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I

Aman rode up one of the dark winding trails to Henny's Road-house, whistled twice a clear call, and waited, still as a tree. The back door opened with a thin thread of orange light and a woman slipped out. Their meeting together was as silent as the meeting of animals, and something of the animal sense they must have had to see at all in this vague blackness that abolished outline. But he stooped at once from the saddle, lifted a burden out of her arms, and laid it across the pommel.

"The grub, is it?" he murmured.

"Aye. An' here's the bloody powder. I can't git no more, Collins. It was near as much as my life's worth to git that."

Henny inlaid her speech with words of prison slang that were obsolete to the man. She had left Port Arthur while Collins was still a twelve-year-old youngster being "disciplined" at Point Puer. Of the other children who had come with him on the boat from England several had disciplined themselves into suicide, but Collins had always been fond of his life. He was no less fond of it because it was now forfeit. Twice he had killed his man, and some day he would be killed: by one of the hunted half-scared rabble he led, by a gun in the hands of some pursuer, or by the gallows down in the prison at Hobart Town. It was only the last he dreaded. Other endings were all in the game.

"Got a chew, Henny?" he said hungrily. "Carn't git the taste o' them bloody leaves outer me gullet. We been livin' on leaves an' possums this larst month."

Henny broke a plug of tobacco and handed a piece up. Her dim gaunt shadow had a grotesque head which was the beaver bonnet no man ever saw her without. "Now you vamoose, Collins. There's more folk than I likes about, to-night."

Within the hut sounded the mourning notes of an accordion clumsily played, the rhythmic stamp of heavy feet.

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"They got a roof over 'em, anyways," said the man who would never walk freely under a roof again. "How much, yer bloody old witch?"

She told him, and he pulled out a gentleman's silk purse, running the rings and selecting gold pieces. "There'll be more to-morrer," he said with a chuckle. "Clent's a rich place, and there are rich folks there to-night. Military gent too." He patted the pistol on his hip. "That's fur him, blarst him."

The mare backed away under his hand, dainty as a lady. Henny held his leg with her hard old claw. "Don't kill Comyns," she whispered.

"Let 'em not git in my way, then. We must have the loot."

"I'll niver help 'ee agin, Jack, if tha kills Comyns."

"Curse it! We gotter live," the man responded violently. "An' we gotter git enough to-night to live on for months. The hull country'll be up on us arter this." He stooped to her ear. "You starve in the rain an' cold in them bloody hills till yer do' know you're a man no more an' yer won't be too pertickler how yer takes what yer has to have," he said, and melted into the dim trail, the imported blood mare stolen from Baxter moving over dead sticks and leaves delicately as a ghost.

The woman stood still, staring into the dark where he had vanished, as though he drew her mind after him. She glanced once over her shoulder in the brainless terror of a brute, frightened at he knows not what, gave a long hushed gasp as though some spell worked in her, and then threw it off with a shudder. For a moment she had been tempted to send one of her visitors over to warn Clent, but fear of what Collins would do if ever he found out overwhelmed her. She put her skinny hands to her mouth and bit them in a transport of fear. Fear such as the Ancients knew, bodiless, unescapable.

"No, no. They must take theer chanst," she muttered, and went back, dragging her heavy man-boots into the hut.

II

"Gentlemen," said the Captain, "I give you 'Dear Women'."

They were all on their feet now, and as sober as could be expected. Oliver, very tired of being watch-dog, was eager to page 70hand them over to the ladies, who would have to make what they could of Berry's blank black stare and Joe Merrick's dropping underlip and old Sorley's ramrod rigidity. And they'd do it, these excellent, adaptable Dear Women he thought, with a thread of wonder running through the sneer.

That toast was never drunk. From the rear of the house came a sharp angry banging of muskets, shouting, one frightened squeal from a woman. In some houses that would have been enough to send the men pelting down to the kitchens while the bush-rangers got in through the front and held them up from the rear. But in these who had been raided before, instinct worked quicker than thought. Beverley and Keyes slammed and fastened shutters, William bolted the front door, and Madam had her brood out of the salon and down the back passage into the hall before the red wine had stopped running over the table-edge.

"Pillows!" cried Susan, stumbling up the stairs. "Feather beds. Cushions. Annie … Nurse … Celeste!"

In a few moments, finding their feint had failed, the bushrangers would begin shooting all round the house, and barricades could not be set up too fast while the Captain was dealing out muskets from the gun-room and Oliver guarding the big iron door to the kitchen veranda. Cook, the maids and men out in the kitchen, must submit to force. But they would not be hurt if they kept their wits. It was Clent these ruffians were after: its silver, the gold in the Captain's safe, the jewels.

Gad! If I could get off for the police! thought Oliver. They mean business.

The Captain came plunging up, his shock of white hair defiant. "We'll make a siege of it, anyway, damme! Mab … where's Mab?"

But no one had seen Mab, and all but Louisa Sorley had forgotten Julia. She ran crying through the upper rooms, where Martha Sorley was wrapping up her babies in some wild sense of protection and Celeste bringing Mrs. Merrick round with burnt feathers. Most of the lights were put out for precaution, and Clent seemed like some dark ship labouring uncertainly in black uncharted seas.

But there was no panic. These pioneers had faced too much page 71for that. The psychology of courage ran through the house like a flame, and the children were hopping everywhere, laughing, clapping their soft little hands. The women went with strained faces, silent, blocking up windows that were not being fired from, biting back cries when a bullet got past their defences and cracked into the opposite wall. Collins and Wingy, mad at this resistance when they had expected an easy descent on drunken men, would do their most devilish. Burn the house down, perhaps. Murder the women rushing out in the flames. Already their hatchets were splintering shutters here and there, and when the defenders rushed up they were met with a volley.

"Should have iron grilles like me," grunted old Merrick. "Wood no damned use…. Ellen, tell your mother to stop that damned screaming."

"Oh, dear Papa, she won't stop!" cried Ellen running. "Oh, dear Mamma, do stop, please."

Long afterward Jenny remembered that poignant night, when she and Brevis sat on the stairs in the strange unfamiliarity of the banging dark. Their little ghost-like bodies in the gloom were held together by his arm about her neck and together they snuffed up the choking smell of burned powder, the greasy smell of blown-out candles, the hot smell of blood where Susan was binding William's bleeding neck with a table napkin. "Keep calm, my dear," he was repeating urgently. "Remember your condition. I beg of you to keep calm."

"I like these smells," confided Brevis. "It makes me feel … I don't know … different, somehow."

Jenny, too, felt different. But it was the red flashes springing out of the dark that excited her, the sudden visions out of nothingness, exposing souls, not faces. Captain Berry's black round eyes with a new evil light behind them; Oliver's pretty features twisted in a mirthless grin; Conrad Beverley wildly glad as a berserker; William passing a nervous tongue over dry lips; Madam alert and angry as a bird; Susan with the sweat pouring down her pale face where the gauze turban hung draggled. Like that their elders came out of secrecy for a moment, unconsciously making a gift of their souls to one another, and faded again.

The house was too big to be defended by such a handful. The page 72salon shutters had been wrenched from their hinges and the bush-rangers were in, beating on the door barricading them from the passage. They were along the veranda, shooting under the heavy hall door. They were in through a pantry window, where old Jerrold and Oliver drove them out after much determined fighting among the glass and china.

Oliver came to have an arm bound up. "I think we settled one. But they have the advantage. We're shooting into the wide. And they outnumber us, I think."

"Where in God's name is Mab?" cried Captain, reloading his musket from the powder-flagon Nurse brought.

"Gad!" said Oliver, suddenly remembering. "I fancy he went to the stables. Why, ten to one he'll have the police here in a minute."

"If they have not already killed him," thought Madam. But she would not kill the gleam of hope around her by saying it.

"Damme, that will be it!" said the Captain banging away. "What? What do you say, Keyes?"

From the stair window, where his pistol was preventing the bush-rangers from setting up a stable ladder, Roger Keyes called down: "They want us to throw out the silver and the ladies' jewels or they'll fire the house. They are bringing straw from the ricks."

Madam came to the stair-foot with a candle in her hand. Under the frosty lace on her head her eyes gleamed. "Madam Comyn's compliments and they can have the jewels when they come for them," she cried, and laughed.

Mrs. Merrick, like a yellow-beaked hen in black feathers, scuffled down the stairs. "Give up your jewels, woman!" she shrieked. "We shall be burned like rats. Would you burn me … murder me?"

"Avec beaucoup de plaisir," said Madam, politely, and young Martha Sorley with a baby on each arm, said, quavering:

"I don't think I'm a coward … but with the babies … oh, couldn't we give up the jewels and send them away?"

"My child, do you think they'd go? Do you not think it would be oil on fire to show the white feather? Besides, Mab …" she brought it out roundly as though she believed it, did not see page 73him lying dead among the trodden hollyhocks, "Mab will have the military here directly."

The Captain said in her ear: "Get the women and children into the study, Jenny. It's the best protected. Lock the door. We may not be able to keep them out much longer."

Madam shut her eyes. The horror that walks by night invaded her soul. When blackfellow spears flew around the bullockdrays, when Day's Gang had attacked the boundary-fence hut and Garney come down on Clents, she had stayed by her man. Now she must leave him.

"Soit," she said, and drove her flock in like chickens.

Mrs. Merrick, half blinded by the brown-silk turban that had slipped over her eyes, carrying the front of stiff brown curls with it, slapped at both her dutiful daughters who supported her with pillows, and cried: "I vow I'll never come to this vile place again. Something always happens. Last year Susan left the warming-pan in my bed."

Louisa Sorley, spent with looking for Julia, said hopefully: "She may have hid in the linen-cupboards…. Adam, come here and let me wipe your nose."

In a corner of the study the maids huddled together, whimpering. Their mothers were out in the cottages, their fathers and lovers perhaps tied up in the kitchens or dead among the bullets. Madam sat still, head on hand, listening to the ebb and rise of the fight. So, it was said, Mrs. Hatherton of Mains had sat one night last year while bush-rangers killed her husband.

Conrad Beverley, half stripped and blackened by gunpowder, was in the scullery, stamping out burning straw thrown in through the broken windows, while Oliver, at the stair-opening, tried to pick off the flitting figures among the sunflowers and great dahlias down below. A loud crashing at the salon door brought the Captain with Joe Merrick and Keyes; and he actually had his hands on Collins, with that famished wolf face near his own and bullets flying all round, before something cracked him over the head and Keyes pulled him back.

That breach was patched up somehow, with a sofa pulled out of a side room, but it would not hold. And the fight was too hot to last much longer. Roger Keyes, his consciousness sharpened by page 74strain as often happens to finer natures, saw more in this than a mere battle of man against man. Indestructible forces were at work here: the basic need of the crushed and half-paralyzed ego to regain its human power; the subconscious savagery of the brute whom man has made bestial and Nature has prompted with her heroic forces.

"It's not Collins's Gang we are fighting," he thought. "It is the system. It is what began with the beginnings of tyranny and was carried on through Egypt and Rome right up to the Spanish Inquisition and the Fleet and Marshalsea and the floating hells of the Thames hulks. It is what we did at Port Arthur and Fort Macquarie, and what men always will do to their feebler brothers. We are fighting that elemental something in humanity which makes of the purely personal equation a thing of mere shreds and patches."

"Hear 'em howling out there, the dogs," said the Captain, rubbing a torn sleeve across his wet forehead. "I think Sorley's hit, but it was too dark to make sure. Damme, it's about time Mab did something!"

III

A part of Mab knew with the first musket-shot that he should leave Julia there in the summer-house and ride at once for help. But only a part. That profound thing which some name love and some lust had hold of him. He was possessed by Julia, although—or perhaps because—he had not yet dared do more than kiss her hands, bury his hot face in their curving coolness, gasp out the uncouth words of adolescence which to these two young things seemed the very miracle of meaning. The manners of the time required that this mistress should begin as the goddess, and worship came naturally to Mab's eager blood. But presently he was listening. He was on his feet.

"Darling, I can't stay. I must go to Trienna for help." Julia, thoroughly frightened, clung to him. She prepared to faint with the current adaptability of the time, so that Mab was for a little too distracted to think of anything but reviving her with prayers, with frantic hand-pattings and one quick stolen kiss on her forehead.

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"You do love me?" she opened an eye to say. "Don't leave me. Don't."

In Clent the lights went out. It was turned into a beleaguered fortress vibrating to the whine and crack of musketry. In the dim starlight dark figures were running, weaving about it a spell…. Mab drew Julia up in his arms.

"Come with me then, dearest … beloved. I daren't try for the stables now, but we could get across the fields."

"I've only got slippers on. I couldn't. Oh, hear the guns! Darling, let us die together."

"Be hanged to dying," said Mab. "I shall carry you." He bundled her, all foamy green and gold head, up in his arms and ran down the garden beneath the pale lilac trees. Duck on the river heard them coming and rose with a harsh beat of wings. In the paddock feeding sheep sheered off like ghosts, stamped their little sharp hoofs, stared, and began to crop again. The shots were distant now, far apart, like something heard in a dream. At the slip-rail Mab stopped. Julia was a well-grown wench and his unset limbs could do no more. He leaned on the post, too spent for speech, and Julia, relieved from present terrors, began to think of the future. Reputations were delicate things in the 'forties, easily "blown upon."

"I mustn't go into Trienna, darling," she said quaveringly. "You must go and come back for me and never tell any one I'm here. But do, do come soon, for I'm so dreadfully frightened!"

In his male blindness he would have argued, but now she was frantic for him to go and be back. So he set off again, running. And the fear that the bush-rangers, routed and scattered, might come on her there at the slip-rails, ran beside him to hound him on.

IV

Half the township turned out to the aid of Clent and they did not come too soon. Heaped straw was blazing against the north wall. Ladders at the windows told of hand-to-hand fights inside. Constable Quane and young Lieutenant Anderson led their men up, tumbled inside, and nearly killed Joe Merrick in the darkness. page 76With one man left behind, Collins's Gang got away, taking every horse in the stables with them. But Mab's racer, Vanity, came home next day, wild-eyed and sweating and scored with long lash-cuttings.

In the kitchens, grooms and maids were found trussed and gagged, and Cook's very wedding-ring and gold chain had been raped from her plump indignant body.

"But, damme, that's all the loot the rascals got!" exulted the Captain, industriously getting in the way of the doctor who was extracting a ball from James Sorley's leg.

Julia, smuggled into the house about this time, ran straight to her room, where poor weary Louisa found her later, very properly and conveniently in hysterics; for if young ladies of the 'forties had few rights, they had many refuges denied to those of later years.

"You shouldn't have hid in the linen-cupboard," said Louisa. "I am sure it must have been worse there, and now your father has been shot. Drink this up, dear, and do stop kicking."

It was grey morning now, and Mab followed his mother to her room and shut the door. The story he had given below had contented the Captain, but Madam must have the truth. "I was out with Julia," he said at once.

Madam had dropped into her high-backed chair. Now she gave a little shiver and her hands moved together in her lap. "I guessed it. And what then?"

"She is mine. I shall marry her."

Madam looked at him. "I know what men mean by that. What do you mean?"

"I mean," cried Mab, glowing, "that she is the most perfect and most pure of all God's angels——"

"Bah!" said Madam, sitting up. "You are only a boy, after all." Some obscure feeling of disappointment edged her tongue. "What do you think Mr. Sorley will have to say to you?"

"He must give her to me. We love each other."

"Is that all?"

"What more can there be?" asked Mab, innocently.

"Bien!" Madam shrugged. "If you don't know yet, you will some day." She put out her little heavily ringed hand and page 77drew him close. "Mab, mon petit garcon, there can no more come of this. James Sorley will not give the toast of Hobart Town to such as you. He means her for that oaf Berry, who is to have a title some fine day."

"But she loves me. Mother, you don't understand. We love each other. We are pledged."

"Do you mean to tell Mr. Sorley about to-night?"

"But of course! It was only to-night that we discovered …"

"Then tell him soon," said Madam, leaning back and closing her eyes. "They have taken him to Bredon, where he will be in bed with his side-whiskers and the faithful Louisa. Tell him soon, mon brave, before he has a leg to stand upon while he kicks you."

Mab walked over to Bredon in the afternoon. To his shocked disgust he had slept until midday, like any man not consumed with passion, and already old battered Clent was putting itself in order, with Durbin and William taking down the splintered shutters, and a boy out on the drive picking up the spent cartridgecases and sweeping away the bundles of charred straw where the children were playing.

The day was reckless with sun, sweet winds, and birds singing. There were grasshoppers in the paddock grass and white butterflies drunken over the tall purple flags by the river. Ugly things of the night were forgotten, as ugly things should be. With the dance of yellow wattle bloom against blue sky Mab's heart went up. He dreamed, walking the well-trodden way. Titles, position, wealth … all that he did not have … the magnet of his desire drew to him and they surrendered. Having Julia, all the lesser things would come, must come.

His setter, ranging after rabbits in the patch of bush by the boundary fence, lay down on the broad Bredon veranda with the dogs already stretched in the sun, and Mab went into the familar sprawling house with its bastard architecture, which James Sorley called pure Tuscan, feeling an enormous friendliness to every one.

Martha Sorley, her baby on her arm, met him with surprised eyes in her tired face. "Are you not after the bush-rangers like the others, Mab? Henry went off at dawn with most of the men. He was to meet Mr. Corrigan."

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Mab had forgotten the bush-rangers. He said, stammering: "I came to see Mr. Sorley. Can I see him now?"

"Oh! Is it a message? I'll inquire."

In the cool hall with the long rooms opening out of it Mab stood, laying stick and hat on the carved table. All his palpitating young body called for Julia, but she did not come Only Martha, leading him into the brown library where the councillor lay like an old grey fox in a brown-leather chair, his raised leg covered with a red-and-green shawl. Louisa Sorley, whose crisp white cap with tartan ribbons could not disguise what last night had done to her plump comeliness, kissed him on both cheeks.

"You look as fresh as hollyhocks, Mab. How is Madam? And poor Susan? A few more nights like that and I assure you I would begin to lose my nerve. And Julia in the linen-cupboard all the time, and bullets in Mr. Sorley's leg, and my knitting-needles gone …"

Mab seized his chance with the clumsiness of preoccupation: "Julia was not in the linen-cupboard. She was with me."

"My dear boy! What are you saying! You were outside, and a mercy you were——"

"Let me speak, Louisa." The councillor lifted himself in his chair. "What is this, Mab? What do you say about Julia?"

Mab told in a dozen words. "She hasn't caught cold?" he asked anxiously. "I did all I could, Mr. Sorley."

"Wait." The councillor was sitting up straight now. His whiskers seemed to bristle. Mab was dimly aware that he had become portentous. "Wait, I beg. You are speaking of Julia? Do I understand you to state that you and my daughter were out together all night?"

"Not all night, sir. It couldn't have been much past one o'clock——"

"Am I to understand that you and my daughter were out together, alone, until one o'clock at night?"

"Yes. But we love each other," cried Mab in a burst of feeling.

"Oh, dear!" said Louisa, and sat suddenly on a faldstool.

Her husband glanced at her. "My love," he said, "please leave us."

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"Oh, dear!" said poor Louisa again. She rose, hesitating.

"Mrs. Sorley," cried Mab, "tell him how much we love each other. She must have told you. Tell him how I worship … adore her."

"My love …" said the councillor, inexorably.

"Yes, dear, yes, I'm going…. Julia has told me nothing, Mab. She had hysterics, and then she had sal volatile, and then she had a bath——"

For once the councillor had ceased to remind himself that he was a gentleman. "Go, will you? Damn you!" he shouted, and Louisa bustled out in startled disarray. But she closed the door gently. James disliked noise unless he made it himself.

"And now," he said thinly, "let us get to the bottom of this."

Mab saw with surprise that the man's narrow forehead and long upper lip were wet. He began eagerly to explain that there could be no bottom to the bottomless, the overwhelming love …

The councillor set that aside with a jerk of his lean neck. His hard eyes probed. He chose his words deliberately: "I ask you what I am to understand by all this. What have you done to my daughter? Have you ruined her?"

Mab stared blankly. The colour burned up in his face and his eyes filled with a rush of hot tears. A sudden lump came in his throat as though this inconceivable, this impossible accusation were concrete and stuck there. "You … you old hog!" he cried, half-sobbing.

James Sorley relaxed. He would not have been where he was if he had not been able to recognize sincerity when he saw it. "You have both been extremely foolish," he said more mildly. "But so long as no one knows of this escapade, there is not much harm done. I suppose no one knows? Others might not be so ready to believe …"

"Others would never suggest such a … a …" Mab's voice broke on a sob. Like the high gods, he had built a magic palace for his lady, and this man had defiled it.

"You are a man, I suppose," said James Sorley, with compressed lips. "I have had some experience of young men. Have you spoken of this matter?"

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"No." To Mab's sensitiveness it was as though the man had asked, "Have you walked naked through Trienna?" "How could I until I had told you, had your consent——"

"That you will never have," said James Sorley, with such deadly quiet that it seemed to kill all the words he spoke after. He had spoken a number, Mab knew later, refusing all the prayers that Mab had poured out; refusing to listen; refusing to let him see Julia.

"Just for a minute. My God! You can't deny her to me just for a minute."

But, it seemed, James Sorley could and did. Mab went away empty; staggering and hatless in the hot sun. By the open door of the hut by the fence he hesitated; went in blindly and flung himself on the bed where Madam had borne him, where Julia had sat. What he did there he never remembered, but it was dark when he came back to Clent.

Oliver met him in the door, having just seen the great winered Sorley coach, swinging opulently on its leathers, pass down the Main Road on the first stage of its journey back to town. The councillor had asked for no pledges, being, like all men, incapable of judging others by different standards than his own. He had merely removed his lame leg, the round-eyed Berry nodding sleepily in the saddle, and Julia weeping on her mother's shoulder, from agitations…. Next week, thought Oliver, a little sorry, for when he had presented Berry for James's inspection he had not thought of Mab … next week a fashionable engagement will be announced in all the papers.

Now he said lightly: "Our Susan is modest and considerate as ever. She postponed the adding of another female to a population desperately in need of them until this fracas was over." Under Mab's black stare he elucidated further: "Susan's baby has arrived. You are an aunt this time."

"Oh," said Mab heavily, and slouched on into the house. Oliver stared after him with lips pursed to a delicate whistle…. I thought so. Yes, decidedly we shall hear of a fashionable engagement within the week, he mused.