There was no more fervent admirer of Stingaree and all bushrangers than
George Oswald Abernethy Melvin. Despite this mellifluous nomenclature
young Melvin helped his mother to sell dance-music, ballads, melodeons,
and a very occasional pianoforte, in one of the several self-styled
capitals of Riverina; and despite both facts the mother was a lady of
most gentle blood. The son could either teach or tune the piano with a
certain crude and idle skill. He endured a monopoly of what little
business the locality provided in this line, and sat superior on the
music-stool at all the dances. He had once sung tenor in Bishop
Methuen's choir, but, offended by a word of wise and kindly advice, was
seen no more in surplice or in church. It will be perceived that Oswald
Melvin had all the aggressive independence of Young Australia without
the virility which leavens the truer type.
Yet he was neither a base nor an unkind lad. His bane was a morbid
temperament, which he could no more help than his sallow face and weedy
person; even his vanity was directly traceable to the early influence of
an eccentric and feckless father with experimental ideas on the
upbringing of a child. It was a pity that brilliantly unsuccessful man
had not lived to see the result of his sedulous empiricism. His wife was
left to bear the brunt--a brave exile whose romantic history was never
likely to escape her continent lips. None even knew whether she saw any
or one of those aggravated faults of an only child which were so
apparent to all her world.
And yet the worst of Oswald Melvin was known only to his own morbid and
sensitive heart. An unimpressive presence in real life, on his mind's
stage he was ever in the limelight with a good line on his lips. Not
that he was invariably the hero of these pieces. He could see himself as
large with the noose round his neck as in coronet or halo; and though
this inward and spiritual temper may be far from rare, there had been no
one to kick out of him its outward and visible expression. Oswald had
never learned to gulp down the little lie which insures a flattering
attention; his clever father had even encouraged it in him as the
nucleus of imagination. Imagination he certainly had, but it fed on
strong meat for an unhealthy mind; it fattened on the sordid history of
the earlier bushrangers; its favorite fare was the character and
exploits of Stingaree. The sallow and neurotic face would brighten with
morbid enthusiasm at the bare mention of the desperado's name. The
somewhat dull, dark eyes would lighten with borrowed fires: the young
fool wore an eye-glass in one of them when he dared.
"Stingaree," he would say, "is the greatest man in all Australia." He
had inherited from his father a delight in uttering startling opinions;
but this one he held with unusual sincerity. It had come to all ears,
and was the subject of that episcopal compliment which Oswald took as an
affront. The impudent little choristers supported his loss by calling
"Stingaree!" after him in the street: he was wise to keep his eye-glass
for the house.
There, however, with a few even younger men who admired his standpoint
and revelled in his store of criminous annals, or with his patient,
inscrutable mother, Oswald Melvin was another being. His language became
bright and picturesque, his animation surprising. A casual customer
would sometimes see this side of him, and carry away the impression of a
rare young dare-devil. And it was one such who gave Oswald the first
great moment of his bush life.
"Not been down from the back-blocks for three years?" he had asked, as
he showed a tremulous and dilapidated bushman how to play the instrument
that he had bought with the few shillings remaining out of his check.
"Been on the spree and going back to drive a whim until you've enough to
go on another? How I wish you'd tell that to our high and mighty Lord
Bishop of all the Back-Blocks! I should like to see his face and hear
him on the subject; but I suppose he's new since you were down here
last? Never come across him, eh? But, of course, you heard how good old
Stingaree scored off him the other day, after he thought he'd scored off
Stingaree?"
The whim-driver had heard something about it. Young Melvin plunged into
the congenial narrative and emerged minutes later in a dusky glow.
"That's the man for my money," he perorated. "Stingaree, sir, is the
greatest chap in all these Colonies, and deserves to be Viceroy when
they get Federation. Thunderbolt, Morgan, Ben Hall and Ned Kelly were
not a circumstance between them to Stingaree; and the silly old Bishop's
a silly old fool to him! I don't care twopence about right and wrong.
That's not the point. The one's a Force, and the other isn't."
"A darned sight too much force, to my mind," observed the whim-driver
with some warmth.
"You don't take my meaning," the superior youth pursued. "It's a
question of personality."
"A bit more personal than you think," was the dark rejoinder.
"How do you mean?"
Melvin's tone had altered in an instant.
"I know too much about him."
"At first hand?" the youth asked, with bated breath.
"Double first!" returned the other, with a muddled glimmer of better
things.
"You never knew him, did you?" whispered Oswald.
"Knew him? I've been taken prisoner by him," said the whim-driver, with
the pause of a man who hesitates to humiliate himself, but is lost for
the sake of that same sensation which Oswald Melvin loved to create.
Mrs. Melvin was in the back room, wistfully engrossed in an English
magazine sent that evening from Bishop's Lodge. The bad blood in the son
had not affected Dr. Methuen's keen but tactful interest in the mother.
She looked up in tolerant consternation as her Oswald pushed an unsavory
bushman before him into the room; but even through her gentle horror
the mother's love shone with that steady humor which raised it above the
sphere of obvious pathos.
"Here's a man who's been stuck up by Stingaree!" he cried, boyish enough
in his delight. "Do keep an eye on the show, mother, and let him tell me
all about it, as he's good enough to say he will. Is there any whiskey?"
"Not for me!" put in the whim-driver, with a frank shudder. "I should
like a drink of tea out of a cup, if I'm to have anything."
Mrs. Melvin left them with a good-humored word besides her promise. She
had given no sign of injury or disapproval; she was not one of the
wincing sort; and the tremulous tramp was in her own chair before her
back was turned.
"Now fire away!" cried the impatient Oswald.
"It's a long story," said the whim-driver; and his dirty brows were knit
in thought.
"Let's have it," coaxed the young man. And the other's thoughtful
creases vanished suddenly in the end.
"Very well," said he, "since it means a drink of tea out of a cup! It
was only the other day, in a dust-storm away back near the Darling, as
bad a one as ever I was out in. I was bushed and done for, gave it up
and said my prayers. Then I practically died in my tracks, and came to
life in a sunny clearing later in the day. The storm was over; two coves
had found me and carried me to their camp; and as soon as I saw them I
spotted one for Howie and the other for Stingaree!"
The narrative went no farther for a time. The thrilling youth fired
question and leading question like a cross-examining counsel in a fever
to conclude his case. The tea arrived, but the whim-driver had to help
himself. His host neglected everything but the first chance he had ever
had of hearing of Stingaree or any other bushranger at first-hand.
"And how long were you there?"
"About a week."
"What happened then?"
The whim-driver paused in doubt renewed.
"You will never guess."
"Tell me."
"They waited for the next dust-storm, and then cast me adrift in that."
Oswald stared; he would never have guessed, indeed. The unhealthy light
faded from his sallow face. Even his morbid enthusiasm was a little
damped.
"You must have done something to deserve it," he cried, at last.
"I did," was the reply, with hanging head. "I--I tried to take him."
"Take your benefactor--take him prisoner?"
"Yes--the man who saved my life."
Melvin sat staring: it was a stare of honestly incredulous disgust. Then
he sprang to his feet, a brighter youth than ever, his depression melted
like a cloud. His villainous hero was an heroic villain after all! His
heart of hearts--which was not black--could still render whole homage to
Stingaree! He no longer frowned on his informer as on a thing accursed.
The creature had wiped out his original treachery to Stingaree by
replacing the uninjured idol in its niche in this warped mind. Oswald,
however, had made his repugnance only too plain; he was unable to elicit
another detail; and in a very few minutes Mrs. Melvin was back in her
place, though not before flicking it with her handkerchief, undetected
by her son.
It was certainly a battered and hang-dog figure that stole away into the
bush. Yet the creature straightened as he strode into star-light
undefiled by earthly illumination; his palsy left him; presently as he
went he began fingering the new melodeon in the way of a man who need
not have sought elementary instruction from Oswald Melvin. And now a
shining disk filled one unwashed eye.
Stingaree lay a part of that night beside the milk-white mare that he
had left tethered in a box-clump quite near the town; at sunrise he
knelt and shaved on the margin of a Government tank, before breaking the
mirror by plunging in. And before the next stars paled he was snugly
back in older haunts, none knowing of his descent upon those of men.
There or thereabouts, hidden like the needle in the hay, and yet
ubiquitous in the stack, the bushranger remained for months. Then there
was an encounter, not the first of this period, but the first in which
shots were exchanged. One of these pierced the lungs of his melodeon--an
instrument more notorious by this time than the musical-box before it--a
still greater treasure to Stingaree. That was near the full of a certain
summer moon; it was barely waning to the eye when the battered buyer of
melodeons came for a new one to the shop in the pretty bush town.
The shop was closed for the night, but Stingaree knocked at a lighted
window under the veranda, which Mrs. Melvin presently threw up. Her eyes
flashed when she recognized one against whom she now harbored a
bitterness on quite a different plane of feeling from her former
repulsion. Even to his first glance she looked an older and a harder
woman.
"I am sorry to see you," she said, with a soft vehemence plainly foreign
to herself. "I almost hate the sight of you! You have been the ruin of
my son!"
"His ruin?"
Stingaree forgot the speech of the unlettered stockman; but his cry was
too short to do worse than warn him.
"Come round," continued Mrs. Melvin, austerely. "I will see you. You
shall hear what you have done."
In another minute he was in the parlor where he had sat aforetime. He
never dreamt of sitting now. But the lady took her accustomed chair as a
queen her throne.
"_Is_ he ruined?" asked Stingaree.
"Not irrevocably--not yet; but he may be any moment. He must be before
long."
"But--but what ails him, madame?"
"Villain-worship!" cried the lady, with a tragic face stripped of all
its humor, and bare without it as a winter's tree.
"I remember! Yes--I understand. He was mad about--Stingaree."
"It is madness now," said the bitter mother. "It was only a stupid,
hare-brained fancy then, but now it is something worse. You're the first
to whom I have admitted it," she continued, with illogical indignation,
"because it's all through you!"
"All through me?"
"You told him a tale. You made that villain a greater hero in his eyes
than ever. You made him real."
"He is real enough, God knows!"
"But you made him so to my son." The keen eyes softened for one divine
instant before they filled. "And I--I am talking my own boy over
with--with----"
Stingaree stood in twofold embarrassment. Did she know after all who he
was? And what had he said he was, the time before?
"The lowest of the low," he answered, with a twitch of his unshaven
lips.
"No! That you were not, or are not, whatever you may say. You--" she
hesitated sweetly--"you had been unsteady when you were here before." He
twitched again, imperceptibly. "I am thankful to see that you are now
more like what you must once have been. I can bear to tell you of my
boy. Oh, sir, can you bear with me?"
Stingaree twitched no more. Rich as the situation was, keenly as he had
savored its unsuspected irony, the humor was all over for him. Here was
a woman, still young, sweet and kind, and gentle as a childish memory,
with her fine eyes full of tears! That was bad enough. To make it worse,
she went on to tell him of her son, him an outlaw, him a bushranger with
a price upon his skin, as she might have outlined the case to a
consulting physician. The boy had been born in the trouble of her early
exile; he could not help his temperament. He had countless virtues; she
extolled him in beaming parentheses. But he had too much imagination and
too little balance. He was morbidly wrapped up in the whole subject of
romantic crime, and no less than possessed with the personality of this
one romantic criminal.
"I should be ashamed to tell you the childish lengths to which he has
gone," she went on, "if he were quite himself on the point. But indeed
he is not. He is Stingaree in his heart, Stingaree in his dreams; it is
as debasing a form as mental and temperamental weakness could well take;
yet I know, who watch over him half of the night. He has an eye-glass;
he keeps revolvers; he has even bought a white mare! He can look
extremely like the portraits one has seen of the wretched man. But come
with me one moment."
She took the lamp and led the way into the little room where Oswald
Melvin slept. He had slept in it from that boyhood in which the brave
woman had opened this sort of shop entirely for his sake. Music was his
only talent; he was obviously not to be a genius in the musical world;
but it was the only one in which she could foresee the selfish,
self-willed child figuring with credit, and her foresight was only
equalled by her resource. The business was ripe and ready for him when
he grew up. And this was what he was making of it.
But Stingaree saw only the little bed that had once been far too large,
the Bible still by its side, read or unread, the parents' portraits
overhead. The mother was looking in an opposite direction; he followed
her eyes, and there at the foot, where the infatuated fool could see it
last thing at night and first in the morning, was an enlarged photograph
of the bushranger himself.
It had been taken in audacious circumstances a year or two before. A
travelling photographer had been one of yet another coach-load turned
out and stood in a line by the masterful masterless man.
"Now you may take my photograph. The police refuse to know me when we do
meet. Give them a chance."
And he had posed on the spot with eye-glass up and pistols pointed, as
he saw himself now, not less than a quarter life-size, in a great gaudy
frame. But while he stared Mrs. Melvin had been rummaging in a drawer,
and when he turned she was staring in her turn with glassy eyes. In her
hands was an empty mahogany case with velvet moulds which ought to have
been filled by a brace of missing revolvers.
"He kept it locked--he kept them in it!" she gasped. "He may have done
it this very night!"
"Done what?"
"Stuck up the Deniliquin mail. That is his maddest dream. I have heard
him boast of it to his friends--the brainless boys who alone look up to
him--I have even heard him rave of it in his dreams!"
Stingaree was heavy for a moment with a mental calculation. His head was
a time-table of Cobb's coaches on the Riverina road-system; he nodded it
as he located the imperilled vehicle.
"A dream it shall remain," said he. "But there's not a moment to lose!"
"Do you propose to follow and stop him?"
"If he really means it."
"He may not. He will ride at night. He is often out as late."
"Going and coming about the same time?"
"Yes--now I think of it."
"Then his courage must have failed him hitherto, and it probably will
again."
"But if not!"
"I will cure him. But I must go at once. I have a horse not far away. I
will gallop and meet the coach; if it is still safe, as you may be sure
it will be, I shall scour the country for your son. I can tell him a
fresh thing or two about Stingaree!"
"God bless you!"
"Leave him to me."
"Oh, may God bless you always!"
His hands were in a lady's hands once more. Stingaree withdrew them
gently. And he looked his last into the brave wet eyes raised gratefully
to his.
The villain-worshipper was indeed duly posted in a certain belt of trees
through which the coach-route ran, about half-way between the town and
the first stage south. It was not his first nocturnal visit to the spot;
often, as his prototype divined, had the mimic would-be desperado sat
trembling on his hoary screw, revolvers ready, while the red eyes of the
coach dilated down the road; and as often had the cumbrous ship pitched
past unscathed. The week-kneed and weak-minded youth was too vain to
feel much ashamed. He was biding his time, he could pick his night; one
was too dark, another not dark enough; he had always some excuse for
himself when he regained his room, still unstained by crime; and so the
unhealthy excitement was deliciously maintained. To-night, as always
when he sallied forth, the deed should be done; he only wished there was
a shade less moon, and wondered whether he might not have done better to
wait. But, as usual, the die was cast. And indeed it was quite a new
complication that deterred this poor creature for the last time: he was
feverishly expecting the coach when a patter of hoofs smote his ear from
the opposite quarter.
This was enough to stay an older and a bolder hand. Oswald tucked in his
guns with unrealized relief. It was his last instinct to wait and see
whether the horseman was worth attacking for his own sake; he had room
for few ideas at the same time; and his only new one was the sense of a
new danger, which he prepared to meet by pocketing his pistols as a
child bolts stolen fruit. There was no thinking before the act; but it
was perhaps as characteristic of the naturally honest man as of the
coward.
Stingaree swept through the trees at a gallop, the milk-white mare
flashing in the moonlit patches. At the sight of her Oswald was
convulsed with a premonition as to who was coming; his heart palpitated
as even his heart had never done before; and yet he would have sat
irresolute, inert, and let the man pass as he always let the coach, had
the decision been left to him. The real milk-white mare affected the
imitation in its turn as the coach-horses never had; and Oswald swayed
and swam upon a whinnying steed. . . .
"I thought you were Stingaree!"
The anti-climax was as profound as the weakling's relief. Yet there was
a strong dash of indignation in his tone.
"What if I am?"
"But you're not. You're not half smart enough. You can't tell me
anything about Stingaree!"
He put his eye-glass up with an air.
Stingaree put up his.
"You young fool!" said he.
The thoroughbred mare, the eye-glass, a peeping pistol, were all
superfluous evidence. There was the far more unmistakable authority of
voice and eye and bearing. Yet the voice at least was somehow familiar
to the ear of Oswald, who stuttered as much when he was able.
"I must have heard it before, or have I dreamt it? I've thought a good
deal about you, you know!"
To do him justice, he was no longer very nervous, though still
physically shaken. On the other hand, he began already to feel the
elation of his dreams.
"I do know. You've thought your soul into a pulp on the subject, and you
must give it up," said Stingaree, sternly.
Oswald sat aghast.
"But how on earth did you know?"
"I've come straight from your mother. You're breaking her heart."
"But how can _you_ have come straight from _her_?"
"I've come down for another melodeon. I've got to have one, too."
"Another----"
And Oswald Melvin knew his drunken whim-driver for what he had really
been.
"The yarn I told you about myself was true enough," continued Stingaree.
"Only the names were altered, as they say; it happened to the other
fellow, not to me. I made it happen. He is hardly likely to have lived
to tell the tale."
"Did he really try to betray you after what you'd done for him?"
"More or less. He looked on me as fair game."
"But you had saved his life?"
Stingaree shrugged.
"We rode across him."
"And you think he perished of dust and thirst?"