Part 10

‘We--ell,’ and there was an alarming touch of boredom in his tone, ‘after we’d tied the old boy, we had a quiet time, doctoring up those we’d stretched, as best we could, and figuring out what was to be done. Kinjan and I palavered over the chances, but Torin didn’t seem to care what we did, and seemed sort of disgusted with the whole affair. He stood leaning on a spear by the horses, and once I heard him mutter, “Damn! shan’t get such a chance again.” I judged he would have let himself be killed like a sheep, but the fighting instinct was too strong for him; he was as sulky as he could be, but he did what he was told, which was the main thing. I was for riding along the coast and trying to make Mogador, but Kinjan over-persuaded me that a bold course was the best thing; he wanted to go right there for the city. “We’ve got the weapons, clothes, horses, and a goide, but we’ve got nothing to dhrink,” he said, “and ut would be unbecomin’ of us if we lift the neighbourhood without dhroppin’ a cyard.” He took great pleasure in dressing us up in clothes taken from the deceased, and fussed around like a seven-year-old going to a party--the little devil had lots of sand; he said the great thing was to get _into_ the city, and to do that we must throw in plenty of style.

‘At last we got rigged out and mounted; I guess we made pretty fair heathens, all except Kinjan--he was too red and fat. He tied the old chief’s hands and his feet under his horse, and make him go first. I came next with a shooting-iron handy, and the other two brought up the rear. After a stretch, Kinjan rode up alongside the old gentleman, and began to blandhander to him in his own tongue, and presently he made me a sign, and then cut the ropes that bound his feet, and the old boy perked up, and began to spread himself; and by the time we came within sight of the town, those two were as thick as thieves. I judge Kinjan would have made a fine poker-player,’ said Mr Denver in parentheses, with a sigh of regret.

‘It was a light kind of a night, and we could see the walls around the institution from quite a way off. The old boy was heading us for the principal gate, and Kinjan turned to me: “The town’s in the hands of the ribils,” he said; “but, praises to the Almighty! the ould gintleman’s a big pot amongst thim, and he’s promised to take us to the Sheikh--or whativer his misbegotten name may be--and git us a pass and an iscort.” “Bluff!” I said; “’ware snakes.” “Faith! no,” said he, “’tis a swate old baboo, and ut’s truth he’s telling.” I wasn’t taking any, but it wouldn’t have done to interfere then, so I shut my head, and we rode on along the walls. Presently we struck what I judge was the front door; considerable of a high gate, fortified with iron spikes, and vūrry strong. There were no signs of hospitality. “I guess I’ll knock,” I said, and butted the end of my lance against the gate. A voice cried out from one of the little towers on the walls on each side in a kind of a sing-song; the old chief sung out something in answer, and then they had a palaver. I reckon they spoke some strange lingo, for Kinjan called out to me excitedly, “Can ye understand thim? May me sowl rust if oi can.” Before I could answer, we heard a sound of horses tramping, the gate’s hinges turned and it swung open, and there in front of us, drawn up in line, with spears in rest, was a troop of most a dozen mounted niggers. “Euchred, be Jasus! The ould schoundhrel! and the drinks oi promused ’um!” said Kinjan, mournfully; I guess I was thinking it was about time to throw up the cards and leave, when Torin trotted his horse past me. “Good-bye, boys,” he said, “_I’m_ going into the city.” He just waved his hand, clapped his heels into his horse’s side, and went like a catamount for the troop. They slashed and speared at him right and left, but they were taken by surprise; and I guess his release hadn’t been signed, for he went through them like so much paper. ‘Well, _sir_,’--Mr Denver rolled a cigarette and drew his breath in with a sharp hiss--‘how it came about I can’t say, but Kinjan and I, with the old gentleman between us, went through after him--they were kind of discommoded, I suppose--Torin was a big man, and he left an aperture. The moment we cleared them, Kinjan put a pistol to the chief’s head. “Ye son of a herring,” he said, quite forgetting to speak Moorish, “take us straight to the Sheikh’s palace, or I’ll schatter yer dhirty brains.” The only words of Moorish were Sheikh and palace, but they were enough for the old boy; he was as skeered an old cuss as I ever saw; he ducked from the pistol, touched his forehead, and muttered something, and we all vamoosed down the rattling stone-paved streets, like the job lot of horse-thieves we were.

‘The old gentleman was profoundly interested in the business-end of that shooting-iron, and so we got right there without any more hanky-panky; you see the streets were just as empty as a nigger’s head, and we had more than a street’s start of the guard. When we pulled up sharp in front of a large detached location, we could hear the guard coming, hell for leather. Kinjan explained to the chief that he had got to take us to the Sheikh right along, or he would investigate his interior. Now that old heathen was as swift a man at trapping an idea as ever I saw; he signed to us to get off our horses, and, with the end of the pistol working into the small of his back, he called out loudly in Moorish, and the gate was thrown open for us. ‘Then,’ said Mr Denver, flipping petulantly at his cigarette ash, ‘occurred a most annoying little affair. We were just passing quietly through the doorway, and the guard not more than a hundred yards away, coming like Jerusalem, when Torin pushed me aside, and stepped back to his horse. “Go on,” he said, “I’ve got another word to say to those fellows.” He was swinging himself into the saddle, when Kinjan drew a bead on the horse and brought the whole show to the ground. “Not so fast, ye suicidin’ divil,” he said, “bear ahand, Dick,” and before Torin could get his balance we lugged him through the door and shut it. ‘I’ve often regretted it since; ’twasn’t a neighbourly thing to do,’ said Mr Denver, thoughtfully, ‘for when a man wants his release real bad, why in thunder shouldn’t he have it?’ He lounged back in his seat with a far-away look in his sunken eyes, and I had to jog him with questions once or twice before he took up the word again.

‘Well, sir, the old chief had vamoosed down the street in the shindy, and there was only the porter, looking tolerably parti-coloured. When Torin found himself inside, instead of out, as he’d reckoned to be, he just folded his arms and shut his head, and I guess neither of us ever felt like alluding to that incident. Whether the porter took us for devils or not, I can’t say, but he was tarnation civil, specially when he felt the end of Kinjan’s pistol. As we passed through a stone archway into a courtyard, the house began to hum, and we could hear the guard behind us hammering at the gate we’d just come through. Kinjan pointed out to the porter in Moorish, and shooting-iron, that we were going right up to the Sheikh’s bedroom. The unfortunate coon said he reckoned his head was feeling loose, and kind of wobbly on his shoulders, but if we would ascend the steps he pointed to, we would find the Sheikh’s private apartments at the top; we thanked him, and he said his head felt real loose; but we took him along and went right there. He played us honest Injun, did that porter, and may be his woolly top’s on his shoulders yet; but I’m not betting on that,’ drawled Mr Denver, compassionately; and he stopped, turning his head to gaze out of the window.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s the dawn.’ And sure enough, far away behind us on the eastern horizon, a pale salmon streak slowly lengthened and spread; between us and it on the dim prairie lay a still, murky sheet of water. In front of the train, in its western wayfaring, the young slopes of the Rockies rose shadowy and faint in the growing light. As we stepped out on to the car platform the shrill tragic cry of the loon came floating to us, through the wreathing mist, from across the reedy pools. We watched the sun rise--and those who are watching the sun rise on the prairie and the flushing of the early mountain slopes in the reflected light, are not greatly given to talk. But when it was over, I turned to Dick Denver. His brown, lean face looked drawn and haggard, and he shaded his eyes with his hand. Presently he raised his hand to his hat, and taking it off, stood looking long and steadily at the now risen sun, and his lips moved. If I hadn’t known him for a hardened and notorious sinner, I should have said he was muttering a prayer. The impression was so strong upon me that I waited to speak until he had replaced his hat.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Well?’ he replied absently, his eyes still on the far horizon.

‘And then? What happened next? Did you see the Sheikh?’ I lamely jogged him.

‘What!’ his mind returned unwillingly. ‘You can’t in thunder want to hear any more after that?’ and he pointed eastwards.

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘but I most certainly do. I want to hear the rest of your yarn badly.’

‘Oh! well,’ he said, resignedly, ‘I guess there’s mighty little left to tell.’

‘The Sheikh,’ I jogged.

‘Oh, yes, the Sheikh,’ he went on in a hopelessly bored tone; ‘we saw him--he was a vūrry civil cuss, said it was all a mistake, and we were his dearest friends, and the English were his fathers and his brothers and all his relations, and I guess--oh, yes, I guess he sent us down to Mogador with a troop of cavalry, and--that’s all.’ He turned and went back into the smoking car. The oyster was closing fast.

‘Just one question,’ I hazarded; ‘what became of the other two men afterwards?’ He drew out a pack of cards, and began shuffling them, and I had to repeat the question.

‘Oh! I guess Kinjan would be alive,--why certainly he would be; unless he might have been caught up in a flame of fire, there wouldn’t be any other kind of a death for him,’ he said with the ghost of a smile.

‘And Torin?’

‘Gone out, I reckon,’ he said impassively.

The curt grimness of this remark jarred upon me, though why it should have, I don’t know; why expect sentiment from Dick Denver, who lived from day’s end to day’s end with his life in his hands?

‘In heaven’s name, why indeed?’ I said aloud to myself, as I turned once again before going through the door to my berth--Dick Denver was dealing a set of poker hands, and humming softly to himself. It was broad daylight, and the train still droned along. I was dead tired; and as I shut the door softly, and turned into my bunk, instead of an intelligent moral deduction from the story and its teller, all I could think of was the children’s grace, ‘Thank God for a good dinner.’

ACCORDING TO HIS LIGHTS

‘Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone; Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.’

--Adam Lindsay Gordon.

‘Prevention is better than cure,’ they say. Quite probably; anyway that must be the reason why our system of imprisonment is so popular, for whoever knew anyone cured by it?

What the exact state of Eugene Rattray’s moral sentiments were upon the day that he was released from Rochester Gaol, it would be difficult to say.

Judging from the following record, I very much doubt whether the term of his imprisonment had materially affected his view of things.

What was his offence? The law called it by an awkward name having consequences; these consequences the law applied to a man who had come back of his own accord from Australia to ‘face the music,’ as he phrased it. I myself could never see that the offence was more than a chance effect of circumstances upon a formed character. It seemed to me futile to punish a chance effect, seeing that it was the formed character you wanted to get at; but anyway, ‘they done it,’ as Huck Finn has it.

When I went to see him in Pentonville, where he was known as ‘that there tall _I_talian with the strong beard, wot carries ’is ’ead so ’igh’ (certainly Eugene’s origin was half Greek, but then it was _all_ Greek to the warders--hence the _I_talian), he talked cheerfully enough, poor chap, and without any bitterness as to the past. As to the future, he put it away; he had to ‘face the music,’ and in doing that he was hard enough put to it to ‘carry ’is ’ead ’igh’ in the present, without thinking of the future. I suppose he realised to a certain degree what it would be like to ‘come out,’ but not greatly, for he told me that he felt exactly like a wrecked man flung on a desert island, when, on a February morning, with his certificate of discharge in his pocket, he walked out of Rochester Gaol into the world.

So feeling, he strolled to the end of the street, and there the sense of having lived his life pressed so strongly upon him that he stood debating dazedly whether he would not go back, and ask to be taken in again. He even took some steps in the direction of the prison, till the absurdity of the idea presented itself to his mind. He shook himself like a dog, and, pulling up before a shop window, looked long and critically at his image in the plate-glass. It was a presentable reflection, tall, straight, well-clothed; he took off his hat, and replaced it quickly with a shudder; he registered a mental vow not to remove his gloves for some days; he gazed at his upper lip blankly, it did not seem to fit in with his surroundings; finally he turned out his pockets--one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence.

This pantomime he went through mechanically, with the feeling that he must do something rational, something practical, however trifling, to save him from thought; and the next moment, the black waves of despair came rolling in over his flimsy breakwater one after the other, driving him with head down and huge strides anywhere away from his fellows. _This_ was the tug; anything that had gone before was child’s play to _this_. Out into a world that could look, and point and whisper the words ‘Convicted felon!’ to which there was no answer. It had been different in there; what were the words but the common property of all? It was easy enough to hold one’s head up in that dim world; but outside it, where everything was so clear and bright, where the light was strong--he cursed the sun; where everyone could and would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his shame; where he was branded like any poor devil of a sheep on a bush run. He flung himself down in a field, and--well, there are some things that are best left alone, and the full tide of a strong man’s humiliation is one of them.

Two hours later, Eugene walked into Rochester Station, his brow knit and his head thrown back, and cursing his fate silently in his heart. He took a first single to London.

‘As long as I have a sou,’ he thought, ‘I’ll give it for the only luxury left me--solitude;’ and he jingled the few remaining coins in his pocket.

They say an habitual criminal turned loose again upon society goes back to the scene of his offence--there is also a saying about a dog. Eugene was not an habitual criminal, he was only a victim of circumstances, playing on a formed character, yet he experienced a vague desire to return to the circumstances. He has told me that on that short but divinely lonely journey he was able to think his position over rationally. Item--he had no money, but many relations and friends, possibly, nay probably, willing to help him. Item--he was of the leisured class, unfitted for, _and_--a large _and_--disqualified for anything, except the merest manual labour. Item--he was physically strong, but happily, so he had been told, not unlikely to die at any minute. Item--he loved the best of everything. Finally, item--he had no reputation, and therefore no self-respect. He cast about in agony for any foundation on which to base a self-respect, and he found one, whether good or bad, who knows? In the circumstances, to the man, the only one. ‘Face the music; keep your head up; society has dealt you hard measure, treat it with the contempt with which it will undoubtedly treat you; if you let go the plank of your pride for but a minute, you drown.’

Nobody knew that he was free; his discharge had come a month earlier than expected, for some reason connected with certain services to the internal economy of the dim world. So far, good. The practical sum of his reflections came to this: ‘_Let_ no one know, avoid acquaintances, work in the docks till you have earned a passage to the diggings, and then’--he thought almost cheerfully of the ‘then.’

He stepped out of the carriage serenely; after all it was only his friends and acquaintances that mattered, a tiny eddy in the huge whirlpool of existence; easy enough to keep out of that eddy. He was always of a sanguine disposition; it had been very hard, I remember, at school to persuade him that he would infallibly miss his remove. It is the sanguine people upon whom circumstances play their pranks; luckily the payment of the piper is not to them so severe a tax as it is to the others--the pendulum swings very evenly. He lunched, to fortify the reaction; he lunched well; it was the first meal he had had for fourteen months--those in the dim world did not count. A cup of coffee and a cigar completing the fortification, he walked out of the station and along the crowded streets, enjoying the stir and bustle around him.

Mechanically he moved westwards. Presently he found himself opposite one of his favourite haunts--he would go in and read the papers. He stopped at the steps with a jerk, the waves came rolling back on him again, he gripped his plank and strode on. Some vague idea of seeking the docks directed his steps eastwards again through the heart and centre of the hum. He caught himself gazing with an indifferent, almost a callous eye at places and objects which were as the very pivot upon which had turned the whirling wheel of circumstances that now forced him to walk among his fellows a branded outcast. As he passed the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, a grey-haired man, hurrying from the door, ran against him, and without apology hastened past westwards. Eugene, in no mood to be jostled, turned angrily, but something familiar in the man’s back arrested his attention; the close, humping set of the shoulders, the head set stiffly forward, the walk of a man who goes straight to his object, and that object, money. Eugene looked after him undecided, then crossed the street, and hurrying on, took up a position that enabled him to see the face.

As he thought--his Uncle Stephen; no mistaking the shark’s mouth between the close-cut white moustache and beard, the light grey eyes under thick lids, looking neither to the right nor left, mechanically summing up the price of the man’s coat in front of him.

‘Not a day older, the same amiable Uncle Stephen; you old beast!’ muttered Eugene between his clenched teeth. He followed him, at first mechanically, then with a steadily growing resolve.

The one man who had had it in his power in the first place to check, in the second to annul circumstances--and yet not a hand raised, not even the kink of the crooked, grasping little finger unbent. The words, in the saw-like voice, dinned in his ears:

‘You’re a black sheep, sir, I’ll do nothing for you.’

To-day he was bidding farewell to his identity and to his former life, but he meant to have a word with that man first; merely an expression of opinion. How he hated that back threading the mazes of Cheapside and Ludgate Hill, stopping every now and then before a picture or a china shop, ‘bargain’ in its every line.

‘Four miles a day, and seventy,’ thought Eugene disgustedly; ‘he’ll live to be a hundred.’ The back threaded its way unwearyingly through the Strand and Charing Cross, and down the now gas-lighted Piccadilly, towards the Park, unconscious of the tall shadow that, dogging it grimly, waited for a less crowded thoroughfare. So journeying, they neared Hyde Park corner, and the back wavered; a slight drizzling rain had begun to fall.

‘It’s a cab fare against the gloss of that hat,’ thought Eugene; ‘um! thought so; the fare has it,’ for the back had turned into the Park, and was being borne swiftly along under an umbrella in the direction of Kensington. Eugene turned up his coat collar, and crossing over to the opposite side, drew slightly nearer to the chase. As he intended the opinion to be a strong one, he preferred to have a fair field and no favour, and waited his chance quietly, knowing his Uncle’s usual route would lead him through a sufficiently deserted region.

To speak his mind!--A very empty satisfaction, but still, some sort of salve to the bitterness of his feelings.

A nursemaid and her charge pressing homewards in the dim distance were now the only people in sight, and Eugene was on the point of ranging alongside, when something white lying in the pathway where his Uncle had just passed caught his eye. Stooping, he picked it up, and stopped mechanically to examine the contents of the packet. The light was dim, and he read the heading words on the covering with difficulty: ‘Seabright Trust.’

He rubbed his eyes, and read it again. No mistake about the words: ‘Seabright Trust,’ the Trust of which himself and his respected Uncle were, or rather had been, the co-trustees; he tore open the covering.

Quite so; documents of importance, notes, gold, dropped, undoubtedly dropped by his Uncle. A fierce joy leapt up in his heart; he took one look at the fast disappearing figure, then drew quickly back into the shelter of some trees, and turned again to the contents of the packet.