The Shadow of a Man

XII

AN ESCAPADE

She put her mind to it with characteristic thoroughness and honesty. Let there be no mistake about Moya Bethune. She had faults of temper, and faults of temperament, and as many miscellaneous faults as she was quick to find in others; but this did not retard her from seeing them in herself. She was a little spoilt; it is the almost inevitable defect of the popular qualities. She had a good conceit of herself, and a naughty tongue; she could not have belonged to that branch of the Bethunes and quite escaped either. On the other hand, she was not without their cardinal merits. There was, indeed, a brutal honesty in the breed; in Moya it became a singular sincerity, not always pleasing to her friends, but counterbalanced by the brightness and charm of her personality. She was incapable of deceiving another; infinitely rarer, she was equally incapable of deceiving herself; and could consider most things from more standpoints than are accessible to most women, always provided that she kept that cornerstone of all sane judgment, her temper. She had lost it with Rigden and lost it with Theodore, and was in a pretty bad temper with herself to boot; but that is a minor matter; it does not drive the blood to the brain; it need not obscure every point of view but one. And there were but two worthy of Moya's consideration.

There was her own point of view, and there was Rigden's. Moya took first innings; she was the woman, after all.

She began with the beginning of this visit – this visit that the almanac pretended was but fifty hours old after all these days and nights: Well, to believe it, and go back to the first night: they had been happy enough then, still happier next day, happiest of all in the afternoon. Moya could see the shadows and feel the heat, and hear Rigden wondering whether she would ever care for the place, and her own light-hearted replies; but there she checked herself, and passed over the memorable end of that now memorable conversation, and took the next phase in due order.

Of course she had been angry; anybody of any spirit, similarly placed, would have resented being deserted by the hour together for the first wayfarer. And the lie made it worse; and the refusal to explain matters made the lie incalculably worse. He had put her in an abominable position, professing to love her all the time. How could she believe in such love? Love and trust were inseparable in her mind. Yet he had not trusted her for a moment; even when she stooped to tell a lie herself, to save him, even then he could not take her into his confidence. It was the least he could have done after that; it was the very least that she had earned.

Most of the next day – to-day! – even Moya shirked. Why had it laid such a hold upon her – the bush – the bush life – the whole thing? Was it the mere infection of a real enthusiasm? Or was it but the meretricious glamour of the foregone, and would the fascination have been as great if all had still been well? Moya abandoned these points; they formed a side issue after all. Her mind jumped to the final explanation – still ringing in her ears. It was immeasurably worse than all the rest, in essence, in significance, in result. The result mattered least; there was little weakness in Moya; she would have snapped her fingers at the world for the man she loved. But how could she forgive his first deceit, his want of trust in her to the end? And how could she think for another moment of marrying a man whom she could not possibly forgive?

She did not think of it. She relinquished her own point of view, and tried with all her honesty to put herself in his place instead.

It was not very difficult. The poverty-stricken childhood (so different from her own!) with its terrible secret, its ever-hidden disgrace; small wonder if it had become second nature to him to hide it! Then there was the mother. Moya had always loved him for the tone of his lightest reference to his mother. She thought now of the irreparable loss of that mother's death, and felt how she herself had sworn in her heart to repair it. She thought of their meeting, his sunburnt face, the new atmosphere he brought with him, their immediate engagement: the beginning had come almost as quickly as the end! Then Moya darkened. She remembered how her people had tried to treat him, and how simply and sturdily he had borne himself among them. Whereas, if he had told them all … but he might have told her!

Yet she wondered. The father was as good as dead, was literally dead to the world; partly for his sake, perhaps, the secret had been kept so jealously all these years by mother and son. Moya still thought that an exception should have been made in her case. But, on mature reflection, she was no longer absolutely and finally convinced of this. And the mere shadow of a doubt upon the point was her first comfort in all these hours.

Such was the inner aspect; the outward and visible was grave enough. It was one thing to be true to a prisoner and a prisoner's son, but another thing to remain engaged to him. Moya was no hand at secrets. And now she hated them. So her mind was made up on one point. If she forgave him, then no power should make her give him up, and she would wear his ring before all her world, though it were the ring of a prisoner in Pentridge Stockade. But she knew what that would mean, and a brief spell of too vivid foresight, which followed, cannot be said to have improved Rigden's chances of forgiveness.

There was one thing, however, which Moya had unaccountably forgotten. This was the sudden inspiration which had come to her an hour ago, among the station pines. She was reminded of it and of other things by the arrival of Mrs. Duncan with a tray; she had even forgotten that her last meal had been made in the middle of the afternoon, at the rabbiter's camp. Mrs. Duncan had discovered this by questioning young Ives, and the tea and eggs were the result of a consultation with Mr. Bethune.

"And after that," smiled Moya, "you will leave me for the night, won't you? I feel as if I should never want to get up again!"

"I'm sure you do, my dear," the good woman cried.

"I shall lock my door," said Moya. "Don't let anybody come to me in the morning; beg my brother not to come."

"Indeed I'll see he doesn't."

And Mrs. Duncan departed as one who had been told little but who guessed much, with a shake of her head, and a nod to follow in case there was nothing to shake it over; for she was entirely baffled.

Moya locked the door on her.

"To think I should have forgotten! My one hope – my one!"

And she ate every morsel on the tray; then undressed and went properly to bed, for the sake of the rest. But to sleep she was afraid, lest she might sleep too long. And between midnight and dawn, she was not only up once more, but abroad by herself in the darkest hour.

Her door she left locked behind her; the key she pushed underneath; and she stepped across the verandah with her riding habit gathered up in one hand, and both shoes clutched in the other.

"It is dreadful! I am as bad as he is. But I can't help it. There's nobody else to do it for me – unless I tell them first. And at least I can keep his secret!"

The various buildings lay vague and opaque in the darkness: not a spark of light in any one of them. And the moon had set; the stars alone lit Moya to the horse-yard.

Luckily she was not unused to horses. She not only had her own hack at home, but made a pet of it and kept her eye upon the groom. A single match, blown out in an instant, showed Moya the saddle and bridle which she had already used, with a water-bag hanging hard by, in the hut adjoining the yard. The bag she filled from the tank outside. The rest was an even simpler matter; a rocking-horse could not have stood quieter than the bony beast which Ives had left behind with the night-horse.

It proved a strong and stolid mount, with a hard, unyielding, but methodical canter, and only one bad habit: it shaved trees and gateposts a little too closely for a rider unaccustomed to the bush. Moya was near disaster at the start; thereafter she allowed for the blemish, and crossed Butcher-boy without mishap.

It was now the darkest quarter of the darkest hour; and Moya was quite thankful that she had no longer a track to follow or to lose. For in Big Bushy she turned sharply to the left, as in the morning with young Ives, and once more followed the fence; but this time she hugged it, and was not happy unless she could switch the wires to make certain they were there.

It was lighter when she reached the first corner: absolute blackness had turned to a dark yet transparent grey; it was as though the ink had been watered; but in a little it was ink no more. Moya turned in her saddle, and a broadening flail of bloodshot blue was sweeping the stars one by one out of the eastern sky.

Also Moya felt the wind of her own travelling bite shrewdly through her summer blouse; and she put a stop to the blundering, plodding canter about half-way down the east-and-west fence whose eastern angle contained the disused whim and hut.

It was no longer necessary to switch the wires; even the line of trees in Blind Man's Block had taken shape behind them; and that sinister streak soon stood for the last black finger-mark of the night.

Further down the fence a covey of crows got up suddenly with foul outry; and Moya, remembering the merino which had fallen by the way, steeled her body once more to the bony one's uneasy canter.

The beast now revealed itself a dapple-grey; and at last between its unkempt ears, and against the slaty sky to westward, Moya described the timbers of the whim.

She reined in again, her bent head puzzling over what she should say.

And again she cantered, the settled words upon her lips; but there they were destined to remain until forgotten; for it was at this point that Moya's adventure diverged alike from her purpose and her preconception.

In the first place the hut was empty. It took Moya some minutes to convince herself of the fact. Again and again she called upon the supposed occupant to come out declaring herself a friend come to warn him, as indeed she had. At last she dismounted and entered, her whip clutched firmly, her heart in her mouth. The hut was without partition or inner chamber. A glance proved it as empty as it had seemed.

Moya was nonplussed: all her plans had been built upon the supposition that she should find the runaway still skulking in the hut where she had seen him the previous forenoon. She now perceived how groundless her supposition had been; it seemed insane when she remembered that the runaway had as certainly seen her – and her sudden flight at sight of him. Unquestionably she had made a false start. Yet she did not see what else she could have done.

She led her horse to the whim itself. Twin shafts ran deep into the earth, side by side like the barrels of a gun. But this whim was finally forsaken; the long rope and the elaborate buckets had been removed and stored; and the slabbed shafts ended in tiny glimmering squares without break or foot-hole from brink to base.

Moya stood still to think; and very soon the thought of the black tracker put all others out of court. It came with a sigh: if only she had him there! He would think nothing of tracking the fugitive from the hut whithersoever his feet had carried him; was it only the blacks who could do such things?

How would he begin? Moya recalled her brother's description, and thought she knew. He would begin by riding down the fence, and seeing if anybody had crossed it.

She was doing this herself next minute. And the thought that had come with a sigh had already made her heart beat madly, and the breath come quicker and quicker through her parted lips; but not with fear; she was much too excited to feel a conscious qualm. Besides, she had somehow no fear of the unhappy man, his father.

Excitement flew to frenzy when she actually found the place. She knew it on the instant, and was never in doubt. There were several footmarks on either side of the fence; on the far side a vertebrate line of them, pointing plainly to the scrub; even her unskilled eye could follow it half the way.

The next thing was to strap down the wires, but Moya could not wait for that. She galloped to a gate that she had seen in the corner near the whim, and came up the other side of the fence also at a gallop.

The trail was easily followed to the scrub: among the trees the ground was harder and footprints proportionately faint. By dismounting, however, and dropping her handkerchief at each apparent break of the chain, Moya always succeeded in picking up the links eventually. Now they gave her no trouble for half-an-hour; now a check would last as long again; but each half-hour seemed like five minutes in her excitement. The trees grew thicker and thicker, but never any higher. Their branches swept the ground and interlaced; and many were the windings of the faint footmarks tenaciously followed by Moya and the dapple-grey. They were as divers wandering on the bed of a shallow sea; for all its shallowness, the patches of sunlight were fewer and fewer, and farther between; if they were also hotter, Moya did not notice the difference. She did not realize into what a labyrinth she was penetrating. Her entire attention was divided between the last footprint and the next; she had none over for any other consideration whatsoever. It was an extreme instance of the forcing of one faculty at the expense of all the rest. Moya thought no more even of what she should say when she ran her man to earth. She had decided all that before she reached the hut. No pang of hunger or of thirst assailed her; excitement and concentration were her meat and drink.

Yet when the end came her very first feeling was that of physical faintness and exhaustion. But then it was an exceedingly sudden and really terrifying end. Moya was dodging boles and ducking under branches, the dapple-grey behind her, her arm through the reins, when all at once these tightened. Moya turned quickly, thinking the horse was unable to follow.

It was.

A gnarled hand, all hair and sinew, held it by the bridle.

XIII

BLIND MAN'S BLOCK

It was some moments before Moya looked higher than that hand, and it prepared her for a worse face than she found waiting for her own. The face was fierce enough, and it poured a steady fire upon the girl from black eyes blazing in the double shade of a felt wideawake and the overhanging mallee. But it was also old, and lined, and hunted; the man had grown grey in prison; whatever his offences, there was rare spirit in a last dash for freedom at his age. Moya had not thought so before. She was surprised that she should think it now. The last thing that she had expected to feel was an atom of real sympathy with the destroyer of her happiness. And yet it was the first thing she felt.

"Please don't look at me like that," she begged. "I wish you no harm, believe me!"

There was a pause, and then a first stern question.

"Who sent you here?"

"Nobody."

"Rot!"

"It's the truth."

"How else did you find me?"

"I saw you yesterday in the hut; you know that; you saw me."

"This is not the hut."

"No, but as you weren't there I looked for your tracks. And I found them. And here I am."

Shaggy brows rose above the piercing eyes.

"I thought you didn't come from the bush?"

"Nor do I; but I have heard a good deal about tracking, this last day or two; and I had luck."

"You've come all this way alone?"

"Absolutely."

"Then nobody else knows anything about it. That's certain. But they will know! You'll be followed, and I shall be found!"

"I don't think so; they'll think I've gone somewhere else."

The convict gave her a long look, and his hawk's eye gleamed; then he turned his attention to the dapple-grey. It was over a minute before he spoke again.

"Do you know who I am?" he then asked.

"Captain Bovill."

He smiled wickedly.

"And nothing else?"

"Oh, yes," said Moya, sadly; "I know what else you are, of course. His father!"

"So he's had the pluck to tell you, after all?"

"He should have told me at once."

"And lost you?"

"He hasn't lost me yet!" cried Moya impulsively, but from her loyal heart none the less.

"Then why break away from him like this? Wasn't his word good enough?"

"I haven't broken away," said Moya, "from him. I couldn't. I've come to tell you why. They've taken him to prison!"

"Taken him!"

"On your account. They know he helped you. That's all they do know."

The convict stared; but, in the perpetual twilight of the mallee that was the only fact to which Moya could have sworn. She could make nothing of the old man's expression. When he spoke, however, there was no mistaking his tone. It was hard and grim as a prison bell.

"In his turn!" said he. "Well, it'll teach him what it's like."

"But it isn't his turn," cried Moya, in a fury; "what has he done to deserve such degradation, except a good deal more than his duty by you? And this is all the thanks he gets! As though he had taken after you! How can you speak like that of him? How dare you – to me?"

So Moya could turn upon the whilom terror of a colony, a desperado all his days, yet surely never more desperate than now; and her rings flashed, and her eyes flashed, and there was no one there to see! No soul within many miles but the great criminal before her, whose turn it was to astonish Moya. He uncovered; he jerked a bow that was half a shrug, but the more convincing for the blemish; and thereafter hung his cropped head in strange humility.

"You're right!" said he. "I deserve all you've said, and more. He has treated me ten thousand times better than I deserve, and that's my gratitude! Yet if you had been half a lifetime in the hulks – in irons – chained down like a wild beast – why, you'd be one, even you!"

"I know," said Moya in a low voice. "It is terrible to think of!"

"And God bless you for admitting that much," the old man whined, "for it's few that will. Break the law, and the law breaks you – on a wheel! Talk about the wrongs of prisoners; they have neither wrongs nor rights in the eyes of the law; it's their own fault for being prisoners, and that's the last word."

"It is very terrible," said Moya again.

"Ah, but you little know how bad it is; and I'm not going to tell you. It's worse than your worst dreams, and that must do for you. The floggings, the irons, the solitary confinement in your irons with the blood running down your back! No, I said I wouldn't, and I won't. But it's hard to hold your tongue when you're talking to a lady for the first time in thirty years. And to think of a young lady like you coming all this way, alone too, to say a kind word to a double-dyed old rogue like me! It's the most wonderful thing I ever heard of in all my days. I can't think why you did it, for the life of me I can't!"

"It was to tell you about your son," Moya reminded him.

"Ah, poor fellow! God help him, for I can't."

"Are you quite sure?" said Moya gently, and for once rather nervously as well.

"Sure? Of course I'm sure! Why, what can I do?" cried the other, with sudden irritation as suddenly suppressed. "Hiding – hunted – with every hand against me but yours – I'd help him if I could, but I can't."

"So he's to go to prison instead of you?"

Moya spoke quietly, but with the more effect; indeed, she was herself beginning to feel surprised at her success with a desperate man in vital straits. He was more amenable than she had imagined possible. That he should parley with her at all was infinite encouragement. But now there came a pause.

"I see what you're driving at," he cried savagely at last. "You want me to give myself up! I'll see you – further."

The oath was dropped at the last moment – another strange sign – but the tone could not have been stronger. Yet the mere fact that he had seen her point, and made it for her, filled Moya with increasing confidence.

"I don't wonder," she had the tact to say. "How could you be expected to go back – to that – of your own free will? And yet what can be worse than waiting – waiting till – "

"I'm taken, eh? Is that what you want to say? They shall never take me alive, curse them; don't you trouble about that!"

The tone was stubborn, ferocious, blood-curdling, but at least it was in keeping with the blazing eyes and the great jowl beneath. Moya looked steadily at the bushranger, the mutineer, the indomitable criminal of other days; more remained of him than she had fancied. And to think that he had soft answers for her!

She made haste to earn another.

"Please – please – don't speak like that! It is dreadful. And I feel sure there is some middle course."

"I'm no believer in middle courses!"

"That I know. Yet – you have suffered so – I feel sure something could be done! I – that is my people – have influence – money – "