A TOUCH OF FEVER
Denis awoke between clean sheets in the widest berth and the largest
cabin he had ever occupied: it was a matter of moments to realize that
he was really on land, for the bed still heaved a little as the beach
had done yesterday, or whenever it was he had been washed ashore. He
felt as though he had been asleep a week; he could not have imagined so
delightful a lassitude of limb and spirit. It was a small room without
pretense of paper upon its weather-board walls, but the toilet cover on
Denis's left was as snowy as the sheet under his chin, and a sunlit
blind flapped soothingly behind it. Silence reigned, but it was the
peculiarly drowsy hush of hot weather, only the deeper for its
innumerable tiny sounds: one could have heard that it was hot. But there
was so little on him, that little was so light, and so sweet a draught
blew through the room, that in his own person Denis felt deliciously
cool.
He tried to remember how he had come there, but the final stages were a
painful farrago. He beheld a bandage on either hand, and could feel one
on head and foot; but they led him too far back. He had an impression
of the stars as he lay upon the beach, and another of interminable steps
with a handbreadth of starry sky at the top, but there was something far
more important that he was seeking in his mind without avail. He
certainly had not found it when the blind was pushed aside by a
sun-burned face, which vanished instantly, to reappear with its
appertaining shirt and moleskins in the doorway opposite.
"Awake at last, mister!"
"Only just," said Denis, feebly, but with his first smile, and the lad
entered staring curiously.
"You couldn't look like that whilst we was seekin' her," said he, drily.
"Why, what's wrong now?"
Denis had shot upright in bed.
"Didn't we find her?" he cried. "Yes, yes, of course we did! I remember
now. I'm so grateful to you; that's exactly what I was trying to
remember. Well? Well? And how is she?"
"Right as the mail, mister, so they all say; but I haven't seen her
yet."
"You're sure they say so?"
"Sure as my name's Jimmy Dockerty."
Denis fell back with a whispered thanksgiving.
"What did you say your name was?" he asked presently.
"Dockerty," replied the boy. "Christian name of Jim."
"Well, Jim, I don't forget you. It was you I clapped eyes on first, and
I'm almost as glad to see you again. Where am I exactly?"
"Merinderie Station: the barricks."
"The what?"
"Where the parlour men camp," explained Mr. Doherty, darkly. "You've got
the tooter's room; he has his schoolroom next door."
"It's very quiet."
"They've all cleared out for the day, apuppus; and you ain't in the
house, you see, though nice and handy. But I'll have to go over to the
house, to tell 'em you've waked up. There was something ready for you
the moment you did. But, I say--mister!" And the boy stood wistfully
beside the bed.
"Well, Jim?"
"Ask for me to come back and set along of you! Say you feel lonely like,
and ask for me to look arter you, mister. You needn't take no notice of
me, and no more won't I say nothink, if you don't want."
"But I shall want, Jimmy. I shall want you to tell me heaps of things.
Go and say so for me, by all means; and bring me anything they like to
send, though a cup of tea is all I fancy."
But when a chop was sent in characteristic conjunction it was eaten with
its slice of damper, and so heartily as to exclude immediate
conversation.
"One thing at a time," said Denis, "and the next thing is a wash; but I
don't mean to get up yet a bit."
"I wouldn't," said the boy, removing the tray and flourishing a towel.
"The young lady, there ain't any signs of 'er either; I'll give you the
word when there is."
Meanwhile the subject nearest Denis's heart was the one on which he
could extract least information. Doherty did not warm to it as he did to
other topics. And yet Denis could not help liking the lad; in the first
place, the lad was openly enamoured of him, and the present Denis far
too languid a hero to object very strenuously to his worship. There was
nothing slavish about it; hardly a word was employed in its expression;
but in the pauses the boy's eyes would remain upon the man's, and once
he said he had been to see the place, and continued gazing at Denis and
his bandages with redoubled reverence. It appeared that many bodies had
been washed ashore, and Mr. Kitto with nearly all his men was down there
now. Mrs. Kitto was at the other bedside, and had sent word that she
preferred not to leave it in case her patient, who had been asleep many
hours, should wake and miss her. Doherty suddenly remembered the
message; it drove Denis back into yesterday's inferno, and he lay with
such a pained face that the boy darted in with his own details. It was
four o'clock in the afternoon: Denis had slept nineteen hours, but Miss
Merridew was beating him. And they were the only survivors; not another
soul had been saved.
Denis thought of the hundred souls on board, above all of Nan's father,
her all in this world, to whose loss she would awake now any moment. And
that was a thought which brought tears to the second mate's eyes, yet it
was one with several facets, and presently his eyes were shining in
quite a different way; then he caught himself, and little Jim saw the
marine bronze deepen on the heroic cheek. But at last it was Jim's turn,
for Denis turned to him as though impatient of himself.
"Now let's hear about you," he said. "How long have you been in
Australia, Jim?"
"Only since I was born, and a bit before, and ever after, amen!" said
Mr. Doherty; and the teeth displayed by his grin were certainly worthy
of an aboriginal.
"And how long is that?" asked Denis, smiling, too.
"I don't know. They say as I am a good seventeen, but I don't look it,
do I?"
"What! Don't know your own age?"
"Not to a year or two."
"Didn't your parents tell you?"
"I never had none, mister."
And Mr. Doherty grinned again.
"You don't remember, them?"
"That's what I mean. They were--I don't mind tellin' you, mister, though
I'd rather bite my tongue out than tell another soul on the place"--and
little Jim came sidling from his seat at the foot of the bed to an easy
distance from Denis's ear, a dead secret in his astute young face. "But
you'll think no worse of a cove," he went on, whispering, "and you won't
split either; so it's a bit of a relief to tell you--they was both old
hands."
"Old hands?"
"Lags!"
Now Denis understood. "Of course I don't think the less of you," he
said, gently; "we are what we make ourselves, at any rate there's no
credit in anything else we may be. I, for instance----"
But Denis had strength enough left to control his tongue, and his
parents' memory was too sacred for association with that of transported
felons, however little there might be to chose between their sons.
"It might be worse," the lad went on, with an elderly air the more
pathetic for its unconscious humour: "they was married at Parramatta
factory, and my mother let me know it when I was as high as this bed;
it's the one thing I recollect her by, keepin' on tellin' me that; but
'im I never see as I remember. Parramatta factory," he continued,
lifting his shrewd eyes once more, "was the place where they kep' the
women prisoners, up on the Sydney side in the convict days; you could go
and take your pick as long as you married her." The boy's stare grew
into a contemplative grin, and Denis prepared for a familiarity.
"There'll be need for you to go there," said Mr. Doherty.
Denis was not offended; either he was too stricken to be readily
ruffled, or the young monkey had a way with him. He only rolled his head
on the pillow, and questioned whether such an establishment existed
still.
"It doesn't," rejoined Jim; "but even if it did, eh? You're all right,
you see, so you can go on shaking your head till you loosen it! _I_
seen, whether or no, last night when you couldn't."
"I don't want to know what you saw," cried Denis, vehemently enough; and
lay quite agitated between the sheets.
"I suppose," the imp pursued, with a precocious union of tact and
tenacity, "you'll go and get married straight away, and never let us see
or hear from you again."
Denis set his teeth, not because the boy jarred, but at the gulf between
this fancy picture and the possibilities of the case as it now stood. It
was characteristic of him that for the first time they seemed
impossibilities. He had saved her life, and now they were alone in the
world, he and she: how could he trade on such things, how avoid the
suspicion of trying to trade on them? If only another had saved her! If
only others had been saved!
"Don't speak of it," he groaned. "I am far too poor."
"Too poor, are you?"
The boy had brightened.
"And she is too rich."
"Then what more do you want, mister?"
"What more? It should be the opposite way; we should both be one thing
or the other. Anything but as we are!"
There was a brief intermezzo of the tiny summer noises. The blind
flapped; a mosquito sang an ominous solo in the sick man's ear; from
without came the faint hacking of an axe at the wood-heap. Denis looked
up at last, and there sat Jim with a startlingly wise face upon his
narrow young shoulders.
"Do you know what I should do, if I was you, mister?"
"Well, what?"
"If I felt same as you," said Mr. Doherty, "I'd make a fortune same as
hers."
Denis smiled tolerantly; the urchin amused him.
"Well, and how would you do that?"
"I should go up to Ballarat, and peg out my claim, as sure as my name's
Jimmy Dockerty!"
"It would have to be a lucky one," said Denis, dryly, though not until
he had paused to think.
"Then it wouldn't be the only one," retorted Doherty, with the readiness
of their common race.
Denis could not help dallying with the idea.
"Have they been doing such good business up there, then?"
"Good! Why, haven't you heard? There's never been such doings as they've
had on Ballarat this year. I thought it was all over the world," the boy
added, with shining eyes.
"It may be," said Denis, "but I've been at sea since June, and it isn't
exactly in a sailor's line."
"Isn't it!" laughed Jimmy. "You wait till you see the empty ships in
Hobson's Bay! Some of 'em been stuck there since the last day of
January, when the fun began. Do you mean to say you never heard of the
big finds in Canadian Gully?"
"You tell me, Jimmy. I want to hear."
Denis was leaning on an elbow. Jimmy had long been on his feet.
"There were some coves had a claim in Canadian Gully, on Ballarat," the
boy began, a wild light in his face, a light that Denis had never seen
before. "They were doing well, but not too well, and they offered to
sell the hole for a matter of three hundred. Then one of them went down
and came up with a nugget weighing sixty-six ounces!"
"At how much the ounce?"
"About four guineas."
"Well, that wasn't quite the three hundred."
"Stop a bit!" cried Doherty, a perfect fever in his eyes, a fever as new
to Denis as the light upon the lad's face. "That was only the beginning
of it. Of course they wouldn't sell after that. And before night they'd
got a nugget of a hundred and twenty pounds. Troy weight--whatever that
is--perhaps you can turn it into the other pounds, for I can't."
Denis sat forward, pressing the lint upon his forehead with his hands.
When at length he looked up there was the same light beneath the
bandages, the same fever in the still blood-shot eyes, as Denis himself
had remarked in the face and eyes of his companion.
"Six thousand pounds!" he whispered almost aghast.
"Six thousand golden sovereigns!" shouted the lad, capering about the
room. "Think of that, mister, think of that! I had it read to me out of
the papers. I got it off by heart. It was one big, solid, yellow lump of
gold, and they had to carry it between them slung to a pole. It wasn't
the only one, neither; as they went tunneling on it stuck out of the
sides, like bunches of grapes--at twenty pound a berry! There was only
four on 'em in the party; they made their fortunes in less than no time;
and two on 'em was new chums, same as you'd be if you went up
and--and----"
"And what, boy?"
"And took me along with you!"
Denis only wondered that the little brown face, thrust so near him in
its eagerness, did not burst into actual flame; it never occurred to him
that his own was perhaps presenting the like phenomenon.
"You talk as though you'd been there already, Jimmy," said he.
"But I haven't. I'd only give my two ears to go. The boss won't let me.
He says I'm too young; and he's been such a jolly good boss to me, I
haven't the heart to go agin him, especially when he's promised me my
kit if I wait till the Noo Year. But I b'lieve he'd give 'em me
to-morrow, mister, if I was going up with you!"
It was a strange talk for Denis on the day after his deliverance, in the
bed where they had laid him more dead than alive, but the manner of its
ending was the strangest part of all. In the fever that was so new to
Denis, that he had a touch of it before he dreamed there was such a
disease, he not only forgot the perils through which he had passed, but
his every sense turned blunt by comparison with the intensely keen edge
put so suddenly on certain of his desires. He had not heard the voices
outside; neither had Doherty; and the feet upon the threshold fell upon
four equally deaf ears. It was not until Mr. Kitto opened the door, and
entered first, that the one looked round and the other up.
"Here," said the squatter, "is a gentleman whom I know you will be
heartily thankful to see again."
The gentleman stood forward with outstretched hands and a quivering lip.
It was John Merridew.