CHAPTER I
.
THE MASTER.
Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict gardeners--who were going about their work with a monotonous and exasperating deliberation of movement--and lamenting the evil fortune that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being, destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had, as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment, Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or kangaroo-hunting in the interior?
“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher, I couldn’t be _much_ worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?”
This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room.
“Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.”
“That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.”
“But you see you _are_ captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler, emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and any amount of convicts to look after.”
“If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the _vieille roche_, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his companion--a cheerful _bourgeois_, who pretended to make light of his situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets something.”
“That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign Harcourt Lowther.
If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world. But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual discontent.
But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted to talk to him, well and good--he was ready and willing to talk about any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions.
It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign, when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who was nothing but a boor and a clod.
Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort to penetrate.
“The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes, “he knows how to keep his place.”
The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees, and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters, pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation: but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and catch flies.
But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire, which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was, indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett, the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.
“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that; but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re preternaturally poor.”
Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window, admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat. He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate, but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which “Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss Corbett’s drab-coloured head.
Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face, while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman. The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in his cottage at Port Arthur.
He went out presently, swinging his thin cane, and whistling all the triplets and cadences of an elaborate _scena_; he was an amateur musician and an amateur artist, playing more or less upon two or three different instruments, and painting more or less in half-a-dozen different styles. He could ride across country to the astonishment of burly Leicestershire squires, who were inclined to think contemptuously of his small waist and pretty blue eyes, his amber-tinted, jockey-club perfumed whiskers, trim tops, and unstained “pink.” He was a good shot, and long ago at Harrow had been renowned as a cricketer. He spoke three or four modern languages, and had that dim recollection of his classic studies which is sufficient for a man of the world who knows how to make much out of little. He was altogether a very accomplished gentleman; but with him intellectual pursuits were a means rather than an end, and he took very little pleasure in the society of books or bookmen. He wanted to be in the world, foremost in the perpetual strife, amid the crash of drums and trumpets, the roaring of cannon, and glitter of emblazoned standards flaunting gallantly in the wind. He wanted to be one of the conquerors in the universal tournament, and to ride up to the Queen of Beauty flushed and triumphant after the strife, to be admired and caressed. This is why the inaction of his present existence was so utterly intolerable to him. He had a supreme belief in himself, and in the indisputable nature of his right to the best and brightest amongst earth’s prizes. The time must be indeed out of joint in which there was nothing better for such as he than a dreary convict settlement in the island of Tasmania.
Unluckily, the time _was_ out of joint. Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall, Hampshire, had given his younger son an aristocratic name and a gentlemanly education; and then, having nothing more to bestow upon him, had been forced to leave the lad to fish for himself in the troubled waters of life. The prospects of the junior had always been more or less sacrificed to those of the senior of Robert Lowther’s two sons, and Harcourt bore a hearty grudge against his father and his brother on this account. Plainly told that he was to expect no more assistance from the parent purse, the young man had elected to become a barrister; but after a three years’ course of reading, in which the cultivation of light literature and modern languages was diversified by a slight sprinkling of legal study, he had grown heartily sick of his shabbily-furnished third floor in Hare Court, Temple, and had gladly accepted the price of a commission in one of Her Majesty’s light infantry regiments from an affectionate maiden aunt, believing that the regiment would be speedily under orders for India, where glory and loot no doubt awaited a dashing young soldier with a very high opinion of his own merits.
Unhappily for Mr. Lowther the regiment did not go to India; but he and his captain, with a detachment of seventy rank and file, embarked at Deptford on a misty morning in October, in charge of 450 convicts bound for Hobart Town. At the time of which I write the ensign had been nearly a twelvemonth in Van Diemen’s Land, and before him lay the prospect of another dreary year which must elapse before there was much chance of his seeing a change of quarters. There are some people who take their troubles with a cheerful countenance and make the best of a bad bargain; but Mr. Lowther was not one of them. He had begun to grumble before the convict ship left Deptford; and he had gone on complaining, with very little intermission, until to-day, and was likely so to continue until the end of the chapter. Napoleon at St. Helena could scarcely have felt his exile more keenly; nor could that fallen hero have more bitterly resented the injustice of his fate than Harcourt Osborne Lowther, who believed that there must be something radically wrong in a universe in which there was no provision of 40,000_l._ or so a year for an elegant young man with a perfect aquiline nose, a clear ringing touch upon the piano, a trumpet tone on the flute, a talent for taking pen-and-ink portraits that were equal to anything of Count D’Orsay’s, and an irreproachable taste in waistcoats.
He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute.
“When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,” thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks, the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?--die, forgotten and unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?”
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