THE ENEMY'S CAMP
Ralph Devenish was the eldest son of doting parents who had done their
duty by him according to their lights. They were well-to-do folk, though
the homely epithet would have insulted the blood which was their boast;
they were not, however, really wealthy, and they had the vast family of
their generation. It was therefore something of a sacrifice to send
Ralph to his public school, and a distinct one to support his subsequent
commission in the Guards. It is true that the sacrifice fell principally
upon a long line of younger brethren, who could scarcely have filled the
parental eye less if they had stood all their lives in Indian file
behind the first-born. But many was the time the father paid some debt
with hardly a murmur, or the mother pinched herself to make
surreptitious additions to the gay lad's allowance; for man and boy he
was the first consideration in their minds, and consequently the sole
consideration in his own.
In return this criminal couple had a brilliant and successful son, who
was a favourite wherever he went, especially among strangers, and who
fraternized to their satisfaction with the more direct issue of
families almost as old as their own; the only disappointment was that
Ralph was nearing his thirties without having married into one or other
of them. It was time, for many reasons, that he made the marriage that
was only to be expected of him, and settled down. The marriage that was
only to be expected of Ralph Devenish declined in brilliance as the
years went on; but the prospect finally resolved itself into no
regrettable alliance with a beautiful and charming girl, who was also
quite a little heiress in her way. Then Ralph and Nan had known each
other all their lives. The families were allied in business. There was
nothing in the world against the inferior family, except that invidious
juxtaposition. It was therefore a sound choice, if it was nothing more.
Yet Ralph became a company officer without getting engaged even to Nan
Merridew. Some said she had refused him. Mr. and Mrs. Devenish could
afford to smile. Nevertheless, the attachment became obvious on his side
and not on hers. Then Ralph had an illness at Portman Street; it
developed into a malignant typhus which nearly killed him; and the
shattered officer was given a year's leave in which to recruit from the
day he got about again. It seemed certain that this episode would bring
matters to a crisis; and when the convalescent was ordered a health
voyage in one of the firm's vessels, and Mr. and Miss Merridew
accompanied him, it was quite understood that the engagement would be
announced on their return.
Nan alone did not so understand it; and in exceptional circumstances
already set forth, her father was the next to relinquish an idea which
he had cherished as much as anybody. Devenish, however, was naturally no
prey to the sentiment to which he attributed his reverse in one quarter
and its acceptance in the other. He had never regarded it as a defeat,
and he was certainly not the man to do so as he saw the last of Denis
against an Australian sky from the _Memnon's_ poop. On the contrary, the
gallant Ralph had never been nearly so much in love as with the ardent
and disheveled girl, nobly careless of appearances, who wept and waved
within a few feet of him until the last.
His tact, however, was not equal to his passion, and it was a breach of
tact that sent Ralph Devenish ashore with the pilot.
"Ah, well!" he had said at last. "He has the best of it, after all!"
"What do you mean?" cried Nan, as she turned on him with fiery tears,
but not one in her voice.
"He has all the fun of the fair," replied Devenish, lightly. "They say
it's the biggest fair ever held on earth."
"You mean the gold-fields, I suppose?"
"Yes. I shouldn't blame him for wanting to have his fling on them."
"I don't understand you," said the girl, very coldly. "Pray who is
blaming him?"
"Well, Dent is rather in Mr. Merridew's bad books for insisting on
staying out, you know; and I thought he might be in yours, too."
"Did you, indeed! Then let me tell you I am proud of him--for what he
has done, and for what he's going to do. But if he were here now,
standing in your shoes, though I would give anything to have him here, I
should still be ashamed of him in my heart!"
Devenish winced, and his dark, clear skin was stained a deeper shade; as
for Nan, she was so heated that every tear had dried upon her angry
blushes.
"If you are thinking of me," he said, "you certainly aren't thinking of
what you are saying, or you would remember that a year's leave is a
year's leave."
"And that yours isn't up till May," she added with ironic levity. "It's
no business of mine, of course; only you shouldn't start comparisons
between the man who stays and the man who turns back."
"I am also in less need of money," he told her through his teeth.
"Money!" she cried in unrestrained contempt. "I wasn't thinking of the
money--I was thinking of the fun and adventure and romance that would
have enticed every man worth calling a man, once he had got so
far--except you!"
"From their sweethearts even!" he hissed out, with a devilish nod--"from
the girls they pretend they want to marry!"
Nan was stung in her turn; and hers was a poisonous sting. The blood
drained from her face. It was some moments before she could speak.
"That is their business," she whispered at last. "At all events you know
what I should have thought of Denis if he hadn't stayed; but if you want
to know what I think of him now, you shall." And with trembling lips,
before Ralph, before the man at the wheel, before the officer and the
midshipman of the watch, Miss Merridew kissed the bloodstone signet ring
upon the third finger of her left hand. That was what happened on the
_Memnon_ while Denis watched her dipping out of sight.
What happened next was that Devenish nearly knocked his servant, Jewson,
from top to bottom of the companion hatch; the man just managed to
clutch the rail, and was called roughly into his master's cabin
forthwith.
"Sorry I upset you, Jewson, but you should have got out of my way. You
were listening, of course?"
"I couldn't help hearing that last, sir."
"No, I suppose the whole ship heard that. Nice, isn't it?"
"I know what I'd do in your place, sir."
Devenish looked fiercely into the cunning, elderly face, with the dyed
beard and the foxy eyes.
"You do, do you?"
"I do, sir; but don't look at me like that, Captain Devenish, sir, or I
shall never dare to tell you. There's something else I'd as lief tell
you first; but how can I when you look like giving me a horse-whipping
if I so much as open my mouth?"
"Go on, you old humbug," said Ralph, relaxing a little; "give me some
brandy and water, and let's have it."
Jewson gave him the brandy and water first. Ralph took a gulp, and
nodded for the news.
"Well, sir, you see what he give her; but do you know what she give
him?" asked Jewson, in a vile undertone, half-gloating, half-afraid.
"No. What?"
"Another ring."
"He's not wearing it."
"That's just it; he is, round his neck. And what do you suppose he's
wearing it on?"
"Out with it."
"It's one of her own rings," said Jewson, bringing his small eyes so
close together that they seemed to touch. "And he's wearing it round his
neck on a lanyard she made him out of her own hair!"
Ralph's comment did him some credit.
"You brute!" he said at last.
"Captain Devenish, sir, it's the four gospels."
"But you've been listening to them too."
"I couldn't help it, sir; really I couldn't. She only give it 'im to-day
when he come aboard to bid good-bye. They went into the after saloon,
and I was only in here with the door open. I couldn't help hearing every
word."
And the wretch displayed his obvious longing, with the cunning light in
the little eyes and the grin amid the dyed hair on the wizened face; but
with all his faults Ralph Devenish was still something of a gentleman,
and, Nan notwithstanding, even more of a man.
"You will never dare to repeat one of them," said he. "If you ever do,
and I hear of it, you will get what you yourself suggested just now.
That'll do, Jewson; not another word about that."
The old steward accepted his rebuff with aplomb.
"Very well, sir. Of course my feelings ain't like a gentleman's; a
gentleman wouldn't expect it. But this I do promise, never to tell
anybody if I don't tell you. And now, sir, I should like to tell you, if
I may make so bold, what I'd do in your place."
"If it amuses you, by all means."
"It does, sir; but it'd amuse me more if you'd do it, and there's time
enough still. I'd take Miss Merridew at her word, and ashore I'd go with
the pilot, and to Ballarat by the first coach!"
Ralph sipped his brandy on the settee. It was finished before he spoke.
"I should never make my fortune there," he said.
"You might if you took me with you. I was in Californy in 'forty-nine.
And I'd cook for ye," added the steward, his face shining with its
least evil light; "I'd cook as not many can in Australia, let alone the
diggings. That's what I used to ship as; but it's heart-breaking work at
sea."
"If I did make my pile," added Ralph, shrewdly, "it wouldn't alter
matters one way or the other."
"Perhaps not. But you'd be able to see whether he made his!"
That was all Jewson said; that was all Devenish heard. But the words
were spoken with so subtle an intonation that the tantalizing prospect
held out sounded the most solid satisfaction in the world; and they
turned the scale. Captain Devenish's portmanteaux were not even
unstrapped; within a few hours he had bag and baggage aboard the pilot's
cutter, with Nan's last ironic wishes ringing unkindly in his ears, and
the chief steward of the _North Foreland_, whom the second mate had been
instrumental in disrating, at his elbow. The next day but one they
passed Denis and his companions on the Ballarat Road, and had pegged out
a claim in the palpitating heart of the Gravel Pits before the week was
out.
The encounter in the crowded tent was not a solitary experience of the
kind in Ralph's case; being a public-school boy, he had not been an hour
on the diggings before he recognized an old schoolfellow. It was,
indeed, the old schoolfellow who first recognized Ralph Devenish; but
that was not Ralph's fault. Nigger Rackham was the very fellow whom his
old friends would have expected to find up to the bare neck in
wash-dirt, but perhaps the last whom they would have looked for in
spruce uniform at the head of a jingling mob of mounted troopers. He
came of an old West Indian stock, thickly tinctured with native blood,
and had been expelled from school for a hearty, natural blackguard who
was only good at games. His present employment suggested extensive
reformation, but that impression was soon removed over a bottle of
brandy in Rackham's tent, and the pair cracked another in Ralph's on the
Saturday night.
"You ought to join us," says Rackham. "Talk of me being out of my
element! I'm more in mine than ever you'll be in yours as a licensed
miner. You've neither the turn nor the patience, as I remember you; and
what do you want with a few extra thousand, which is all you'll make
with the luck of the devil?"
"They will come in very useful when I get back to town. You breathe
money in the Guards, Nigger."
"But you won't make enough to feel the difference. I know you won't.
You're not the sort. Whereas, if you were to join us, I could promise
you the best sport on earth, better than fox-hunting, and plenty of it."
"What's that, Nigger?"
"Digger-hunting!" says Rackham, his white teeth gleaming in a grin, his
bright eyes brighter than ever in his cups. "You look upset: we won't
hunt you; but you want to be one of them, and I want you to be one of
us."
"But how and why do you hunt them, Nigger?"
"To see their licenses; half of them don't take a license out; you did,
because your man knows the ropes. But of course I wouldn't have let an
old chum get into trouble."
"But what trouble can it get you into?"
"If you're caught digging without a license on you, whether you have it
elsewhere or no," said Rackham, with a gleam and a glitter from his
negroid teeth and eyes, "you may get run down and run in, and shut up in
the Logs till all's blue. The Logs is the camp lock-up. You sha'n't see
the inside of 'em--unless you want, out of curiosity--but that's what
happens to the ordinary digger-devil. I've had a fine fellow chained up
to a tree all night for his cheek. I rather like 'em like that. But when
they don't go to ground in their claims, and break for the bush with you
after them, boot and saddle, spurs and sabre, then you know what hunting
is!"
"It seems a bit unfair," said Devenish, blowing a reflective cloud from
the Turk's head.
"Unfair as you like," says Rackham under his breath, "but the best fun
going! I'd rather put up one well-nourished digger than all the foxes in
Leicestershire; but there you are, and now you know, not that it applies
to you; only, if you should happen to make any enemies (and they're a
precious rough crowd to do with), you pass the word and I'll do the
rest for the sake of old times."
Devenish coloured a little, and looked to see whether Jewson was within
earshot outside the tent; and he was; but just then a diversion was
caused by a pistol-shot in the distance, then another, and then so many
more, both far and near, that it was as though battle and murder were
taking place on no small scale.
"You'd better empty yours, too," said Rackham, pointing to Ralph's
revolver in answer to his look. "Some do it most nights, but every
mother's son does it on Saturday night, to load up again and start the
week with fresh powder and shot. Now's your time, old fellow, while the
night's young and your hand steady; then fill up my can, for to-morrow's
the Day of Rest!"
The brandy had been obtained at a sovereign the bottle from one of the
numerous sly-grog tents at which a digger-hunting constabulary was
delighted to wink. But neither Devenish nor Rackham was a drunkard; they
were merely congenial and convivial spirits whose incongruous
environment promoted a mutual warmth. And the guardsman's contribution
to the common fusillade, which still continued, was heard with the rest
not a mile away, in the other new tent on Black Hill Flat, where Moseley
was making the like explanations to his equally inexperienced comrades,
and the redoubtable Deane and Adams was duly emptied in its turn.