Jack disappeared shortly after his father's arrest on a charge of horse
and cattle-stealing, and Tom, the prodigal, turned up unexpectedly.
He was different from his father and eldest brother. He had an open
good-humoured face, and was very kind-hearted; but was subject to
peculiar fits of insanity, during which he did wild and foolish things
for the mere love of notoriety. He had two natures--one bright and
good, the other sullen and criminal. A taint of madness ran in the
family--came down from drunken and unprincipled fathers of dead
generations; under different conditions, it might have developed into
genius in one or two--in Mary, perhaps.
“Cheer up, old woman!” cried Tom, patting his mother on the back. “We'll
be happy yet. I've been wild and foolish, I know, and gave you some
awful trouble, but that's all done with. I mean to keep steady, and
by-and-bye we'll go away to Sydney or Queensland. Give us a smile,
mother.”
He got some “grubbing” to do, and for six months kept the family
in provisions. Then a change came over him. He became moody and
sullen--even brutal. He would sit for hours and grin to himself without
any apparent cause; then he would stay away from home for days together.
“Tom's going wrong again,” wailed Mrs. Wylie. “He'll get into trouble
again, I know he will. We are disgraced enough already, God knows.”
“You've done your best, mother,” said Mary, “and can do no more.
People will pity us; after all, the thing itself is not so bad as the
everlasting dread of it. This will be a lesson for father--he wanted
one--and maybe he'll be a better man.” (She knew better than that.) “YOU
did your best, mother.”
“Ah, Mary! you don't know what I've gone through these thirty years
in the bush with your father. I've had to go down on my knees and beg
people not to prosecute him--and the same with your brother Tom; and
this is the end of it.”
“Better to have let them go, mother; you should have left father when
you found out what sort of a man he was; it would have been better for
all.”
“It was my duty to stick by him, child; he was my husband. Your father
was always a bad man, Mary--a bad man; I found it out too late. I could
not tell you a quarter of what I have suffered with him.... I was proud,
Mary; I wanted my children to be better than others.... It's my fault;
it's a judgment.... I wanted to make my children better than others....
I was so proud, Mary.”
Mary had a sweetheart, a drover, who was supposed to be in Queensland.
He had promised to marry her, and take her and her mother away when he
returned; at least, she had promised to marry him on that condition. He
had now been absent on his latest trip for nearly six months, and there
was no news from him. She got a copy of a country paper to look for the
“stock passings”; but a startling headline caught her eye:
IMPUDENT ATTEMPT AT ROBBERY UNDER ARMS.
----
“A drover known to the police as Frederick Dunn, alias Drew,
was arrested last week at----”
She read to the bitter end, and burned the paper. And the shadow of
another trouble, darker and drearier than all the rest, was upon her.
So the little outcast family in Long Gully existed for several months,
seeing no one save a sympathetic old splitter who would come and smoke
his pipe by the fire of nights, and try to convince the old woman that
matters might have been worse, and that she wouldn't worry so much if
she knew the troubles of some of our biggest families, and that things
would come out all right and the lesson would do Wylie good. Also, that
Tom was a different boy altogether, and had more sense than to go
wrong again. “It was nothing,” he said, “nothing; they didn't know what
trouble was.”
But one day, when Mary and her mother were alone, the troopers came
again.
“Mrs. Wylie, where's your son Tom?” they asked.
She sat still. She didn't even cry, “Oh, my God!”
“Don't be frightened, Mrs. Wylie,” said one of the troopers, gently. “It
ain't for much anyway, and maybe Tom'll be able to clear himself.”
Mary sank on her knees by her mother's side, crying “Speak to me,
mother. Oh, my God, she's dying! Speak for my sake, mother. Don't die,
mother; it's all a mistake. Don't die and leave me here alone.”
But the poor old woman was dead.
. . . . .
Wylie came out towards the end of the year, and a few weeks later he
brought home a--another woman.