The Rogue's March/Chapter 33
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE SHIP COMES IN
September finished on its sweetest note: a mild breeze blowing off the South Pacific, a temperate sun in a spotless sky, a harbour fretted with waves like azure shells, and winding among shores still green and wholesome from a winter’s rains. It was a Sunday, too, and round the woody headlands, and across the dark-blue inlets, came the sound of bells for afternoon church. Tom lay on his back, his head beneath a Norfolk Island pine, his heels in the warm sand at the water’s edge. His eyes were closed; but he was listening to the bells.
He fancied the sound as fourteen thousand miles away: for so had he lain and listened amid the Suffolk rabbit-warrens on summer Sundays when his place was in the cool dark rectory pew. His spirit was in Suffolk now. Then the bells stopped. Then he lay very still; and when he turned he half expected his back to smart and his legs to jingle. Once more he was a felon in a felon’s country; it was that despite sun and waves and soft white sand; and felon was his name no less for this his unmerited ease. As he looked across the bay a black fin broke the blue and made an allegory with a single smudge: even as those sweet waters teemed with sharks, so the fair land that locked them was rank and rotten with intestine horror and cruelty and corruption.
Fourteen thousand miles! The distance was brought home to Tom by being printed on the chart, beneath an ideal course, in small type which the little Rosamund was sailing over at that moment. It set him thinking of Claire, but the thoughts had no form and little sting. Not even yet could he think or feel acutely: a bundle of dead nerves and clouded brains, he could but ache and work, or ache and bask as he was doing now.
An odd number of “The Pickwick Papers” had found its way to the bungalow, and now lay in the sand beside Tom; he had finished it, to his sorrow, before the bells began. Presently up came Daintree with the dog that still followed him to every haunt but his study. He carried his camp-stool and an armful of books; and Tom’s heart sank; their taste in literature differing terribly, though, of the two, only one held himself qualified to judge. The judge glanced at the green cover in the sand, much as he would have favoured a mountebank at a fair, with insolent nostrils and a pitying eye for those who smiled. He opened his Byron and read a canto of “Lara,” aloud and admirably, but Tom nearly fell asleep, and was accused of having no soul for poetry. “Or for anything else,” Tom reminded the reader, who shut the book with an offended snap, but opened another next minute.
“Perhaps,” said Daintree, “you prefer this sort of thing. I shouldn’t wonder!”
And he read:—
“Oh! that ’twere possible,
After long grief and pain;
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
“When I was wont to meet her
In the silent woody places
Of the land that gave me birth,
We stood tranced in long embraces.
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter,
Than anything on earth.
“A shadow flits before me—
Not thou, but like to thee,
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.”
When Daintree began, Tom’s eyes had been swimming lazily about the bay; but the first quatrain brought them at a bound to the reader’s face, and now he was hanging upon every word. Line after line rang through him like a trumpet-call—waking old echoes—stirring and stabbing him—until the whole man tingled with the rushing of long-stagnant blood. And now came stanzas that went no deeper than the ear, while those three ran their course through every vein. Yet when he next caught up the thread it was his own soul still speaking—the very story was now his own.
“Alas! for her that met me,
That heard me softly call—
Came glimmering thro’ the laurels
At the quiet even fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.”
He had turned his head: a blue mist hid the world, but through it shone a poignant vision of Claire Harding—among the Winwood fir-trees—in the autumn evenings long ago. … And this is how the tears came back into Tom Erichsen’s eyes, to show him that his soul had lived through a night’s bushranging and four months of Major Honeybone’s iron-gang,
Daintree looked on with a jealous scorn. That a few stray verses in the “Annual Register” should put fire and water in eyes which the combined Hours of Exile and of Idleness sometimes left in such a very different state! It was a galling thought, and it showed itself in such black looks that Tom was constrained to cut his first heartfelt outburst very short indeed. So he hastily added that the poem appealed to him particularly—he need not explain why.
“I see,” said Daintree. “Not altogether on its merits, eh? I’m glad to hear it;” and his face lightened a little.
“I don’t know,” said Tom humbly; “it was on its merits, I think. Surely it must appeal to every miserable man. Oh, it’s all, all there—in such words! Come, sir, don’t you think it fine yourself?”
“Fine,” said Daintree, “is a word which the critic does not employ unadvisedly. Your fine poem is not spasmodic: it takes a metre and sticks to it—as I do, for example, and as Byron did. You don’t catch me—or Byron—writing poems with no two stanzas alike in form! No, Thomas, the verdict is not ‘fine’; but that the lines have a certain merit I don’t deny.”
“Who wrote them?” asked Tom after a pause.
“His name is Tennyson,” replied the poet. “You have never heard it before, I daresay, and I shouldn’t be surprised if you were never to hear it again. There were fair things in his last book, but, upon the whole, I am afraid the production you so admire may be taken as representing his high-water mark—which is a sufficient commentary upon the rest. I understand, however, that he is a very young man, so we must give him a chance. When he is my age he may do very much better, if he perseveres, as I have done. Now, my notion of treating such a theme,” said Daintree, “you have heard before, but you shall hear it again.”
And with that he drew “Hours of Exile” from his pocket, and read with ineffable unction one of the longest sets of “Stanzas to Clarinda”; while the terrier gazed up at him with eyes of devoted sympathy and admiration; and Tom fed his upon feathery emerald branches and a turquoise sky, as he reluctantly decided that the kindest of men was in some respects the most egregious also. Suddenly—to his horror—the reading stopped. He had been caught not attending! He lowered his eyes, and they fell upon the snowy wings of a full-rigged ship just clearing the woody eastern point of the bay, and sailing slowly and majestically on.
Both men sprang to the water’s edge. Daintree’s book lay in the sand. The ship was now clear of the point—standing to the north of Shark Island, with the light sea-breeze upon her counter—a noble vessel of six hundred tons, flying the red ensign at her peak.
Not a word passed at the water’s edge; but it was Tom who led the rush to the bungalow, who fetched Daintree’s immense spy-glass, with the flags of all nations let into the leather, and who bared the lenses before putting it in his master’s shaking hands.
“How many days are they out?” asked Daintree, aiming wildly with the glass.
“Ninety-nine.”
“She could never do it!”
“It’s been done before.”
“Oh, no, no; this must be some other ship. Steady the glass for me. I can’t get focus. There—now! Yes! I can see her people, but I can’t read her name!”
“Let me try, sir.”
“Here, then.”
Tom tried and gave it up.
“To Piper’s Point!” he cried. “She’ll pass there much closer!” And again he led the way, with Daintree thundering close behind, and the terrier barking happily at their heels.
Along the shore they raced, the little bay on their right, then across the promontory diagonally, and out at its western point, panting, trembling, streaming with perspiration, but in time: her bowsprit was sticking out behind the island, and they were there to see her nose follow, with the foam curling under it like a white moustache.
Tom had the telescope, focussed still, and he handed it to Daintree without a word; but the one concerned was trembling so violently, the ship jumped right and left, and Tom had to try again. He was steady enough. What was it to him? She was only half a mile off now, and the first thing he saw was a frock fluttering on the poop.
“Now I have it!” he muttered. “The sun’s on the letters: one, two, three—yes, there are eight! R—o—”
He lowered the glass and held out his hand.
“I congratulate you from my heart: the Rosamund it is, and I think that with the glass you may find the young lady herself upon the poop.”
It was Tom who led the cheers a moment later.
“I sha’n’t be there to meet them,” moaned Daintree as they were running back. “Ninety-nine days—ninety-nine days!”
“They’re not doing four knots; they’re shortening sail; you’ll see the Cove as soon as they do. Even if you don’t, they won’t land at once.”
“Suppose they did!”
“They won’t; we’ll put to in five minutes.”
Tom was the cheery one, the one with his wits about him; but then it was nothing to Tom. He would not go in with the curricle, though Daintree was as bent as a flurried man could be upon having the livery and the cockade in waiting on the quay. Tom, however, pointed out that the two ladies, their maid, and the driver were all the curricle could possibly hold; also that there was more to do at the bungalow than the other realised; but he promised to receive them in all his buttons, and in less than ten minutes the dazed man started both horses at a gallop down the Point Piper Road.
Tom heard him rattle out of earshot among the trees without audible mishap. He then ran back to the house, where Mrs. Fawcett was already beside herself in the kitchen; but Peggy had paused on the verandah with an anxious face.
“’Tis you should be wid ’m, Tom,” said she reproachfully.
“There wasn’t room, Peggy.”
“Room enough the one way. I take shame o’ ye for lettin’ the masther go alone in his haste.”
“Why?”
“’Tis thrown out an’ kilt he may be, on the way to meet his lady!”
“God forbid!” cried Tom—and the words came back to him next day.