HELEN.
SOME years before the occurrence of the events recorded in the former
part of our narrative, Mr. Sedley, a professional gentleman, pretty
well off in the world, and with a good position in society, having
taken umbrage at some slight offered him in the county town where he
had imagined his influence to be paramount, hastily made up his mind to
leave the country.
In pursuance of this design, he first of all disposed of his practice;
sold the house in which he lived, and the greater part of his
furniture; went into lodgings; and then, when all these steps had been
taken, began to study the science of emigration in connection with the
numerous and various British colonies scattered over the face of the
globe.
If Mr. Sedley had had only himself to please, the matter would have
been of smaller consequence than it was. But he was a married man, and
was, in sequence, the father of some half-dozen sons and daughters. Of
these appendages, or encumbrances as they are sometimes called, such as
were old enough to have any opinions of their own were at first rather
rebellious; at least, they thought it hard to have to give up the
comforts and luxuries of a genteel home in England for the uncertain
prospects and advantages, and the certain toils and sacrifices, of an
emigrant life.
But Mr. Sedley had a strong will of his own, and was especially
liable to attacks of obstinacy which sometimes seemed to lead on to
remorselessness of purpose, and which, as is usual in such cases,
gained strength by opposition. It was natural enough, therefore, though
not necessarily judicious, that he should silence the objections of
these younger members of his family, by the unanswerable argument
wrapped up in Le roi le veut.
As to Mrs. Sedley, the meek-spirited wife, it was sufficient for her to
know that she must follow in her husband's wake. Had she not vowed to
"love, honour, and obey"? So, without any fruitless remonstrances, she
prepared quietly to fulfil her duty.
As, however, my story is about John Tincroft, I must follow the
fortunes of the Sedley family only so far as they relate indirectly to
the continuance of his history. Briefly, then, after long pondering
on the subject, and consulting as many authorities as he thought
expedient, the ex-lawyer fixed on the then almost terra incognita of
Australia as his general, and the part of it known as New South Wales
as his particular, destination.
Those were not the times of fast clippers, to say nothing of
ocean steamers. As Mr. Sedley, however, could afford to pay good
passage-money, he and his set sail one day in late summer from
Gravesend, under comparatively comfortable circumstances.
The voyage was attended with the usual variety of monotonous incidents.
It was long and wearying, but it came to an end; and about the
commencement of the Australian summer, the party landed at Sydney. Not
long to remain there, but to proceed a good way up the country to a
farm or settlement, which, on the representation of an advertisement,
and forgetting his professional caution, the gentleman had purchased
without seeing.
The bargain probably was not a bad one, after all; or it might not
have been, in the hands of one who understood the ins and outs of a
pastoral life at the Antipodes. But, unfortunately, Mr. Sedley would
have been at his wits' ends on an English farm; for farming comes no
more by nature than gig-driving. Very soon, therefore, he found himself
altogether beyond his wits on an Australian settlement. In other words,
misfortunes rapidly set in upon him; and to add to his embarrassments,
one of those periodical times of depression, to which all now colonies
are more or less subject, fell upon New South Wales.
Happily for the Sedleys, their whole property was not invested in land
and stock, and they outrode the storm. After the lapse of a year or
two, their circumstances began to mend; and they had their share in the
returning and increasing prosperity of their adopted country.
But while regaining his lost ground in this respect, Mr. Sedley had
still reason to regret the course into which he had been driven by the
impulses of his unreasoning obstinacy. In England he had maintained
a certain position in social life for which he was very well suited,
and in which were combined and concentrated a good many rational
pleasures, counterbalanced, it is true, by a liability to be slighted
and mortified occasionally.
In Australia, he had none with whom to dispute precedence, or to stand
up for his rights, simply because he had no such neighbours. He was
"monarch of all he surveyed," it is true; but then it was because he
had no equals or fancied superiors his "right to dispute." Wife and
children—an ignorant and awkward and untoward woman-help who had come
out to the colony under the pressure of circumstances, and at the
expense of the home Government—a shepherd and hut keeper (obtained
under similar advantages or disadvantages), who drew monthly rations
and smoked strong tobacco, and otherwise comported themselves as
free and independent savages in a shanty some three miles away—a
rough-and-ready bush carpenter and blacksmith, with a rather more
civilised groom of the stables at home, and one or two farm labourers,
who called Mr. Sedley their "boss," obeying him when it suited them,
and setting him aside when it did not, formed the whole of the
community within a radius of some ten miles in every direction.
Now, this was not, in all respects, pleasant to Mr. Sedley. Authority
is gratifying, no doubt, under certain conditions, and when it can be
enforced. But in this case, those conditions were wanting, and all that
Mr. Sedley got for his occasional outbreaks of despotic temper was the
timid fear of those to whose confiding love he thought he had a right,
and the contempt and daring rebellion of the few to whom he looked for
unlimited obedience.
If Mr. Sedley was disappointed in his fancy-drawn pictures of an
emigrant life (on which he ought never to have entered, because totally
unfitted for it), his wife and children were confirmed in their
prophetic dread of it. To have exchanged a respectable family mansion
in a quiet country town, a bevy of well-conducted servants, a circle
of friends and acquaintances, the delights of leisurely occupations,
the conveniences of life in general, for a rough log-house in what to
them was a desert, with all its disadvantages and drawbacks, was simply
disgusting.
They had not been accustomed to hardships, and the freedom they might
have exercised and enjoyed in their new home, and which to many others
would have been a boon of price, was to them mere slavery. We have
thought proper to drew attention to, and to dwell for a minute or two
on, this state of things at Sedley Station, as the settlement was
called, for a reason of our own. It is a benevolent one: let this
suffice.
To go on with our episodal sketch.
The Sedleys were to pass through deeper trials than the disappointments
and coarse toils of an emigrant life. Not many years after their
settling down at the station, a fever (introduced, as was supposed,
by a miserable, half-starved wretch who was loafing his way from
settlement to settlement professedly in search of work, and who was
taken in out of charity, and suffered to remain for some days to
recruit his strength) broke out among them. Only those who have passed
through a like experience can fully enter into the terrors of that time.
At first, recourse was had to the family medicine chest which the
Sedleys had brought out with them from London. This failing, the
nearest doctor was sent for. He lived full thirty miles away, and he
came to find two of the stricken ones already dead, two in a state of
collapse, the remaining two in the earlier stages of the fever, and the
parents, who had been deserted by their faithless helps at the outbreak
of the sickness, in almost speechless agony of mind, and worn out with
bodily fatigue.
A few weeks later, and the home was desolate. Of all who had, a few
years before, left a happy home in England, only two remained—the
father, prematurely aged, and Helen, a maiden of fifteen; the fever had
carried off all beside—the mother last of all. She had been spared,
upheld as it seemed by the strength of a mother's devotion, till her
services were no longer needed, and then she too was stricken down.
Time softens sorrow, especially to the young. Helen Sedley had felt,
with all the poignancy of a daughter's and a sister's grief, the
bereavement of which we have told. But as months, and afterwards years,
passed away, her tears ceased to flow as she thought of the lost ones;
and she bent herself with more determination to the duties in life
which lay before her.
She had need enough to do this, for her path was rough, and her
duties were severe. The infirmities of age were fast gathering and
concentrating themselves upon Mr. Sedley, and through these the
infirmities of his natural temper became more and more glaring. To
Helen, indeed, he was gentle and loving; to his dependents, he was as
morose and arbitrary as the conditions of their service permitted or
enabled him to be, and the kind-hearted girl had constantly to watch
for those outbursts of anger, so as both to moderate their fury and to
prevent their worst consequences.
We have hinted that some of the servants at Sedley Station were of
the convict class. Indeed, the labour market of the colony was, at
the time of which we write, in a great measure supplied by convicts
on ticket-of-leave. Many of these turned out valuable servants. In
fact, knavery, at any rate on a small scale, was too bad a trade to
fall back upon; it paid a transported housebreaker or pickpocket much
better to practise honest labour. The spell, therefore, was to a great
extent broken. At the same time, there were desperate characters among
the convicts whom no discipline could tame, and whom experience could
not teach; and there is no doubt that such as these were an element of
danger to all concerned.
The men whom Mr. Sedley first engaged, or rather obtained from the
proper authorities, as his bond-servants, had worked out their time and
disappeared soon after the terrible blow fell on him and Helen. But
others of the same class succeeded, and it was between these and her
father, when in his moods of obstinate despotism, that Helen had so
frequently to mediate, or afterwards to interpose the balm of soft and
kindly words to the chafed and galled.
"Your father may thank you, Helen Sedley, for being in a whole skin
at this present," said a man to her one day, when Sedley had been
mare than usually violent in his language and bearing towards him for
having, in some trivial matter, disobeyed his orders. "He taunted me
with having been lagged, as you heard, Miss Sedley; and it isn't the
first nor the second time, and my opinion is that he will do it once
too often. He threatened me with Norfolk Island, too, did he? Let him
take care that he isn't sent to a darker and narrower hole than Norfolk
Island one of these days."
"You must not speak so to me, Styles," said Helen, firmly, though her
heart secretly fluttered at seeing the dark eyes of the man glisten, as
with the wild fire of rage and vengeance, while he was speaking. But
Helen, though scarcely twenty years old, was wise and brave as well as
good and kind; and she knew that she must not show signs of fear.
"I must speak, Miss Sedley," rejoined the man, respectfully enough so
far as Helen was concerned, but doggedly and fiercely too; "if I don't
speak here and now, I shall talk to another purpose somewhere else, and
at some other time, not far-off, perhaps. Look here, Miss Sedley, in
the old country I was as good a man as your father, I reckon, though I
mightn't have had his education. At all events, I wasn't a lawyer as he
was—so I have heard, at least. But I was a gentleman's son, and might
have been a gentleman myself at this time if it hadn't been for—there,
never mind. But I don't forget what I was once; and 'tis hard lines to
be treated worse than a dog, as your father treats me."
"I have told you many times, Styles, how much I feel for you—for all
who are in your unhappy position," said Helen, softly; "and now I ask
you for my sake to make allowances for my father."
"He makes precious few allowances for me," retorted the man, gloomily.
Nevertheless, he remained waiting to hear what more Helen had to say.
"You know what a loss he—what a loss both of us had to bear five years
ago. My mother, my sisters, my brothers—there were six of us then—"
Helen's firmness gave way here.
"I know—that is, I have heard it all," said Styles, more mildly than
he had before spoken; "and I am a brute not to make allowances, as you
say. But it is hard, Miss Sedley, for all that, to be a—to be what I
am, and to feel what I feel at times. It gets over me. Do you know why
I was sent out and am here, Miss Sedley?"
"I have never inquired, and I have never been told," the young woman
answered.
"It was not for dishonesty; I never stole a penny, I never cheated any
man out of a farthing to my knowledge; but I struck a man when I was
in a passion, and I struck him hard. I didn't mean to do mischief; I
didn't know what I was doing till it was too late. The man insulted me,
but not so bad as your father has done the same thing, and I was too
high-spirited to stand it. Before he could speak another word, the deed
was done; he fell down like lead, and he never spoke again."
The perspiration broke out on Styles's forehead, and his lips quivered
as he spoke; and then presently he added, more quietly and softly—
"I tell you, Miss Sedley, it isn't safe for your father to go on as
he does with others as well as with me. I don't want to hurt him. It
is bad enough to have one man's death on the mind, to want to have
another. But what has happened once unawares might happen a second
time. There's some of the old grit left, I sometimes feel; and setting
myself aside, there are others who wouldn't care a straw so they could
have their revenge."
"I thank you for your warning, Styles," said Helen; "and I will do what
I can to make your position—I mean to shield you from trouble of any
sort. I did not before know what you have now told me; but as you are
feeling now the consequences of rash anger, you surely would not give
way again to the same temptation?"
"I don't know why not, Miss Sedley. Life such as mine out here is not
so valuable as to be worth keeping. But you speak about my feeling the
consequences, you don't know all."
The man's voice faltered here, and the muscles of his face were
painfully moved.
"I had a wife—I hadn't been married a year." The poor ticket-of-leave
man here broke out into a passionate cry, and hastily turned away.
"Don't speak of it to me, Styles. It only distresses you. Pray to God
to give you pardon and strength to bear your sorrow. The Lord Jesus
will give you rest and peace. Go to Him."
"Yes, I know, I know," said the man, again facing his monitress; "but
I think for all that, the devil would long before now have got the
mastery, if it hadn't been for you. Helen Sedley, you are like my
Caroline, like what she was; and when I look on you, my heart seems to
soften."
"And have you no hope of being restored to her?"
"No hope. She is dead; she died on ship-board the year after our last
parting in prison. She was following me out." And the man walked slowly
away when he had said this.
It was with experiences such as these that Helen Sedley became familiar
in her life in the Australian bush. Let it be borne in mind that I am
writing of what is now long past. Australian life, whether in bush
or towns and cities, has strangely altered since then. But is it to
be wondered that, under such circumstances, a feeling of desolation
sometimes made the solitary young woman sad, while the need for
constant watchfulness and daily labour, not always of the most feminine
kind, made her seem and feel older than her years.
As time wore on, Helen had to take active superintendence of her
father's concerns, even to the occasional visiting of the out-station,
for he was becoming feeble and forgetful. It was in fulfilment of this
duty that she had, soon after the conversation just recorded, to take
cognisance of a plot she had discovered (but in which the man Styles
had no part), and which had some time been in operation, for seriously
damaging the livestock on the distant run.
On making this discovery, there was no alternative but to lodge an
information with the nearest district magistrate; and Helen had,
reluctantly enough but courageously, to be a witness against the
conspirators. These were convicted, principally on her evidence,
and heavily sentenced. Being remitted to headquarters to undergo a
lengthened imprisonment, these men were replaced in the station by
others of the same class.
But thenceforth it could not be concealed from the Sedleys (father
and daughter) that they were surrounded by greater dangers than ever.
Is it to be wondered that, in the bitterness of her loneliness, Helen
sometimes uttered the mournful plaint within herself, "Oh, why did we
ever leave England?"
[Illustration]
[Illustration]