For the Term of His Natural Life Part 53

The debauch of the previous night had left the usual effects behind it.

His brain seemed on fire, his hands were hot and dry, his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. He shuddered as he viewed his pale face and red eyes in the little looking-gla.s.s, and hastily tried the door. He had retained sufficient sense in his madness to lock it, and his condition had been un.o.bserved. Stealing into the sitting-room, he saw that the clock pointed to half-past six. The flogging was to have taken place at half-past five. Unless accident had favoured him he was already too late. Fevered with remorse and anxiety, he hurried past the room where Meekin yet slumbered, and made his way to the prison. As he entered the yard, Troke called "Ten!" Kirkland had just got his fiftieth lash.

"Stop!" cried North. "Captain Burgess, I call upon you to stop."

"You're rather late, Mr. North," retorted Burgess. "The punishment is nearly over." "Wonn!" cried Troke again; and North stood by, biting his nails and grinding his teeth, during six more lashes.

Kirkland ceased to yell now, and merely moaned. His back was like a b.l.o.o.d.y sponge, while in the interval between lashes the swollen flesh twitched like that of a new-killed bullock. Suddenly, Macklewain saw his head droop on his shoulder. "Throw him off! Throw him off!" he cried, and Troke hurried to loosen the thongs.

"Fling some water over him!" said Burgess; "he's shamming."

A bucket of water made Kirkland open his eyes. "I thought so," said Burgess. "Tie him up again."

"No. Not if you are Christians!" cried North.

He met with an ally where he least expected one. Rufus Dawes flung down the dripping cat. "I'll flog no more," said he.

"What?" roared Burgess, furious at this gross insolence.

"I'll flog no more. Get someone else to do your blood work for you. I won't."

"Tie him up!" cried Burgess, foaming. "Tie him up. Here, constable, fetch a man here with a fresh cat. I'll give you that beggar's fifty, and fifty more on the top of 'em; and he shall look on while his back cools."

Rufus Dawes, with a glance at North, pulled off his shirt without a word, and stretched himself at the triangles. His back was not white and smooth, like Kirkland's had been, but hard and seamed. He had been flogged before. Troke appeared with Gabbett--grinning. Gabbett liked flogging. It was his boast that he could flog a man to death on a place no bigger than the palm of his hand. He could use his left hand equally with his right, and if he got hold of a "favourite", would "cross the cuts".

Rufus Dawes planted his feet firmly on the ground, took fierce grasp on the staves, and drew in his breath. Macklewain spread the garments of the two men upon the ground, and, placing Kirkland upon them, turned to watch this new phase in the morning's amus.e.m.e.nt. He grumbled a little below his breath, for he wanted his breakfast, and when the Commandant once began to flog there was no telling where he would stop. Rufus Dawes took five-and-twenty lashes without a murmur, and then Gabbett "crossed the cuts". This went on up to fifty lashes, and North felt himself stricken with admiration at the courage of the man. "If it had not been for that cursed brandy," thought he, with bitterness of self-reproach, "I might have saved all this." At the hundredth lash, the giant paused, expecting the order to throw off, but Burgess was determined to "break the man's spirit".

"I'll make you speak, you dog, if I cut your heart out!" he cried. "Go on, prisoner."

For twenty lashes more Dawes was mute, and then the agony forced from his labouring breast a hideous cry. But it was not a cry for mercy, as that of Kirkland's had been. Having found his tongue, the wretched man gave vent to his boiling pa.s.sion in a torrent of curses. He shrieked imprecation upon Burgess, Troke, and North. He cursed all soldiers for tyrants, all parsons for hypocrites. He blasphemed his G.o.d and his Saviour. With a frightful outpouring of obscenity and blasphemy, he called on the earth to gape and swallow his persecutors, for Heaven to open and rain fire upon them, for h.e.l.l to yawn and engulf them quick.

It was as though each blow of the cat forced out of him a fresh burst of beast-like rage. He seemed to have abandoned his humanity. He foamed, he raved, he tugged at his bonds until the strong staves shook again; he writhed himself round upon the triangles and spat impotently at Burgess, who jeered at his torments. North, with his hands to his ears, crouched against the corner of the wall, palsied with horror. It seemed to him that the pa.s.sions of h.e.l.l raged around him. He would fain have fled, but a horrible fascination held him back.

In the midst of this--when the cat was hissing its loudest--Burgess laughing his hardest, and the wretch on the triangles filling the air with his cries, North saw Kirkland look at him with what he thought a smile. Was it a smile? He leapt forward, and uttered a cry of dismay so loud that all turned.

"Hullo!" says Troke, running to the heap of clothes, "the young 'un's slipped his wind!"

Kirkland was dead.

"Throw him off!" says Burgess, aghast at the unfortunate accident; and Gabbett reluctantly untied the thongs that bound Rufus Dawes.

Two constables were alongside him in an instant, for sometimes newly tortured men grew desperate. This one, however, was silent with the last lash; only in taking his shirt from under the body of the boy, he muttered, "Dead!" and in his tone there seemed to be a touch of envy. Then, flinging his shirt over his bleeding shoulders, he walked out--defiant to the last.

"Game, ain't he?" said one constable to the other, as they pushed him, not ungently, into an empty cell, there to wait for the hospital guard.

The body of Kirkland was taken away in silence, and Burgess turned rather pale when he saw North's threatening face.

"It isn't my fault, Mr. North," he said. "I didn't know that the lad was chicken-hearted." But North turned away in disgust, and Macklewain and Burgess pursued their homeward route together.

"Strange that he should drop like that," said the Commandant.

"Yes, unless he had any internal disease," said the surgeon.

"Disease of the heart, for instance," said Burgess.

"I'll post-mortem him and see."

"Come in and have a nip, Macklewain. I feel quite qualmish," said Burgess. And the two went into the house amid respectful salutes from either side. Mr. North, in agony of mind at what he considered the consequence of his neglect, slowly, and with head bowed down, as one bent on a painful errand, went to see the prisoner who had survived. He found him kneeling on the ground, prostrated. "Rufus Dawes."

At the low tone Rufus Dawes looked up, and, seeing who it was, waved him off.

"Don't speak to me," he said, with an imprecation that made North's flesh creep. "I've told you what I think of you--a hypocrite, who stands by while a man is cut to pieces, and then comes and whines religion to him."

North stood in the centre of the cell, with his arms hanging down, and his head bent.

"You are right," he said, in a low tone. "I must seem to you a hypocrite. I a servant of Christ? A besotted beast rather! I am not come to whine religion to you. I am come to--to ask your pardon. I might have saved you from punishment--saved that poor boy from death. I wanted to save him, G.o.d knows! But I have a vice; I am a drunkard. I yielded to my temptation, and--I was too late. I come to you as one sinful man to another, to ask you to forgive me." And North suddenly flung himself down beside the convict, and, catching his blood-bespotted hands in his own, cried, "Forgive me, brother!"

Rufus Dawes, too much astonished to speak, bent his black eyes upon the man who crouched at his feet, and a ray of divine pity penetrated his gloomy soul. He seemed to catch a glimpse of misery more profound than his own, and his stubborn heart felt human sympathy with this erring brother. "Then in this h.e.l.l there is yet a man," said he; and a hand-grasp pa.s.sed between these two unhappy beings. North arose, and, with averted face, pa.s.sed quickly from the cell. Rufus Dawes looked at his hand which his strange visitor had taken, and something glittered there. It was a tear. He broke down at the sight of it, and when the guard came to fetch the tameless convict, they found him on his knees in a corner, sobbing like a child.

CHAPTER XVI. KICKING AGAINST THE p.r.i.c.kS.

The morning after this, the Rev. Mr. North departed in the schooner for Hobart Town. Between the officious chaplain and the Commandant the events of the previous day had fixed a great gulf. Burgess knew that North meant to report the death of Kirkland, and guessed that he would not be backward in relating the story to such persons in Hobart Town as would most readily repeat it. "Blank awkward the fellow's dying,"

he confessed to himself. "If he hadn't died, n.o.body would have bothered about him." A sinister truth. North, on the other hand, comforted himself with the belief that the fact of the convict's death under the lash would cause indignation and subsequent inquiry. "The truth must come out if they only ask," thought he. Self-deceiving North! Four years a Government chaplain, and not yet attained to a knowledge of a Government's method of "asking" about such matters! Kirkland's mangled flesh would have fed the worms before the ink on the last "minute" from deliberating Authority was dry.

Burgess, however, touched with selfish regrets, determined to baulk the parson at the outset. He would send down an official "return" of the unfortunate occurrence by the same vessel that carried his enemy, and thus get the ear of the Office. Meekin, walking on the evening of the flogging past the wooden shed where the body lay, saw Troke bearing buckets filled with dark-coloured water, and heard a great splashing and sluicing going on inside the hut. "What is the matter?" he asked.

"Doctor's bin post-morticing the prisoner what was flogged this morning, sir," said Troke, "and we're cleanin' up."

Meekin sickened, and walked on. He had heard that unhappy Kirkland possessed unknown disease of the heart, and had unhappily died before receiving his allotted punishment. His duty was to comfort Kirkland's soul; he had nothing to do with Kirkland's slovenly unhandsome body, and so he went for a walk on the pier, that the breeze might blow his momentary sickness away from him. On the pier he saw North talking to Father Flaherty, the Roman Catholic chaplain. Meekin had been taught to look upon a priest as a shepherd might look upon a wolf, and pa.s.sed with a distant bow. The pair were apparently talking on the occurrence of the morning, for he heard Father Flaherty say, with a shrug of his round shoulders, "He woas not one of moi people, Mr. North, and the Govermint would not suffer me to interfere with matters relating to Prhotestint prisoners." "The wretched creature was a Protestant," thought Meekin.

"At least then his immortal soul was not endangered by belief in the d.a.m.nable heresies of the Church of Rome." So he pa.s.sed on, giving good-humoured Denis Flaherty, the son of the b.u.t.ter-merchant of Kildrum, a wide berth and sea-room, lest he should pounce down upon him unawares, and with Jesuitical argument and silken softness of speech, convert him by force to his own state of error--as was the well-known custom of those intellectual gladiators, the Priests of the Catholic Faith. North, on his side, left Flaherty with regret. He had spent many a pleasant hour with him, and knew him for a narrow-minded, conscientious, yet laughter-loving creature, whose G.o.d was neither his belly nor his breviary, but sometimes in one place and sometimes in the other, according to the hour of the day, and the fasts appointed for due mortification of the flesh. "A man who would do Christian work in a jog-trot parish, or where men lived too easily to sin harshly, but utterly unfit to cope with Satan, as the British Government had transported him," was North's sadly satirical reflection upon Father Flaherty, as Port Arthur faded into indistinct beauty behind the swift-sailing schooner. "G.o.d help those poor villains, for neither parson nor priest can."

He was right. North, the drunkard and self-tormented, had a power for good, of which Meekin and the other knew nothing. Not merely were the men incompetent and self-indulgent, but they understood nothing of that frightful capacity for agony which is deep in the soul of every evil-doer. They might strike the rock as they chose with sharpest-pointed machine-made pick of warranted Gospel manufacture, stamped with the approval of eminent divines of all ages, but the water of repentance and remorse would not gush for them. They possessed not the frail rod which alone was powerful to charm. They had no sympathy, no knowledge, no experience. He who would touch the hearts of men must have had his own heart seared. The missionaries of mankind have ever been great sinners before they earned the divine right to heal and bless. Their weakness was made their strength, and out of their own agony of repentance came the knowledge which made them masters and saviours of their kind. It was the agony of the Garden and the Cross that gave to the world's Preacher His kingdom in the hearts of men. The crown of divinity is a crown of thorns.

North, on his arrival, went straight to the house of Major Vickers. "I have a complaint to make, sir," he said. "I wish to lodge it formally with you. A prisoner has been flogged to death at Port Arthur. I saw it done."

Vickers bent his brow. "A serious accusation, Mr. North. I must, of course, receive it with respect, coming from you, but I trust that you have fully considered the circ.u.mstances of the case. I always understood Captain Burgess was a most humane man."

North shook his head. He would not accuse Burgess. He would let the events speak for themselves. "I only ask for an inquiry," said he.

"Yes, my dear sir, I know. Very proper indeed on your part, if you think any injustice has been done; but have you considered the expense, the delay, the immense trouble and dissatisfaction all this will give?"

"No trouble, no expense, no dissatisfaction, should stand in the way of humanity and justice," cried North.

"Of course not. But will justice be done? Are you sure you can prove your case? Mind, I admit nothing against Captain Burgess, whom I have always considered a most worthy and zealous officer; but, supposing your charge to be true, can you prove it?"

"Yes. If the witnesses speak the truth."

"Who are they?" "Myself, Dr. Macklewain, the constable, and two prisoners, one of whom was flogged himself. He will speak the truth, I believe. The other man I have not much faith in."