COLD WATER
The Merridews sailed for England about the middle of October. They had
been less than a fortnight on dry land; and it was with a heavy and
uneasy heart that Denis watched their new vessel to a speck from the
highest point commanding Corio Bay.
With all his candour, there were one or two things that he could not
hide from himself, but that he had hidden from the girl to whom he was
now engaged. He was a very young man. He loved adventure for its own
sake, and though he had been through much, he felt to the very bone that
he was only on the threshold of an exciting and successful career. There
could scarcely have been a more sanguine temperament, or a character
with more right to one. But the young man's confidence in himself was
neither blind nor overweening, and in his heart he was under no illusion
as to his own motives. It grieved his soul to see the ship sailing away
with all he loved on earth, yet he knew how bitterly he would have felt
sailing in her, with never a sight of Bendigo or of Ballarat. Then he
was inordinately independent. It was in the blood. He must make his own
way. And here he was frank, yet not so frank as to tell his Nan that her
father had definitely offered to put him in a position to make his way
quietly at home; and the father was not so incontinent.
A little incident had contributed to Denis's depression; and he was not
one to make much of little incidents. But the first person he had
encountered on the _Memnon_, when he had gone on board to see the last
of them, was another survivor of the _North Foreland_--a diseased being
named Jewson, who had shipped in her as chief steward, only to be
disrated for an incompetent sot before the voyage was a month old. The
disrating had been largely due to the second officer, who did not
hesitate to ask the fellow in what capacity he saw him now.
"Captain Devenish's servant," was the answer, with a grin that maddened
Denis, but it was the fact that rankled. He had said no more. It was too
late; and the man had been saved, he deserved a fresh start; but that
Devenish, of all people, should give him one, in that vessel of all
vessels! It was a sign of more than Denis had time to realize until
Corio Bay lay blue and bare at his feet, and the tiny sail on the
horizon had vanished forever from his view.
He sat in the sun with his face hidden in his hands. His heart had
filled with prayer, his eyes with tears; he dug his knuckles into them,
and missed the bloodstone signet-ring that he had worn since his
father's death. There had been no time for an engagement ring, but Nan
was to wear this one until they met again. And she had given him one of
hers--a ruby, a diamond, and a sapphire--that jammed in the middle of
his little finger nail; but he was to wear it day and night about his
neck instead, on a tiny lanyard that she had plaited for it out of her
own warm hair. Denis could not trust himself to look at it yet; he could
only press the ring to his heart until it hurt, as holy sinners press
the scapular, but that was enough to nerve him. He could even smile as
he remembered the absurd injunction which had accompanied this sweet
talisman. Still smiling he looked down again through the sunshine upon
the empty bay; but now the first thing Denis saw was a separate shadow
on the grass.
"Cheer up, mister! All board! It's getting on for fifty knots to
Melbourne, and the Lord knows how many bells!"
Jimmy Doherty was standing over him, and his dark skin beamed as he
rolled the nautical phrases on his tongue. Denis got up without a smile.
"Don't remind me of the sea, Jimmy; help me to forget about it. And as
for Melbourne, we shall never see it to-night."
"Sha'n't we though!"
"What! Fifty miles between midday and midnight?"
"It's not so much, and I've got us a lift half-way."
"But we can't afford that, Jimmy."
A shifty grin from Doherty betrayed a sort of guilty pride in his
arrangements.
"I've got it for love, mister, from a hawker as only wishes he was
a-goin' all the way, for the honour and glory o' carryin' a gent that's
done what you've done and got himself in all the papers."
Denis was divided between natural satisfaction and annoyance.
"Very well, Jimmy, and I congratulate you; but, once and for all, never
another word about that unless you're asked! We're mates now, remember;
I might as well brag of it myself. Besides--but it's a bargain, isn't
it?"
Mr. Doherty said he supposed it must be; but for once his spirit was
under a cloud, for he had appointed himself sole minstrel of his hero's
praises, foreseeing both honour and profit in the employment; but on
reflection the embargo only made him think the more of Denis, and his
first care was to whisper it in the hawker's ear.
The hawker was waiting with his wagon outside an inn in Moorabool
Street, and Denis was relieved to find the man less palpably impressed
by his exploit than Jimmy had represented him. He was a little flint of
a fellow, sharp but surly, who accepted an eight-penny glass of porter
with a nod and drained it without removing his eyes from the sailor's
face. But in a mile or so his tongue loosened, as the trio sat abreast
under the wagon's hood, and the scattered buildings of the budding town
melted into the unbroken timber of the bush track.
"So you're bound for the diggings, are you?" said the hawker. "And what
may you think of doing when you get there?"
"Well," said Denis, to enter into the man's humour, "we did think we
might dig."
"Oh, dig!" said the hawker, and relapsed at once into his former
taciturnity.
"What would you do, then?" inquired Denis, nudging Doherty, who, though
he had plenty to say when they were alone, was a respectful listener
before a third person.
"Bake!" said the hawker, without a moment's hesitation.
"Bake?" echoed Denis in amused dismay.
"It's four-and-six the half-loaf at this moment," said the hawker. "Same
price as a quarter of sheep. On the diggings, that is. Yes, sir, I'd
bake, that's what I'd do, if I had my time over again, and capital
enough to make a start."
"And if you hadn't enough?"
"If I hadn't enough, and if they were full-handed in all the publics,
and I couldn't get a job in any o' the stores, and the Commissioner
wouldn't give me one, and if I could borrow a license, beg some tools,
and steal enough to eat, well, I might have another dig myself. But not
till I'd tried everything else. You've heard what they got in Canadian
Gully, I suppose?"
"I have," said Denis.
"So had I," said the hawker.
"And what did you get?"
"Not enough to eat bread on; not one in a thousand does. But you go and
have your try. You may have a bit of luck in the end, and manage to
bring your bones away with the flesh on 'em, like me. That's the most I
can wish you, and it's hoping for the best. But you take my advice, and
when the luck turns, never wait for it to turn again. You get rid of
your claim for what it'll fetch; mine fetched what you see--a hawker's
wagon, horses, and whole stock-in-trade. I just jumped in and drove
away, and he jumped into my claim. And I will say I'm doing better at
this game than I was at that."
"And how is he doing?"
"I don't know," said the hawker, "and I don't care."
"Prices must be good," remarked Denis.
"Among the middlings," said the hawker with a sidelong glance at
Doherty, who, however, was looking the other way. "I can let you have a
nice pair o' boots for a five-pound-note, and a spare shirt like what
you've got on for thirty bob. But it's not what it was when I came out
last year. I wouldn't come into the hawking business if I were you; you
could get twenty-five bob a day as a carpenter, and three-pound-ten to
four pound a week at bullock-driving. But I'd rather be a labourer on
the roads, with two crown certain a day, and wood, water, and tent
supplied, than peg out another claim."
Denis had heard enough. He was not easily discouraged, but he found it a
relief to turn his attention to the scenery. They were intersecting a
forest of rather stunted trees, all blown one way by the wind, which
made music of a peculiar melancholy among their branches. Doherty said
the trees were she-oaks, answering Denis's question with great zeal.
Similarly Denis learned the names of the various parrots that perched by
the flock amid the dull green foliage, or fled from tree to tree with a
whirr and a glint of every colour in the rainbow. Then a pond must be
called a water-hole, it seemed--a beck a creek, and the curly-bearded
aboriginals blacks or blackfellows--but not niggers. It was the earliest
and most elementary stage of Denis's colonial training, and he would
have relished it if only for his mentor's intense satisfaction in his
task, to say nothing of a capacity to teach not inferior to the will.
But the hawker had a last word left, which he kept, as though by
demoniac design, for one of their glimpses, depressing enough to Denis
as it was, of the sparkling sea never many miles distant on their
right.
"Ah!" said the hawker, pointing with his whip, "if I'd been one hour
earlier in Geelong, I'd have sold lock, stock, barrel an' ammunition for
a berth in that ship that cleared out for Old England this forenoon.
Ship from Melbourne you can't get. It was a chance in a hundred, and I'd
have given all I have for it, as you will for such another before you've
seen half as much as me."
It was about three in the afternoon, at a place called Wyndham, that the
pair took their leave of this dispassionate pessimist, with as little
regret as may be supposed, and found themselves afoot for the last
twenty miles. And almost from the first step Doherty was loud in his
denunciation of every word the hawker had uttered, not one of which was
Denis to believe for an instant. But there was no Denis left to embrace
this view; the leave-taking of the morning and the hawker in the
afternoon had reduced him between them to unmitigated Dent, a dogged
fellow ready for the worst, though more than ever bent upon the best.
"There are two sides to everything, and give me the dark side first,"
said he; "besides, a lift for nothing is a lift for nothing. But what's
that you've got in your pack, Jim?"
"What's what?" asked Doherty, changing colour as he trudged.
"There's a box of some sort showing through your outer blanket."
"Oh, that's my revolver."
"Your revolver! You hadn't one this morning. Who's given it to you?"
demanded Denis.
"No one," the boy confessed. "I bought it from the hawker while you were
on the ship."
"And how much did you give for this?" asked Denis, as they squatted by
the roadside, with a neat oak case open between them, and a great
five-chambered Deane and Adams twinkling in the sun.
"Ten guineas, mister."
"Ten guineas! More than half the wages you drew from the station, for a
second-hand revolver? He didn't say it was first-hand, did he?"
"No, but he said it was worth more."
Denis sprang impatiently to his feet.
"Well, it may save our lives, and then it will be," said he. "But I like
your notion of a lift for love!"