The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn Part 3

"No; but you are both gentlemen born, you see, and, therefore, ought to be in some way models for those who are not."

"Bosh," said the Doctor. "All this about Hamlyn's going out hare-hunting."

"I don't mind it once a-week," said the Vicar, ignoring the Doctor's interruption; "but FOUR TIMES is rather too much. And Hamlyn has been out four days this week. Twice with Wrefords, and twice with Holes. He can't deny it."

Jim couldn't, so he laughed. "You must catch him, sir," he said, "and give him a real good wigging. He'll mind you. But catch him soon, sir, or you won't get the chance. Doctor, do you know anything about New South Wales?"

"Botany Bay," said the Vicar abstractedly, "convict settlement in South Seas. Jerry Shaw begged the judge to hang him instead of sending him there. Judge wouldn't do it though; Jerry was too bad for that."

"Hamlyn and I are thinking of selling up and going there," said Jim.

"Do you know anything about it, Doctor?"

"What!" said the Doctor; "the mysterious hidden land of the great South Sea. Tasman's land, Nuyt's land, Leuwin's land, De Witt's land, any fool's land who could sail round it, and never have the sense to land and make use of it--the new country of Australasia. The land with millions of acres of fertile soil, under a splendid climate, calling aloud for some one to come and cultivate them. The land of the Eucalypti and the Marsupials, the land of deep forests and boundless pastures, which go rolling away westward, plain beyond plain, to none knows where. Yes; I know something about it."

The Vicar was "knocked all of a heap" at James' announcement, and now, slightly recovering himself, said--

"You hear him. He is going to Botany Bay. He is going to sell his estate, 250 acres of the best land in Devon, and go and live among the convicts. And who is going with him? Why, Hamlyn, the wise. Oh dear me.

And what is he going for?"

That was a question apparently hard to answer. If there was a reason, Jim was either unwilling or unable to give it. Yet I think that the real cause was standing there in the window, with a look of unbounded astonishment on her pretty face.

"Going to leave us, James!" she cried, coming quickly towards him.

"Why, whatever shall I do without you?"

"Yes, Miss Mary," said James somewhat huskily; "I think I may say that we have settled to go. Hamlyn has got a letter from a cousin of his who went from down Plymouth way, and who is making a fortune; and besides, I have got tired of the old place somehow, lately. I have nothing to keep me here now, and there will be a change, and a new life there. In short," said he, in despair of giving a rational reason, "I have made up my mind."

"Oh!" said Mary, while her eyes filled with tears, "I shall be so sorry to lose you."

"I too," said James, "shall be sorry to start away beyond seas and leave all the friends I care about save one behind me. But times are hard for the poor folks here now, and if I, as 'squire, set the example of going, I know many will follow. The old country, Mr. Thornton," he continued, "is getting too crowded for men to live in without a hard push, and depend on it, when poor men are afraid to marry for fear of having children which they can't support, it is time to move somewhere.

The hive is too hot, and the bees must swarm, so those that go will both better themselves, and better those they leave behind them, by giving them more room to work and succeed. It's hard to part with the old farm and the old faces now, but perhaps in a few years, one will get to like that country just as one does this, from being used to it, and then the old country will seem only like a pleasant dream after one has awoke."

"Think twice about it, James, my boy," said the Vicar.

"Don't be such an a.s.s as to hesitate," said the Doctor impatiently. "It is the genius of your restless discontented nation to go blundering about the world like buffaloes in search of fresh pasture. You have founded already two or three grand new empires, and you are now going to form another; and men like you ought to have their fingers in the pie."

"Well, G.o.d speed you, and Hamlyn too, wherever you go. Are you going home, Mr. Hawker?"

George, who hated James from the very bottom of his heart, was not ill-pleased to hear there would be a chance of soon getting rid of him.

He had been always half jealous of him, though without the slightest cause, and to-night he was more so than ever, for Mary, since she had heard of James' intended departure, had grown very grave and silent. He stood, hat in hand, ready to depart, and as usual, when he meant mischief, spoke in his sweetest tones.

"I am afraid I must be saying good evening, Mr. Thornton. Why, James,"

he added, "this is something quite new. So you are going to Botany without waiting to be sent there. Ha! ha! Well, I wish you every sort of good luck. My dear friend, Hamlyn, too. What a loss he'll be to our little society, so sociable and affable as he always is to us poor farmers' sons. You'll find it lonely there though. You should get a wife to take with you. Oh, yes, I should certainly get married before I went. Good night."

All this was meant to be as irritating as possible; but as he went out at the door he had the satisfaction to hear James' clear honest laugh mingling with the Vicar's, for, as George had closed the door, the Doctor had said, looking after him--

"Gott in Himmel, that young man has go a skull like a tom-cat."

This complimentary observation was lost on Mary, who had left the room with George. The Vicar looked round for her, and sighed when he missed her.

"Ah!" said he; "I wish he was going instead of you."

"So does the new colony, I'll be bound," added the Doctor.

Soon after this the party separated. When James and the Doctor stood outside the door, the latter demanded, "Where are you going?"

"To Sydney, I believe, Doctor."

"Goose. I mean now."

"Home."

"No, you ain't," said the Doctor; "you are going to walk up to Hamlyn's with me, and hear me discourse." Accordingly, about eleven o'clock, these two arrived at my house, and sat before the fire till half-past three in the morning; and in that time the Doctor had given us more information about New South Wales than we had been able to gather from ordinary sources in a month.

Chapter V

IN WHICH THE READER IS MADE ACCOMPLICE TO A MISPRISION OF FELONY.

Those who only know the river Taw as he goes sweeping, clear and full, past orchards and farmhouses, by woods and parks, and through long green meadows, after he has left Dartmoor, have little idea of the magnificent scene which rewards the perseverance of anyone who has the curiosity to follow him up to his granite cradle between the two loftiest eminences in the West of England.

On the left, Great Cawsand heaves up, down beyond down, a vast sheet of purple heath and golden whin, while on the right the lofty serrated ridge of Yestor starts boldly up, black against the western sky, throwing a long shadow over the wild waste of barren stone at his feet.

Some Scotchmen, perhaps, may smile at my applying the word "magnificent" to heights of only 2,100 feet. Yet I have been among mountains which double Ben Nevis in height, and, with the exception of the Murray Gates in Australia, and a glen in Madeira, whose name I have forgotten, I have never seen among them the equal of some of the northern pa.s.ses of Dartmoor for gloomy magnificence. For I consider that scenery depends not so much on height as on abruptness.

It is an evil, depressing place. Far as the eye can reach up the glen and to the right it is one horrid waste of grey granite; here and there a streak of yellow gra.s.s or a patch of black bog; not a tree nor a shrub within the sky-line. On a hot summer's day it is wearisome enough for the lonely angler to listen to the river crawling lazily through the rocks that choke his bed, mingled with the clocking of some water-moved boulder, and the chick-chick of the stonechat, or the scream of the golden plover overhead. But on a wild winter's evening, when day is fast giving place to night, and the mist shrouds the hill, and the wild wind is rus.h.i.+ng hoa.r.s.e through tor and crag, it becomes awful and terrible in the extreme.

On just such a night as that, at that time when it becomes evident that the little light we have had all day is about to leave us, a lonely watcher was standing by the angry swelling river in the most desolate part of the pa.s.s, at a place where a vast confusion of formless rocks crosses the stream, torturing it into a hundred boiling pools and hissing cascades.

He stood on the summit of a cairn close to the river, and every now and then, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked eastward through the driving rain, as though expecting some one who came not. But at length, grown tired of watching, he with an oath descended to a sheltered corner among the boulders, where a smouldering peat-fire was giving out more smoke than heat, and, crouching over it, began to fan the embers with his hat.

He was a somewhat short, though powerful man, in age about forty, very dark in complexion, with black whiskers growing half over his chin. His nose was hooked, his eyes were black and piercing, and his lips thin.

His face was battered like an old sailor's, and every careless, unstudied motion of his body was as wild and reckless as could be.

There was something about his TOUTE ENSEMBLE, in short, that would have made an Australian policeman swear to him as a convict without the least hesitation.

There were redeeming points in the man's face, too. There was plenty of determination, for instance, in that lower jaw, and as he bent now over the fire, and his thoughts wandered away to other times and places, the whole appearance of the man seemed to change and become milder and kindlier; yet when some slight noise makes him lift his head and look round, there is the old expression back again, and he looks as reckless and desperate as ever; what he is is more apparent, and the ghost of what he might have been has not wholly departed.

I can picture to myself that man scowling behind the bayonet line at Maida, or rapidly and coolly serving his gun at Trafalgar, helping to win the dominion of all seas, or taking his trick at the helm through arctic iceblocks with Parry, or toiling on with steadfast Sturt, knee-deep in the sand of the middle desert, patiently yet hopelessly scanning the low quivering line of the north-west horizon.

In fifty situations where energy and courage are required, I can conceive that man a useful citizen. Yet here he is on the lone moor, on the winter's night, a reckless, cursing, thrice convicted man. His very virtues,--his impatient energy and undeniable courage,--his greatest stumbling-blocks, leading him into crimes which a lazy man or a coward would have shrunk from. Deserted apparently by G.o.d and man, he crouched there over the low fire, among his native rocks, and meditated fresh villanies.

He had been transported at eighteen for something, I know not what, which earned transportation in those days, and since then his naturally violent temper, aggravated instead of being broken by penal discipline, had earned him three fresh convictions in the colony. From the last of these sentences he had escaped, with a cunning and address which had baffled the vigilance of the Sydney police, good as they were, and had arrived home, two years before this time, after twentyone years'

absence, at his native village in the moor.

None there knew him, or even guessed who he was. His brother, a small farmer, who would have taken him to his heart had he recognised him, always regarded him as a suspicious stranger; and what cut him deeper still, his mother, his old, half-blind, palsied mother, whose memory he had in some sort cherished through the horrors of the hulk, the convict-s.h.i.+p, the chaingang, and the bush, knew him not. Only once, when he was speaking in her presence, she said abruptly,--