Part 6

She was all by herself, but she didn’t seem lonely; and she didn’t seem to want to talk. I’d watch her on deck, reading and working by the hour together, and sometimes just thinking, with a happy smile on her face.

She was a great one for reading, and she read clever books—histories and travels and biographies, and I would even see her studying grammars and suchlike. I wondered why she was so eager to improve herself, and I wondered what made her look so happy.

It was seeing me usually reading, too, that made her notice me, I think, and I contrived to make the books a means of falling into talk.

I offered to lend her one I had, that was the sequel to one of hers, and it came about after this, that she would let me sit with her on deck, and she said she learned things from me that none else had taught her. But she had plenty of brains, had Nan; anyone could see that, though, of course, I saw, too, that she had not been educated in the way girls are, and, in fact, that she wasn’t a lady, as the saying goes.

Nan was a lady, every inch of her, as far as Nature went; but she hadn’t the ways of those “born.” I could see that then, having my mother and my sisters and the dear old Rectory full in my mind. Perhaps I shouldn’t so easily tell the difference now.

Nan didn’t make any secret of her humble beginnings. She had been a girl in a baker’s shop, and she had been nurse in a Children’s Hospital.

I supposed that was where she picked up her gentle manners. But that hadn’t lasted long, she said, and she had never had any time for improving her mind. And she told me, that her only friends were in a low walk of life.

That didn’t matter to me. I fell in love with Nan, before we had been talking half an hour—before, indeed, we had ever spoken at all, and I asked her to marry me, just ten days before the ship landed at Australia.

She refused me. I hadn’t supposed she would accept me right off. In spite of her frank cordiality where she trusted, there was a sort of impenetrableness and stand-offishness about Nan, which always rebuffed me. I felt somehow that she wasn’t in love with me. But I thought that was her way. And I didn’t expect to find that she was on the eve of being married to somebody else. And yet I might have guessed it if I hadn’t been a fool.

That was the secret of her dreamy, happy smile—of her suppressed excitement as the voyage neared its close—of stray allusions which, preoccupied with my own hopes, I had totally misunderstood. I had got the impression that she was going to join her brother in Australia; now I found that it was her lover, who was awaiting her—her lover, whom she hadn’t seen for seven years.

“Seven long, weary years, Mr. Curran,” she said. “Seven years of waiting and hoping and struggling—everything, as it seemed, against us.”

Then she told me something of hers and Nick’s story; of the wrongful accusation and unjust sentence; of its remission, and of his efforts to earn sufficient money to pay her passage out, so that they might marry and work together.

But people wouldn’t believe in Nick’s innocence, and in spite of what he had done, there was a prejudice against employing him. Then, she said, luck had been altogether against Nick.

Just when he was getting on, his little savings had been lost; and then he had had a bad illness, and for a very long while she had heard nothing, and had been almost wild with anxiety.

Letters had miscarried, and at one time she had almost believed that he had forgotten her. But two years before he had written to tell her that he had his health again, and that he would never rest until he could make her his wife. And then had come a letter telling her, that he had found gold and would be a rich man—a letter enclosing a sum for her expenses to Australia.

“It seems like a dream,” she said. “I wake of nights, and I can’t believe, that, in a little while, I shall see my Nick again. And then I get afraid that he may be disappointed in me, and find that, while he has risen, I have sunk. For I am only a poor girl, and I’ve led a hard life.

“It was all right, while I was in the Children’s Hospital, and I think they would have made almost a lady of me there; but Miss Challice died, and her brother was removed to another place, and things went wrong, and one day I found,” she went on, “that I was turned out without a penny in the world.

“I don’t know how I managed. I got into a factory and worked there, and after a bit, I got easier work, but I could never save enough to be of any use. Ah, Mr. Curran, if you knew how Nick and I have loved each other, and how we have looked forward to this meeting, you wouldn’t grudge us our happiness.”

It went to my heart, and touched all the best part of me, that girl’s way of taking my disappointment.

She seemed to think it was her fault, and that she ought to have told me at the first.

She asked me to let her be my friend, and she asked me to go on teaching her and helping her to be worthy of Nick.

It’s only good women that can rub it into a chap, by saying things like that.

Help to improve her for the joy of another man—a man probably, I thought then, not worthy to tie her shoe-strings! But I said I’d do my best to be her friend, and I’d love her always. And I think I had a lurking hope that the other fellow might throw her over at the last, or that she might find she had been making a mistake.

Of course I didn’t believe all that, about the unjust sentence. I asked her where he was, and then it seemed like a fate, that she should say Eungella, and I told her that it was Eungella I was bound to.

She knew he was to meet her in Sydney. I knew it, too. And I shall never forget the wonderful look on Nan’s face, as we steamed in between Sydney Heads into the new world.

She was trembling all through her little thin body, and her red lips were parted, and her eyes were like two shining stars set in darkness. “Oh, how beautiful it is!” I heard her murmur; “and Nick is there.”

It _was_ beautiful: the great rugged cliffs and the sun setting over the barren ridge of rock, and then the harbour with all its little bays lying blue and peaceful, and the town and the forts, and the lovely Botanic Gardens with their tropical trees and the feathery clumps of bamboos.

Nan had never seen such trees and plants before. But I don’t think she distinguished anything; I am sure it was all like a picture in a dream to her. She could think of nothing, but that she was going to see Nick.

I felt her give a little gasp and a strange cry, as he came pressing forward from the crowd on the wharf. He never seemed to pause or hesitate. He knew her at once for his own.

He was a great, tall fellow, with a sunburnt face, and he had a noble presence—I was obliged to own that. And he had clear, blue eyes and fair, curly hair. He made me think, somehow, of one of the old Vikings of the North. I didn’t wonder that she loved him.

“Nan!” I heard him say, as she cried “Nick!” and if I had ever had any hope of change in her or him, it died in that moment, when I saw the wonderful and immortal love in their eyes.

Love! love, real love! In spite of the cynics, there’s nothing else in this universe that endures. I turned away feeling lonely and sick at heart. I’d had my dream, and it was over; but I knew that I should never love any woman as I loved Nan, and when I saw the two, drawn as it were into each other’s arms, both uttering that strange yearning cry, of a longing that was at last to be fulfilled, I swore to myself that I’d be Nan’s loyal brother and Nick’s friend, as long as Fate kept us three together.

Eungella Diggings was a wild sort of place to bring a woman to—a straggling town, set in a hollow of the hills, with claims all about, and heaps of mullock, as they call the refuse after the crushing of the quartz, and queer, unsightly erections of machinery, of which the whirr ceased not day nor night.

Then there were mushroom tenements of canvas, and shanties of bark, and weather-board lean-to’s, and zinc-roofed buildings, mostly of a public character—the Courthouse, and Bank, and _The Star_ Office, and the many public-houses, into which all the scum of the earth seemed to gather itself. And some of its aristocracy, too.

There was a baronet doing a store business two doors from _The Star_, and “Honourables” were as thick as peas—or Chinamen, which is saying much the same thing at the Diggings.

There were all sorts, mostly scamps; and fine, daredevil scamps they were that went out to Australia in those days. Many are the stories I could tell, if I hadn’t to tell that of Nick and Nan, about the Diggings crew.

There were lags, too, of course—old hands, as bad as you make ’em, and rough miners as honest as you make ’em, and Oxford and Cambridge men, and army swells, that you’d expect to see in London drawing-rooms.

There were women, too, of all sorts—the worst and the best; and drink flowing, and divine bank-notes flying, and knives gleaming, and tomahawks and pistols at men’s belts.

I often wondered what Nan thought of it all, and if things startled her as much as they sometimes did me. Perhaps it was a good thing for me, that I had the new work and the queer experiences and the “copy” to think of; they helped me to reconcile myself to my disappointment, though I never saw Nan and Nick without a nasty pain at my heart, and at first I rather avoided seeing them at all.

I cannot think why Nick didn’t marry Nan straight off—why he hadn’t married her in Sydney, when she arrived, and brought her to Eungella as his wife.

He was rich enough. He had a good claim, and was turning out gold hand over hand. I believe that was what he wanted and intended, but Nan had some romantic notion that she wasn’t educated enough to be his equal, and that it would be right of her to give him a little time before the knot was irrevocably tied, so that he might be quite certain of his own mind.

She was a noble creature, and I am not sure that she wasn’t right. And she wouldn’t take any more money from Nick, but insisted on working for herself. She talked it over with the doctor’s wife, and they got her nursing jobs to do, and she was called there, as she had been called in the hospital, she said, “Sister Nan.”

There was sickness enough at Eungella—accidents in the mines, and touches of fever and sunstroke cases as the great heat came on. It was early in November when we got to Eungella, and hot indeed then. But that heat was nothing to what came later.

Sometimes on the blazing December days, when the sun would beat on the zinc roofs, and the glare be reflected from the white stones and the mullock heaps, and when there was no shade to be got under the straight lank gum-trees, and the miners, red and grimy and perspiring, would loaf about the street, and the bars would be filled with the sound of swearing, I used to fancy that, if you wanted to find an earthly similitude of Hades, you couldn’t go to a more likely place than Eungella Diggings.

There were drink cases, too—plenty of them, only Nick drew the line there. Though he humoured Nan’s pride and independent spirit, he watched her as carefully as Dummy, the dog, had done in days gone by.

It was to last only a few months—this probation and testing of each other.

Nick made a bargain for a certain date, though he was always begging her to change her mind, and let him off a month or so, more especially as the nuggets thickened.

And when he pleaded in his earnestness, Nan’s face, for all its wistful, resolute look, would brighten and brighten till it seemed to me the face of an angel, and would give me that nasty pain at my heart once more. But she was resolute always, and the richer Nick became the more she held to her determination.

Nan used to live with the Postmaster’s wife, who was a good sort and something of a lady. She used to take Nan to the entertainments, that were given at Eungella, and there were balls and picnics and concerts, and even a kind of theatre, for money was so plentiful there just then, that actors and conjurors and people of that sort were bound to come.

This was all good for _The Eungella Star_, which flourished mightily, and I made quite a feature of “social topics.”

It was a short time before Christmas when there was a big ball given at the Town Hall, as they called the zinc building. That was the wind up of some races, to which I went as in duty bound, and at which Nick ran and rode a horse, and Nan was present with the Postmaster’s wife, and clapped Nick as he went victoriously past the winning post.

Nick could afford to keep racehorses in these days.

It was only a few days before, that he had come into my office—we had got great friends—I couldn’t help liking the fine, generous fellow in spite of my love for Nan and the soreness of my disappointment. I am sure that Nan had told him about the whole affair, though he never said a word to me on the subject, and that was what made him so nice in his ways to me.

“Curran,” he said, and his whole face was alight, “do you believe in a good fairy coming to bring a man luck? Nan is my good fairy—she has brought me luck. The gold has been coming up thicker and thicker ever since my darling came out to me. To-day has come the biggest luck of all. I’m a rich man, Curran—my fortune is made.”

I could not help quoting the old proverb, but Nick only laughed.

“Unlucky in love! Looks like it, eh? Nan and I are a living disproof of all the saws. Ah, my Nan shall drive down the Ladies’ Mile in her carriage yet, and I shall perhaps fulfil what has been—next to Nan—my life’s dream!”

“What’s that?” I said.

“To be a power, Curran—a power for good in that terrible city—that Babylon in which I was born. I want to do something for the poor and the vicious; I want to help to save such helpless, deserted children as were Nan and I from the fate that, but for God’s mercy, might have been Nan’s fate and mine. I want to get into the English Parliament, Curran; I want to plead the cause of the friendless—to get protection for the children—justice for the hireling.”

There was a great solemnity in Nick’s tone, and a curious prophetic look in his eyes.

He had been talking it all over with Nan, he said. They were to be married in two months’ time, which was the limit she had fixed, and as soon as he was in a position to make a good start in the old country, he would leave Australia. And he would leave no stone unturned to clear himself of the charge, which would, he knew, cling to him through life, and hinder the useful career, which he might otherwise carve out for himself.

But I am getting away from the races. It was after Nick had won his race that a rather handsome man of a coarse, underbred type, well dressed, and looking what the Australians call “flash,” was brought up by a friend of Nan’s, and introduced as Mr. Tempest.

I was standing near Nan at the time. Nick had left her to see after something about his horse, and she was talking gaily to a little knot of her Eungella friends, elated at the good luck that had befallen Nick, and looking cool and fresh and surprisingly beautiful in her white dress which she had put on in honour of the occasion.

I had been noticing this “Mr. Tempest.” He was a recent arrival at the diggings, and I did not like his manner or appearance. He was loud, boastful, and vulgar, with a veneer of smartness—and an occasional lapse into ways, that would have disgraced a navvy.

Just now he was on his good behaviour. He had evidently been greatly struck with Nan, who was certainly the belle of the Stand. He made her a very low bow and said a few words of compliment.

I saw an odd startled look come over Nan’s face, and she looked at him closely, and repeated his name, as if she were puzzled. “Mr. Tempest?”

“Reginald Tempest—at your service,” said he, with a kind of leer that made me inclined to strike him.

They began to talk, and at every word, the man said, I saw the mystified look deepening in Nan’s face. She seemed glad when she spied Nick—away down the course—and proposed to me that we should walk and find him.

Before she went, however, Tempest had got her promise to dance several dances with him at the ball that evening.

Nan was greatly agitated. “Mr. Curran,” she said as we walked along, “that man’s name isn’t Tempest. I wish you’d try and find out something about him; he is either the brother of a man I knew long ago—the man who got Nick into terrible trouble—or he is the man himself, and his name is Rummles. But he has grown a beard and moustache since then, and is changed in every way, and I can’t be sure.

“Oh, if I knew!” she went on, excitedly. “He, and he only, can clear Nick, and give him the right to go about the world without a stain.

“Mr. Curran, if there’s any spark of good feeling in him, he’d do it now—now, after Nick and I have suffered so. And now that Nick is rich and has a career before him, and wants so to do good—we’d pay him, Mr. Curran.

“I’d promise for Nick the half of his fortune—you know about the big nugget—and Nick wants me to marry him at once, and to get away from this dreadful place, and start a fresh life in England. But what’s the good of his trying, with that stain always on him? Oh, I feel that I’d almost sell my soul to clear him.”

She told me that was the reason she had promised the dances to Tempest. She wanted to find out if he was really Rummles. She said he had been fond of her once, and perhaps he would tell her the truth now.

Remembering a look in the man’s eyes, when they had rested on Nan, I told her it was a dangerous game, and that she had best not encourage this Tempest, or Rummles, whichever he might be. But she shook her head, and her eyes had that shining look, which Nan’s eyes always took, when she was determined.

We missed Nick somehow in that walk; and it wasn’t for some time—not till we got back near the stand—that we saw him coming from it. His face was quite white, and I could see that he was deeply moved. He came up to Nan.

“Nan,” he said, hoarsely, “I’ve seen him, I’ve recognized him—our enemy. And you’ve been speaking to him! Nan, I forbid you to do it. He will work us harm again, as he did before. And he has been talking about you—chaffing—pretending that he has made a conquest. I won’t have it, Nan.”

I never before saw Nick angry. He was almost angry with Nan, and when she told him that she had promised to dance with Rummles, forbade her sternly. But Nan tightened her lips. She had her own design, I knew. I wished that she would not try to carry it out.

There was a coolness, it was very evident, between Nick and Nan that evening. The Postmaster’s wife told me they had almost had words on the way to the ball, because Nan wanted to do something that he wouldn’t allow.

The Postmaster’s wife was curious about it, and there was talk in the ballroom, for a good deal of interest attached to Nick just now, because of his splendid find and his rapidly increasing fortune.

Nan looked lovely. She had a soft colour, and her white dress set off her beautiful eyes and hair.

It was quite a grand affair, the ball. You wouldn’t expect there could be anything so fine at a place like Eungella Diggings. The stewards had sent blacks into the scrub, and they had brought back branches of treefern and bunya cones and creepers, and what with flags and one thing and another, it was as pretty a sight as you could fancy.

The Baronet had turned out in swell evening clothes, and so had the “Honourables”—though nobody knew how they had managed it, as they had only brought their swags on their backs to the diggings. And they had got out all their London manners, and danced unlike the other men.

The Gold Commissioner was at the ball, too, and the Police Magistrate, and we had all got ourselves up, as well as we could.

Tempest was in regular dress clothes, with a flower in his button-hole, and looked like a Strand shopman, I thought.

Nan kept to her word and danced with him, and I saw them sitting out and talking very earnestly. But for all Nan’s bright colour, she looked unhappy, and Nick scarcely went near her. “It’s for Nick’s good,” she said to me, when we were dancing together. “Mr. Curran, I was right; it _is_ Rummles, and he has promised me—— Oh! Nick will thank me some day.”

Whatever Rummles had promised, he didn’t seem in a hurry to keep his promise, and tried in the meantime to get as much as he could of Nan’s company. He was always up at the doctor’s and the Postmaster’s, where Nan spent most of her time, and the consequence was that Nick went seldom to see her.

Nick began to look moody and wild; but he was so proud that he wouldn’t go straight to Nan and have things out. He had got it into his head already, I could see, that she was being attracted to Rummles.

Now was my time, and the devil did whisper to me—I’ll own it honestly—that if I chose to foment the mischief by working on Nick’s suspicions, there’d be a chance for me yet with Nan. But I didn’t yield to the temptation.

I did my best to put it away, and I even expostulated with Nan for letting Rummles come between her and Nick. The tears came into her eyes as I talked to her. She was looking very worn and white and thin. All she said was, “It won’t last much longer, Mr. Curran; I’ve got his promise, and Nick will be grateful to me in the end.”

That very afternoon, as I was going across the gully from _The Star_ office to one of my claims, I came upon Rummles and Nan. They were standing close by the passionfruit hedge, which screened the Postmaster’s garden, and she seemed to be pleading earnestly, and he was looking at her in a mad, wicked sort of way.

I crept round the hedge. I suppose it was dishonourable, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to take care of Nan, and I felt by that look on Rummles’ face, that he was up to devilry.

“You’ve got to do this for me,” I heard him say, “and then I’ll do what you ask. I’ll give you the proofs because I love you—yes, I love you, Nan, and I’ve always loved you, and I hate Nick because he has taken you from me.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” she cried. “You mustn’t say that. I love none but Nick, and you mustn’t say you’re doing it for love of me. You are doing it for love of right and justice.”

“Very well,” he said with a malign laugh, “I’m doing it for the love of right and justice. But I’m not going to abate my terms, Nan. You are to come yourself, and alone.”

She was frightened, and argued with him, and begged him to let her bring Nick, but he roughly refused.

She had to come alone—to his hut up the gully—after dusk that evening, and he pledged himself to give her the proof of Nick’s innocence. Then they parted, and I went on to the claim, a good deal disturbed in my mind.

I was afraid, that if I told Nick, there would be murder done, but I was determined Nan should not go to that villain’s hut, without my being somewhere within earshot.

I skulked about the Postmaster’s house till after sunset, and it was almost dark when I saw Nan come out, looking very pale and very frightened, but with the steadfast, resolute look in her face, that I knew meant she wasn’t to be turned from her purpose. I felt easier about things when I saw her stop and take a little pistol from her belt, look at it, and hide it away again under her jacket. Nan was a brave woman, but she was not blindly foolhardy.

I followed her to Rummles’ hut. I knew he had a mate, and he was by way of working hard, but I felt pretty sure he would have got rid of his mate that evening, and it turned out that he had.

He met Nan outside his hut, and he tried to make her go in, but she refused. She was very quiet and gentle, and she talked to him, as she might have done if she had been his sister.