," she said. "It is not done yet!"

"I know what you mean," he groaned with an inward oath. "Your assigned gardener!"

"Exactly."

"I tried my best."

"Could you not try again?"

"If I did," said the major hoarsely, "would it make any difference to the answer you would give me if I said again what I have said to-night? I tell you candidly I begin to feel jealous of that convict. I shall be glad to see his back."

The woman gave a little nervous laugh, but no answer.

"Would it make any difference?" he repeated.

"I cannot bargain like that," sighed the widow, turning away.

"And you are right!" exclaimed the other, hotly flushing. "I unsay that; I'm ashamed of it. But I'll get that ticket-of-leave this summer, or I'll never look you in the face again!"

And this time Thomas Blacker went to work in earnest; but then a year had passed since his former half-hearted attempt of foregone futility; and the forlorn hope of that season was the easy goal of this. The major, without doubt, stood well at Government House; he was secretly engaged upon plans for the fortifications of the harbour, and had the ear of his Excellency in magisterial matters as well. What he had mentioned only tentatively and not altogether seriously the year before, he now urged as a peculiarly deserving case. And in no more than a day or two he had the pleasure of calling at the cottage, with a paper for the widow to sign, and of meeting the gardener on the path as he was coming away.

"I suppose you know what I have here, my man?" cried the major, tapping a breast inflated with conscious benevolence.

"The mistress has mentioned it," replied the man, trembling in an instant. "I am deeply grateful, sir, to you. I little thought to get it yet."

"Nor have you, sir, nor have you," said the major briskly. "Your ticket's no ticket till it's signed by the Governor and safe in your hands. However," he added, with a touch of the self-importance he enjoyed, "I have promised your mistress to use my influence in your behalf, so by the end of the week you may very possibly hear from me again."

And as if to finish the thing off with a flourish Thomas Blacker was finally even better than his word, for, as far from the end of the week as the Wednesday evening, he dined in Sydney and rode out by moonlight and the Point Piper Road with Whybrow's ticket signed and sealed in his pocket. Once more the major had dined well, but this time not unwisely; yet his heart was troubled with a trouble which had never entered his calculations hitherto. His brother was dead; his brother's estates were now his own. The incoming mail had brought the news, and with it a round of applause and congratulations from connections and friends who for years had ignored his existence. The major was in a private quandary of the spirit; he was quite unable to make up his mind. Should he go home a married man, or should he see his time-serving friends to the deuce and never go home at all? The tropic moon and the heavenly harbour inclined him to the latter, certain phrases in his home-letters to the former course; but what about his wife? She was qualified to adorn any society in which the major had ever moved, but – there were buts. The major was gallant enough to try to ignore them, but there they were. At home he was not sure that he should want to be married at all; here it was a different thing; and here, no doubt, he would end his days after all. There were worse places. These moonlight nights made the place a paradise of soft airs and rustling leaves, and miles and miles of a jewelled carpet beneath the white-starred ceiling of the Southern sky. Yes, it was a spot to live and die in, and be thankful; and yes! he would marry the widow, if the widow would marry him. And after the other night —

The major had reached the cottage gate. Here he dismounted, tethering his horse within. There were voices and lights, both low, in the cottage; the French windows were wide open to the night; and an ignoble instinct, begotten of a swift suspicion that was more truly an inspiration, caused the major to advance upon the grass. So he crept nearer – nearer yet – within earshot. And the first words he heard confirmed him in his deceit. By heaven! there should be trick for trick!

"Darling," said the widow's voice – the sweet voice that had beguiled him – "it will be the end of the week to-morrow – well, then, next day; and after that we will hide it no more. Let us brazen it out! I am always ready; and you, you will have the right to take care of me as you should: you will have your ticket-of-leave."

"Never!" muttered the major between his teeth, and he crushed up the paper he held ready in his hand. He forgot his doubts upon the moonlit road. The injured man was all the man now. He crept still nearer and saw that for which he was now so fully prepared: the widow reposing in the convict's arms.

"There's only one thing that troubles me," the man was saying (though his twitching, restless face was an eternal sea of trouble and remorse), "and that is your poor old major. He has turned up trumps" ("I'm damned if he has," muttered the major behind the leaves), "and it does seem a shame. I fear the other night you must have led him on."

"I did," replied the woman, with a groan for which she received no credit. "I did – I could not help it. It grieves me to think of it; I am so ashamed; but, darling, it was for you!"

"Was it indeed?" cried the major, striding into the room with sounding heels and jingling spurs; and he stood there twirling his moustache. The woman was first upon her feet. The man's face sank into his hands.

"It was," she repeated boldly. "And oh, sir, even you will forgive me when I tell you all!"

"Naturally," sneered the other – "if I stopped to listen. But explanations I imagine would be somewhat superfluous after this. Here, you may have it," he added, opening his hand and letting the crumpled ticket drop with an air of ineffable contempt. "I won't condescend to put it back in my pocket, as you deserve; take it – and marry the man, for God's sake, at the nearest church!"

The woman laid a tender hand upon the bowed and bended head at which Thomas Blacker glanced in righteous scorn.

"Marry him I cannot," said she. "We have been married these fifteen years."

AFTER THE FACT

I

It is my good fortune to cherish a particularly vivid recollection of the town of Geelong. Others may have found the place so dull as to justify an echo of the cheap local sneer at its expense; to me those sloping parallels of low houses have still a common terminus in the bluest of all Australian waters; and I people the streets, whose very names I have forgotten, with faces of extraordinary kindness, imperishable while memory holds her seat. Even had it bored me, I for one should have good reason to love Geelong. It was my lot, however, not only to happen upon the town in a week of unique excitement, but, thanks to one of those chance meetings which are the veriest commonplace of outlandish travel, to have a finger in the pother. I arrived by the boat on a Monday afternoon, to find the streets crowded and peace disturbed by a sudden run on one of the banks. On the Wednesday, another bank, which had notoriously received much of the money withdrawn from the Barwon Banking Company, Limited, was in its turn the victim of a still uglier fate: the Geelong branch of the Intercolonial was entered in broad daylight by a man masked and armed to the beard, who stayed some ten minutes, and then walked into thin air with no less a sum than nineteen thousand and odd pounds in notes and gold.

I was playing lawn-tennis with my then new friends when we heard the news; and it stopped our game. The bank manager's wife, a friend of my friends, arrived with her daughter: the one incoherent, the other dumb, with horror and dismay. And I heard at first-hand a few broken, hysterical words from the white lips of the elderly lady, and noted the tearless trouble in the wide blue eyes of the girl, before it struck me to retire. The family had been at luncheon in the private part of the bank, and knew nothing of the affair until the junior clerk broke in upon them like a lunatic at large. He, too, had gone out for his lunch, and returned to find teller and cashier alike insensible, and the safe rifled. That was all I stayed to gather, save that the unhappy lady was agitated by a side issue far worse to her than the bank's loss. There had been no bloodshed. The revolver kept beneath the counter had been used, but used in vain. It was not loaded. Her husband would be blamed, nay, discharged to a certainty in his old age. And I, too, walked down the street more absorbed in the picture of an elderly couple brought to ruin, and a blue-eyed girl gone for a governess, than in the immediate catastrophe.

I found my way to the Intercolonial Bank; there was no need to ask it. A crowd clamoured at the doors, but these were shut for the day. And I learned no more than I already knew, save that the robber wore a black beard, and was declared by some to be a second Ned Kelly from the Strathbogie Ranges. Nor did I acquire more real information the rest of that day; nor hope for any when late at night I thought I recognised an old schoolfellow in the street.

"Deedes major!" I cried without pausing to make certain; but I was certain enough when my man turned and favoured me with the stare of studied insolence which had made our house-master's life a burden to him some ten years before that night. Among a thousand, although the dark eyes were sunken and devil-may-care, the full lips hidden by a moustache with grey hairs in it, and the pale face prematurely lined, I could have sworn to Deedes major then.

"Don't know you from Adam," said he. "What do you want?"

"We were at school together," I explained. "I was your fag when you were captain of footer. To think of meeting you here!"

"Do tell me your name," he said wearily; and at that moment I recollected (what had quite escaped my memory) his ultimate expulsion; and I stood confounded by my maladroitness.

"Bower," said I, abashed.

"The Beetle!" cried Deedes, not unkindly; a moment later he was shaking my hand and smiling on my confusion. "Hang school!" said he. "Where are you staying?"

"Well," said I, "I'm supposed to be staying with some people I brought a letter of introduction to; but they hadn't a room for me, and insisted on getting me one outside; so that's where I am."

"What's their name?" said Deedes; when I told him, he nodded, but made no further comment, beyond inviting himself to my room for a chat. The proposal delighted me; indeed it caused me a positive thrill, which I can only attribute to an insensible return of the small boy's proper attitude towards a distinguished senior. We were twenty-eight and twenty-four now, instead of eighteen and fourteen; yet, as we walked, only one of us was a man, and I was once more his fag. I felt quite proud when he accepted a cigarette from my case, prouder yet when he took my arm. The feeling stuck to me till we reached my room, when it suddenly collapsed. Deedes had asked me what I was doing. I had told him of my illness and my voyage, and had countered with his own question. He laughed contemptuously, sitting on the edge of my bed.

"Clerk in a bank!" said he.

"Not the Intercolonial?" I cried.

"That's it," he answered, nodding.

"Then you were there to-day! This is luck; I've been so awfully keen to know exactly what happened."

"I was not there," replied Deedes. "I was having my lunch. I can only tell you what I saw when I got back. There was our cashier sprawled across the counter, and the teller in a heap behind it – both knocked on the head. And there was the empty safe, wide open, with the sun shining into it like a bull's-eye lantern. No, I only wish I had been there: it's such a chance as I shall never get again."

"You'd have shown fight?" said I, gazing at his long athletic limbs, and appreciating the force of his wish as I perceived in what threadbare rags they were imprisoned. "Yes, you'd have stood up to the chap, I know; I can see you doing it!"

"There would have been nothing wonderful in that," was his reply. "I should have had everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"Not your life?"

"It's less than nothing."

"Nonsense, Deedes," said I, although or because I could see that it was not. "You don't expect me to believe that!"

"I don't care what you believe, and it's not the point," he answered. "Give me another cigarette, Beetle; you were asking about the robbery; if you don't mind, we'll confine ourselves to that. I'm afraid old I'Anson will get the sack; he's the manager, and responsible for the bank revolver being loaded. He swears it was; we all thought it was; but nobody had looked at it for weeks, and you see it wasn't. Yes, that's a rule in all banks in this country where sticking them up is a public industry. The yarn about Ned Kelly's son? Don't you believe it; nobody ever heard of him before. No, if you ask me, we must look a little nearer home for the man who stuck up our bank this afternoon."

"Nearer home!" said I. "Then you think it was somebody who knew about the run upon the Barwon Banking Company and the payments into the Intercolonial?"

"Obviously; somebody who knew all about it, and perhaps paid in a big lump himself. That would have been a gorgeous blind!" cried Deedes, kindling suddenly. "Beetle, old chap, I wish I'd thought of it myself – only it would have meant boning the capital too! I strongly suspect some of these respectable Geelongese and Barwonners of being at the bottom of the whole thing, though; they're so respectable, Beetle, there's bound to be villains among 'em. By Jove!" he added, getting to his feet with a sinister light in his handsome, dissipated countenance, "I'll go for the reward when they put it up! Four figures it can't fall short of; that would be better than junior clerking for eighty pounds a year!" And he walked up and down my room laughing softly to himself.

"I'll join you," cried I. "I'll go in for love, or honour and glory, and you shall pocket the £ s. d."

"Rot!" said he curtly, yet almost with the word he had me by the shoulders, and was smiling queerly in my face. "Why not join me in the other thing?" he exclaimed. "You were well enough plucked at school!"

"But what other thing?" said I.

"Doing the trick," he cried; "not finding out who did it!"

"Deedes," said I, "what the devil do you mean?"

"Mean? What I say, my dear Beetle – every word of it! What's the use of being honest? Look at me. Look at my shirt-cuffs, that I've got to trim every morning like my nails; look at my trousers, as I saw you looking at 'em just now. Those bags at the knees are honesty; and honesty's rapidly wearing them through on an office stool. I'm as poor as a rat in a drain: it's all honesty, and I've had about enough of it. Think of the fellow who walked off with his fortune this morning, and then think of me. Wouldn't you like to be in his shoes? No? My stars, you don't know what it is to live, Beetle; honest idiots like us never do. But I'm going to turn it up. If one can play at that game, two can; why not three? Come on, Beetle; make a third, and we'll rob another bank to-morrow!"

"You're joking," said I, and this time I returned his smile. "Still, if I was going in for that sort of thing, Deedes, I don't know who I'd rather have on my side than you."

His smile went out like a light.

"Will you go in for it?" he cried. "I'm joking far less than you think. My life's a sordid failure. I'm sick of it and ready for a fling. Will you come in?"

"No," I said. "I won't."

And we looked each other steadily in the eyes, until he led me back to laughter with as much ease as he had lengthened my face.

"All right, old Beetle!" said he. "I won't chaff any more – not that it was all chaff by any means. I sometimes feel like that, and so would you in my place. Bunked from school! In disgrace at home! Sent out here to be got rid of, sent to blazes in cold blood! The things I've done for a living during these ten years – this is the most respectable, I can tell you that. It's the respectability drives me mad."

His bitter voice, the lines upon his face, his grey hairs at twenty-eight (they were not confined to his moustache), all appealed to me with equal and irresistible force; my hand went out to him, and with it my heart.

"I am so sorry, Deedes," said I nervously. "If a fiver or two – yes, you must let me! For the sake of the old school!"

He shook his head, and the blood rushed to mine. I burst into apologies, but he cut me short.

"That's all right, Beetle. It was well meant, and you're a good chap. We'll foregather to-morrow, if this enviable stroke leaves us a spare moment in the bank. Meanwhile good-night, and thanks all the same."

And he crept down the stairs at my request; for I was not in the position of an ordinary lodger; and having followed and closed the door noiselessly behind him, I returned as stealthily to my room. I did not wish my hospitable friends to know that I had used lodgings, placed at my disposal as their guest, as though I had engaged them on my own account. Theoretically I was under their roof, and had committed a breach in introducing a man at midnight and sitting up in conversation with him till all hours. Deedes, moreover, as I suspected from his manner when I mentioned them, was most probably no friend of my friends; indeed I had no clue to his reputation in the town, and should have been surprised to find it a good one. He had been a reckless boy at school; at the very least he was a reckless man. And other traits must have developed with his years; he had been expelled, for instance, for certain gallantries not criminal in themselves, but sufficiently demoralising at a public school; and, despite his clothes, I could have sworn those dark, unscrupulous eyes, and that sardonic, insolent, and yet attractive manner, had done due damage in Geelong.