Dr. Te Henare Rauparaha, the youngest member of the New Zealand House of Representatives, had made his mark, to a certain extent, upon the political life of the colony. Representing no party, and having no interests but those of the Maori race, he seldom rose to speak except on questions of native land-grants, or when similar matters affecting the Maori population were under discussion. Then his close, masterly reasoning and his natural eloquence gained him the most profound attention. Twice had he succeeded in inducing the House to throw out measures that would have perpetrated the grossest injustice upon certain Maori tribes; and ere long, without effort on his part, he became the tacit leader of a small but growing party that followed his arguments and resisted tooth and nail the tendency of certain Ministers to smooth the path of the land-grabber and company-promoter. Later on in the session his powers of debate, undeviating resolution, and determined opposition to Governmental measures that he regarded as injurious to the natives began to make Ministers uneasy; and although they cursed him in secret for a meddling fool and mad-brained enthusiast, they no longer attempted to ride rough-shod over him in the House, especially as the Labour members, who held the balance of power, entertained very friendly feelings towards the young man, and gave him considerable support. Therefore he was to be conciliated, and accordingly the curt nods of recognition, which were all that were once given him, were exchanged for friendly smiles and warm hand-grasps. But Rauparaha was not deceived. He knew that in a few evenings a certain Bill to absolutely dispossess the native holders of a vast area of land in the North Island would be read, and that its mover, who was a Government member, was merely the agent of a huge land-buying concern, which intended to re-sell the stolen property to the working people on magnanimous terms for village settlements; and although sorely afraid at heart that he would have to bear the brunt of the battle in opposing the Bill, the young doctor was hopeful that the Labour members would eventually come to his support when he exposed the secret motives that really had brought it into existence. But he did not know that the Labour members had already been “approached,” and had given promises not to support him and not to vote against the measure; otherwise some concessions regarding railway contracts, which the Government were prepared to make to the great Labour party, would be “matters for future consideration” only. And, therefore, rather than offend the Government, the honest men agreed to let Rauparaha “fight it out himself against the Government,” and “ratted” to a man. Every one of their number also expected to be appointed a Director of a Village Settlement, and were not disposed to fly in the face of a Providence that would give them each a permanent and comfortable billet, especially as their parliamentary career was doomed—not one of them had the faintest hope of re-election.
And so Dr. Rauparaha made the effort of his life, and the House listened to him in cold and stony silence. From the first he knew that he was doomed to failure, when he saw two or three of his once ardent admirers get up and sneak out of the Chamber; but, with a glance of contemptuous scorn at their retreating figures, he went on speaking. And then, at the close of an impassioned address, he held up in his right hand a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi.
“And this, honourable members, is the solemn bond and testimony of a great nation, the written promise of our Queen and her Ministers to these people that their lands and their right to live in their country should be kept inviolate! How has that promise been kept? Think of it, I pray you, and let your cheeks redden with shame, for the pages of this Treaty are blotted with the blackest treachery and stained a bloody red. And the Bill now before the House to rob and despoil some hundreds of native families of land that has been theirs before a white man ever placed his foot in the country is the most shameful and heartless act of all. I say 'act' because I recognise how futile is my single voice raised on behalf of my race to stay this bitter injustice. Rob us, then, but offer us no longer the ghastly mockery of parliamentary representation. Better for us all to die as our forefathers have done, rifle in hand, than perish of poverty and starvation on the soil that is our only inheritance.”
“Rot!” called out a short, fat man wearing a huge diamond ring and an excessively dirty white waistcoat. This was the Minister for Dredges and Artesian Bores, a gentleman who hoped to receive a C.M.G. ship for his clamorous persistency in advocating the claim of the colony to “'ave a Royel dook as its next Governor.”
“Shut up!” said an honourable member beside him. “Rauparaha doesn't talk rot. You do—always.”
The Minister muttered that he “didn't approve of no one a-usin' of inflammetery langwidge in the 'Ouse,” but made no further remark.
Rauparaha resumed his seat, the proposer of the Bill made his reply, and the House voted solidly for the measure.
That evening, as the young man sat in his chambers gazing moodily into the glowing embers of the fire, and thinking bitterly of the utter hopelessness of the cause that lay so near his heart, his door opened, and Captain Lionel Brewster, a member of the House and a favouredprotégéof the Government, walked in and held out his hand.
“How are you, doctor?” and he showed his white teeth in a smile of set friendliness. “I hear you are leaving Wellington at the close of the session for the North Island. I really am sorry, you know—deuced sorry—that your splendid speech was so quietly taken this afternoon. As a matter of fact, both ——— and ——— have the most friendly feeling towards you, and, although your political opponents in this matter, value and esteem you highly.”
“Thanks, Captain Brewster,” answered Rau-paraha coldly. He knew that this polished gentleman had been sent to him merely to smooth him down. Other land-grants had yet to come before the House, and Dr. Rauparaha, although he stood alone, was not an enemy to be despised or treated with nonchalance. One reason was his great wealth, the second his influence with a section of the Press that attacked the Government native policy with an unsparing pen. But, as a matter of fact, his visitor had a second and more personal motive.
However, he asked Brewster to be seated; and that gentleman, twirling his carefully-trimmed moustache, smiled genially, and said he should be delighted to stay and chat a while.
“By the way, though, doctor,” he said cordially, “my people—my aunt and cousin, you know—have heard so much of you that I have promised to take you down to our place for a few days if I can induce you to come. They were both in the gallery yesterday, and took the deepest interest in your speech. Now, my dear fellow, the House doesn't meet again till Tuesday. Come down with me to-morrow.”
“Thanks,” and the doctor's olive features flushed a deep red; “I will come. I think I have fired my last shot in Parliament, and intend to resign, and so do not care much whether I ever enter the House again. And I shall have much pleasure in meeting your aunt and cousin again; I was introduced to them some weeks ago.”
“So they told me,” and Brewster smiled sweetly again. “Then you won't come as a stranger. Now I must be off. I shall call for you after lunch tomorrow.”
As Lionel Brewster threw himself back in his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. “Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred savage into one's own family. However, he's really not a man to be ashamed of, so far as appearances go.... And I must humour her. Five thousand a year must be humoured.”
“Well, Helen, and what do you think of your savage?” said Mrs. Torringley to her niece, late the following evening, as she came to the door of Helen's room before she said good-night.
The girl was lying on a couch at the further end of the room, looking through the opened window out into the shadows of the night. The pale, clear-cut face flushed. “I like him very much, auntie. And I have been thinking.”
“Thinking of what, dear?”
“Wondering if my father ever thought, when he was leading his men against the Maoris, of the cruel, dreadful wrong he was helping to perpetrate.”
“'Cruel'! 'dreadful'! My dear child, what nonsense you talk! They were bloodthirsty savages.”
“Savages! True. But savages fighting for all that was dear to them—for their lands, their lives, their liberties as a people. Oh, auntie, when I read of the awful deeds of bloodshed that are even now being done in Africa by English soldiers, it makes me sicken. Oh, if I were only a man, I would go out into the world and——”
“My dear child,” said the older lady, with a smile, “you must not read so much of—of Tolstoy and other horrible writers like him. What would Lionel say if he thought you were going to be a Woman with a Mission? Good-night, dear, and don't worry about the Maoris. Many of them are real Christians nowadays, and nearly all the women can sew quite nicely.”
Outside on the broad gravelled walk the young doctor talked to himself as he paced quickly to and fro. “Folly, folly, folly. What interest can she have in me, except that I have native blood in my veins, and that her father fought our people in the Waikato thirty years ago?”
Brewster had gone back to town for a day or two; but as he bade his aunt and cousin goodbye, he warmly seconded their request to the doctor to remain at Te Ariri till he returned, although inwardly he swore at them both for a pair of “blithering idiots.” And as he drove away to the station he congratulated himself on the fact that while his fiancée had a “touch of the tar-brush,” as he expressed it, in her descent, her English bringing-up and society training under her worldly-minded but rather brainless aunt had led her to accept him as her future husband without difficulty.
For the next two days Dr. Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows. Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening with a strange pleasure to her low, tender voice, and gazing into the deep, dark eyes, that shone with softest lustre from out the pale, olive face, set in a wealth of wavy jet-black hair. For Helen Torringley was, like himself, of mixed blood. Her mother, who had died in her infancy, was a South American quadroon, born in Lima, and all the burning, quick passions and hot temperament of her race were revealed in her daughter's every graceful gesture and inflexion of her clear voice.
It was late in the afternoon, and Dr. Rauparaha, pushing his papers wearily away from him, rose from his seat. His work was finished. To-morrow he would bid these new friends goodbye—this proud English lady and her beautiful, sweet-voiced niece—the girl whose dark eyes and red lips had come into his day-dreams and visions of the night. And just then she came to the library door, carrying in her hand a portfolio.
“Are you very busy, Dr. Rauparaha?” she said, as she entered and stood before him.
“Busy! No, Miss Torringley. Are these the sketches you told me Colonel Torringley made when he was in New Zealand?” and as he extended his hand for the book, the hot blood surged to his sallow forehead.
“Yes, they were all drawn by my father. I found them about a year since in the bottom of one of his trunks. He died ten years ago.”
Slowly the young man turned them over one by one. Many of them were drawings of outposts, heads of native chiefs, &c. At last he came to one, somewhat larger than the others. It depicted the assault and capture of a Maoripah, standing on a hill that rose gradually from the margin of a reedy swamp. The troops had driven out the defenders, who were shown escaping across the swamp through the reeds, the women and children in the centre, the men surrounding them on all sides to protect them from the hail of bullets that swept down upon them from the heights above the captured fortress.
A shadow fell across the face of Dr. Rauparaha, and his hand tightened upon and almost crumpled the paper in his grasp; then he smiled, but with a red gleam in his dark eyes.
“'The assault on Maungatabu by the 18th Royal Irish,'” he read.
“The brave Irish,” he said, with a mocking smile, raising his head and looking intently into the pale face of the girl; “the brave Irish! So ardent for liberty themselves, such loud-mouthed clamourers to the world for justice to their country—yet how they sell themselves for a paltry wage to butcher women and children”—then he stopped suddenly.
“Pardon me, I forgot myself. I did not remember that your father was an officer of that regiment.”
She gave him her hand, and her eyes filled. “No, do not ask my pardon. I think it was horrible, horrible. How can such dreadful things be? I have heard my father say that that very victory filled him with shame.... He led the storming party, and when thepahwas carried, and he saw the natives escaping—the men surrounding the women and children—he ordered the 'Cease firing' to be sounded, but——” and her voice faltered.
“But——” and the lurid gleam in Rauparaha's eyes made her face flush and then pale again.
“The men went mad, and took no notice of him and the other two officers who were both wounded—the rest were killed in the assault. They had lost heavily, and were maddened with rage when they saw the Maoris escaping, and continued firing at them till they crossed the swamp, and hid in the long fern scrub on the other side.”
“And even then a shell was fired into them as they lay there in the fern, resting their exhausted bodies ere they crept through it to gain the hills beyond,” added the young man slowly.
“Yes,” she murmured, “I have heard my father speak of it. But it was not by his orders—he was a soldier, but not a cruel man. See, this next sketch shows the bursting of the shell.”
He took it from her hand and looked. At the foot of it was written, “The Last Shot at Maungatabu.”
His hand trembled for a moment; then he placed the drawing back in the portfolio, and with averted face she rose from the table and walked to the window.
For a moment or two she stood there irresolutely, and then with the colour mantling her brow she came over to him.
“I must askyourpardon now. I forgot that—that—that——”
“That I have Maori blood in my veins. Yes, I have, my father was a Pakeha Maori,{*} my mother a woman of one of the Waikato tribes. She died when I was very young.” Then, in a curiously strained voice, he said: “Miss Torringley, may I ask a favour of you? Will you give me that sketch?”
* A white man who had adopted Maori life and customs.
She moved quickly to the table, and untied the portfolio again.
“Which, Dr. Rauparaha? The last——”
“Yes,” he interrupted, with sudden fierceness, “the Last Shot at Maungatabu.”
She took it out and came over to him. “Take it, if you wish it; take them all, if you care for them. No one but myself ever looks at them.... And now, after what you have told me, I shall never want to look at them again.”
“Thank you,” he said, in softer tones, as he took the picture from her. “I only wish for this one. It will help to keep my memory green—when I return to my mother's people.”
“Ah,” she said, in a pained voice, “don't say that. I wish I had never asked you to look at it. I have read the papers, and know how the Maori people must feel, and I am sorry, oh! so sorry, that I have unthinkingly aroused what must surely be painful memories to you.”
“Do not think of it, Miss Torringley. Such things always will be. So long as we live, breathe, and have our being, so long will the strong oppress and slay the weak; so long will the accursed earth-hunger of a great Christian nation be synonymous for bloodshed, murder, and treachery; so long will she hold out with one hand to the children of Ham the figure of Christ crucified, and preach of the benefits of civilisation; while with the other she sweeps them away with the Maxim gun; so long will such things as the 'Last Shot at Maungatabu'—the murder of women and children, always be.”
With bated breath she listened to the end, and then murmured—
“It is terrible to think of, an unjust warfare. Were any women and children killed at Maungatabu?”
“Yes,” he almost shouted back, “many were shot as they crossed the swamp. And when they gained the fern two more were killed by that last shell—a woman and child—my mother and my sister!”
He turned away again to the window, but not so quickly but that he could see she was crying softly to herself, as she bent her face over the table.
Three days after, Mrs. Torringley showed her nephew a note that she had found on her niece's dressing-table:—
“Do not blame me. I cannot help it. I love him, and am goingaway with him to another country. Perhaps it is my mother'sblood. Wipe me out of your memory for ever.”
Years ago, in the days when the “highly irregular proceedings,” as naval officers termed them in their official reports, of the brigCarland other British ships engaged in the trade which some large-minded people have vouched for as being “absolutely above reproach,” attracted some attention from the British Government towards the doings of the gentlemanly scoundrels engaged therein, the people of Sydney used to talk proudly of the fleet of gunboats which, constructed by the New South Wales Government for the Admiralty, were built to “patrol the various recruiting grounds of the Fijian and Queensland planters and place the labour-traffic under the most rigid supervision.” The remark quoted above was then, as it is now, quite a hackneyed one, much used by the gallant officers who commanded the one-gun-one-rocket-tube craft aforementioned. Likewise, the “highly irregular proceedings” were a naval synonym for some of the bloodiest slaving outrages ever perpetrated, but which, however, never came to light beyond being alluded to as “unreliable and un-authenticated statements by discharged and drunken seamen who had no proper documentary evidence to support their assertions.”
The Australian slave-suppressing vessels were not a success. In the first place, they could not sail much faster than a mud-dredge. Poor Bob Randolph, the trader, of the Gilbert and Kingsmill Groups, employed as pilot and interpreter on board, once remarked to the officer commanding one of these wonderful tubs which for four days had been thrashing her way against the south-east trades in a heroic endeavour to get inside Tarawa Lagoon, distant ten miles (and could not do it), that “these here schooners ought to be rigged as fore-and-afters and called 'four-and-halfters; for I'll be hanged if this thing can do more than four and a half knots, even in half a gale of wind, all sail set and a smooth sea.” But if the “four-and-halfters,” as they were thenceforth designated in the Western Pacific, were useless in regard to suppressing the villainies and slaughter that then attended the labour trade, there was one instance in which one of the schooners and her captain did some good by avenging as cruel a murder as was ever perpetrated in equatorial Oceania.
One Jack Keyes was a trader on the island of Apiang, one of the Gilbert Group, recently annexed by Great Britain. He was very old, very quiet in his manner, and about the last kind of man one would expect to see earning his living as a trader among the excitable, intractable native race which inhabit the Line Islands. His fellow-trader, Bob Randolph, a man of tremendous nerve and resolution, only maintained his prestige among the Apiang natives by the wonderful control he had learnt to exercise over a naturally fiery temper and by taking care, when knocking down any especially insulting native “buck,” never to draw blood, and always to laugh. And the people of Apiang thought much of Te Matân Bob, as much as the inhabitants of the whole group—from Arorai in the south to Makin in the north—do to this day of quiet, spectacled Bob Corrie, of wild Maiana, who can twist them round his little finger without an angry word. Perhaps poor Keyes, being a notoriously inoffensive man, might have died a natural death in due time, but for one fatal mistake he made; and that was in bringing a young wife to the island.
A white woman was a rarity in the Line Islands. Certainly the Boston mission ship,Morning Star, in trying to establish the “Gospel according to Bosting—no ile or dollars, no missn'ry,” as Jim Garstang, of Drummond's Island, used to observe, had once brought a lady soul-saver of somewhat matured charms to the island, but her advent into the Apiangmoniapor town hall, carrying an abnormally large white umbrella and wearing a white solar topee with a green turban, and blue goggles, had had the effect of scaring the assembled councillors away across to the weather-side of the narrow island, whence none returned until the terrifying apparition had gone back to the ship. But this white woman who poor old Keyes married and brought with him was different, and the Apiang native, like all the rest of the world, is susceptible to female charms; andherappearance at the doorway of the old trader's house was ever hailed with an excited and admiring chorus of “Te boom te matân! Te boom te matân!” (The white man's wife.) But none were rude or offensive to her, although the young men especially were by no means chary of insulting the old man, who never carried a pistol in his belt.
One of these young men was unnecessarily intrusive. He would enter the trader's house on any available pretext, and the old man noticed that he would let his savage eyes rest upon his wife's figure in a way there was no mistaking. Not daring to tackle the brawny savage, whose chest, arms, and back were one mass of corrugations resulting from wounds inflicted by sharks' teeth spears and swords in many encounters, old Jack one day quietly intimated to his visitor that he was not welcome and told him to “get.” The savage, with sullen hate gleaming from cruel eyes that looked out from the mat of coarse, black hair, which, cut away in a fringe over his forehead, fell upon his shoulders, rose slowly and went out.
Early next morning old Keyes was going over to Randolph's house, probably to speak of the occurrence of the previous day, when his wife called him and said that some one was at the door waiting to buy tobacco.
“What have you to sell?” called out the old man.
“Te moe motu” (young drinking-coconuts), was the answer, and the old man, not recognising the voice as that of his visitor of the day before, went unsuspectingly to take them from the native's hand, when the latter, placing a horse-pistol to the trader's heart, shot him dead, with the savage exclamation—
“Now your wife is mine!”
The poor woman fled to Bob Randolph for safety, and, dreading to remain on the island, went away in a schooner to her home in New Zealand. Nearly a year passed, and then a man-of-war came and endeavoured to capture the murderer; but in vain, for the captain would not use force; and “talk” and vague threats the natives only laughed at. So the ship steamed away; and then the natives began to threaten Randolph, and talk meaningly to each other about his store being full ofte pakeaandte rom(tobacco and gin). A long, uneasy six months passed, and then the little “four-and-halfter” Renard, Commander ——— sailed into Apiang lagoon, and the naval officer told Randolph he had come to get the man and try him for the murder.
The commander first warped his vessel in as near as possible to the crowded village, and moored her with due regard to the effectiveness of his one big gun. Then, with Randolph as interpreter, negotiations commenced.
The old men of the village were saucy; the young men wanted a fight and demanded one. Randolph did his part well. He pointed out to the old men that unless they gave the man up, the long gun on the ship would destroy every house and canoe on the island, even if no one were killed. That meant much to them, whereas one man's life was but little. But, first, the natives tried cunning. One and then another wretched slave was caught and bound and taken off to the naval officer as the murderer, only to be scornfully rejected by Randolph and the captain. Then the officer's patience was exhausted. If the man who murdered Keyes was not surrendered in an hour he would open fire, and also hang some of the chiefs then detained on board as hostages.
Randolph's gloomy face quickened their fears. This captain could neither be frightened nor fooled. In half an hour the slayer of the trader was brought on board. The old men admitted their attempt at deception, but pleaded that the murderer was a man of influence, and they would rather the two others (who were absolutely innocent) were hanged than this one; but their suggestion was not acted upon. The trial was just and fair, but short, and then Randolph urged the captain to have the man executed on shore by being shot. It would impress the people more than hanging him on board. And hanging they regarded as a silly way of killing a man.
The naval officer had no relish for work of this nature, and when Randolph told him that the natives had consented to execute the prisoner in his (Randolph's) presence (and the captain's presence also if necessary) he, no doubt, felt glad. Bob Randolph then became M.C., and gave his instructions to the old men. The whole village assembled in front of Randolph's to see the show. An old carronade lying in the corner of the copra house was dragged out, cleaned, and loaded with a heavy blank charge. Then the prisoner, sullen and defiant to the last, but wondering at the carronade, was lashed with his back to the muzzle, and, at a signal from one of the old men, a firestick was applied to the gun. A roar, a rush of fragments through the air, and all was finished. Bob Randolph's fox-terrier was the only creature that seemed to trouble about making any search for the remnants of the body. Half an hour afterwards, as Bob was at supper, he came in and deposited a gory lump of horror at his master's feet.
When Captain Henry Charlton—generally known as “Bully Charlton”—stepped on shore at Townsville in North Queensland with his newly-wedded wife, his acquaintances stared at them both in profound astonishment. They had heard that he had married in Sydney, and from their past knowledge of his character expected to see a loudly-attired Melbourne or Sydney barmaid with peroxided hair, and person profusely adorned with obtrusive jewelry. Instead of this they beheld a tall, ladylike girl with a cold, refined face, and an equally cold and distant manner.
“Well, Ihaveseen some curious things in my time,” said Fryer, the American master of a Torres Straits pearling schooner, to the other men, as they watched Charlton and his wife drive away from the hotel, “but to think thatthatfellow should marry a lady! I wonder if she has the faintest idea of what an anointed scoundrel he is?”
“He's been mighty smart over it, anyway,” said a storekeeper named Lee. “Why, it isn't six months since Nina drowned herself. I suppose it's true, Fryer, that she did bolt with Jack Lester?”
The American struck his hand upon the table in hot anger. “That's a lie! I know Lester well, and Nina Charlton was as good a woman as ever breathed.”
“Well, you see, Fryer, we don't know as much as you do about the matter. But when Nina cleared out from her husband and Lester disappeared a day or two later and went no one knows where, it did look pretty queer.”
“And I tell you that Lester never saw Mrs. Charlton after the day he took it out of Charlton. He's a gentleman. And if you want to know where he is now I'll tell you. He's pearling at Thursday Island in Torres Straits. And Nina Charlton, thank God, is at rest. After the fight between Lester and her husband she ran away, and reached Port Denison almost dead from exposure in the bush. Shannon, of theLynndale, who had known her in her childhood, gave her a passage to Sydney. Two days before the steamer reached there she disappeared—jumped overboard in the night, I suppose.”
“Well, I'm sorry I repeated what is common gossip; but Charlton himself put the story about. And the papers said a lot about the elopement of the wife of a well-known plantation manager.'”
Fryer laughed contemptuously. “Just the thing Charlton would do. He's an infernal scoundrel. He told Lester that he'd make it warm for him—the beast. But I'm sorry for that sad-faced girl we saw just now. Fancy the existence she will lead with an unprincipled and drunken brute like Charlton! Good-bye; I'm off aboard. And look here, if ever any of you hear any more talk about Lester and Nina Charlton and repeats it in my hearing I'll do my best to make him sorry.”
Lester was the manager of a mine and quartz-crushing battery near Charlton's plantation on the Lower Burdekin River when he “took it out” of its owner. He was a quiet, self-possessed man of about thirty, and occasionally visited Charlton and his wife and played a game of billiards—if Charlton was sober enough to stand. Sometimes in his rides along the lonely bush tracks he would meet Mrs. Charlton and go as far as the plantation gates with her. She was a small, slenderly built woman, or rather girl, with dark, passionate eyes, in whose liquid depths Lester could read the sorrows of her life with such a man as Henry Charlton. Once as he rode beside her through the grey monotone of the lofty, smooth-barked gum-trees she told him that her father was an Englishman and her mother a Portuguese.
“I married Captain Charlton in Macao. He was in the navy, you know; and although it is only four years since I left my father's house I feel so old; and sometimes when I awake in the night I think I can hear the sound of the beating surf and the rustle of the nipa-palms in the trade wind. And, oh! I so long to see——” Her eyes filled with tears, and she turned her face away.
Perhaps Lester's unconsciously pitying manner to her whenever they met, and the utter loneliness of her existence on the Belle Grace Plantation made Nina Charlton think too much of the young mine manager, and, without knowing it, to eagerly look forward to their chance meetings.
One day as Lester was walking through Charlton's estate, gun in hand, looking for wild turkeys, he met her. She was seated under the widespreading branches of a Leichhardt-tree, and was watching some of her husband's labourers felling a giant gum.
“I came out to see it fall,” she said. “It is the largest tree on Belle Grace. And it is so dull in the house.” She turned her face away quickly.
Lester muttered a curse under his breath. He knew what she meant. Charlton had returned from Townsville the day before in a state of frenzy, and after threatening to murder his servants had flung himself upon a couch to sleep the sleep of drunkenness.
As the men hewed at the bole of the mighty tree Lester and Nina Charlton talked. She had spent the first year of her married life in Sydney, which was Lester's native town, and in a few minutes she had quite forgotten the tree, and was listening eagerly to Lester's account of his wanderings through the world, for his had been an adventurous career—sailor, South Sea trader, pearl-sheller, and gold miner in New Guinea and the Malayan Archipelago.
“And now here I am, Mrs. Charlton, over thirty years of age, and not any the richer for all my roving. Of course,” he added, with boyish candour, “I know when I'm well off, and I have a good billet here and mean to save money. And I intend to be back in Sydney in another fortnight.”
“But you will return to Queensland, will you not?” she said quickly.
Lester laughed. “Oh yes, I suppose I shall settle down here finally. But I'm going to Sydney to be married. Would you care to see my future wife's photograph? You see, Mrs. Charlton, you're the only lady I've ever talked to about her, and I should like you to see what she is like.”
She made no answer, and Lester in wondering ignorance saw that her face had paled to a deathly white and that her hands were trembling.
“You are ill, Mrs. Charlton. You must be getting a touch of fever. Let me take you home.”
“No,” she answered quickly; “let me stay here. I shall be better in a minute.” And then she began to sob passionately.
Charlton, awakening from his drunken sleep, looked at them from the window of the sitting-room. He hated his wife because she feared him, and of late had almost shuddered when he touched her. Picking up his whip from the table, he walked out of the house to where she was sitting.
“So this is your little amusement, is it?” he said savagely to Nina; “and this fellow is the cause of all my trouble. I might have known what to expect from a woman like you. Your Portuguese nature is too much for you. Go back to the house, and leave me to settle with your lover.”
The next instant Lester launched out and struck him on the mouth. He lay where he fell, breathing heavily, and when he rose to his feet he saw Lester carrying his wife, who had fainted, to the house.
Placing Mrs. Charlton in the care of a servant, Lester returned quickly to where Charlton, who was no coward, awaited him.
“You drunken scoundrel!” he burst out; “I've come back to settle up with you!”
And Lester did “settle up” to his heart's content, for he half-killed Charlton with his own whip.
A week later, however, Charlton had his first bit of revenge. Lester was dismissed, the directors of the mine being determined, as they said, to show their disapproval of his attack upon “a justice of the peace and one of their largest shareholders.”
Lester sat down and wrote to the “girl of his heart,” and told her that he could not see her for another year or so. “I have had to leave the mine, Nell, dear,” he said. “I won't tell you why—it would anger you perhaps. But it was not all my fault. However, I have decided what to do. I am going back to my old vocation of pearler in Torres Straits. I can make more money there than I could here.”
The following morning, as he was leaving Belle Grace, he heard that Mrs. Charlton had left her husband two days previously, and had made her way through the bush to Port Denison, from where she had gone to Sydney.
Soon after Lester had sailed for Torres Straits in Fryer's schooner, the owner of Belle Grâce Plantation received a telegram from Sydney telling him that his wife was dead—she had jumped overboard on the passage down. And, later on, Lester heard it also.
Lester was doing well, but wondering why Nellie March did not write. He little knew that Charlton was in Sydney working out his revenge. This he soon accomplished.
From the local postmistress at Belle Grace Charlton had learned the address of the girl Lester was to marry; and the first thing he did when he arrived in Sydney was to call upon her parents, and tell them that Lester had run away with his wife. And they—and Nellie March as well—believed his story when he produced some Queensland newspapers which contained the accounts of the “elopement.” He was a good-looking man, despite his forty years of hard drinking, and could lie with consummate grace, and Nellie, after her first feelings of shame and anger had subsided, pitied him, especially when he said that his poor wife was at rest now, and he had forgiven her. Before a month was out she married him.
Then Charlton, who simply revelled in his revenge, sent the papers containing the announcement of his marriage to Lester.
Lester took it very badly at first. But his was a strong nature, and he was too proud a man to write to the woman he loved and ask for an explanation. It was Charlton's money, of course, he thought. And as the months went by he began to forget. He heard of Charlton sometimes from the captains of passing vessels. He was drinking heavily they said, and whenever he came to town boasted of having “got even” with the man who had thrashed him. Lester set his teeth but said nothing, and in time even such gossip as this failed to disturb him. But he swore to give Charlton another thrashing when the opportunity came.
A year had come and gone, and Lester found himself in Sydney. He liked the free, open life among the pearlers, and intended to go back after a month or so of idleness in the southern city. One evening he strolled into the bar of Pfahlerts Hotel and ordered a whisky-and-soda. The girl he spoke to looked into his face for a moment and then nearly fainted—it was Nina Charlton!
“Give me your address,” she said quickly, as she put out her hand. “I will come and see you in an hour from now.”
She came, and in a few minutes told him her history since he had seen her last. The captain of theLynnialepitying her terror at the prospect of her husband following her, had concealed her when the steamer was near Sydney, and it was he who telegraphed to Charlton that his wife had disappeared on the passage and was supposed to have jumped or fallen overboard. And she told Lester that she knew of her husband's second marriage and knew who it was whom he had married.
What was she going to do? Lester asked.
Nothing, she said. She would rather die than let Charlton know she was alive. When she had saved money enough she would go back to her own people.
Lester walked home with her. At the door of the hotel she bade him good-night.
“We shall meet sometimes, shall we not?” she asked wistfully. “I have not a friend in all Sydney.”
“Neither have I,” he said, “and I shall only be too happy to come and see you.” She was silent a moment, then as she placed her hand in his she asked softly—
“Have you forgottenheraltogether?”
“Yes,” he answered, “I have. I did cut up a bit at first. But I'm over it now.”
Her fingers pressed his again, and then with an almost whispered “Good-night” she was gone.
Before a month was over Lester was honestly in love with her. And she knew it, though he was too honourable a man to tell her so. Then one day he came to her hurriedly.
“I'm going back to Torres Straits to-morrow,” he said. “I may be away for two years.... You will not forget me.”
“No,” she answered, with a sob, “I shall never forget you; you are all the world to me. And go now, dear, quickly; for I love you—and I am only a woman.”
But there is a kindly Providence in these things, for when Lester reached Thursday Island in Torres Straits he heard that Charlton was dead. He had been thrown from his horse and died shortly after. His widow, Lester also heard, had returned to Sydney.
So Lester made quick work. Within twenty-four hours he had sold his business and was on his way back to Sydney.
He dashed up in a cab to his old lodgings. In another hour he would see Nina. He had sent her a telegram from Brisbane, telling her when the steamer would arrive, and was in a fever of excitement. And he was late. As he tumbled his things about, his landlady came to the door with a letter.
“There was a lady called here, sir, a week ago, and asked for your address. I had just got your telegram saying you were coming back to-day, and she said she would write, and this letter came just now.”
Lester knew the handwriting. It was from Nellie. He opened it.