Only a clod
pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and
savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and
black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation:
but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those
mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to
attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie
in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and
catch flies.
But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty
much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt
Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign
was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire,
which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with
tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the
sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and
could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was,
indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett,
the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.
“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most
of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small
farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an
old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish
I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that;
but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re
preternaturally poor.”
Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window,
admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat.
He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the
evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony
with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting
on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the
hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which
had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of
thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and
she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano
which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate,
but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild
stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the
world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s
piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which
“Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now
prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in
chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging
himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a
hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had
no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old
instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss
Corbett’s drab-coloured head.
Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face,
while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to
admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother
Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime
favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in
the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and
deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one
could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome
man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman.
The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the
ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in
his cottage at Port Arthur.
He went out presently, swinging his thin cane, and whistling all the
triplets and cadences of an elaborate _scena_; he was an amateur
musician and an amateur artist, playing more or less upon two or three
different instruments, and painting more or less in half-a-dozen
different styles. He could ride across country to the astonishment of
burly Leicestershire squires, who were inclined to think contemptuously
of his small waist and pretty blue eyes, his amber-tinted, jockey-club
perfumed whiskers, trim tops, and unstained “pink.” He was a good shot,
and long ago at Harrow had been renowned as a cricketer. He spoke three
or four modern languages, and had that dim recollection of his classic
studies which is sufficient for a man of the world who knows how to make
much out of little. He was altogether a very accomplished gentleman; but
with him intellectual pursuits were a means rather than an end, and he
took very little pleasure in the society of books or bookmen. He wanted
to be in the world, foremost in the perpetual strife, amid the crash of
drums and trumpets, the roaring of cannon, and glitter of emblazoned
standards flaunting gallantly in the wind. He wanted to be one of the
conquerors in the universal tournament, and to ride up to the Queen of
Beauty flushed and triumphant after the strife, to be admired and
caressed. This is why the inaction of his present existence was so
utterly intolerable to him. He had a supreme belief in himself, and in
the indisputable nature of his right to the best and brightest amongst
earth’s prizes. The time must be indeed out of joint in which there was
nothing better for such as he than a dreary convict settlement in the
island of Tasmania.
Unluckily, the time _was_ out of joint. Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall,
Hampshire, had given his younger son an aristocratic name and a
gentlemanly education; and then, having nothing more to bestow upon him,
had been forced to leave the lad to fish for himself in the troubled
waters of life. The prospects of the junior had always been more or less
sacrificed to those of the senior of Robert Lowther’s two sons, and
Harcourt bore a hearty grudge against his father and his brother on this
account. Plainly told that he was to expect no more assistance from the
parent purse, the young man had elected to become a barrister; but after
a three years’ course of reading, in which the cultivation of light
literature and modern languages was diversified by a slight sprinkling
of legal study, he had grown heartily sick of his shabbily-furnished
third floor in Hare Court, Temple, and had gladly accepted the price of
a commission in one of Her Majesty’s light infantry regiments from an
affectionate maiden aunt, believing that the regiment would be speedily
under orders for India, where glory and loot no doubt awaited a dashing
young soldier with a very high opinion of his own merits.
Unhappily for Mr. Lowther the regiment did not go to India; but he and
his captain, with a detachment of seventy rank and file, embarked at
Deptford on a misty morning in October, in charge of 450 convicts bound
for Hobart Town. At the time of which I write the ensign had been nearly
a twelvemonth in Van Diemen’s Land, and before him lay the prospect of
another dreary year which must elapse before there was much chance of
his seeing a change of quarters. There are some people who take their
troubles with a cheerful countenance and make the best of a bad bargain;
but Mr. Lowther was not one of them. He had begun to grumble before the
convict ship left Deptford; and he had gone on complaining, with very
little intermission, until to-day, and was likely so to continue until
the end of the chapter. Napoleon at St. Helena could scarcely have felt
his exile more keenly; nor could that fallen hero have more bitterly
resented the injustice of his fate than Harcourt Osborne Lowther, who
believed that there must be something radically wrong in a universe in
which there was no provision of 40,000_l._ or so a year for an elegant
young man with a perfect aquiline nose, a clear ringing touch upon the
piano, a trumpet tone on the flute, a talent for taking pen-and-ink
portraits that were equal to anything of Count D’Orsay’s, and an
irreproachable taste in waistcoats.
He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked
himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all
day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare
old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and
thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian
settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and
drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute.
“When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of
himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,”
thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s
Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I
ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light
upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks,
the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across
the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or
shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?--die, forgotten and
unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?”
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CHAPTER II.
THE MAN.
While Mr. Lowther went to eat his dinner with the hospitable magistrate,
Francis Tredethlyn did his work briskly; folding his master’s coats and
waistcoats, brushing boots, clearing away little heaps of cigar-ash, and
picking up torn scraps of paper and open books cast recklessly upon the
floor by a reader who was too badly disposed towards a world that had
ill-treated him to find the opinions of any author entirely to his
taste.
The soldier whistled that lively melody in praise of Erin’s daughters
all the time, and achieved his task with the rapid neatness of a male
Cinderella specially endowed by some fairy godmother; and when Mr.
Lowther’s humble sitting-room and bed-room were restored to perfect
order, his valet retired to his own little apartment, which was a
shed-like chamber at the back of the cottage, and a kind of compromise
between a dressing-room and a wash-house. Here Mr. Tredethlyn made his
toilet, which consisted of a rapid plunge of his head and throat into a
tub of cold water, some brisk operations with a cake of yellow soap,
accompanied by sputtering and whizzing noises of an alarming character,
a little fierce rubbing down with a coarse towel, and the smart
application of a stiff and implacable-looking hair-brush. When this was
done, Francis Tredethlyn put on his jacket, and went out into the garden
to smoke his pipe and converse with the convicts.
Now that the gifts of nature had been enhanced by the adornments of art,
the ensign’s valet was by no means a bad-looking fellow. He was tall,
broad-shouldered, and muscular in build as a modern Hercules. His
closely cut black hair revealed the outline of a well-shaped head well
placed upon his shoulders. Under his dark, almost gipsy-brown, skin was
a rich crimson glow, which deepened or faded under the influence of any
powerful emotion. His nose was straight, but rather short, and of no
particular type; but a sculptor would have told you there was a special
beauty about the curve of his full open nostrils, and Honoré de Balzac
would have informed you that a man with that kind of nostril is
generally good for something in this world. His forehead was low,