Denis Dent

Chapter 17

n****r Rackham had the freedom of the tent on the Gravel Pits, where he would appear sometimes at dead of night, brandishing a bottle and demanding the Welsh rarebit or the savoury omelette at which Jewson had shown himself an adept. Many an impromptu carouse was thus initiated, and it was after one of them that Rackham distinguished himself by whistling for a hansom outside the tent. He was a man of violent appetites, whose every vein was swollen with sufficiently savage blood. But he had a crude vitality and a brutal gaiety very bracing on occasion, as when he told of Denis's fortunes in one breath, but undertook his ruin in the next. This was a night or two after their collision at the new claim; the bottle was getting low, and the lieutenant's eyes were like living coals.

"I'll take it out of him! I'll have him at the Logs yet, never fear," said he. "There are only two of them; some fine morning there'll be only one, and no license to show. Then away he goes, and if you like you shall jump the claim. But it won't be for another month."

"Another month!" echoed Devenish with a blank face.

"The brutes have taken out their new license a good two days before they need," explained the lieutenant. "That I happen to know, but they don't know I know it. They've had a fight, and we are ready for another raid; if we let them be they won't take such care when this next month's up. But we must wait till it is up, and we must chance your poor relation growing rich in the time."

Ralph Devenish sat up smoking for an hour when the bottle was empty and his companion gone. He was much the more temperate man of the two, but patience was not one of his virtues, though it had become a necessity of his protracted suit. That only left him with less than ever for the ordinary incidents of life, and his experience as a digger had not made Devenish more patient. He had been as lucky at the start as Dent had been unlucky. In these few weeks he had actually netted some three hundred pounds sterling, out of a chain of shallow workings whereby he and others had been tracing the Gravel Pits Lead down its course: only within the last day or two had the lead run into a drift of water which had flooded all the holes and completely damped Ralph's ardour. It was pronounced impossible to sink through this drift without the tiresome operation known as "puddling"; and that proved far too heroic a measure for Ralph Devenish, who was only happy when washing his two or three ounces a day. So one morning he was counting on making his three hundred up to five at least, and by the following night he had found out when the next ship sailed from Melbourne. It was at this juncture that Rackham brought word of a contrary turn in the affairs of Denis. The untimely news checked all Ralph's plans. He was not at all inclined to leave his rival with the ball at his feet, and nothing to stop him but the capricious persecution of a corrupt constabulary.

Ralph might have blushed to put it so even to himself, but that was his actual attitude as he sat smoking into the small hours, and so Jewson stole in and found him in the end. Ralph was not startled; the steward was regularly the last abed; but now his boots were yellow with fresh dust, and the perspiration showered from his peaked cap as he took it off.

"Where have you been?" asked Ralph, raising a morose face to stare.

"I thought you might like an extra drop to-night," replied the steward, winking and grinning as he produced a bottle, "so I've been getting you another of these from where the lieutenant gets 'em. You don't do your fair share, Captain Devenish, sir, and you may want to when you've heard my little report."

"Report of what?" asked Devenish. But the steward would only chuckle and shake a wicked skull until the grog was served out and the pair seated, pannikin to pannikin, on either side of the packing-case that did duty for a table.

"I heard what you were talking about, you see," began Jewson, wiping the gray moustache from which the dye had almost disappeared.

"You generally do."

"And you generally know it, so where's the harm? But when I hear you talking about the second mate that was," continued the steward, showing a whole set of ill-fitting false teeth, "I do more than hear-I listen-and listen I will whenever I catch his cursed name!"

"Well?"

"Well, sir, it's right."

"What's right?"

"What the lieutenant was telling you. He's fallen on his feet this time. I've been to see."

"You've been to Mr. Dent's tent already?"

The prefix was a mark which it would have been against Ralph's instincts to overstep with an inferior. It was incongruous enough to curve the corners of the steward's mouth.

"It ain't a tent," said he, chuckling. "It's one of the best huts I've seen on the diggings."

"It is, is it?"

"Once I'd found Rotten Gully, which isn't so very far from this, it was easy enough to find the only claim it could be."

"So it's as good as all that!"

"To look at," said Jewson, "on a moonlight night. But they'd their own light burning inside; you hadn't to get very near to hear their voices. They were sitting up yarning, same as you and the lieutenant. Only on tea," added the steward, in the absence of further encouragement.

"Poor devils!" remarked Devenish, raising his pannikin.

"You can't call 'em poor now, sir," declared the steward. "All's fair in love and war, and I had a look in on 'em like a mouse: they've proper crockery left 'em by the outgoing tenant, and a proper table to set it on."

"Anything else?" inquired Ralph, sarcastically.

Jewson leaned forward and lowered his voice as though they were being spied upon in their turn.

"Half a saucerful of gold-dust out of the hole!"

"Already!" exclaimed Devenish, dropping reserve in his astonishment.

"In the very first day's washing! They never began until to-day. That's what's keeping them up all night," added Jewson. "They've started looking ahead, you see. Let me fill up your pannikin, Captain Devenish. You don't get half a chance with Mr. Rackham, sir!"

Ralph Devenish was one who carried his liquor in a manner worthy of his blood. His worst friend had seldom seen him fuddled. He was so much the less proof against the deeper and more damning effects. His tongue did not slur a syllable that followed, but it ran away with him all the faster for that. It muttered degrading confidences; it snarled unscrupulous revenge; it revealed a man so different from the Ralph Devenish known of other men that it was as though the drink had gone to his heart instead of to his head.

"I will marry her! I swear I will! We were all but engaged before, and I'll marry her yet. He never shall. I'll see him in hell first-I'll send him there myself! An infernal snob out of the merchant service, and his infernal father's son all over! What's the matter with you, Jewson? What are you grinning at?"

"Only at the idea of you committing a crime, sir. A captain in the Grenadier Guards! Ho, ho, ho!" And the steward showed his horrible teeth again; but there was no mirth in the little black penetrating eyes that were fast to Ralph's.

"But I would!" he swore. "I mean to marry her, by hook or crook."

"You really do?" said Jewson, turning grave.

"Fair or foul!" cried Ralph, recklessly.

"It's all one in love and war," repeated the steward, with a shrug. "But if you mean what you say I'll tell you what to do."

"You will, will you? Well, let's have it."

"I should do as you were thinking of doing earlier in the evening. I should go home by the first ship, and marry her quick!"

"What! Leave him digging his fortune and writing her all about it every mail?"

Devenish had already vowed that he would never do that. He repeated the vow with an oath.

"But you don't know that she's getting any letters," remarked Jewson, calmly.

Ralph gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean by that?"

"Only that he may not be writing to her; he didn't in the beginning, you see; that letter I posted was his first."

"How do you know?"

"His mate told me so."

"You did post it, Jewson?"

The steward chuckled as he shook his head.

"That's tellings," said he, slyly. "You can think I didn't, or you can think I did. He deserved to have it posted, didn't he? He deserves so well of me and you, don't he? All's fair in them two things, you know; if it's the one thing with you, it's the other with me; it's bloody war between me and the second mate, and will be whether you stay or not!"

Devenish was revolted in spite of his worst self. But he was also relieved, and his conscience deadened as quickly as it had come to life again. If the letter had not been posted, it was through no fault of his, and even now he knew nothing about it. And if Jewson, for his own reasons, chose to stay behind on the diggings, in order to thwart the man who so richly deserved thwarting, neither had he, Ralph, anything on earth to do with that. Yet his nature shrank from such an ally, even as he began to appreciate the creature's value, and he frowned as he filled the Turk's head for the twentieth time that night. His hand was as steady as his speech. It was his better nature that was under eclipse. Meanwhile, the steward took the opportunity of surreptitiously replenishing Ralph's pannikin, and still more surreptitiously emptying his own upon the ground.

"So you propose to hold a watching brief on my behalf?" said Ralph at last, and forced a smile at the idea.

"I propose to keep an eye on him for you, if that's what you mean," replied the steward.

"But Sergeant Rackham's going to do that as it is. He says he'll be level with our friend in a month."

"A month!" echoed Jewson, scornfully. "He'll be a made man in a month, if he goes on as he's begun. He's tumbled on a jeweler's shop, or I'm much mistaken."

"Well, you can't take it from him, can you?"

"Perhaps not."

"You mean you can!" exclaimed Devenish, irritated by the confident subtlety of the man's manner.

"Oh, no, I don't."

Devenish tilted the pannikin and set it down with a clatter.

"Then what do you mean? Out with it, Jewson. I'm sick of beating about the bush!"

"So am I," said the steward, dryly.

"If you can't turn a man out of his hole, and prevent him getting all that's to be got out of it, what on earth can you do that's any good to me?"

"If you went home," said Jewson, slowly, "I could keep him here till it was no use his following you-till you were married!"

"Oh, so you think you could do all that?"

"I know I could, Captain Devenish."

"You know it, do you?"

"Of course, you would make it worth my while."

Ralph laughed harshly as he raised the pannikin once more.

"I was waiting for that, you old villain! I was waiting for that!"

But it did not disgust him. He did not even pretend to be disgusted. There were no scruples left in those reckless, heated eyes.

"You give me your promissory note for a thousand pounds, payable on your wedding day, or on demand thereafter, and you'll be married the month after you get back."

Ralph laughed more harshly than before.

"Go on, Jewson! You aren't drunk, are you? Then how do you think you're going to manage it?"

"Ah, that I sha'n't tell you; but manage it I can and will. You leave it to me. If you sail at the New Year-and there's two or three ships advertised-it'll be your own fault if you aren't married by midsummer. And if that isn't worth a thousand pounds I don't know what is."

"It's worth two!" whispered Devenish, hoarsely; "and you shall have two if-if--"

"If what?"

"If he-if he lives to see the day."

Jewson chuckled aloud.

"Of course he will!" he cried. "Where would be the fun if he didn't? Where would be my fun-that's been due to me ever since he had me disrated?"

"Then it's a bargain."

"What? Are you going to give me your hand on it, Captain Devenish?"

"My hand and word, and if I break the one may the other wither!"

"But you'll put it on paper, sir, won't you?"

"Whenever you like."

"One thousand or two?"

"Two if he lives to see it-nothing if he doesn't."

"A bargain it is."