"AUTHOR! AUTHOR!"

"AUTHOR! AUTHOR!"This story has to do with two men and a play, instead of a woman, and it is none of mine. I had it from an old gentleman I love: only he ought to have written it himself. This, however, he will never do, having known intimately in his young days one of the two men concerned. But I have his leave to repeat the story more or less as he told it—if I can. And I am going to him for my rebuke—when I dare."You want to hear the story of poor old Pharazyn and his play? I'm not going to tell it you...."Ah, well! My recollection of the matter dates from one summer's night at my old rooms in the Adelphi, when he spoilt my night's work by coming in flushed with an idea of his own. I remember banging the drawer into which I threw my papers to lock them away for the night; but in a few minutes I had forgotten my unfinished article, and was glad that Pharazyn had come. We were young writers, both of us; and, let me tell you, my good fellow, young writing wasn't in those days what it is now. I am thinking less of merit than of high prices, and less of high prices than of cheap notoriety. Neither of us had everhad our names before the public—not even in the bill of an unread and unreadable magazine. No one cared about names in my day, save for the half-dozen great ones that were then among us; so Pharazyn's and mine never got into the newspapers, though some of them used our stuff."In a manner we were rivals, for we were writing the same sort of thing for the same sort of publications, and that was how we had come together; but never was rivalry friendlier, or mutually more helpful. Our parts were strangely complementary: if I could understand for the life of me the secret of collaboration, I should say that I might have collaborated with Pharazyn almost ideally. I had the better of him in point of education, and would have turned single sentences against him for all he was worth; and I don't mind saying so, for there my superiority ended. When he had a story to tell he told it with a swing and impetus which I coveted him, as well I might to this day; and if he was oftener without anything to write about, his ideas would pay twenty shillings in the pound, in strength and originality, where mine made some contemptible composition in pence. That is why I have been a failure at fiction—oh, yes, I have! That is why Pharazyn would have succeeded, if only he had stuck to plain ordinary narrative prose."The idea he was unable to keep within his own breast, on the evening of which I am telling you, was as new, and simple, and dramatic as any that everintoxicated the soul of story-teller or made a brother author green with envy. I can see him now, as I watched him that night, flinging to and fro with his quick, nervous stride, while he sketched the new story—bit by bit, and often the wrong bit foremost; but all with his own flashing vividness, which makes me so sorry—so sorry whenever I think of it. At moments he would stand still before the chair on which I sat intent, and beat one hand upon the other, and look down at me with a grand, wondering smile, as though he himself could hardly believe what the gods had put into his head, or that the gift was real gold, it glittered so at first sight. On that point I could reassure him. My open jealousy made me admire soberly. But when he told me, quite suddenly, as though on an afterthought, that he meant to make a play of it and not a story, I had the solid satisfaction at that moment of calling him a fool."The ordinary author of my day, you see, had a certain timorous respect for the technique of the stage. It never occurred to us to make light of those literary conventions which it was not our business to understand. We were behind you fellows in every way. But Pharazyn was a sort of forerunner: he said that any intelligent person could write a play, if he wanted to, and provided he could write at all. He said his story was a born play; and it was, in a way; but I told him I doubted whether he could train it up with his own hand into a good acting one. I knewI was right. He had neither the experience nor the innate constructive faculty, one or other of which is absolutely necessary for the writing of possible plays. I implored him to turn the thing into a good dramatic novel, and so make his mark at one blow. But no; the wilful fit was on him, and one had to let it run its course. Already he could see and hear his audience laughing and crying, so he said, and no doubt he had further visions of his weekly cheque. Anyhow, we sat up all night over it, arguing, smoking, and drinking whisky until my windows overlooking the river caught the rising sun at an angle. Then I gave in, for poor old Pharazyn was more obstinate than ever, though he thanked me with the greatest good temper for my well-meant advice."'And look here, my boy,' says he, as he puts on his hat, 'you shan't hear another word about this till the play's written; and you are to ask no questions. Is that a bargain? Very well, then. When I've finished it—down to the very last touches—youshall come and sit up all night withme, and I'll read you every word. And by George, old chap, if they give me a call the first night, and want a speech—and I see you sitting in your stall, like a blessed old fool as you are—by George, sir, I'll hold up you and your judgment to the ridicule of the house, so help me Himmel!'"Well, I am coming to that first night presently. Meanwhile, for the next six months I saw very little of Pharazyn, and less still in the new year. He seldomcame to my rooms now; when he did I could never get him to stay and sit up with me; and once when I climbed up to his garret (it was literally that) he would not answer me, though I could smell his pipe through the key-hole in which he'd turned the key. Yet he was perfectly friendly whenever we did meet. He said he was working very hard, and indeed I could imagine it; his personal appearance, never his strong point, being even untidier, not to say seedier, than of old. He continued to send me odd magazines in which his stuff happened to appear, or, occasionally a proof for one's opinion and suggestions; we had done this to each other all along; but either I did not think about it, or somehow he led me to suppose that his things were more or less hot from the pen, whereas many of mine had been written a twelve-month before one saw them in type. One way or another I gathered that he was at work in our common groove, and had shelved, for the present at all events, his proposed play, about which you will remember I had undertaken to ask no questions."I was quite mistaken. One night in the following March he came to me with a haggard face, a beaming eye, and a stout, clean manuscript, which he brought down with a thud on my desk. It was the play he had sketched out to me eight or nine months before. I was horrified to hear he had been at work upon it alone from that night to this. He actually boasted that he hadn't written another line in all thattime, only each line of his play some ten times over."I recollect looking curiously at his shabby clothes, and then reminding him that it was at his place, not mine, I was to have heard him read the play: and how he confessed that he had no chair for me there—that his room was practically dismantled—that he had sacrificed everything to the play and would do so again. I was extremely angry. I could have helped him so easily, independent as I was of the calling I loved to follow. But there was about him always an accursed unnecessary independence, which has since struck me—and I think I may say so after all these years—as the mark of a rather humble, deadly honest origin."He read me the play, and I cried over the third act, and so did he. I thought then, and still think, that there was genius in that third act—it took you off your feet. And to me, certainly, it seemed as if the piece must act as well as it read, though indeed, as I took care to say and to repeat, my opinion was well-nigh valueless on that point. I only knew that I could see the thing playing itself, as I walked about the room (for this time I was the person who was too excited to sit still), and that was enough to make one sanguine. I became as enthusiastic about it as though the work were mine (which it never, never would or could have been), yet I was unable to suggest a single improvement, or to have so much as a finger-tip in thepie. Nor could I afterwards account for its invariable reception at the hands of managers, whose ways were then unknown to me. That night we talked only of one kind of reception. We were still talking when once more the sun came slanting up the river to my windows; you could hardly see them for tobacco-smoke, and this time we had emptied a bottle to the success of Pharazyn's piece."Oh, those nights—those nights once in a way! God forgive me, but I'd sacrifice many things to be young again and feel clever, and to know the man who would sit up all night with me to rule the world over a bottle of honest grog. In the light of after events I ought perhaps to be ashamed to recall such a night with that particular companion. But it is ridiculous, in my opinion, to fit some sort of consequence to every little solitary act; and I shall never admit that poor Pharazyn's ultimate failing was in any appreciable degree founded or promoted by those our youthful full-souled orgies. I know very well that afterwards, when his life was spent in waylaying those aforesaid managers, in cold passages, on stage doorsteps, or in desperation under the public portico on the street; and when a hundred snubs and subterfuges would culminate in the return of his manuscript, ragged but unread; I know, and I knew then, that the wreck who would dodge me in Fleet Street, or cut me in the Strand, had taken to his glass more seriously and more steadily than a man should. But I am not surethat it matters much—much, you understand me—when that man's heart is broken."The last words I was ever to exchange with my poor old friend ring in my head to this day, whenever I think of him; and I can repeat them every one. It was years after our intimacy had ceased, and when I only knew that he had degenerated into a Fleet Street loafer of the most dilapidated type, that I caught sight of him one day outside a theatre. It was the theatre which was for some years a gold-mine to one Morton Morrison, of whom you may never have heard; but he was a public pet in his day, and his day was just then at its high noon. Well, there stood Pharazyn, with his hands in his pockets and a cutty-pipe sticking out between his ragged beard and moustache, and his shoulders against the pit door, so that for once he could not escape me. But he wouldn't take a hand out of his pocket to shake mine; and when I asked him how he was, without thinking, he laughed in my face, and it made me feel cruel. He was dreadfully emaciated and almost in rags. And as I wondered what I ought to do, and what to say next, he gave a cough, and spat upon the pavement, and I could see the blood."I don't know what you would have done for him, but for all I knew what had brought him to this, I could think of nothing but a drink. It was mid-winter, and I tell you the man was in rags. I felt that ifI could get him to a bar he might eat something, too, and that I should lay such a hold of him this time as I need never again let go. Judge of my surprise when he flatly refused to come with me even for a drink."'Can't you see?' he said in his hollow voice. 'There'll be a crowd here directly, and I want the best seat in the pit—the best in the house. I've been going dry for it these two days, and I'm going dry till I've seen the piece. No, I've been here an hour already, and I'm still the first; but I mightn't be when I came back, and I'm not going to risk it, thanks all the same.'"By this I had remembered that Morton Morrison was to re-open that night with a new piece. Indeed, I ought not to have forgotten that, seeing that I had my order about me somewhere, and it meant a column from my pen between twelve and one in the morning. But this sudden sorry meeting had put all other thoughts out of my head."'My dear fellow,' I said, with a sort of laugh, 'are you a first-nighter, too?'"'Only at this theatre.'"He looked me queerly in the face."'You admire Morrison as much as all that?'"'I love him!'"I suppose my eyes thawed him, though God knows how hard I was trying not to hurt him with pitying looks. At all events he began to explain himselfof his own accord, in one bitter, swift, impetuous outburst."'Look here,' he said, with his hoarse voice lowered: 'I hoped never to see your face again. I hoped you'd never see mine. But now you are here, don't go this minute, and I'll tell you why I think so much of Morton Morrison. I don't know him, mind you—he doesn't know me from Adam—but once long ago I had something to do with him. And God bless him, but damn every other manager in London, for he was the only one of the lot to give me a civil hearing and a kind word!'"I knew what he was talking about, and he knew that I knew, for we had understood one another in the old days."'I took it to him last of all,' he went on, wiping his damp lips with his hand. 'When I began hawking it about he was an unknown man; when his turn came he was here. He let me read it to him. Then he asked me to leave it with him for a week; and when I went back to him, he said what they'd all said—that it would never act. But Morton Morrison said it nicely. And when he saw how it cut me up into little bits, he got me to tell him all about everything; and then he persuaded me to burn the play, instead of ruining my life for it; and I burnt it in his dressing-room fire, but the ruin was too far gone to mend. I wrote that thing with my heart's blood—old man, you know I did! And none of them would think of it—myGod! But Morrison was good about it—he's a good soul—and that's why you'll see me at every first night of his until the drink does me.'"I had not followed him quite to the end. One thing had amazed me too much."'You burnt your play,' I could only murmur, 'when it would have turned into such a novel! Surely you have some draft of it still?'"'I burnt the lot when I got home,' says Pharazyn, 'and before long I shall join 'em and burn too.'"I had nothing to answer to that, and was, besides, tenacious of my point. 'I don't think much of the kindness that makes one man persuade another to burn his work and throw up the sponge,' I said, with a good deal of indignation, for I did feel wroth with that fellow Morrison—a bread-and-butter drawing-room actor whose very vogue used to irritate me."'Then what do you think of this?' asked Pharazyn, as he dipped a hand within his shabby coat, and cautiously unclenched it under my nose."'It's a five-pound note.'"'I know; but wasn'tthatkind, then?'"'So Morrison gave you this!' I said."Two or three persons had stopped to join us at the pit door, and Pharazyn hastily put the note back in his pocket. As he did so, his dreadfully shabby condition gave my heart a fresh cut."'Are you never going to spend that?' I asked ina whisper; and in a whisper he answered, 'Never. It's all my play has brought me—all. It was given me as a charity, but I took it as my earnings—my earnings for all the work and waiting, and flesh and blood and self-respect, that one thing cost me. Spend it? Not I. It will bury me as decently as I deserve.'"We could converse no more. And the presence of other people prevented me from giving him my overcoat, though I spoke of it into his ear, begging and imploring him to come away and take it while there was still time for him to slip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my cleverest friend."I saw him next the moment I entered the theatre that evening, and I nodded my head to him, which he rebuked with the slightest shake of his own. So I looked no more at him before the play began, comprehending that he desired me not to do so. The temptation, however, was too strong to go on resisting, for while Pharazyn was in the very centre of the front row in the pit, I was at one end of the last row of the stalls; and I was very anxious about him, wanting to make sure that he was there and not going toescape me again, and nervous at having him out of my sight for five minutes together."Thus I know more about the gradual change which came over Pharazyn's poor face, as scene followed scene, than of the developments and merits of those scenes themselves. My mind was in any case running more on my lost friend than on the piece; but it was not till near the end of the first act that the growing oddity of his look first struck me."His eyebrows were raised; it was a look of incredulity chiefly; yet I could see nothing improbable in the play as far as it had gone. I was but lightly attending, for my own purposes, as you youngsters skim your betters for review; but thus far the situation struck me as at once feasible and promising. Also it all seemed somehow familiar to me; I could not say just where or why, for watching Pharazyn's face. And it was his face that told me at last, in the second act. By God, it was his own play!"It was Pharazyn's play, superficially altered all through, nowhere substantially; but the only play for me, when I knew that, was being acted in the front row of the pit, and not on the stage, to which I had turned the side of my head. I watched my old friend's face writhe and work until it stiffened in a savage calm; and watching, I thought of the 'first night' he had pictured jovially in the old days, when the bare idea of the piece was bursting his soul; andthinking, I wondered whether it could add a drop to his bitterness to remember that too."Yet, through all my thoughts, I was listening, intently enough now. And in the third act I heard the very words my friend had written: they had not meddled with his lines in the great scene which had moved us both to tears long ago in my rooms. And this I swear to, whether you believe it or no—that at the crisis of that scene, which was just as Pharazyn made it, the quiet ferocity transfiguring his face died suddenly away, and I saw it shining as once before with the sweetest tears our eyes can shed—the tears of an artist over his own work."And when the act was over he sat with his head on his hand for some minutes, drinking in the applause, as I well knew; then he left his seat and squeezed out on my side of the house, and I made sure he was coming to speak to me over the barrier, and got up to speak to him; but he would not see me, but stood against the barrier with a face as white and set as chiselled marble."What followed on the first fall of the curtain I can tell you as quickly as it happened. Louder call for an author I never heard, and I turned my eyes to the stage in my intense curiosity to see who would come forward; for the piece had been brought out anonymously; and I divined that Morrison himself was about to father it. And so he did: but as the lie passed his lips, and in the interval before the applause—thebreathless interval between flash and peal—the lie was given him in a roar of fury from my left: there was a thud at my side, and Pharazyn was over the barrier and bolting down the gangway towards the stage. I think he was near making a leap for the footlights and confronting Morrison on his own boards; but the orchestra came between, and the fiddlers rose in their places. Then he turned wildly to us pressmen, and I will say he had our ear, if not that of the whole house besides, for the few words he was allowed to utter."'Gentlemen!' he cried at the top of his voice—'Gentlemen, I'm one of you! I'm a writing man like yourselves, and I wrote this play that you've seen. That man never wrote it at all—I wrote it myself! That man has only altered it. I read it to him two years ago—two years ago, gentlemen! He kept it for a week, and then got me to burn it as rubbish—when he had made a copy of it! And he gave me this, gentlemen—this—this—that I give him back!'"It was a matter of only a few seconds, but not till my own last hour shall I forget Morrison's painted face on the stage, or that sweating white one beneath the boxes; or the fluttering from Pharazyn's poor fingers of the five-pound note he had treasured for two years; or the hush all over the house until the first hand was laid upon his dirty collar."'What!' he screamed, 'do none of you believeme? Will none of you stand by me—isn't there a man—not one man——'"And they threw him out with my name on his lips. And I followed, and floored a brute who was handling him roughly. And nothing happened to me—because of what happened to Pharazyn."The dear old boy sat silent, his grey head on his hand. Presently he went on, more to himself than to me: "What could I do? What proof had I? He had burnt them every one. And as long as the public would stand him, Morrison kept his good name at least. And that play was his great success!"I ventured gently to inquire what had happened to Pharazyn."He died in my arms," my old friend cried, throwing up his head with an oath and a tear. "He died in a few minutes outside the theatre. I could hear them clapping after he was dead—clapping his piece."

This story has to do with two men and a play, instead of a woman, and it is none of mine. I had it from an old gentleman I love: only he ought to have written it himself. This, however, he will never do, having known intimately in his young days one of the two men concerned. But I have his leave to repeat the story more or less as he told it—if I can. And I am going to him for my rebuke—when I dare.

"You want to hear the story of poor old Pharazyn and his play? I'm not going to tell it you....

"Ah, well! My recollection of the matter dates from one summer's night at my old rooms in the Adelphi, when he spoilt my night's work by coming in flushed with an idea of his own. I remember banging the drawer into which I threw my papers to lock them away for the night; but in a few minutes I had forgotten my unfinished article, and was glad that Pharazyn had come. We were young writers, both of us; and, let me tell you, my good fellow, young writing wasn't in those days what it is now. I am thinking less of merit than of high prices, and less of high prices than of cheap notoriety. Neither of us had everhad our names before the public—not even in the bill of an unread and unreadable magazine. No one cared about names in my day, save for the half-dozen great ones that were then among us; so Pharazyn's and mine never got into the newspapers, though some of them used our stuff.

"In a manner we were rivals, for we were writing the same sort of thing for the same sort of publications, and that was how we had come together; but never was rivalry friendlier, or mutually more helpful. Our parts were strangely complementary: if I could understand for the life of me the secret of collaboration, I should say that I might have collaborated with Pharazyn almost ideally. I had the better of him in point of education, and would have turned single sentences against him for all he was worth; and I don't mind saying so, for there my superiority ended. When he had a story to tell he told it with a swing and impetus which I coveted him, as well I might to this day; and if he was oftener without anything to write about, his ideas would pay twenty shillings in the pound, in strength and originality, where mine made some contemptible composition in pence. That is why I have been a failure at fiction—oh, yes, I have! That is why Pharazyn would have succeeded, if only he had stuck to plain ordinary narrative prose.

"The idea he was unable to keep within his own breast, on the evening of which I am telling you, was as new, and simple, and dramatic as any that everintoxicated the soul of story-teller or made a brother author green with envy. I can see him now, as I watched him that night, flinging to and fro with his quick, nervous stride, while he sketched the new story—bit by bit, and often the wrong bit foremost; but all with his own flashing vividness, which makes me so sorry—so sorry whenever I think of it. At moments he would stand still before the chair on which I sat intent, and beat one hand upon the other, and look down at me with a grand, wondering smile, as though he himself could hardly believe what the gods had put into his head, or that the gift was real gold, it glittered so at first sight. On that point I could reassure him. My open jealousy made me admire soberly. But when he told me, quite suddenly, as though on an afterthought, that he meant to make a play of it and not a story, I had the solid satisfaction at that moment of calling him a fool.

"The ordinary author of my day, you see, had a certain timorous respect for the technique of the stage. It never occurred to us to make light of those literary conventions which it was not our business to understand. We were behind you fellows in every way. But Pharazyn was a sort of forerunner: he said that any intelligent person could write a play, if he wanted to, and provided he could write at all. He said his story was a born play; and it was, in a way; but I told him I doubted whether he could train it up with his own hand into a good acting one. I knewI was right. He had neither the experience nor the innate constructive faculty, one or other of which is absolutely necessary for the writing of possible plays. I implored him to turn the thing into a good dramatic novel, and so make his mark at one blow. But no; the wilful fit was on him, and one had to let it run its course. Already he could see and hear his audience laughing and crying, so he said, and no doubt he had further visions of his weekly cheque. Anyhow, we sat up all night over it, arguing, smoking, and drinking whisky until my windows overlooking the river caught the rising sun at an angle. Then I gave in, for poor old Pharazyn was more obstinate than ever, though he thanked me with the greatest good temper for my well-meant advice.

"'And look here, my boy,' says he, as he puts on his hat, 'you shan't hear another word about this till the play's written; and you are to ask no questions. Is that a bargain? Very well, then. When I've finished it—down to the very last touches—youshall come and sit up all night withme, and I'll read you every word. And by George, old chap, if they give me a call the first night, and want a speech—and I see you sitting in your stall, like a blessed old fool as you are—by George, sir, I'll hold up you and your judgment to the ridicule of the house, so help me Himmel!'

"Well, I am coming to that first night presently. Meanwhile, for the next six months I saw very little of Pharazyn, and less still in the new year. He seldomcame to my rooms now; when he did I could never get him to stay and sit up with me; and once when I climbed up to his garret (it was literally that) he would not answer me, though I could smell his pipe through the key-hole in which he'd turned the key. Yet he was perfectly friendly whenever we did meet. He said he was working very hard, and indeed I could imagine it; his personal appearance, never his strong point, being even untidier, not to say seedier, than of old. He continued to send me odd magazines in which his stuff happened to appear, or, occasionally a proof for one's opinion and suggestions; we had done this to each other all along; but either I did not think about it, or somehow he led me to suppose that his things were more or less hot from the pen, whereas many of mine had been written a twelve-month before one saw them in type. One way or another I gathered that he was at work in our common groove, and had shelved, for the present at all events, his proposed play, about which you will remember I had undertaken to ask no questions.

"I was quite mistaken. One night in the following March he came to me with a haggard face, a beaming eye, and a stout, clean manuscript, which he brought down with a thud on my desk. It was the play he had sketched out to me eight or nine months before. I was horrified to hear he had been at work upon it alone from that night to this. He actually boasted that he hadn't written another line in all thattime, only each line of his play some ten times over.

"I recollect looking curiously at his shabby clothes, and then reminding him that it was at his place, not mine, I was to have heard him read the play: and how he confessed that he had no chair for me there—that his room was practically dismantled—that he had sacrificed everything to the play and would do so again. I was extremely angry. I could have helped him so easily, independent as I was of the calling I loved to follow. But there was about him always an accursed unnecessary independence, which has since struck me—and I think I may say so after all these years—as the mark of a rather humble, deadly honest origin.

"He read me the play, and I cried over the third act, and so did he. I thought then, and still think, that there was genius in that third act—it took you off your feet. And to me, certainly, it seemed as if the piece must act as well as it read, though indeed, as I took care to say and to repeat, my opinion was well-nigh valueless on that point. I only knew that I could see the thing playing itself, as I walked about the room (for this time I was the person who was too excited to sit still), and that was enough to make one sanguine. I became as enthusiastic about it as though the work were mine (which it never, never would or could have been), yet I was unable to suggest a single improvement, or to have so much as a finger-tip in thepie. Nor could I afterwards account for its invariable reception at the hands of managers, whose ways were then unknown to me. That night we talked only of one kind of reception. We were still talking when once more the sun came slanting up the river to my windows; you could hardly see them for tobacco-smoke, and this time we had emptied a bottle to the success of Pharazyn's piece.

"Oh, those nights—those nights once in a way! God forgive me, but I'd sacrifice many things to be young again and feel clever, and to know the man who would sit up all night with me to rule the world over a bottle of honest grog. In the light of after events I ought perhaps to be ashamed to recall such a night with that particular companion. But it is ridiculous, in my opinion, to fit some sort of consequence to every little solitary act; and I shall never admit that poor Pharazyn's ultimate failing was in any appreciable degree founded or promoted by those our youthful full-souled orgies. I know very well that afterwards, when his life was spent in waylaying those aforesaid managers, in cold passages, on stage doorsteps, or in desperation under the public portico on the street; and when a hundred snubs and subterfuges would culminate in the return of his manuscript, ragged but unread; I know, and I knew then, that the wreck who would dodge me in Fleet Street, or cut me in the Strand, had taken to his glass more seriously and more steadily than a man should. But I am not surethat it matters much—much, you understand me—when that man's heart is broken.

"The last words I was ever to exchange with my poor old friend ring in my head to this day, whenever I think of him; and I can repeat them every one. It was years after our intimacy had ceased, and when I only knew that he had degenerated into a Fleet Street loafer of the most dilapidated type, that I caught sight of him one day outside a theatre. It was the theatre which was for some years a gold-mine to one Morton Morrison, of whom you may never have heard; but he was a public pet in his day, and his day was just then at its high noon. Well, there stood Pharazyn, with his hands in his pockets and a cutty-pipe sticking out between his ragged beard and moustache, and his shoulders against the pit door, so that for once he could not escape me. But he wouldn't take a hand out of his pocket to shake mine; and when I asked him how he was, without thinking, he laughed in my face, and it made me feel cruel. He was dreadfully emaciated and almost in rags. And as I wondered what I ought to do, and what to say next, he gave a cough, and spat upon the pavement, and I could see the blood.

"I don't know what you would have done for him, but for all I knew what had brought him to this, I could think of nothing but a drink. It was mid-winter, and I tell you the man was in rags. I felt that ifI could get him to a bar he might eat something, too, and that I should lay such a hold of him this time as I need never again let go. Judge of my surprise when he flatly refused to come with me even for a drink.

"'Can't you see?' he said in his hollow voice. 'There'll be a crowd here directly, and I want the best seat in the pit—the best in the house. I've been going dry for it these two days, and I'm going dry till I've seen the piece. No, I've been here an hour already, and I'm still the first; but I mightn't be when I came back, and I'm not going to risk it, thanks all the same.'

"By this I had remembered that Morton Morrison was to re-open that night with a new piece. Indeed, I ought not to have forgotten that, seeing that I had my order about me somewhere, and it meant a column from my pen between twelve and one in the morning. But this sudden sorry meeting had put all other thoughts out of my head.

"'My dear fellow,' I said, with a sort of laugh, 'are you a first-nighter, too?'

"'Only at this theatre.'

"He looked me queerly in the face.

"'You admire Morrison as much as all that?'

"'I love him!'

"I suppose my eyes thawed him, though God knows how hard I was trying not to hurt him with pitying looks. At all events he began to explain himselfof his own accord, in one bitter, swift, impetuous outburst.

"'Look here,' he said, with his hoarse voice lowered: 'I hoped never to see your face again. I hoped you'd never see mine. But now you are here, don't go this minute, and I'll tell you why I think so much of Morton Morrison. I don't know him, mind you—he doesn't know me from Adam—but once long ago I had something to do with him. And God bless him, but damn every other manager in London, for he was the only one of the lot to give me a civil hearing and a kind word!'

"I knew what he was talking about, and he knew that I knew, for we had understood one another in the old days.

"'I took it to him last of all,' he went on, wiping his damp lips with his hand. 'When I began hawking it about he was an unknown man; when his turn came he was here. He let me read it to him. Then he asked me to leave it with him for a week; and when I went back to him, he said what they'd all said—that it would never act. But Morton Morrison said it nicely. And when he saw how it cut me up into little bits, he got me to tell him all about everything; and then he persuaded me to burn the play, instead of ruining my life for it; and I burnt it in his dressing-room fire, but the ruin was too far gone to mend. I wrote that thing with my heart's blood—old man, you know I did! And none of them would think of it—myGod! But Morrison was good about it—he's a good soul—and that's why you'll see me at every first night of his until the drink does me.'

"I had not followed him quite to the end. One thing had amazed me too much.

"'You burnt your play,' I could only murmur, 'when it would have turned into such a novel! Surely you have some draft of it still?'

"'I burnt the lot when I got home,' says Pharazyn, 'and before long I shall join 'em and burn too.'

"I had nothing to answer to that, and was, besides, tenacious of my point. 'I don't think much of the kindness that makes one man persuade another to burn his work and throw up the sponge,' I said, with a good deal of indignation, for I did feel wroth with that fellow Morrison—a bread-and-butter drawing-room actor whose very vogue used to irritate me.

"'Then what do you think of this?' asked Pharazyn, as he dipped a hand within his shabby coat, and cautiously unclenched it under my nose.

"'It's a five-pound note.'

"'I know; but wasn'tthatkind, then?'

"'So Morrison gave you this!' I said.

"Two or three persons had stopped to join us at the pit door, and Pharazyn hastily put the note back in his pocket. As he did so, his dreadfully shabby condition gave my heart a fresh cut.

"'Are you never going to spend that?' I asked ina whisper; and in a whisper he answered, 'Never. It's all my play has brought me—all. It was given me as a charity, but I took it as my earnings—my earnings for all the work and waiting, and flesh and blood and self-respect, that one thing cost me. Spend it? Not I. It will bury me as decently as I deserve.'

"We could converse no more. And the presence of other people prevented me from giving him my overcoat, though I spoke of it into his ear, begging and imploring him to come away and take it while there was still time for him to slip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my cleverest friend.

"I saw him next the moment I entered the theatre that evening, and I nodded my head to him, which he rebuked with the slightest shake of his own. So I looked no more at him before the play began, comprehending that he desired me not to do so. The temptation, however, was too strong to go on resisting, for while Pharazyn was in the very centre of the front row in the pit, I was at one end of the last row of the stalls; and I was very anxious about him, wanting to make sure that he was there and not going toescape me again, and nervous at having him out of my sight for five minutes together.

"Thus I know more about the gradual change which came over Pharazyn's poor face, as scene followed scene, than of the developments and merits of those scenes themselves. My mind was in any case running more on my lost friend than on the piece; but it was not till near the end of the first act that the growing oddity of his look first struck me.

"His eyebrows were raised; it was a look of incredulity chiefly; yet I could see nothing improbable in the play as far as it had gone. I was but lightly attending, for my own purposes, as you youngsters skim your betters for review; but thus far the situation struck me as at once feasible and promising. Also it all seemed somehow familiar to me; I could not say just where or why, for watching Pharazyn's face. And it was his face that told me at last, in the second act. By God, it was his own play!

"It was Pharazyn's play, superficially altered all through, nowhere substantially; but the only play for me, when I knew that, was being acted in the front row of the pit, and not on the stage, to which I had turned the side of my head. I watched my old friend's face writhe and work until it stiffened in a savage calm; and watching, I thought of the 'first night' he had pictured jovially in the old days, when the bare idea of the piece was bursting his soul; andthinking, I wondered whether it could add a drop to his bitterness to remember that too.

"Yet, through all my thoughts, I was listening, intently enough now. And in the third act I heard the very words my friend had written: they had not meddled with his lines in the great scene which had moved us both to tears long ago in my rooms. And this I swear to, whether you believe it or no—that at the crisis of that scene, which was just as Pharazyn made it, the quiet ferocity transfiguring his face died suddenly away, and I saw it shining as once before with the sweetest tears our eyes can shed—the tears of an artist over his own work.

"And when the act was over he sat with his head on his hand for some minutes, drinking in the applause, as I well knew; then he left his seat and squeezed out on my side of the house, and I made sure he was coming to speak to me over the barrier, and got up to speak to him; but he would not see me, but stood against the barrier with a face as white and set as chiselled marble.

"What followed on the first fall of the curtain I can tell you as quickly as it happened. Louder call for an author I never heard, and I turned my eyes to the stage in my intense curiosity to see who would come forward; for the piece had been brought out anonymously; and I divined that Morrison himself was about to father it. And so he did: but as the lie passed his lips, and in the interval before the applause—thebreathless interval between flash and peal—the lie was given him in a roar of fury from my left: there was a thud at my side, and Pharazyn was over the barrier and bolting down the gangway towards the stage. I think he was near making a leap for the footlights and confronting Morrison on his own boards; but the orchestra came between, and the fiddlers rose in their places. Then he turned wildly to us pressmen, and I will say he had our ear, if not that of the whole house besides, for the few words he was allowed to utter.

"'Gentlemen!' he cried at the top of his voice—'Gentlemen, I'm one of you! I'm a writing man like yourselves, and I wrote this play that you've seen. That man never wrote it at all—I wrote it myself! That man has only altered it. I read it to him two years ago—two years ago, gentlemen! He kept it for a week, and then got me to burn it as rubbish—when he had made a copy of it! And he gave me this, gentlemen—this—this—that I give him back!'

"It was a matter of only a few seconds, but not till my own last hour shall I forget Morrison's painted face on the stage, or that sweating white one beneath the boxes; or the fluttering from Pharazyn's poor fingers of the five-pound note he had treasured for two years; or the hush all over the house until the first hand was laid upon his dirty collar.

"'What!' he screamed, 'do none of you believeme? Will none of you stand by me—isn't there a man—not one man——'

"And they threw him out with my name on his lips. And I followed, and floored a brute who was handling him roughly. And nothing happened to me—because of what happened to Pharazyn."

The dear old boy sat silent, his grey head on his hand. Presently he went on, more to himself than to me: "What could I do? What proof had I? He had burnt them every one. And as long as the public would stand him, Morrison kept his good name at least. And that play was his great success!"

I ventured gently to inquire what had happened to Pharazyn.

"He died in my arms," my old friend cried, throwing up his head with an oath and a tear. "He died in a few minutes outside the theatre. I could hear them clapping after he was dead—clapping his piece."

THE WIDOW OF PIPER'S POINTOn the green shores of Sydney harbour, in a garden bounded by the beach, there sat long ago a wizened, elderly gentleman and a middle-aged, sweet-faced woman in widow's weeds. It was a glaring afternoon in early summer, but a bank of ferns protected the couple from the sun, the blue waters of Port Jackson frothed coolly upon the ribbon of golden sand at their feet, and the gentleman at all events was suitably attired. He wore a pair of nankeen trousers, fitting very close and strapped under the instep, with a surtout of the same material. A very tall, very narrow-brimmed hat rested on the ground between his chair and that of the lady; and his card, still lying in her lap, proclaimed a first visit on the part of Major Thomas Blacker, late of the Royal Artillery, but now relegated to Rose Bay, New South Wales.Mrs. Astley was, in fact, a new and interesting arrival in the settlement, who, having found the cottage to the south-east of Point Piper untenanted when she landed, had taken it within a week of that time, as if to eschew her new world as she had fled the old. Her nearest neighbour was the major himself, who lived on the opposite shore of Rose Bay, a mile away by landand half that distance by water. He had not been five minutes in the widow's garden when he pointed across the bay with his cane, and called her attention to a sunlit window blazing among the trees."That's my place, madam," said the major in an impressive voice. "You can't see it properly for the scrub; but that's where you'll find me when you require my services. I'm afraid you'll have trouble with your convict servants; if you don't you'll be different from everybody else; when you do, you come to me."The widow bowed and smiled, and asked her visitor whether it was long since he had been in England. It was seven years: there had been sad changes in the time. George the Fourth was gone, and poor dear Edmund Kean; the stalls would never look upon his like again. No, the theatre in Sydney was of the poorest description; madam must not dream of going there, at least not without the major's protection. Madam had entertained no such dream; she was merely making talk. A green-backed, paper-covered book lay on her lap with the major's card; she handed him the book, and asked him whether he had heard of it. He had not, nor of the author either. "Posthumous Papers," eh? Melancholy sound about it: was it worth reading?"Worth reading?" said Mrs. Astley, with a pardonable smile. "Well, it is considered so in England; but I doubt whether anybody ever found any book so well worth reading as I have found this: ithas made me forget a great sorrow when nothing else could—forget it by the hour together! It is still appearing in monthly parts. I am going to have the remaining numbers sent out to me, and I can lend you the early ones.""Ah, very kind of you, I'm sure," remarked the major; but he was thinking of something else. "I can't imagine what can have brought you to such a God-forsaken spot as this!" he cried out."Because itisforsaken," murmured the widow."But alone!""I wish to be alone."The major picked up his hat."Madam," said he, "I would not for the world prolong an unwelcome intrusion; yet if you knew this settlement as I know it you would understand the anxiety of an old stager like myself to render you all the assistance, and I may say the protection, in my power. It may seem officious to you now, but you will understand it, my dear madam, when you've been out here as long as I have." And with that the major held out his hand; but Mrs. Astley laid hers upon his arm."I understand it already," she replied, sweetly; "it is you who misunderstand me. I do appreciate your kindness in coming to see me like this; you will know it, too, the first difficulty I am in; for I shall not hesitate to take you at your generous word. And I shall always be glad to receive you, sir, when you will do methe honour of calling. Only I have suffered deeply. I am here to avoid society, not to seek it, and—but surely, Major Blacker, you can sympathise with me there?""I can indeed," cried the honest major. "It was the death of my own dear wife that drovemeto New South Wales."The fact, however (and it was one), was scarcely stated with the pathos it deserved; the gallant speaker being occupied, indeed, in noting the few lines and the many beauties of the comely face so compassionately raised to his."Then our case is the same, and we must be friends," said the widow very gently, as she rose. And she accompanied her visitor to the gate, keeping him waiting, however, on the way, while she found the early numbers of her book."Read them," she said, "and you will come for more. Oh, how I envy you having to begin at the very beginning, and not knowing one word of what is to come! I shall hear you laughing across the bay! Oh, yes, I will come and see your house one day; but I can come no further as I am, and here is the gate.""One moment, ma'am," said the major, glancing at a man who was at work in the front garden, and lowering his voice. "A convict?""Yes.""A gentleman convict, as they say, by the cut of him," muttered the major; "and that's the veryworst sort. Look you, madam, if that fellow gives you the slightest trouble, you let me know.""What could you do?""Get him fifty lashes!" replied the major vindictively. "I should have mentioned that I happen to be a magistrate of the colony. You may bring your man before me in my own house any day you like, and for the first piece of impudence he shall have his fifty. I also happen to possess some private influence with the Governor. I need hardly say that it would be my privilege to use it in your interest, could you but show me the way.""You have influence with the Governor?" cried the widow, with an animation which she had not hitherto displayed, and which vastly enhanced her charms. "Then get my poor gardener, not fifty lashes, but his ticket-of-leave!"The other gazed upon her with kindling admiration, and a pleasant, smiling tolerance."A philanthropist!" said he. "An enthusiast in philanthropy! Only wait, my dear lady, until you've been out here a little longer. Why, I shall have the fellow before me in a week!"And taking off his hat as he spoke, the major jerked his bald head in the direction of the convict gardener, and departed chuckling; but turned more thoughtful on the way, and reached home walking slowly, his yellow face ploughed with thought. Major Blacker was sixty years of age, but he never consideredhimself an old man, and now of a sudden he felt full ten years younger. He consulted his glass when he got in; the climate had dried him up a little; but there were black hairs in his whiskers yet, and a youthful glitter in his mirrored eyes which he hoped had not been wanting in the late interview. Major Blacker had lived; and now the desire was come to him to live a little more. Turning from the mirror to his bedroom window he beheld the smoke of the widow's cottage making a grey lane through the sunset; in between and down below the fretted floor of the bay was rosy indeed from shore to shore; overhead an incredible blue was fast changing to richest purple. And to such accompaniments of the eye, and in blood as cold as you please, the major's mind was made up.Two days later—in a community which counted three men to the woman, there was no time to be lost—in two days, therefore, Major Blacker presented himself once more at the widow's cottage. He had devoured hisPickwickto the last line of the second number, and the book armed him both with a topic of familiar conversation and an excuse for a second visit so precipitate. He needed numbers three and four; but the widow was from home; the assigned servant had taken her out in a boat.The assigned servant! the gardener! in that harbour full of sharks! The major strode through the cottage, was shown the boat rounding Shark Islandhomeward bound, and elected to await the lady's landing in her own garden. He must speak seriously to Mrs. Astley. It was bad enough for an unprotected woman to live alone in that lonely place with a convict man-servant and a maid who was doubtless a convict also. But to trust herself upon the water with the male criminal and none beside! It was worse than madness. The poor lady was in need of a friend to warn her of her danger, and she should find that friend in Thomas Blacker.The major stood twirling his moustaches by the water's edge until the boat's keel slid into the sand. His eye was on the convict, a tall, bearded, round-shouldered man, who hung his head (as well he might, thought the major) before that ferocious orb. It was the visitor who helped Mrs. Astley to alight on dry land, and there and then broke out, without a word of apology for his presence in her garden. Did she know what she was doing—trusting herself in that cockleshell with a transported ruffian—a desperado who would murder her in a minute if it seemed worth his while? Had no one told her the harbour was full of sharks? But the land sharks in Sydney itself, the felons and malefactors stalking at large there in the light of day, were as bad and worse; yet she could trust herself willingly to one of these!Mrs. Astley had changed colour at his words."Hush!" she cried at last. "He will hear you.""He!" exclaimed the martinet. "What do I care whathehears? Let him listen and take heed.""ButIcare," insisted the lady in an imploring voice. "I take an interest in the poor fellow. I am sorry for him. He has been telling me all about his trouble.""Trouble!" sneered the major. "That's what they all call it. What's his name?""Whybrow.""Not Whybrow the forger?""Yes.""Then all I can say, my dear lady," cried the major in his most pompous manner, "is that I sincerely hope you have brought no plate or valuables to this accursed country; if you have I beg of you to let me take them to my bank to-morrow. Whybrow might hesitate to cut your throat—I doubt if he has the pluck for one thing—but he'll rob you as sure as you stand there. I remember his case very well. A more accomplished villain has never been transported. He'd rob a church, so you may be quite sure he'll rob you; it's only a question of time and opportunity."Mrs. Astley turned on her heel, took a few quick steps towards the house, turned again and rejoined her neighbour."Has he ever got into trouble out here?" she demanded. "Has he once been up before you or any one of your brother magistrates? Is there anythingat all against him but the single offence for which he was transported?""Not that I know of," admitted the other with a shrug; "but he's a clever man, he would naturally behave pretty well.""So well that you didn't even know he was in the settlement; yet you are ready, for that one crime in the past, to credit him with any villainy present or to come! Oh, can you wonder that men grow worse out here, if that is all you expect of them? If you treat your convicts like dogs, whip them like dogs, and never credit them with a single remnant of their native manhood, how can you expect ever to make them into the men they were? Yet what is this country for, if not to give the wicked and the weak another chance, a fresh start? Oh, I have no patience with your view, sir, that once a villain is always one; I have heard it on all sides of me since I landed; but I tell you it is abominable—hateful—inhuman—immoral!"Major Blacker bowed his head. His eyes could not conceal their admiration; the fire in hers was a revelation to him; he had sought a woman and found a queen, and the falseness (to his mind) of her premiss took not a whit from his delight."Madam," said he, pointing with his cane to the subject of this argument, who had drawn up the boat and was carrying in the oars; "madam, I am only sorry for one thing. I am only sorry I am not yondergardener, with you for my champion and defender! I withdraw every word I have said. Assigned to you, I can well believe that the greatest rogue in the settlement would soon become an honest man!""It depends so entirely on us," cried the widow, never heeding the compliments in her enthusiasm. "Oh, I think we have so much to answer for! In his last place he was treated horribly; it was up the country; no, I must not mention names, only I know from Whybrow that the chain-gang was rest and peace after what he had gone through at that man's hands. It was from a chain-gang he came to me. He has been nearly three years in the colony. He was transported for seven. Oh, don't you think it would be possible to get him his ticket this summer?"The major felt a warm hand upon his arm; the major saw eyes of liquid blue, lit with enthusiasm, and gazing appealingly into his own. They had reached the cottage, and were standing in a tiny morning-room filled with flowers and heavy with their scent. The major felt younger than ever."I could try," he said, "but I fear it wouldn't be much good. Four years' servitude is the limit. I'm afraid we shouldn't have much chance.""Try!" said the widow. "It would be an act of humanity, and one for which I should feel personally grateful all my life."The major tried, and won the gratitude without achieving the result desired. Perhaps he did not tryquite so hard as he pretended, and perhaps in time the widow detected in him a lukewarmness for the cause upon which she had set her unreasonable heart; at all events the major failed to make the quick advance he had counted upon in Mrs. Astley's affections. At the end of the summer their friendship was still nothing more, and the convict gardener still a convict gardener. As neighbours, the pair would read together thePickwicknumbers as they came and play an occasional game of cribbage in the major's verandah; but as sure as that veteran uttered a sentimental word touching his lonely condition or hers (and the one involved the other), so surely would the widow rise and beg him to escort her home. Nor did the view from the Old Point Piper Road soften her at all with its sparkling moonlit brilliance. Yet it was here, early in the following summer, that the gallant old fellow, after an extra half-bottle with his dinner, at last declared himself.Mrs. Astley heard him with an expressionless face turned towards the harbour; but ere he finished, the moonlight that strewed those waters with shimmering gems had found two also in her eyes."I cannot," she cried. "I loved my husband—I love him still—I shall never marry again!""But so did I love my sainted wife," protested the major; "yet I would marry to-morrow. I consider it no disrespect to the dead; on the contrary, it is the highest compliment we can pay them, as showing sohappy an experience of wedlock that we would fain repeat it. Not that I have thought so always," he added hastily, to quell a look which made him uncomfortable."I don't believe you think so now," replied the candid widow. "You not only mean less than you say; you feel less; and must forgive me, for you may not know it yourself, but a woman is never deceived. Think it over and you will agree with me; but never, never let us speak of this again. It hurts me to hurt you—and I like you so much as a friend!"As for Thomas Blacker, the first plunge had completely sobered him, and he bitterly repented that indiscretion of the table which had led him into a declaration as premature as it had been also unpremeditated. As a soldier, however, he took no kindlier to retreat for the mere fact of deploring his advance; retreat, indeed, was out of the question: and the major's further protestations were pitched in a key calculated to acquit him of a charge which rankled, being true."Your answer I accept, and can bear," he retorted with dignity, "but not your misjudgment of my feelings. That would be cruel—if you were capable of cruelty. Permit me at least to say that it shows an ignorance of my real nature which cuts me to the quick. I have expressed myself but poorly if you can still doubt my readiness to devote my life to you—ay, or to lay it down if need be for your sake! There isnothing I would not do for you. The lightest service I should esteem my privilege."The widow laughed, but not unkindly; on the contrary, her hand slid through the major's arm with her words, as if to sheath their edge."There was one thing you once promised to do for me," she said. "It is not done yet!""I know what you mean," he groaned with an inward oath. "Your assigned gardener!""Exactly.""I tried my best.""Could you not try again?""If I did," said the major hoarsely, "would it make any difference to the answer you would give me if I said again what I have said to-night? I tell you candidly I begin to feel jealous of that convict. I shall be glad to see his back."The woman gave a little nervous laugh, but no answer."Would it make any difference?" he repeated."I cannot bargain like that," sighed the widow, turning away."And you are right!" exclaimed the other, hotly flushing. "I unsay that; I'm ashamed of it. But I'll get that ticket-of-leave this summer, or I'll never look you in the face again!"And this time Thomas Blacker went to work in earnest; but then a year had passed since his former half-hearted attempt of foregone futility; and theforlorn hope of that season was the easy goal of this. The major, without doubt, stood well at Government House; he was secretly engaged upon plans for the fortifications of the harbour, and had the ear of his Excellency in magisterial matters as well. What he had mentioned only tentatively and not altogether seriously the year before, he now urged as a peculiarly deserving case. And in no more than a day or two he had the pleasure of calling at the cottage, with a paper for the widow to sign, and of meeting the gardener on the path as he was coming away."I suppose you know what I have here, my man?" cried the major, tapping a breast inflated with conscious benevolence."The mistress has mentioned it," replied the man, trembling in an instant. "I am deeply grateful, sir, to you. I little thought to get it yet.""Nor have you, sir, nor have you," said the major briskly. "Your ticket's no ticket till it's signed by the Governor and safe in your hands. However," he added, with a touch of the self-importance he enjoyed, "I have promised your mistress to use my influence in your behalf, so by the end of the week you may very possibly hear from me again."And as if to finish the thing off with a flourish Thomas Blacker was finally even better than his word, for, as far from the end of the week as the Wednesday evening, he dined in Sydney and rode out by moonlight and the Point Piper Road with Whybrow'sticket signed and sealed in his pocket. Once more the major had dined well, but this time not unwisely; yet his heart was troubled with a trouble which had never entered his calculations hitherto. His brother was dead; his brother's estates were now his own. The incoming mail had brought the news, and with it a round of applause and congratulations from connections and friends who for years had ignored his existence. The major was in a private quandary of the spirit; he was quite unable to make up his mind. Should he go home a married man, or should he see his time-serving friends to the deuce and never go home at all? The tropic moon and the heavenly harbour inclined him to the latter, certain phrases in his home-letters to the former course; but what about his wife? She was qualified to adorn any society in which the major had ever moved, but—there were buts. The major was gallant enough to try to ignore them, but there they were. At home he was not sure that he should want to be married at all; here it was a different thing; and here, no doubt, he would end his days after all. There were worse places. These moonlight nights made the place a paradise of soft airs and rustling leaves, and miles and miles of a jewelled carpet beneath the white-starred ceiling of the Southern sky. Yes, it was a spot to live and die in, and be thankful; and yes! he would marry the widow, if the widow would marry him. And after the other night——The major had reached the cottage gate. Here hedismounted, tethering his horse within. There were voices and lights, both low, in the cottage; the French windows were wide open to the night; and an ignoble instinct, begotten of a swift suspicion that was more truly an inspiration, caused the major to advance upon the grass. So he crept nearer—nearer yet—within earshot. And the first words he heard confirmed him in his deceit. By heaven! there should be trick for trick!"Darling," said the widow's voice—the sweet voice that had beguiled him—"it will be the end of the week to-morrow—well, then, next day; and after that we will hide it no more. Let us brazen it out! I am always ready; and you, you will have the right to take care of me as you should: you will have your ticket-of-leave.""Never!" muttered the major between his teeth, and he crushed up the paper he held ready in his hand. He forgot his doubts upon the moonlit road. The injured man was all the man now. He crept still nearer and saw that for which he was now so fully prepared: the widow reposing in the convict's arms."There's only one thing that troubles me," the man was saying (though his twitching, restless face was an eternal sea of trouble and remorse), "and that is your poor old major. He has turned up trumps" ("I'm damned if he has," muttered the major behind the leaves), "and it does seem a shame. I fear the other night you must have led him on.""I did," replied the woman, with a groan for which she received no credit. "I did—I could not help it. It grieves me to think of it; I am so ashamed; but, darling, it was for you!""Was it indeed?" cried the major, striding into the room with sounding heels and jingling spurs; and he stood there twirling his moustache. The woman was first upon her feet. The man's face sank into his hands."It was," she repeated boldly. "And oh, sir, even you will forgive me when I tell you all!""Naturally," sneered the other—"if I stopped to listen. But explanations I imagine would be somewhat superfluous after this. Here, you may have it," he added, opening his hand and letting the crumpled ticket drop with an air of ineffable contempt. "I won't condescend to put it back in my pocket, as you deserve; take it—and marry the man, for God's sake, at the nearest church!"The woman laid a tender hand upon the bowed and bended head at which Thomas Blacker glanced in righteous scorn."Marry him I cannot," said she. "We have been married these fifteen years."

On the green shores of Sydney harbour, in a garden bounded by the beach, there sat long ago a wizened, elderly gentleman and a middle-aged, sweet-faced woman in widow's weeds. It was a glaring afternoon in early summer, but a bank of ferns protected the couple from the sun, the blue waters of Port Jackson frothed coolly upon the ribbon of golden sand at their feet, and the gentleman at all events was suitably attired. He wore a pair of nankeen trousers, fitting very close and strapped under the instep, with a surtout of the same material. A very tall, very narrow-brimmed hat rested on the ground between his chair and that of the lady; and his card, still lying in her lap, proclaimed a first visit on the part of Major Thomas Blacker, late of the Royal Artillery, but now relegated to Rose Bay, New South Wales.

Mrs. Astley was, in fact, a new and interesting arrival in the settlement, who, having found the cottage to the south-east of Point Piper untenanted when she landed, had taken it within a week of that time, as if to eschew her new world as she had fled the old. Her nearest neighbour was the major himself, who lived on the opposite shore of Rose Bay, a mile away by landand half that distance by water. He had not been five minutes in the widow's garden when he pointed across the bay with his cane, and called her attention to a sunlit window blazing among the trees.

"That's my place, madam," said the major in an impressive voice. "You can't see it properly for the scrub; but that's where you'll find me when you require my services. I'm afraid you'll have trouble with your convict servants; if you don't you'll be different from everybody else; when you do, you come to me."

The widow bowed and smiled, and asked her visitor whether it was long since he had been in England. It was seven years: there had been sad changes in the time. George the Fourth was gone, and poor dear Edmund Kean; the stalls would never look upon his like again. No, the theatre in Sydney was of the poorest description; madam must not dream of going there, at least not without the major's protection. Madam had entertained no such dream; she was merely making talk. A green-backed, paper-covered book lay on her lap with the major's card; she handed him the book, and asked him whether he had heard of it. He had not, nor of the author either. "Posthumous Papers," eh? Melancholy sound about it: was it worth reading?

"Worth reading?" said Mrs. Astley, with a pardonable smile. "Well, it is considered so in England; but I doubt whether anybody ever found any book so well worth reading as I have found this: ithas made me forget a great sorrow when nothing else could—forget it by the hour together! It is still appearing in monthly parts. I am going to have the remaining numbers sent out to me, and I can lend you the early ones."

"Ah, very kind of you, I'm sure," remarked the major; but he was thinking of something else. "I can't imagine what can have brought you to such a God-forsaken spot as this!" he cried out.

"Because itisforsaken," murmured the widow.

"But alone!"

"I wish to be alone."

The major picked up his hat.

"Madam," said he, "I would not for the world prolong an unwelcome intrusion; yet if you knew this settlement as I know it you would understand the anxiety of an old stager like myself to render you all the assistance, and I may say the protection, in my power. It may seem officious to you now, but you will understand it, my dear madam, when you've been out here as long as I have." And with that the major held out his hand; but Mrs. Astley laid hers upon his arm.

"I understand it already," she replied, sweetly; "it is you who misunderstand me. I do appreciate your kindness in coming to see me like this; you will know it, too, the first difficulty I am in; for I shall not hesitate to take you at your generous word. And I shall always be glad to receive you, sir, when you will do methe honour of calling. Only I have suffered deeply. I am here to avoid society, not to seek it, and—but surely, Major Blacker, you can sympathise with me there?"

"I can indeed," cried the honest major. "It was the death of my own dear wife that drovemeto New South Wales."

The fact, however (and it was one), was scarcely stated with the pathos it deserved; the gallant speaker being occupied, indeed, in noting the few lines and the many beauties of the comely face so compassionately raised to his.

"Then our case is the same, and we must be friends," said the widow very gently, as she rose. And she accompanied her visitor to the gate, keeping him waiting, however, on the way, while she found the early numbers of her book.

"Read them," she said, "and you will come for more. Oh, how I envy you having to begin at the very beginning, and not knowing one word of what is to come! I shall hear you laughing across the bay! Oh, yes, I will come and see your house one day; but I can come no further as I am, and here is the gate."

"One moment, ma'am," said the major, glancing at a man who was at work in the front garden, and lowering his voice. "A convict?"

"Yes."

"A gentleman convict, as they say, by the cut of him," muttered the major; "and that's the veryworst sort. Look you, madam, if that fellow gives you the slightest trouble, you let me know."

"What could you do?"

"Get him fifty lashes!" replied the major vindictively. "I should have mentioned that I happen to be a magistrate of the colony. You may bring your man before me in my own house any day you like, and for the first piece of impudence he shall have his fifty. I also happen to possess some private influence with the Governor. I need hardly say that it would be my privilege to use it in your interest, could you but show me the way."

"You have influence with the Governor?" cried the widow, with an animation which she had not hitherto displayed, and which vastly enhanced her charms. "Then get my poor gardener, not fifty lashes, but his ticket-of-leave!"

The other gazed upon her with kindling admiration, and a pleasant, smiling tolerance.

"A philanthropist!" said he. "An enthusiast in philanthropy! Only wait, my dear lady, until you've been out here a little longer. Why, I shall have the fellow before me in a week!"

And taking off his hat as he spoke, the major jerked his bald head in the direction of the convict gardener, and departed chuckling; but turned more thoughtful on the way, and reached home walking slowly, his yellow face ploughed with thought. Major Blacker was sixty years of age, but he never consideredhimself an old man, and now of a sudden he felt full ten years younger. He consulted his glass when he got in; the climate had dried him up a little; but there were black hairs in his whiskers yet, and a youthful glitter in his mirrored eyes which he hoped had not been wanting in the late interview. Major Blacker had lived; and now the desire was come to him to live a little more. Turning from the mirror to his bedroom window he beheld the smoke of the widow's cottage making a grey lane through the sunset; in between and down below the fretted floor of the bay was rosy indeed from shore to shore; overhead an incredible blue was fast changing to richest purple. And to such accompaniments of the eye, and in blood as cold as you please, the major's mind was made up.

Two days later—in a community which counted three men to the woman, there was no time to be lost—in two days, therefore, Major Blacker presented himself once more at the widow's cottage. He had devoured hisPickwickto the last line of the second number, and the book armed him both with a topic of familiar conversation and an excuse for a second visit so precipitate. He needed numbers three and four; but the widow was from home; the assigned servant had taken her out in a boat.

The assigned servant! the gardener! in that harbour full of sharks! The major strode through the cottage, was shown the boat rounding Shark Islandhomeward bound, and elected to await the lady's landing in her own garden. He must speak seriously to Mrs. Astley. It was bad enough for an unprotected woman to live alone in that lonely place with a convict man-servant and a maid who was doubtless a convict also. But to trust herself upon the water with the male criminal and none beside! It was worse than madness. The poor lady was in need of a friend to warn her of her danger, and she should find that friend in Thomas Blacker.

The major stood twirling his moustaches by the water's edge until the boat's keel slid into the sand. His eye was on the convict, a tall, bearded, round-shouldered man, who hung his head (as well he might, thought the major) before that ferocious orb. It was the visitor who helped Mrs. Astley to alight on dry land, and there and then broke out, without a word of apology for his presence in her garden. Did she know what she was doing—trusting herself in that cockleshell with a transported ruffian—a desperado who would murder her in a minute if it seemed worth his while? Had no one told her the harbour was full of sharks? But the land sharks in Sydney itself, the felons and malefactors stalking at large there in the light of day, were as bad and worse; yet she could trust herself willingly to one of these!

Mrs. Astley had changed colour at his words.

"Hush!" she cried at last. "He will hear you."

"He!" exclaimed the martinet. "What do I care whathehears? Let him listen and take heed."

"ButIcare," insisted the lady in an imploring voice. "I take an interest in the poor fellow. I am sorry for him. He has been telling me all about his trouble."

"Trouble!" sneered the major. "That's what they all call it. What's his name?"

"Whybrow."

"Not Whybrow the forger?"

"Yes."

"Then all I can say, my dear lady," cried the major in his most pompous manner, "is that I sincerely hope you have brought no plate or valuables to this accursed country; if you have I beg of you to let me take them to my bank to-morrow. Whybrow might hesitate to cut your throat—I doubt if he has the pluck for one thing—but he'll rob you as sure as you stand there. I remember his case very well. A more accomplished villain has never been transported. He'd rob a church, so you may be quite sure he'll rob you; it's only a question of time and opportunity."

Mrs. Astley turned on her heel, took a few quick steps towards the house, turned again and rejoined her neighbour.

"Has he ever got into trouble out here?" she demanded. "Has he once been up before you or any one of your brother magistrates? Is there anythingat all against him but the single offence for which he was transported?"

"Not that I know of," admitted the other with a shrug; "but he's a clever man, he would naturally behave pretty well."

"So well that you didn't even know he was in the settlement; yet you are ready, for that one crime in the past, to credit him with any villainy present or to come! Oh, can you wonder that men grow worse out here, if that is all you expect of them? If you treat your convicts like dogs, whip them like dogs, and never credit them with a single remnant of their native manhood, how can you expect ever to make them into the men they were? Yet what is this country for, if not to give the wicked and the weak another chance, a fresh start? Oh, I have no patience with your view, sir, that once a villain is always one; I have heard it on all sides of me since I landed; but I tell you it is abominable—hateful—inhuman—immoral!"

Major Blacker bowed his head. His eyes could not conceal their admiration; the fire in hers was a revelation to him; he had sought a woman and found a queen, and the falseness (to his mind) of her premiss took not a whit from his delight.

"Madam," said he, pointing with his cane to the subject of this argument, who had drawn up the boat and was carrying in the oars; "madam, I am only sorry for one thing. I am only sorry I am not yondergardener, with you for my champion and defender! I withdraw every word I have said. Assigned to you, I can well believe that the greatest rogue in the settlement would soon become an honest man!"

"It depends so entirely on us," cried the widow, never heeding the compliments in her enthusiasm. "Oh, I think we have so much to answer for! In his last place he was treated horribly; it was up the country; no, I must not mention names, only I know from Whybrow that the chain-gang was rest and peace after what he had gone through at that man's hands. It was from a chain-gang he came to me. He has been nearly three years in the colony. He was transported for seven. Oh, don't you think it would be possible to get him his ticket this summer?"

The major felt a warm hand upon his arm; the major saw eyes of liquid blue, lit with enthusiasm, and gazing appealingly into his own. They had reached the cottage, and were standing in a tiny morning-room filled with flowers and heavy with their scent. The major felt younger than ever.

"I could try," he said, "but I fear it wouldn't be much good. Four years' servitude is the limit. I'm afraid we shouldn't have much chance."

"Try!" said the widow. "It would be an act of humanity, and one for which I should feel personally grateful all my life."

The major tried, and won the gratitude without achieving the result desired. Perhaps he did not tryquite so hard as he pretended, and perhaps in time the widow detected in him a lukewarmness for the cause upon which she had set her unreasonable heart; at all events the major failed to make the quick advance he had counted upon in Mrs. Astley's affections. At the end of the summer their friendship was still nothing more, and the convict gardener still a convict gardener. As neighbours, the pair would read together thePickwicknumbers as they came and play an occasional game of cribbage in the major's verandah; but as sure as that veteran uttered a sentimental word touching his lonely condition or hers (and the one involved the other), so surely would the widow rise and beg him to escort her home. Nor did the view from the Old Point Piper Road soften her at all with its sparkling moonlit brilliance. Yet it was here, early in the following summer, that the gallant old fellow, after an extra half-bottle with his dinner, at last declared himself.

Mrs. Astley heard him with an expressionless face turned towards the harbour; but ere he finished, the moonlight that strewed those waters with shimmering gems had found two also in her eyes.

"I cannot," she cried. "I loved my husband—I love him still—I shall never marry again!"

"But so did I love my sainted wife," protested the major; "yet I would marry to-morrow. I consider it no disrespect to the dead; on the contrary, it is the highest compliment we can pay them, as showing sohappy an experience of wedlock that we would fain repeat it. Not that I have thought so always," he added hastily, to quell a look which made him uncomfortable.

"I don't believe you think so now," replied the candid widow. "You not only mean less than you say; you feel less; and must forgive me, for you may not know it yourself, but a woman is never deceived. Think it over and you will agree with me; but never, never let us speak of this again. It hurts me to hurt you—and I like you so much as a friend!"

As for Thomas Blacker, the first plunge had completely sobered him, and he bitterly repented that indiscretion of the table which had led him into a declaration as premature as it had been also unpremeditated. As a soldier, however, he took no kindlier to retreat for the mere fact of deploring his advance; retreat, indeed, was out of the question: and the major's further protestations were pitched in a key calculated to acquit him of a charge which rankled, being true.

"Your answer I accept, and can bear," he retorted with dignity, "but not your misjudgment of my feelings. That would be cruel—if you were capable of cruelty. Permit me at least to say that it shows an ignorance of my real nature which cuts me to the quick. I have expressed myself but poorly if you can still doubt my readiness to devote my life to you—ay, or to lay it down if need be for your sake! There isnothing I would not do for you. The lightest service I should esteem my privilege."

The widow laughed, but not unkindly; on the contrary, her hand slid through the major's arm with her words, as if to sheath their edge.

"There was one thing you once promised to do for me," she said. "It is not done yet!"

"I know what you mean," he groaned with an inward oath. "Your assigned gardener!"

"Exactly."

"I tried my best."

"Could you not try again?"

"If I did," said the major hoarsely, "would it make any difference to the answer you would give me if I said again what I have said to-night? I tell you candidly I begin to feel jealous of that convict. I shall be glad to see his back."

The woman gave a little nervous laugh, but no answer.

"Would it make any difference?" he repeated.

"I cannot bargain like that," sighed the widow, turning away.

"And you are right!" exclaimed the other, hotly flushing. "I unsay that; I'm ashamed of it. But I'll get that ticket-of-leave this summer, or I'll never look you in the face again!"

And this time Thomas Blacker went to work in earnest; but then a year had passed since his former half-hearted attempt of foregone futility; and theforlorn hope of that season was the easy goal of this. The major, without doubt, stood well at Government House; he was secretly engaged upon plans for the fortifications of the harbour, and had the ear of his Excellency in magisterial matters as well. What he had mentioned only tentatively and not altogether seriously the year before, he now urged as a peculiarly deserving case. And in no more than a day or two he had the pleasure of calling at the cottage, with a paper for the widow to sign, and of meeting the gardener on the path as he was coming away.

"I suppose you know what I have here, my man?" cried the major, tapping a breast inflated with conscious benevolence.

"The mistress has mentioned it," replied the man, trembling in an instant. "I am deeply grateful, sir, to you. I little thought to get it yet."

"Nor have you, sir, nor have you," said the major briskly. "Your ticket's no ticket till it's signed by the Governor and safe in your hands. However," he added, with a touch of the self-importance he enjoyed, "I have promised your mistress to use my influence in your behalf, so by the end of the week you may very possibly hear from me again."

And as if to finish the thing off with a flourish Thomas Blacker was finally even better than his word, for, as far from the end of the week as the Wednesday evening, he dined in Sydney and rode out by moonlight and the Point Piper Road with Whybrow'sticket signed and sealed in his pocket. Once more the major had dined well, but this time not unwisely; yet his heart was troubled with a trouble which had never entered his calculations hitherto. His brother was dead; his brother's estates were now his own. The incoming mail had brought the news, and with it a round of applause and congratulations from connections and friends who for years had ignored his existence. The major was in a private quandary of the spirit; he was quite unable to make up his mind. Should he go home a married man, or should he see his time-serving friends to the deuce and never go home at all? The tropic moon and the heavenly harbour inclined him to the latter, certain phrases in his home-letters to the former course; but what about his wife? She was qualified to adorn any society in which the major had ever moved, but—there were buts. The major was gallant enough to try to ignore them, but there they were. At home he was not sure that he should want to be married at all; here it was a different thing; and here, no doubt, he would end his days after all. There were worse places. These moonlight nights made the place a paradise of soft airs and rustling leaves, and miles and miles of a jewelled carpet beneath the white-starred ceiling of the Southern sky. Yes, it was a spot to live and die in, and be thankful; and yes! he would marry the widow, if the widow would marry him. And after the other night——

The major had reached the cottage gate. Here hedismounted, tethering his horse within. There were voices and lights, both low, in the cottage; the French windows were wide open to the night; and an ignoble instinct, begotten of a swift suspicion that was more truly an inspiration, caused the major to advance upon the grass. So he crept nearer—nearer yet—within earshot. And the first words he heard confirmed him in his deceit. By heaven! there should be trick for trick!

"Darling," said the widow's voice—the sweet voice that had beguiled him—"it will be the end of the week to-morrow—well, then, next day; and after that we will hide it no more. Let us brazen it out! I am always ready; and you, you will have the right to take care of me as you should: you will have your ticket-of-leave."

"Never!" muttered the major between his teeth, and he crushed up the paper he held ready in his hand. He forgot his doubts upon the moonlit road. The injured man was all the man now. He crept still nearer and saw that for which he was now so fully prepared: the widow reposing in the convict's arms.

"There's only one thing that troubles me," the man was saying (though his twitching, restless face was an eternal sea of trouble and remorse), "and that is your poor old major. He has turned up trumps" ("I'm damned if he has," muttered the major behind the leaves), "and it does seem a shame. I fear the other night you must have led him on."

"I did," replied the woman, with a groan for which she received no credit. "I did—I could not help it. It grieves me to think of it; I am so ashamed; but, darling, it was for you!"

"Was it indeed?" cried the major, striding into the room with sounding heels and jingling spurs; and he stood there twirling his moustache. The woman was first upon her feet. The man's face sank into his hands.

"It was," she repeated boldly. "And oh, sir, even you will forgive me when I tell you all!"

"Naturally," sneered the other—"if I stopped to listen. But explanations I imagine would be somewhat superfluous after this. Here, you may have it," he added, opening his hand and letting the crumpled ticket drop with an air of ineffable contempt. "I won't condescend to put it back in my pocket, as you deserve; take it—and marry the man, for God's sake, at the nearest church!"

The woman laid a tender hand upon the bowed and bended head at which Thomas Blacker glanced in righteous scorn.

"Marry him I cannot," said she. "We have been married these fifteen years."

AFTER THE FACTIIt is my good fortune to cherish a particularly vivid recollection of the town of Geelong. Others may have found the place so dull as to justify an echo of the cheap local sneer at its expense; to me those sloping parallels of low houses have still a common terminus in the bluest of all Australian waters; and I people the streets, whose very names I have forgotten, with faces of extraordinary kindness, imperishable while memory holds her seat. Even had it bored me, I for one should have good reason to love Geelong. It was my lot, however, not only to happen upon the town in a week of unique excitement, but, thanks to one of those chance meetings which are the veriest commonplace of outlandish travel, to have a finger in the pother. I arrived by the boat on a Monday afternoon, to find the streets crowded and peace disturbed by a sudden run on one of the banks. On the Wednesday, another bank, which had notoriously received much of the money withdrawn from the Barwon Banking Company, Limited, was in its turn the victim of a still uglier fate: the Geelong branch ofthe Intercolonial was entered in broad daylight by a man masked and armed to the beard, who stayed some ten minutes, and then walked into thin air with no less a sum than nineteen thousand and odd pounds in notes and gold.I was playing lawn-tennis with my then new friends when we heard the news; and it stopped our game. The bank manager's wife, a friend of my friends, arrived with her daughter: the one incoherent, the other dumb, with horror and dismay. And I heard at first-hand a few broken, hysterical words from the white lips of the elderly lady, and noted the tearless trouble in the wide blue eyes of the girl, before it struck me to retire. The family had been at luncheon in the private part of the bank, and knew nothing of the affair until the junior clerk broke in upon them like a lunatic at large. He, too, had gone out for his lunch, and returned to find teller and cashier alike insensible, and the safe rifled. That was all I stayed to gather, save that the unhappy lady was agitated by a side issue far worse to her than the bank's loss. There had been no bloodshed. The revolver kept beneath the counter had been used, but used in vain. It was not loaded. Her husband would be blamed, nay, discharged to a certainty in his old age. And I, too, walked down the street more absorbed in the picture of an elderly couple brought to ruin, and a blue-eyed girl gone for a governess, than in the immediate catastrophe.I found my way to the Intercolonial Bank; there was no need to ask it. A crowd clamoured at the doors, but these were shut for the day. And I learned no more than I already knew, save that the robber wore a black beard, and was declared by some to be a second Ned Kelly from the Strathbogie Ranges. Nor did I acquire more real information the rest of that day; nor hope for any when late at night I thought I recognised an old schoolfellow in the street."Deedesmajor!" I cried without pausing to make certain; but I was certain enough when my man turned and favoured me with the stare of studied insolence which had made our house-master's life a burden to him some ten years before that night. Among a thousand, although the dark eyes were sunken and devil-may-care, the full lips hidden by a moustache with grey hairs in it, and the pale face prematurely lined, I could have sworn to Deedesmajorthen."Don't know you from Adam," said he. "What do you want?""We were at school together," I explained. "I was your fag when you were captain of footer. To think of meeting you here!""Do tell me your name," he said wearily; and at that moment I recollected (what had quite escaped my memory) his ultimate expulsion; and I stood confounded by my maladroitness."Bower," said I, abashed."The Beetle!" cried Deedes, not unkindly; a moment later he was shaking my hand and smiling on my confusion. "Hang school!" said he. "Where are you staying?""Well," said I, "I'm supposed to be staying with some people I brought a letter of introduction to; but they hadn't a room for me, and insisted on getting me one outside; so that's where I am.""What's their name?" said Deedes; when I told him, he nodded, but made no further comment, beyond inviting himself to my room for a chat. The proposal delighted me; indeed it caused me a positive thrill, which I can only attribute to an insensible return of the small boy's proper attitude towards a distinguished senior. We were twenty-eight and twenty-four now, instead of eighteen and fourteen; yet, as we walked, only one of us was a man, and I was once more his fag. I felt quite proud when he accepted a cigarette from my case, prouder yet when he took my arm. The feeling stuck to me till we reached my room, when it suddenly collapsed. Deedes had asked me what I was doing. I had told him of my illness and my voyage, and had countered with his own question. He laughed contemptuously, sitting on the edge of my bed."Clerk in a bank!" said he."Not the Intercolonial?" I cried."That's it," he answered, nodding."Then you were there to-day! Thisisluck; I've been so awfully keen to know exactly what happened.""I was not there," replied Deedes. "I was having my lunch. I can only tell you what I saw when I got back. There was our cashier sprawled across the counter, and the teller in a heap behind it—both knocked on the head. And there was the empty safe, wide open, with the sun shining into it like a bull's-eye lantern. No, I only wish Ihadbeen there: it's such a chance as I shall never get again.""You'd have shown fight?" said I, gazing at his long athletic limbs, and appreciating the force of his wish as I perceived in what threadbare rags they were imprisoned. "Yes, you'd have stood up to the chap, I know; I can see you doing it!""There would have been nothing wonderful in that," was his reply. "I should have had everything to gain and nothing to lose.""Not your life?""It's less than nothing.""Nonsense, Deedes," said I, although or because I could see that it was not. "You don't expect me to believe that!""I don't care what you believe, and it's not the point," he answered. "Give me another cigarette, Beetle; you were asking about the robbery; if you don't mind, we'll confine ourselves to that. I'm afraid old I'Anson will get the sack; he's the manager, and responsible for the bank revolver being loaded. Heswears it was; we all thought it was; but nobody had looked at it for weeks, and you see it wasn't. Yes, that's a rule in all banks in this country where sticking them up is a public industry. The yarn about Ned Kelly's son? Don't you believe it; nobody ever heard of him before. No, if you ask me, we must look a little nearer home for the man who stuck up our bank this afternoon.""Nearer home!" said I. "Then you think it was somebody who knew about the run upon the Barwon Banking Company and the payments into the Intercolonial?""Obviously; somebody who knew all about it, and perhaps paid in a big lump himself. That would have been a gorgeous blind!" cried Deedes, kindling suddenly. "Beetle, old chap, I wish I'd thought of it myself—only it would have meant boning the capital too! I strongly suspect some of these respectable Geelongese and Barwonners of being at the bottom of the whole thing, though; they'resorespectable, Beetle, there's bound to be villains among 'em. By Jove!" he added, getting to his feet with a sinister light in his handsome, dissipated countenance, "I'll go for the reward when they put it up! Four figures it can't fall short of; that would be better than junior clerking for eighty pounds a year!" And he walked up and down my room laughing softly to himself."I'll join you," cried I. "I'll go in for love, or honour and glory, and you shall pocket the £ s. d.""Rot!" said he curtly, yet almost with the word he had me by the shoulders, and was smiling queerly in my face. "Why not join me in the other thing?" he exclaimed. "You were well enough plucked at school!""But what other thing?" said I."Doing the trick," he cried; "not finding out who did it!""Deedes," said I, "what the devil do you mean?""Mean? What I say, my dear Beetle—every word of it! What's the use of being honest? Look at me. Look at my shirt-cuffs, that I've got to trim every morning like my nails; look at my trousers, as I saw you looking at 'em just now. Those bags at the knees are honesty; and honesty's rapidly wearing them through on an office stool. I'm as poor as a rat in a drain: it's all honesty, and I've had about enough of it. Think of the fellow who walked off with his fortune this morning, and then think of me. Wouldn't you like to be in his shoes? No? My stars, you don't know what it is to live, Beetle; honest idiots like us never do. But I'm going to turn it up. If one can play at that game, two can; why not three? Come on, Beetle; make a third, and we'll rob another bank to-morrow!""You're joking," said I, and this time I returned his smile. "Still, if I was going in for that sort of thing, Deedes, I don't know who I'd rather have on my side than you."His smile went out like a light."Will you go in for it?" he cried. "I'm joking far less than you think. My life's a sordid failure. I'm sick of it and ready for a fling. Will you come in?""No," I said. "I won't."And we looked each other steadily in the eyes, until he led me back to laughter with as much ease as he had lengthened my face."All right, old Beetle!" said he. "I won't chaff any more—not that it was all chaff by any means. I sometimes feel like that, and so would you in my place. Bunked from school! In disgrace at home! Sent out here to be got rid of, sent to blazes in cold blood! The things I've done for a living during these ten years—this is the most respectable, I can tell you that. It's the respectability drives me mad."His bitter voice, the lines upon his face, his grey hairs at twenty-eight (they were not confined to his moustache), all appealed to me with equal and irresistible force; my hand went out to him, and with it my heart."I am so sorry, Deedes," said I nervously. "If a fiver or two—yes, you must let me! For the sake of the old school!"He shook his head, and the blood rushed to mine. I burst into apologies, but he cut me short."That's all right, Beetle. It was well meant, and you're a good chap. We'll foregather to-morrow, if this enviable stroke leaves us a spare moment in thebank. Meanwhile good-night, and thanks all the same."And he crept down the stairs at my request; for I was not in the position of an ordinary lodger; and having followed and closed the door noiselessly behind him, I returned as stealthily to my room. I did not wish my hospitable friends to know that I had used lodgings, placed at my disposal as their guest, as though I had engaged them on my own account. Theoretically I was under their roof, and had committed a breach in introducing a man at midnight and sitting up in conversation with him till all hours. Deedes, moreover, as I suspected from his manner when I mentioned them, was most probably no friend of my friends; indeed I had no clue to his reputation in the town, and should have been surprised to find it a good one. He had been a reckless boy at school; at the very least he was a reckless man. And other traits must have developed with his years; he had been expelled, for instance, for certain gallantries not criminal in themselves, but sufficiently demoralising at a public school; and, despite his clothes, I could have sworn those dark, unscrupulous eyes, and that sardonic, insolent, and yet attractive manner, had done due damage in Geelong.For there was a fascination in the man, incommunicable by another, and my despair as I write. He was a strong, selfish character, one in whom the end permitted any means; yet there was that in himfor which it is harder to find a name, which attracted while it repelled, which enforced admiration in its own despite. At school he had been immensely popular and a bad influence: at once a bugbear and an idol from the respective points of view of masters and boys. My own view was still that of the boy. I could not help it; nor could I sleep for thinking of our singular rencontre and interview. I undressed, but shirked my pillow. I smoked my pipe; but it did me no good. Finally I threw up my window, and as I did so heard a sound that interested, and another that thrilled me. The first was a whistle blowing in the distance; the second, an answering whistle, which made me jump, for it came from beneath the very window at which I stood.I leaned out. A white helmet and a pair of white legs flashed under a lamp and were gone. My window was no impossible height from the ground, but I did not stay to measure it. With the whistles still in my ears I lowered myself from the sill, dropped into a flower-bed, and gave chase to the helmet and the legs, myself barefooted and in pyjamahs.I saw my policeman vanish round a corner. I was after him like a deer, and even as I ran the position amused me. Chasing the police! He could not hear my naked feet; I gained on him splendidly, and had my hand on his shoulder before he knew me to exist. His face, as he stopped and turned it, feeling for his pistol, I shall remember all my life."All right," I cried. "I'm not the man you're after. Hurry up! I'm coming along to see the fun."He swore in my teeth and rushed on. I followed in high excitement at his heels. All this time the first whistle was blowing through the night. We had reached the outskirts of the town, and were nearing the sound. At length, on turning a corner, we came upon another drill-trousered, pith-helmeted gentleman in the gateway of an empty house."That's about enough of us," said he, pocketing his whistle. "I've got a man already on the lawn at the back. The house is empty, and he's in it like a rat in a trap. But who's this you've brought along with you, mate?""A volunteer," said I. "You won't refuse to let me lend a hand if I get the chance?""You'll get your brains blown out," replied the constable who had given the alarm, a sergeant as I saw now. "You'd best go home, though I won't say but what we want all the men we can get. The town's asleep—as usual. Can you face powder?""I'll see," said I, laughing, for I scarcely suspected he was in earnest. "Who is it you're after? Somebody very dangerous?""The Intercolonial bank-robber," replied the sergeant grimly. "What do you say now?"I said nothing at all. I know not what I had expected; but it was not this; and for the moment my own density concerned me as much as my fears."Oh, that's all right," said the sergeant, with an intolerable sneer. "You cut away and send a grown man along when you see one!"My reply need not be recorded; suffice it that a moment later one of the men, who both carried firearms, had handed me his truncheon; and I was on my way to join the third constable on the lawn behind the house, while those two effected an entrance in front.

It is my good fortune to cherish a particularly vivid recollection of the town of Geelong. Others may have found the place so dull as to justify an echo of the cheap local sneer at its expense; to me those sloping parallels of low houses have still a common terminus in the bluest of all Australian waters; and I people the streets, whose very names I have forgotten, with faces of extraordinary kindness, imperishable while memory holds her seat. Even had it bored me, I for one should have good reason to love Geelong. It was my lot, however, not only to happen upon the town in a week of unique excitement, but, thanks to one of those chance meetings which are the veriest commonplace of outlandish travel, to have a finger in the pother. I arrived by the boat on a Monday afternoon, to find the streets crowded and peace disturbed by a sudden run on one of the banks. On the Wednesday, another bank, which had notoriously received much of the money withdrawn from the Barwon Banking Company, Limited, was in its turn the victim of a still uglier fate: the Geelong branch ofthe Intercolonial was entered in broad daylight by a man masked and armed to the beard, who stayed some ten minutes, and then walked into thin air with no less a sum than nineteen thousand and odd pounds in notes and gold.

I was playing lawn-tennis with my then new friends when we heard the news; and it stopped our game. The bank manager's wife, a friend of my friends, arrived with her daughter: the one incoherent, the other dumb, with horror and dismay. And I heard at first-hand a few broken, hysterical words from the white lips of the elderly lady, and noted the tearless trouble in the wide blue eyes of the girl, before it struck me to retire. The family had been at luncheon in the private part of the bank, and knew nothing of the affair until the junior clerk broke in upon them like a lunatic at large. He, too, had gone out for his lunch, and returned to find teller and cashier alike insensible, and the safe rifled. That was all I stayed to gather, save that the unhappy lady was agitated by a side issue far worse to her than the bank's loss. There had been no bloodshed. The revolver kept beneath the counter had been used, but used in vain. It was not loaded. Her husband would be blamed, nay, discharged to a certainty in his old age. And I, too, walked down the street more absorbed in the picture of an elderly couple brought to ruin, and a blue-eyed girl gone for a governess, than in the immediate catastrophe.

I found my way to the Intercolonial Bank; there was no need to ask it. A crowd clamoured at the doors, but these were shut for the day. And I learned no more than I already knew, save that the robber wore a black beard, and was declared by some to be a second Ned Kelly from the Strathbogie Ranges. Nor did I acquire more real information the rest of that day; nor hope for any when late at night I thought I recognised an old schoolfellow in the street.

"Deedesmajor!" I cried without pausing to make certain; but I was certain enough when my man turned and favoured me with the stare of studied insolence which had made our house-master's life a burden to him some ten years before that night. Among a thousand, although the dark eyes were sunken and devil-may-care, the full lips hidden by a moustache with grey hairs in it, and the pale face prematurely lined, I could have sworn to Deedesmajorthen.

"Don't know you from Adam," said he. "What do you want?"

"We were at school together," I explained. "I was your fag when you were captain of footer. To think of meeting you here!"

"Do tell me your name," he said wearily; and at that moment I recollected (what had quite escaped my memory) his ultimate expulsion; and I stood confounded by my maladroitness.

"Bower," said I, abashed.

"The Beetle!" cried Deedes, not unkindly; a moment later he was shaking my hand and smiling on my confusion. "Hang school!" said he. "Where are you staying?"

"Well," said I, "I'm supposed to be staying with some people I brought a letter of introduction to; but they hadn't a room for me, and insisted on getting me one outside; so that's where I am."

"What's their name?" said Deedes; when I told him, he nodded, but made no further comment, beyond inviting himself to my room for a chat. The proposal delighted me; indeed it caused me a positive thrill, which I can only attribute to an insensible return of the small boy's proper attitude towards a distinguished senior. We were twenty-eight and twenty-four now, instead of eighteen and fourteen; yet, as we walked, only one of us was a man, and I was once more his fag. I felt quite proud when he accepted a cigarette from my case, prouder yet when he took my arm. The feeling stuck to me till we reached my room, when it suddenly collapsed. Deedes had asked me what I was doing. I had told him of my illness and my voyage, and had countered with his own question. He laughed contemptuously, sitting on the edge of my bed.

"Clerk in a bank!" said he.

"Not the Intercolonial?" I cried.

"That's it," he answered, nodding.

"Then you were there to-day! Thisisluck; I've been so awfully keen to know exactly what happened."

"I was not there," replied Deedes. "I was having my lunch. I can only tell you what I saw when I got back. There was our cashier sprawled across the counter, and the teller in a heap behind it—both knocked on the head. And there was the empty safe, wide open, with the sun shining into it like a bull's-eye lantern. No, I only wish Ihadbeen there: it's such a chance as I shall never get again."

"You'd have shown fight?" said I, gazing at his long athletic limbs, and appreciating the force of his wish as I perceived in what threadbare rags they were imprisoned. "Yes, you'd have stood up to the chap, I know; I can see you doing it!"

"There would have been nothing wonderful in that," was his reply. "I should have had everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"Not your life?"

"It's less than nothing."

"Nonsense, Deedes," said I, although or because I could see that it was not. "You don't expect me to believe that!"

"I don't care what you believe, and it's not the point," he answered. "Give me another cigarette, Beetle; you were asking about the robbery; if you don't mind, we'll confine ourselves to that. I'm afraid old I'Anson will get the sack; he's the manager, and responsible for the bank revolver being loaded. Heswears it was; we all thought it was; but nobody had looked at it for weeks, and you see it wasn't. Yes, that's a rule in all banks in this country where sticking them up is a public industry. The yarn about Ned Kelly's son? Don't you believe it; nobody ever heard of him before. No, if you ask me, we must look a little nearer home for the man who stuck up our bank this afternoon."

"Nearer home!" said I. "Then you think it was somebody who knew about the run upon the Barwon Banking Company and the payments into the Intercolonial?"

"Obviously; somebody who knew all about it, and perhaps paid in a big lump himself. That would have been a gorgeous blind!" cried Deedes, kindling suddenly. "Beetle, old chap, I wish I'd thought of it myself—only it would have meant boning the capital too! I strongly suspect some of these respectable Geelongese and Barwonners of being at the bottom of the whole thing, though; they'resorespectable, Beetle, there's bound to be villains among 'em. By Jove!" he added, getting to his feet with a sinister light in his handsome, dissipated countenance, "I'll go for the reward when they put it up! Four figures it can't fall short of; that would be better than junior clerking for eighty pounds a year!" And he walked up and down my room laughing softly to himself.

"I'll join you," cried I. "I'll go in for love, or honour and glory, and you shall pocket the £ s. d."

"Rot!" said he curtly, yet almost with the word he had me by the shoulders, and was smiling queerly in my face. "Why not join me in the other thing?" he exclaimed. "You were well enough plucked at school!"

"But what other thing?" said I.

"Doing the trick," he cried; "not finding out who did it!"

"Deedes," said I, "what the devil do you mean?"

"Mean? What I say, my dear Beetle—every word of it! What's the use of being honest? Look at me. Look at my shirt-cuffs, that I've got to trim every morning like my nails; look at my trousers, as I saw you looking at 'em just now. Those bags at the knees are honesty; and honesty's rapidly wearing them through on an office stool. I'm as poor as a rat in a drain: it's all honesty, and I've had about enough of it. Think of the fellow who walked off with his fortune this morning, and then think of me. Wouldn't you like to be in his shoes? No? My stars, you don't know what it is to live, Beetle; honest idiots like us never do. But I'm going to turn it up. If one can play at that game, two can; why not three? Come on, Beetle; make a third, and we'll rob another bank to-morrow!"

"You're joking," said I, and this time I returned his smile. "Still, if I was going in for that sort of thing, Deedes, I don't know who I'd rather have on my side than you."

His smile went out like a light.

"Will you go in for it?" he cried. "I'm joking far less than you think. My life's a sordid failure. I'm sick of it and ready for a fling. Will you come in?"

"No," I said. "I won't."

And we looked each other steadily in the eyes, until he led me back to laughter with as much ease as he had lengthened my face.

"All right, old Beetle!" said he. "I won't chaff any more—not that it was all chaff by any means. I sometimes feel like that, and so would you in my place. Bunked from school! In disgrace at home! Sent out here to be got rid of, sent to blazes in cold blood! The things I've done for a living during these ten years—this is the most respectable, I can tell you that. It's the respectability drives me mad."

His bitter voice, the lines upon his face, his grey hairs at twenty-eight (they were not confined to his moustache), all appealed to me with equal and irresistible force; my hand went out to him, and with it my heart.

"I am so sorry, Deedes," said I nervously. "If a fiver or two—yes, you must let me! For the sake of the old school!"

He shook his head, and the blood rushed to mine. I burst into apologies, but he cut me short.

"That's all right, Beetle. It was well meant, and you're a good chap. We'll foregather to-morrow, if this enviable stroke leaves us a spare moment in thebank. Meanwhile good-night, and thanks all the same."

And he crept down the stairs at my request; for I was not in the position of an ordinary lodger; and having followed and closed the door noiselessly behind him, I returned as stealthily to my room. I did not wish my hospitable friends to know that I had used lodgings, placed at my disposal as their guest, as though I had engaged them on my own account. Theoretically I was under their roof, and had committed a breach in introducing a man at midnight and sitting up in conversation with him till all hours. Deedes, moreover, as I suspected from his manner when I mentioned them, was most probably no friend of my friends; indeed I had no clue to his reputation in the town, and should have been surprised to find it a good one. He had been a reckless boy at school; at the very least he was a reckless man. And other traits must have developed with his years; he had been expelled, for instance, for certain gallantries not criminal in themselves, but sufficiently demoralising at a public school; and, despite his clothes, I could have sworn those dark, unscrupulous eyes, and that sardonic, insolent, and yet attractive manner, had done due damage in Geelong.

For there was a fascination in the man, incommunicable by another, and my despair as I write. He was a strong, selfish character, one in whom the end permitted any means; yet there was that in himfor which it is harder to find a name, which attracted while it repelled, which enforced admiration in its own despite. At school he had been immensely popular and a bad influence: at once a bugbear and an idol from the respective points of view of masters and boys. My own view was still that of the boy. I could not help it; nor could I sleep for thinking of our singular rencontre and interview. I undressed, but shirked my pillow. I smoked my pipe; but it did me no good. Finally I threw up my window, and as I did so heard a sound that interested, and another that thrilled me. The first was a whistle blowing in the distance; the second, an answering whistle, which made me jump, for it came from beneath the very window at which I stood.

I leaned out. A white helmet and a pair of white legs flashed under a lamp and were gone. My window was no impossible height from the ground, but I did not stay to measure it. With the whistles still in my ears I lowered myself from the sill, dropped into a flower-bed, and gave chase to the helmet and the legs, myself barefooted and in pyjamahs.

I saw my policeman vanish round a corner. I was after him like a deer, and even as I ran the position amused me. Chasing the police! He could not hear my naked feet; I gained on him splendidly, and had my hand on his shoulder before he knew me to exist. His face, as he stopped and turned it, feeling for his pistol, I shall remember all my life.

"All right," I cried. "I'm not the man you're after. Hurry up! I'm coming along to see the fun."

He swore in my teeth and rushed on. I followed in high excitement at his heels. All this time the first whistle was blowing through the night. We had reached the outskirts of the town, and were nearing the sound. At length, on turning a corner, we came upon another drill-trousered, pith-helmeted gentleman in the gateway of an empty house.

"That's about enough of us," said he, pocketing his whistle. "I've got a man already on the lawn at the back. The house is empty, and he's in it like a rat in a trap. But who's this you've brought along with you, mate?"

"A volunteer," said I. "You won't refuse to let me lend a hand if I get the chance?"

"You'll get your brains blown out," replied the constable who had given the alarm, a sergeant as I saw now. "You'd best go home, though I won't say but what we want all the men we can get. The town's asleep—as usual. Can you face powder?"

"I'll see," said I, laughing, for I scarcely suspected he was in earnest. "Who is it you're after? Somebody very dangerous?"

"The Intercolonial bank-robber," replied the sergeant grimly. "What do you say now?"

I said nothing at all. I know not what I had expected; but it was not this; and for the moment my own density concerned me as much as my fears.

"Oh, that's all right," said the sergeant, with an intolerable sneer. "You cut away and send a grown man along when you see one!"

My reply need not be recorded; suffice it that a moment later one of the men, who both carried firearms, had handed me his truncheon; and I was on my way to join the third constable on the lawn behind the house, while those two effected an entrance in front.

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