Chapter 13

'No, no, it's pure gladness--it is indeed. It was good of you to come.'

'You are changed, too. Have you stood to your determination to be happy?'

'I am not unhappy.' She had seated herself beside him, and passed an arm about the shy child, of whom little more than one dark eye was visible, peeping at Jim from the other side, and yet that one eye recalled humorous impressions of Mrs. Donald Macdougal of Boobyalla. He expected to see it start revolving coquettishly.

'You are stronger. You have grown,' he said.

'Yes, I ride a lot with the children. It is good for me. I love it. This life agrees with me well. But it is not only a change in you, it is a transformation. Why, you can laugh!'

'Come, come! I could always laugh.'

She shook her head. 'Not convincingly. You love the new land? You have prospered?'

'Yes,' he answered, 'I have had a wonderful spell of life.'

'And the people--you find you can like them?'

The question gave him rather a shock; he had to think a moment to recall her optimistic advice and his old frame of mind.

'Like is too feeble a word,' he said presently. 'The thought of them warms my heart.'

'Ah, that is good!' She clasped his hand impulsively. 'That is best of all. I was afraid you might cling to your mistrust, and shut the kindly people out of your life.'

'Before it was the people shut me out.'

'Are you sure?'

He had never doubted, now the question set him wondering for a minute. He looked at her again. Certainly she had developed observation, acuteness. Or had he? Once more he wondered. He watched her with new interest. She was not so pretty as she had seemed on the Francis Cadman; the ethereality was gone, but Done liked her the better for it. He felt his whole physical being to be in sympathy with vital things, and, after all, how often the poets, in their rhapsodies on spirituelle and unearthly women, were merely rapturously apostrophizing the evidences of dissolution! He met her now without a doubt in his heart, with a soul free to respond to his natural emotions, and she filled him with delight. Unconsciously he was wooing her--not with words, but with accents more eloquent, and the girl felt it instinctively, with a sense of triumph.

'I can't take my eyes off you,' he said. 'In what are you so different?'

She smiled pleasantly. 'I am dreadfully sunburnt; I am no longer thin; I do not brood.'

'No, no; it is a difference of spirit. Where is that constraint we felt?'

'The constraint was wholly with you.' She blushed again.

The kissing episode had been recalled to both. He laughed gaily, feeling very comfortable, quite forgetful of his mate.

'Yes, I was certainly a humourless, gloomy young fool he said.

'Only an unhappy boy,' she murmured, 'and my wonderful hero.' She, too, spoke as if it were a matter of long years ago, when she was a silly slip of a girl.

'And is there no hero now?'

'I have found no other.'

'Ah, that is something! Do you still pray for the old one, Lucy?'

'But you have no faith in prayers.'

'I may have in the prayer.'

'Well, then, I do. You see, you can never be wholly undeserving in my eyes.' With Lucy, as with many girls in whom gratitude is the precursor of love, most of the sentiments due to the kindling affection were credited to gratitude.

'You have not blamed me for neglecting to write.'

'No; I have had no anxiety for some time. I knew where you were and how you were.'

'You knew!'

'I knew that you had made friends, that you were on pay dirt at Diamond Gully, and that the good Australian sunshine had warmed your heart.' She smiled mysteriously.

'Ah, I know,' he said after a moment's thought--'Ryder.'

'Yes, Mr. Walter Ryder. He wrote me that he had come across you at Diamond Gully. He seemed quite interested in you.'

'And I am interested by him. He is a peculiar personality.'

'Yes, so flippant; and behind it all you seem to feel something iron-like, strong and impenetrable.'

Flippant! Ryder had appealed to Jim as anything but a flippant character.

'He is a man of good family. He came to Australia seeking change and adventure. He is rich--very. He did Mr. Macdougal some service, and we saw a good deal of him in Melbourne. Mrs. Macdougal thinks he is an earl at least, and has woven quite a romance about him. She will be glad to see you.'

Done's mind had flown to Burton's estimate of Ryder, and Lucy's evident admiration of, him gave him a little uneasiness.

'Is Mrs. Macdougal of Boobyalla quite well?' he asked.

'Quite. But you must not laugh at her. One gets to like her.'

'If one is quite determined.'

'Whether or no,' persisted Lucy. 'One would care for nobody if one were resolved to see only the bad points.'

'That serves me right. The little girl is very like her.'

'Eva is my boon companion, my confidante, my guide, philosopher, and friend--aren't you, dear?'

'My oath!' said the child in a grave, sweet voice. Jim started at the incongruous expression, and looked inquiringly at Lucy.

'Your teaching?'

'How dare you? No; that is the teaching of rouseabouts and gins. I am trying to unteach it. Poor kiddies! I found them queer, wild, little Bush animals, with no childish companions, so I became a child myself, and we are the best mates in the world. The other is a boy, a monkey and a rip, but we are civilizing together. Do you know the funniest things in the world? Children like these and half-grown dogs. I discovered that at Boobyalla.'

'The world is a pretty good sort of place, after all eh?'

'Yes.' She did not wonder at its seeming so very delightful to her just then. 'But you do not tell me. Talk, talk! I want your Australian history.'

He talked, describing his life, pleased with his own fluency, and not a little surprised at it. In half an hour she knew his story since the day he left the Francis Cadman, with certain judicious reservations and emendations. Aurora's name did not appear once in the narrative. This suppression was quite instinctive? Lucy told something of her existence on the station, and they chatted cheerfully of the people on shipboard and the incidents of the voyage, avoiding only the most sensational incident of all--the rescue from the sea.

'Dear me I' cried Lucy; 'I am playing the hostess badly. I have offered you nothing, and you must have had a long tramp.'

'And I've forgotten poor Burton.'

'Go, bring him while I get tea. I must know your mate. Of course you drink tea? Here everybody drinks tea at all hours.'

Jim found Mike admiring a wonderful big bay horse, the astounding virtues of which stimulated the black boy to an incoherent flow of yabber.

'Don't mind me,' said Burton. 'I've had a drink an' a sleep, and I've seen the loveliest animal that was ever lapped in horse-hide. Look at him!'

'We were chatting away in there, and I forgot you, old man. But come along; we are to have tea and grub on the veranda.'

'Not me!' Mike looked wildly for a way of escape.

'Here, here! but you must, Mike--I promised.'

'There's a dirty trick to serve 'a man!' Burton was genuinely alarmed. 'Yarding him up with a mob of old women! I'm hanged if I do it!'

'There's no mob. There's only one, and she's young and pleasant. Come along, I'll stand by you.'

'Gi' me your solemn oath you'll break away as soon as possible.'

'I do, I do.'

Mike was led on to the veranda and introduced to Lucy, who gave him a pleasant welcome. He placed his hat by his chair, drank his tea quietly, said very little and ate less, flipped his fingers once or twice at the little girl in a friendly way, looked quite imperturbable, and all the time was painfully ill at ease, and raging inwardly at Jim's delay. When Lucy left them in quest of fruit, he turned furiously on his mate.

'What's that she says about staying?'

'She wants us to take a shakedown in one of the huts for to-night. Mrs. Macdougal will be home before dark. She wishes to see me.'

'By the big blue Bunyip, if you stay I'll bush you in the next scrubby gully, an' leave you to do a three days' perish!' Mike's tribulation was pitiful, but Jim laughed derisively.

Done did not accept Lucy's invitation, however. To tell the truth, although it would have been a great pleasure to remain near the girl, he had no desire to meet Mrs. Macdougal. He made suitable excuses. Mike said it would require smart travelling to bring them to the camp where their tools and swags were left, and, having shaken hands with Lucy, sauntered away.

'You will come again?' said the girl to Jim.

'Yes, if I have the chance; but Burton is the Bush man. I could never find you without his help.'

'In any case you will write?'

'I am bound to.'

They parted with a handshake, but fingers unclasped reluctantly and with a clinging appeal.

Done and Burton, on returning to Jim Crow, found that Harry Peetree, quietly prospecting in the vicinity of the rush, had opened up a new gully. The 'find' was kept dark pending Mike's return, and when the Peetrees had secured their ground, the mates were given the pick of the lead. The discovery leaked out as soon as the friends started operations, and a little rush from the original field followed. Jim was now a mile and a half from Mrs. Kyley's shanty, and derived some satisfaction from that fact. His feelings towards Aurora had undergone another change. Lucy's image loomed to the almost total eclipse of that of her rival, and yet he could not spend ten minutes in the company of the girl at the shanty without being won by her buoyant spirits and the kindliness of her soul. He had some dread of growing to hate Aurora now that Lucy had reestablished herself--a dread founded more on some familiarity with popular fiction than on a knowledge of his own heart.

Christmas came, and there was a rough attempt to celebrate it on Jim Crow, an attempt by which Mrs. Ben Kyley profited largely, as she and Aurora were kept working at high pressure for two days, making Christmas puddings, for which the diggers cheerfully paid half a guinea apiece. Rich plum-pudding, hearty eating, and heavy drinking, the proper concomitants to an English Christmas as the miners understood it, were not compatible with merriment during an Australian Christmas-tune, with the glass at one hundred degrees in the shade; but trifling considerations of that kind were not allowed to interfere with the uproarious festivities at Jim Crow. January passed quietly. The dirt at One Tree Gully proved highly remunerative, and the mates worked hard. Done had discovered an object beyond the rapturous enjoyment of the moment, and showed himself more anxious to win gold. He was living a comparatively quiet life, and the locket containing Lucy Woodrow's picture was restored to its rightful place next his heart. There was a time when the thought of such an act of flagrant and foolish sentimentality would have made him groan aloud.

One night in the following March, returning to their tent from the shanty, where he had left Burton deep in a game of euchre, Jim was startled to see a stream of light flash momentarily across the canvas wall. His first thought was of thieves, and, drawing his revolver, he stole noiselessly to the entrance and peeped in. He saw the figure of a man seated at the head of Mike's bed. On the small table between the two bunks at the end of the tent was a lighted candle, which the man was screening with his hat. Before the intruder the small tin-box in which Done's few heirlooms and papers were stored lay open, and the man was absorbed in its contents.

'If you stir a hand I'll fire!' said Jim, presenting his revolver.

Instinctively the other smothered the light, but after that he sat quite still.

'I can see you distinctly,' said Jim, 'and I'm a fair shot!'

There was silence for a moment, the thief making no attempt to escape.

'I am going to light the candle,' said a voice.

'Light it, then; but no tricks! I'll shoot to kill!'

XV

A MATCH was struck, and in its glow Done recognised his visitor. It was Ryder. The latter lit the candle, and then turned towards Jim. He was quite composed, apparently. Not so Done; the revelation amazed him. The hand containing the revolver sank to his side. He stood for some moments awaiting an explanation. None was offered.

'Is Mr. Walter Ryder a tent thief?' he asked bitterly.

Ryder shook his head. 'No,' he said.

'It looks strangely like it.'

'It does.'

'And I purpose raising the camp, and submitting the matter to the men.'

'You won't do that.'

'Why not?'

'Because I can satisfy you that I have a very excellent excuse for being here and for prying into your affairs.'

'I'll wait two minutes for that.'

'It won't take one, Jim. I am your brother, Richard Done!'

The revolver dropped from Jim's hand. He did not speak; every particle of him thrilled with intense emotion. For half a minute he stood rooted, speechless, and then he strode forward and seated himself on the bunk, staring closely into Ryder's face by the dim light of the candle.

'You will want proof?' said Ryder.

Jim shook his head. Ryder's declaration, abrupt and dramatic as it was, had struck him with absolute conviction. He was amazed, but he did not doubt. He understood now the origin of the deep impression this man had made upon him.

'That is proof enough,' he said, laying a trembling hand upon the miniature of his mother upon the table.

'Almost,' answered Ryder, 'but not enough. We are both very like poor mother.'

'We are very like each other.' Jim's faculties were stunned for the time; there was a dreamlike unreality in their positions.

Ryder nodded. 'We are.'

'It must have been that and your resemblance to my mother impressed me. I was impressed without consciousness of the reason.'

'Miss Woodrow noticed the resemblance, and when I heard your name and your age I thought it very likely that you were my brother. When I saw you that night in the shanty I was almost convinced. These satisfied me.' He indicated the scattered articles upon the table.

Jim made no demonstration; he sat with his eyes fixed upon the miniature, still dazed by the blow. There was something in his had--something he wished to know, but his ideas were all out of control. The thought centred with a shock.

'Good God, no!' he cried, clutching Ryder with a nerveless hand. 'They hanged my brother!'

Ryder's face was perfectly bloodless; it looked cold. He shook his head slowly.

'I was condemned to be hanged. They altered it to transportation for life.'

'But they all believed--'

'Mother must have known. It would have made little difference. The horror of it was a little greater than the horror of hanging. It probably gave her no comfort.'

'She died of it all.' Jim spoke without volition. 'Yes,' responded Ryder dully. 'She was the kind of woman who would. I was transported, and for all those years I lived in hell.'

'For murder!' said Jim sharply.

Ryder shook his head again. His voice was quite even. 'I did no murder. There was no murder done.'

'The body--what of the body?'

'There was none. The man for whose murder I was condemned still lives. Stony is the man!'

'Stony!' Jim peered into the other's face again. 'Stony!' he cried. 'It's not possible. You are lying. It's utterly incredible. Stony! Then this explains?' He did not doubt even while the words of unbelief were on his lips.

'This explains. My coming upon you that night in the Black Forest was not so extraordinary as it seemed. I was following you both. I had been to Melbourne on Stony's track, having caught a glimpse of him one night at Ballarat. I ascertained that he had started for Forest Creek. Meanwhile Mrs. Macdougal and Miss Woodrow had told me of you. It was reasonable to assume that you also had started for the field everybody was talking of. At our first meeting I did not see you: I was too deeply interested in Mr. Stony.'

'Stony was not the name.'

'Stony is an assumed name. Cannon is his real name--Peter Cannon.'

'That is the name. But I cannot understand. My head fails me. I am utterly bewildered!'

'You'll hear Stony's story? He is in his tent.'

'Not now. You have overwhelmed: me. For God's sake, give me time to straighten things out!'

Jim sat in silence for some minutes, but the excitement lingered. He drifted into questions, and plied the other like a cross-examining lawyer eager to trap a witness; but Ryder knew every detail of the family history. He told Jim of a birthmark on his own body. He described the furnishing of the home in Chisley much as it remained within Jim's memory.

'You have not mentioned our sister,' he said.

'She killed herself.' Jim spoke with blunt brutality. He had no energy for equivocation.

Ryder accepted this piece of news in the spirit of a man steeled to the keenest strokes of Fate.

'She was a beautiful girl,' he said. 'I remember I loved her dearly.'

'You speak as if it were fifty years ago.'

'I have been in hell since, I tell you.'

Jim looked closely into his brother's face again, but it baffled him; it betrayed no more feeling than a stone.

'Why have you divulged this now?' he asked.

'You forced it from me. I did not expect you to return. I saw you playing cards at the shanty. But it is as well. I should have told you later.'

'There is something behind?'

'Much; but till you have heard Stony tell his part I shall say no more. And for the present let this be our secret.'

'Burton may come in at any moment.'

'Good-night, then.'

'No; I'll go with you. I cannot face Mike in this condition. He would think me mad.'

'To Stony's tent?'

'If you like. In Heaven's name, man, why are you so cold? Why am I like a stunned brute? We are brothers. We may shake hands.'

Ryder made no advance. 'Better hear the story out,' he said.

It was a two-mile walk from where Jim and Mike were now camped to Stony's tent, and the hour was midnight. The two men walked in silence, Jim with his head bowed, racked with nervous excitement, his mind running from point to point, grasping nothing wholly, seeing nothing clearly, the other erect and calm. When the tent was reached Ryder entered unceremoniously, and, striking a match, looked about him for a candle. There was a slush-lamp on a box by the bunk, and this he lit. Jim saw Stony start up in bed, and stare at the intruder with a look of mortal terror.

'I have brought you a visitor,' said Ryder.

The apprehension faded from the hatter's face when he Jim.

'A nice hour!' he grumbled.

'I have not studied your convenience,' answered Ryder. 'Here is the man to whom you are to tell the story of Richard Done and Peter Cannon. Tell it briefly, as you told it to me.'

Ryder seated himself on a block near the tent entrance, his back half turned to the others, and neither spoke nor moved throughout the narration. Stony looked from one to the other, and then commenced his story. He told it in a monotonous voice, with a dull face and eyes heavy with drink.

'We were always enemies, Dick Done and I--enemies as boys at school at Chisley, fighting over everything, picking at each other from morn till night. As young chaps we remained enemies. It seemed as if God or the devil had sent us to plague each other. Our enmity grew with us. In manhood we were as bitter as death. Then the woman came. We both wanted her. It was just natural of us to get set on the same girl. She liked him--she didn't care a snap of her fingers for me; but I didn't give up. I followed her, plagued her, persecuted her, and hated Done worse than poison. With all my soul I hated him! Of course, we quarrelled over her, and Done went so far as to talk of killing. He didn't mean it, perhaps, but it told against him later. One bright night I came on him and her sitting on Harry's Crag. 'Twasn't an accident. I'd been told they'd gone down to the sea, and I followed. I interfered, furious at heart, but making a show of civility, knowing that would madden him. He was soon up in arms. He tried to drive me off, struck me. I used my stick, and we fought there and then--fought like madmen on the cliff edge, two hundred feet above the sea. The girl, frightened almost to death, ran away. Done got my stick from me, and we fought with our hands. He could beat me at that game, and at length struck me a blow that stunned me; then he left me lying there, and went after the girl.'

Stony paused for a moment, and, drawing a bottle from the back of his bunk, took a long drink. Then his eyes wandered to Ryder again, and he went on:

'When I came to I was alone. I crept a little further from the edge of the cliff, and lay down again. I was pretty badly knocked about; my nose was bleeding freely. Presently, moving my hand, I struck a knife--his knife! It was closed. I opened it, looking at the long blade. The idea had already formed in my mind. I smeared the blade with blood, and dropped the knife, open as it was, over the cliff, being careful that it should fall on the ledge about twenty feet below. Then I smeared blood upon the brink, tore a scrap from my coat, and left it there, throwing the coat with the hat into the sea. I was never seen in Chisley again. I walked all that night. In London I read of the arrest of Done on a charge of murder. They had found my hat and my coat and the knife. The girl had told her story. Done was condemned to death; and then I stowed away in an Australian boat, and was allowed to work my passage out I thought Richard Done had been hanged till I saw him that night at the camp in the Bush. The man sitting there is Richard Done.'

Stony fell back upon his grimy pillow again, and was silent; his eyes were fixed upon Ryder, but at that moment he had more to fear from Jim, who looked down upon him, fierce with disgust, his fingers itching to be at the thin neck of the brute.

'Let us get out of this!' he gasped.

'Have you no questions to ask?' said Ryder quietly.

'None, none! And when I think of what this dog has brought upon me and mine I feel murderous.'

Ryder left the tent without another word, and Jim followed him. As they walked away, Done was stirred with deep sympathy for his companion. Ryder's reiteration of the words, 'I have been in hell!' recurred to him. He felt that there were years of suffering and a fathomless hatred behind the phrase, and his blood ran hotly.

'I wonder you have not killed that man!' he blurted after a few minutes' silence. 'I regret ever having raised a hand to prevent it.'

'I needed him,' answered Ryder.

'You intend to establish your innocence?'

For the first time that night a smile moved Ryder's stark lips--a hard, mirthless smile.

'No,' he said; 'where's the use?'

'How is it you are free?' asked Jim with surprise. This view had not occurred to him before.

They were standing between the stunted and twisted gums. The Bush here was spare and dwarfed, and the moonlight shone clearly upon Ryder's face.

'I am an escaped convict!' he replied

A bitter curse leapt from Done's tongue. He felt himself bound to this man by a common wrong, a wrong that had clouded with misery the greater part of their two lives.

'You may be retaken,' he said.

'I may, but I do not think it likely.'

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.