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DE PROFUNDIS |
JACK hardly knew how and in what fashion he left the city. Mechanically, and all aimlessly, as he steered his course, some old memories helped to guide his footsteps towards the desert, towards the great waste amid which he had joyed and sorrowed, toiled and endured, in which the palm-fringed fountains had been so rare, whence now the simoon had arisen which had whelmed all the treasures of his existence. From time to time as he wandered on, ever northward, and trending towards the outer bush-world, he accepted the rudest labour, working stolidly and desperately until the allotted task was concluded. In truth his mind was stunned; he had no hope, no plan. What was the use of his trying anything? Was he not doomed? Did not Mr. Blockham warn poor Guy against having anything to do with an unlucky man? He tried to forget the past and to avoid thoughts of the future by hard work and continual exertion. When he walked it was not in his accustomed leisurely pace, but as if he were walking for a wager, trying to get away from himself.
But this could not last long. One day, after he had left a lonely bush inn, he felt attacked with dizziness, which for a few moments would obscure his sight. From time to time he felt as if a mortal sickness had seized him, but he disregarded the warnings of Nature and obstinately continued his course, until all at once his powers failed him, and, sick to death in body and in mind, he flung himself down by the side of a sheltering bush and scarcely cared whether he lived or died. Faithful to the last, patient of hunger and of thirst, strong in the blind, unreasoning love of his kind, with a fidelity that exceeds the friendship of man, and equals the purest love of woman, the dog Help, with silent sympathy, lay by his side.
The form of the wanderer lay beneath the forest tree, which swayed and rocked beneath the rising blast. With the moaning of the melancholy shrill-voiced wind, wailing all night as if in half-remembered dirges, mingled the cries of a fever-stricken man. John Redgrave was delirious.
. . . . .
With recovered consciousness came a wondering gradual perception of a hut, of the limited size and primitive design ordinarily devoted to the accommodation of shepherds. A fire burned in the large chimney; and the small resources of the building had been carefully utilized. By the hearth, smoking on a small stool, sat an elderly man, whose general appearance Jack seemed hazily to recall.
As Jack moved, the man turned round, with the watchful air of one who tends the sick, and disclosed the white locks and rugged lineaments of the old Scotch shepherd whom he had relieved at Gondaree, and to whose gratitude he had owed the gift of the dog Help.
“Eh! mon!” ejaculated the ancient Scot, “ye have been mercifully spared to conseeder your ways. I dooted ye were joost gane to yer accoont when I pickit ye up yonder, with the doggie howlin’ and greetin’ o’er ye.”
“I don’t see much mercy in the matter. Better far that I were stiff and cold now under the yarran bush; but I am much obliged to you all the same.”
“Kindly welcome; ye’re kindly welcome, young man: ye’ve been on the spree, as they ca’ it, I can tell that weel, more by token I hae nae preevilege to school ye on that heed, seeing that I, Jock Harlaw, am just as good as ready money in the deel’s purse from that self-same inseedious, all-devourin’ vice.”
“No, it’s not that,” said Jack, with a faint smile, “but I don’t wonder that you thought so. I’m very tired, that’s all, and there’s something wrong with my head, I think.”
“The Lord be thankit; I’m glad it’s no that devil’s glamour that’s seized ye. But surely I ken the collie; how did ye come by him, may I speer?”
“So you don’t remember me or the dog; you came to Gondaree with him and the other pups on your back.”
“Lord save us! auld lassie wasna wrang, then; it’s just fearsome,” ejaculated the old man, in accents of the deepest concern and wonder. “And do you tell me,” continued he, “that you’re the weel-gained, prosperous, kind-spoken gentleman that helped old Jock in his sair need yon time? Fortune’s given ye a downthraw; but oh, hinny, however sair the burden may be, or sharp the strokes of adversity, better a hunner times to bear a thing than to sell your manhood to the enemy of the flesh.”
Jack saw there was still a suspicion in the old man’s mind; it must have been hard for him to believe anything but drink could have brought a man so low, but he did not resent the mistake, and only closed his eyes wearily.
“If ye ask auld Jock Harlaw to tell you the truth,” the old man continued, “he’ll say that of all the men he’s had ken of he never saw one that did not die in the wilderness once he had bowed the knee to the Moloch of drink. Ye may see the Promised Land, and the everlastin’ hills glintin’ in the gold o’ the new Jerusalem; but ye maun see, like Moses on the mountain top, or on the sands o’ the desert, ye’ll no win oot, ance ye’re like me, if the angels frae heaven cam and draggit ye by the hand.”
“It’s a bad look out, Jock, by your showing; but how is it, with your strong perception of the evils of the habit, and your religious turn of mind, that you have not broken yourself of it?”
“Maister Redgrave,” answered the old man, solemnly, “that is one of the awful and inscrutable meesteries of the life of the puir, conceited, doited crater that ca’s himsel’ man. My forbears were godly, sober, self-denying Christian men and women. Till the day I left the bonny homes o’ Ettrick, for this far, sad, wearifu’ land, nae living man had ever seen the sign o’ liquor upon me, or could hae charged me wi’ the faintest token of excess. I was shepherd for the Laird o’ Hopedale, and nae happier lad than Jock Harlaw ever listened to the lilting o’ the lasses on the Cowden Knowes.”
“And what tempted you to emigrate, and better your condition, as it is ironically termed?”
“Weel, aweel,” pursued the old man, contemplatively, “my nature was aye deeply tinged wi’ romance. I had heard tell o’ the grand plains and forests, and the great sheep farms of Australia, with opportunities of makin’ a poseetion just uncommon, and I was tempted, like anither fule, to quit the hame of my fathers, and the bonny Ettrick-shaw, and Mary Gilsland, that was bonnier than a’, to mak’ my fortune. And a pretty like fortune I hae made o’ it.”
“Well, but how did you come to grief? There must have been so many people too glad to get a man like you among their sheep.”
“I had my chances, I’ll no deny,” said the old man. “Ilka one o’ us has ae guid chance in this life, forbye a wheen sma’ opportunities o’ weel-doin’. But though I wrocht, and toiled, and scrapit for the day when I should write and bid Mary to join me across the sea, I had nae great luck, and mair times than one I coupit a’ the siller just as I had filled the stocking. At the lang end of a’, just as things had mended, my puir Mary died, and I had nae strength left to strive against the evil one that came in the form of comfort to my sair heart and broken speerit. Maybe I had learned to pass a wee thing too near to the edge when I was working—there’s a deal too much of that amang men that would scorn the idea of drunkenness.”
“And the end?”
“And the end was that I was delivered over bound hand and foot to a debasing habit, which has clung to me for thretty years, in spite of prayers and resolutions, and tears of blood. And so it will be, wae’s me, till the day when auld Jock Harlaw dies in a ditch or under a tree like a gaberlunzie crater, or is streekit in the dead-house o’ a bush public. And which gate are ye gangin’ the noo?” demanded the old man with a sudden change from his dolorous subject.
“Haven’t an idea; don’t know, and don’t care.”
“That’s bad,” said the old shepherd, looking at him with pained and earnest looks; “but ye’re looking no fit to leave this. I misdoot that I wranged ye when I thocht it was the drink. What will I do if it is the fever?”
“Let me rest here; I dare say I shall soon get over it,” said Jack, with a gleam of his old hopefulness, but he was touched with the anxious manner of the kind old man, and made the best of what he was afraid would be a serious illness.
But he was happily mistaken; a few days’ rest and the careful nursing of the shepherd, whose small stock of medicine had never before been broken into, sufficed to restore him, not to health, but to a state of convalescence which permitted him to stroll a little way from the hut.
Jack had had many talks with the old man, whose experience was worth something, although he had not been able to avail himself of it, and the conclusion he arrived at was that he would accompany Harlaw to Jimburah.
“I’m weel kenned there; why suld ye no get a flock o’ sheep too? The doggie will do work fine for ye, and maybe we’ll get a hut together, and I’ll cook for ye; then when ye get strong ye can look aboot and see what ye can do.”
“Anything you like, Jock,” said he, wearily; “one thing is much the same as another to me now.”
“Weel a weel,” said the old man, gratified at his acquiescence, “there’s better lives than a herd’s in Australia, and there’s waur. I wadna say but that after sax months or so, with the labour and the calm, peaceful life where ye see God’s handiwork and nae ither thing spread out before ye, after sax months ye might find your courage and your health come back to ye, and gang on your way to seek your fortune.”
“Didn’t you find it dreadfully lonely at first?” inquired Jack.
“Weel, I canna in conscience deny that at first I thocht it just being sold into slavery, but as time passed I found it wasna sae devoid of rational satisfaction as might ha’ been supposed. Many a peacefu’ day hae I walked ahint my flock, sound in mind and body too. There’s poseetions in life, I’ll no deny, that’s mair dignified and pridefu’, but on a fine spring morning, when the grass is green, the birds a’ whistling and ca’ing to ither puir things, the face o’ Nature seems kindly and gracious; the vara sheep, puir dumb beasties, seem to acknowledge the influence of the scene, and there’s a calm sense o’ joy and peace unknown to the dwellers in towns.”
The old man warmed with his subject, and spoke with such earnestness that Jack could not help smiling, far as his thoughts were from anything like mirth.
“Well, Harlaw, man is a curious animal, not to be accounted for on any reasonable plan or system. As you and I have not managed to dispossess ourselves of the complex functions chiefly exercised in the endurance of various degrees of pain which we know as life, we may as well wear them out for a time in what men call shepherding as in any other direction. They don’t fence hereabout, then?”
“Not within years of it, sir; and I’m thinkin’ it’s just as well for puir bodies like you and me, if you’ll excuse the leeberty.”
“Don’t make any excuse, and get out of the way of saying ‘sir,’ if we are to be mates. Call me Jack—Jack Smith. Mr. Redgrave is dead and buried—fathoms deep. Would to God he were, and past waking!” he added, with sudden earnestness.
“Dinna say that; oh, dinna cease to have faith in His mercy and long-suffering,” said the old man, beseechingly. “I am old and fechless, and, as I hae told ye, a drunkard neither mair nor less; but I cling to the promises in this book (here he took from his pocket an old, much-worn Bible), and though the mortal pairt o’ Jock Harlaw be stained wi’ sin and weakness and folly, I hae na abandoned the hope and the teaching o’ my youth, nor the trust that they may yet gar me triumph over the Adversary. But we must be ganging; it’s twenty miles, and lang anes too, to Jimburah.”
There was nothing but to buckle to the journey. Jack was weak after his illness, but he faced the road as the manifest alternative, the old man’s rations having been exhausted, and further sojourn in the deserted hut being inexpedient.
He was thoroughly exhausted when the home-paddock of Jimburah was sighted. He walked up with Jock Harlaw to the overseer’s cottage, the proprietor’s house being unapproachable by the “likes of them.” Here he and his companion stood for half an hour, waiting the arrival of that important personage, the overseer, along with nearly a dozen other tramps, candidates for work, or merely food and shelter in the “travellers’ hut,” like themselves. A stout, bushy-bearded man rode up at a hand-gallop in the twilight, and spoke.
“Well, there seem plenty of you just now, a lazy lot of beggars, I’ll be bound; looking for work and praying you mayn’t get it, eh?”
This was held to be very fair wit, and some of the hands laughed appreciatingly at it.
“Any shepherds among you? You fellows with the dogs I suppose have stolen them somewhere to look like the real thing? Oh, it’s you, old Jock, is it?” he went on, with a good-natured inflection, changing the hard tones of his voice. “You’re just in time; I’ve lost two rascally sweeps of shepherds at the dog-trap. Can you and your mate take two flocks of wethers there? You know the place.”
“Nae doot they’ll be bad sheep to take,” quoth old Jock, with national caution. “Just fit to rin the legs off a man with the way they’ve been handled; but I’m no saying, if ye’re in deeficulty.”
“Then you’ll take them? Well, you can come as early as you like to-morrow morning. But stop; is your mate any good? You don’t look as if you’d done much shepherding, though you’ve got a fine dog, by the look of him.”
“He’s a friend of mine,” affirmed Jock, with prompt decision, “and I’ll wager ye a pound o’ ’bacco ye hav’na a better shepherd on the whole of Jimburah.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the official, “he may be as good as most of them, and be no great things either. However, I’m hard up, and must risk it. What’s your name?”
“John Smith,” said Jack, steadily.
“Uncommon fine name too. Well, Smith, you can go out along with Scotch Jock to-morrow morning, and take the 1,800 flock; he has 2,200 in his. I’ll send your rations out after you, and will come and count you to-morrow fortnight. Come in now and take your pannikin of flour for to-night. He knows the travellers’ hut. Here, you other fellows, come in and get your grub.”
He who of old boasted himself equal to either fortune enunciated a great idea. But how different, often, is the practical application to the theory fresh from the philosopher’s workshop!