“Maurice,” she whispered, “how is it that the sight of that man always makes me sad?”
Her husband frowned, and then, caressing her, bade her forget the man and the place and her fears. “I was wrong to have insisted on your coming,” he said. They stood on the deck of the Sydney-bound vessel the next morning, and watched the “Natural Penitentiary” grow dim in the distance. “You were not strong enough.”
* * *
“Dawes,” said John Rex, “you love that girl! Now that you’ve seen her another man’s wife, and have been harnessed like a beast to drag him along the road, while he held her in his arms!–now that you’ve seen and suffered that, perhaps you’ll join us.”
Rufus Dawes made a movement of agonized impatience.
“You’d better. You’ll never get out of this place any other way. Come, be a man; join us!”
“No!”
“It is your only chance. Why refuse it? Do you want to live here all your life?”
“I want no sympathy from you or any other. I will not join you.”
Rex shrugged his shoulders and walked away. “If you think to get any good out of that ‘inquiry’, you are mightily mistaken,” said he, as he went. “Frere has put a stopper upon that, you’ll find.” He spoke truly. Nothing more was heard of it, only that, some six months afterwards, Mr. North, when at Parramatta, received an official letter (in which the expenditure of wax and printing and paper was as large as it could be made) which informed him that the “Comptroller-General of the Convict Department had decided that further inquiry concerning the death of the prisoner named in the margin was unnecessary”, and that some gentleman with an utterly illegible signature “had the honour to be his most obedient servant”.
Chapter XXII.
Gathering In The Threads
Maurice found his favourable expectations of Sydney fully realized. His notable escape from death at Macquarie Harbour, his alliance with the daughter of so respected a colonist as Major Vickers, and his reputation as a convict disciplinarian rendered him a man of note. He received a vacant magistracy, and became even more noted for hardness of heart and artfulness of prison knowledge than before. The convict population spoke of him as “that —- Frere,” and registered vows of vengeance against him, which he laughed–in his bluffness–to scorn.
One anecdote concerning the method by which he shepherded his flock will suffice to show his character and his value. It was his custom to visit the prison-yard at Hyde Park Barracks twice a week. Visitors to convicts were, of course, armed, and the two pistol-butts that peeped from Frere’s waistcoat attracted many a longing eye. How easy would it be for some fellow to pluck one forth and shatter the smiling, hateful face of the noted disciplinarian! Frere, however, brave to rashness, never would bestow his weapons more safely, but lounged through the yard with his hands in the pockets of his shooting-coat, and the deadly butts ready to the hand of anyone bold enough to take them.
One day a man named Kavanagh, a captured absconder, who had openly sworn in the dock the death of the magistrate, walked quickly up to him as he was passing through the yard, and snatched a pistol from his belt. The yard caught its breath, and the attendant warder, hearing the click of the lock, instinctively turned his head away, so that he might not be blinded by the flash. But Kavanagh did not fire. At the instant when his hand was on the pistol, he looked up and met the magnetic glance of Frere’s imperious eyes. An effort, and the spell would have been broken. A twitch of the finger, and his enemy would have fallen dead. There was an instant when that twitch of the finger could have been given, but Kavanagh let that instant pass. The dauntless eye fascinated him. He played with the pistol nervously, while all remained stupefied. Frere stood, without withdrawing his hands from the pockets into which they were plunged.
“That’s a fine pistol, Jack,” he said at last.
Kavanagh, down whose white face the sweat was pouring, burst into a hideous laugh of relieved terror, and thrust the weapon, cocked as it was, back again into the magistrate’s belt.
Frere slowly drew one hand from his pocket, took the cocked pistol and levelled it at his recent assailant. “That’s the best chance you’ll ever get, Jack,” said he.
Kavanagh fell on his knees. “For God’s sake, Captain Frere!” Frere looked down on the trembling wretch, and then uncocked the pistol, with a laugh of ferocious contempt. “Get up, you dog,” he said. “It takes a better man than you to best me. Bring him up in the morning, Hawkins, and we’ll give him five-and-twenty.”
As he went out–so great is the admiration for Power–the poor devils in the yard cheered him.
One of the first things that this useful officer did upon his arrival in Sydney was to inquire for Sarah Purfoy. To his astonishment, he discovered that she was the proprietor of large export warehouses in Pitt-street, owned a neat cottage on one of the points of land which jutted into the bay, and was reputed to possess a banking account of no inconsiderable magnitude. He in vain applied his brains to solve this mystery. His cast-off mistress had not been rich when she left Van Diemen’s Land–at least, so she had assured him, and appearances bore out her assurance. How had she accumulated this sudden wealth? Above all, why had she thus invested it? He made inquiries at the banks, but was snubbed for his pains. Sydney banks in those days did some queer business. Mrs. Purfoy had come to them “fully accredited,” said the manager with a smile.
“But where did she get the money?” asked the magistrate. “I am suspicious of these sudden fortunes. The woman was a notorious character in Hobart Town, and when she left hadn’t a penny.”
“My dear Captain Frere,” said the acute banker–his father had been one of the builders of the “Rum Hospital”–“it is not the custom of our bank to make inquiries into the previous history of its customers. The bills were good, you may depend, or we should not have honoured them. Good morning!”
“The bills!” Frere saw but one explanation. Sarah had received the proceeds of some of Rex’s rogueries. Rex’s letter to his father and the mention of the sum of money “in the old house in Blue Anchor Yard” flashed across his memory. Perhaps Sarah had got the money from the receiver and appropriated it. But why invest it in an oil and tallow warehouse? He had always been suspicious of the woman, because he had never understood her, and his suspicions redoubled. Convinced that there was some plot hatching, he determined to use all the advantages that his position gave him to discover the secret and bring it to light. The name of the man to whom Rex’s letters had been addressed was “Blicks”. He would find out if any of the convicts under his care had heard of Blicks. Prosecuting his inquiries in the proper direction, he soon obtained a reply. Blicks was a London receiver of stolen goods, known to at least a dozen of the black sheep of the Sydney fold. He was reputed to be enormously wealthy, had often been tried, but never convicted. Frere was thus not much nearer enlightenment than before, and an incident occurred a few months afterwards which increased his bewilderment He had not been long established in his magistracy, when Blunt came to claim payment for the voyage of Sarah Purfoy. “There’s that schooner going begging, one may say, sir,” said Blunt, when the office door was shut.
“What schooner?”
“The Franklin.”
Now the Franklin was a vessel of three hundred and twenty tons which plied between Norfolk Island and Sydney, as the Osprey had plied in the old days between Macquarie Harbour and Hobart Town. “I am afraid that is rather stiff, Blunt,” said Frere. “That’s one of the best billets going, you know. I doubt if I have enough interest to get it for you. Besides,” he added, eyeing the sailor critically, “you are getting oldish for that sort of thing, ain’t you?”
Phineas Blunt stretched his arms wide, and opened his mouth, full of sound white teeth. “I am good for twenty years more yet, sir,” he said. “My father was trading to the Indies at seventy-five years of age. I’m hearty enough, thank God; for, barring a drop of rum now and then, I’ve no vices to speak of. However, I ain’t in a hurry, Captain, for a month or so; only I thought I’d jog your memory a bit, d ye see.”
“Oh, you’re not in a hurry; where are you going then?”
“Well,” said Blunt, shifting on his seat, uneasy under Frere’s convict-disciplined eye, “I’ve got a job on hand.”