L I E) RAR.Y OF THE U N IVLR5 ITY or ILLINOIS P883a V.I Viz?. The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN M ^^'* L161— O-1096 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/australianheroin01prae AN AUSTEALIAN HEEOINE BY R. MURRAY PRIOR. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. bonbon : CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited, 193, Piccadilly. 1880. [All rights reserved.] LONDON : K CLAY, SONS, A2n) TATLOE, EAD STREET HILL. to 8-5,3 V, CONTENTS. vi CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. PAGE A RiDE THROUGH THE BUSH 78 CHAPTER VI. ''soul cannot march to THE BLEATING OF SHEEP OR LOWING OF cattle" 98 CHAPTER VII. A STORM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 119 CHAPTER VIIT. IN THE GARDEN AT BULLY WALLAH 147 CHAPTER IX. THE RETURN TO THE PILOT STATION 163 CHAPTER X. THE RECALL OF GEORGE BRAND 184 CONTENTS. vu CHAPTER XT. PAGE GHOSTS OF THE PAST 204 CHAPTER XII. ESTHER ARRIVES IN LONDON 218 CHAPTER XIII. A PLUNGE INTO CIVILISATION 236 AN AUSTPiALIAN HEROINE. CHAPTER I. ESTHER. Esther was perched upon a bare black rock, whicli bristled out from the side of a cliff, T\'oru into crannies and furrows by the incessant dash of the ocean. A tangle of seaweed lay all round her, and her feet dangled over a still pool, left by the retreating waves as they swashed over a sunken reef, a few paces off. The sea gurgled backwards and forwards with a cradle-like motion, and played upon the shingle, casting up shreds of sponge and coarse marine plants, sometimes stranding them high and dry among the decaying jellyfish and dead cuttle-shells, and sometimes carrying them back again, as if in sport. Esther was a slip of a girl, slender as a tropical reed, badly dressed in an ill-fitting cotton gown, VOL. I. B 2 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. with a coarse straw hat in her hand, and rough leather shoes upon her w^ell-formed feet. Her clothing was that of an ill-cared-for child of the people : her hands, though small, were tanned by exposure and hardened by labour, but her face, high-bred in every line, suggested pleasing possibilities of future beauty. It was pale and oval, with a tremulous, sensitive mouth and deep, dreamy eyes — in colour a combination of violet and grey, and with that wistful, half- conscious look which is rarely seen except in the eyes of a precocious child who the gossips say '* is not long for this world. '^ Her features were small and regular, her neck slender, and her hair dark, with a natural tendency to crisp waves upon the brow and the nape of the neck. The black, forbidding cliff formed a sombre background to the girl's figure. It was a bleak rock, which bound the extremity of a narrow cape, and upon its summit was a red lighthouse, visible at sea for miles off. A narrow strip of sand and shingle curved round the base of the cliff, but from where Esther sat there was nothing to be seen but the wild, restless Pacific, stretching out towards the horizon. Esther loved the sea, for it was almost the only companion she had. A nearly uninha- bited island, swept by southern hurricanes and ESTHER. 8 unreclaimed by civilisation, was all the world she knew ; but beyond — to the east — where the horizon-line melted into that of ocean, there was another, a misty, mythic region, peopled by the wandering fancies that had assumed shape in her imagination, and dwelt out there in a charmed life, to which she could at will transport herself. Her eyes were fixed seaward now, and her lips were moving silently. In her lap lay a tattered book, only a few pages of printed matter ; but they contained the story of Hans Andersen's Sea-maid, and Esther had read and re-read them till she knew them almost by heart. Surely upon such a summer's morning as this the little mer- maid might have swum to the shore and gazed wistfully at the palace of the beautiful prince ; but there was no palace on the island, or prince either for that matter, and Esther was to the full as ignorant and as yearning as the poor pathetic sea-maid. All the creatures of Esther's imagination were wistful and longing-eyed, re- garding from afar a paradise of action and romance, from moving in which the very conditions of their being withheld them. It was very dull sitting there, and she was only a child who wanted amusement like all other children, even when they have attained the advanced age of sixteen. A thought suddenly B 2 4 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. struck Esther ; she stooped and unlaced her leather shoes and let her brown, naked feet slip into the shallow basin left by the sea below them. Beside the pool there was a tiny plateau of silvery sand, walled in by miniature rocks, and at one end a shelving dais, which fancy could readily canopy with seaweed and mother-of-pearl, and transform into a throne for marine monarchy. This fairy salon might be the dancing-hall of the sea-princesses. From his raised seat the old king might look down upon their revels and ap- plaud when he was pleased, and yonder was the window whence the seven mermaidens were wont to glance longingly up through the blue sea to the world of ships and of men which was so tantalisingly near, and yet so difficult of attainment. Esther collected the tiny shimmering shells that strewed the beach, and adorned with them the floor of the Princesses' hall, tapestrying the walls with green and crimson seaweed and arranging couches of inverted j)eriwinkles and mussel-shells. It may seem a babyish employ- ment for a girl of sixteen, but Esther was a solitary, uneducated creature, and had no mental resources for the employment of her time. The sun, for it was early morning, rose higher and higher into the cloudless sky, and cast down ESTHEE. 5 myriads of twinkling diamonds into the sea. Esther began to feel hungry. Taking from her pocket a lump of coarse home-made bread, she munched it abstractedly as she proceeded with her fascinating child's play ; so absorbed was she that she did not hear a step that crunched upon the shingle behind her. " Hey, Esther ! " cried a man's rough voice, *' what are you after now ? " The girl started and turned. A short, w^eather- beaten sailor, in a loose dark- blue jersey and baggy trousers, with a square brown face and shaggily fringed deep-set eyes, looked at her in. a kind of wondering disapproval. " Nothing, Joe," replied Esther ; " I'm only playing." " Well, I'm darned ! What has a great gell like you to do w^ith such playing nonsense and mooning ways ? What are you building there ? A doll's house belike, which the sea'll sweep away next tide. You should be above such goings on : a young woman as 'ull be seventeen year old her next birthday ! For shame. Miss Esther ! Now if you were to set yourself to your sewing, or to redd up the house a bit, it \id be a deal better for you." " I have redd up the house, Joe," said Esther, her silvery tones contrasting with the sailor's 6 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. coarse iutoDation ; " and this does no harm, you know. IVe got no books that I care about, and playing stories is next best to reading them. I got up early this morning and did everything before I left the hut, and I was going back presently to see if father had come in, and if he wanted any breakfast/' '• Hao;art has been drinkinor hard a o-ain," said Joe. " I heard him rantino- about the beach last nio-ht." Esther nodded mournfully. "The grog is almost out, Joe." " The shakes 'ull be on him a gen afore long," remarked Joe, with the air of one familiarised to the various stages of drunkenness. *' He were sinmno; out to his dead missus last nio-ht, and when I hears that, I says to Xancy, ' It's time to look after Miss Esther ! ' " " You have been a good friend to me, Joe. I don't know how I should get on if it were not for you." " I promised your mother afore she died that I'd see as Hagart did not harm you," said Joe, " and I'm not one as makes a promise and forgets to keep it." " My poor mother," murmured Esther, her sensitive lip quivering. ** Don't take on," said Joe; "it's a mercy that she is dead. A drunken master is worse for ESTHER. 7 the wife than for the children — leastways, there's a chance for the one of getting rid of him, and there ain't none for the other. A wife is bound by the Bible to cleave to her husband as long as they both shall live. It has always puzzled me," added Joe reflectively, " whether the Almighty took drink into consideration when He laid them orders upon His servants." This was a moral problem beyond Esther's powers of solution. '•' I've noticed," continued Joe — " and Ive seen a many of them in Australia — that it's always them as have been gentlefolks that knock under to drink the worst. I'm not holding out, Esther, that I hain't gone on a spree myself, and come home a darned sight heavier in the head and lighter in the breeches pockets than when I set out; but there was an end to it for that time, at any ratp. But with Hagart it's a being dry for ever — a selling of one's stomach entire to the devil. There ain't no wild beasts in Australia, as there are in Indy or Ameriky ; but to be always dry inside, and craving a drop, is worse to my mind than being eaten outright by a rampaging beast or a venomous reptile. It's since he has been on the island, Esther, that your father has took to drink. I'd give a sight to know what brought him here." 8 AN AUSTRALIAN HEKOINE. Esther shook her head. " I can't remember, Joe, where we lived before we came here." " Lao^ored, may be," said Joe thouo-htfullv. " No, you wouldn't recollect. You were a little toddlekius of six when your father came to the island. I remember your mother carrying you in her arms and crying because there was no milk for you. We bought the goats soon after that, and I fetched 'em all the way from Frazer- ville in the long boat. Your mother took kindly to me after that job. She was a beautiful creature. Miss Esther, — a lady to the sole of her foot. I've seen such in the old country. They mostly drove in carriages and lived in grand houses, and wore silks and velvets. Y^our mother was of that sort, but proud — Lord, she was proud ! and melancholy — there was scarcely ever a smile upon her face. But I kep my dis- tance from her. I was alwavs oue to know a lady when I seed her, and I told Nancy she warn't to be too familiar, and by and by we got to be friends after a fiishion. If she wanted a bit of wood cut she'd come to me, or a shelf put up. ' Joe,' she'd say, ' I know you're a good carpenter.' It was I made the frames for them pictures in the hut — queer drawin's, I thought them, — and the squatters' chairs in the verandah." ESTHER. 9 Joe paused in his reminiscences. " Oh, go on," cried Esther ; " you don't know how I love to hear of my mother. Tell me more, Joe ; for sometimes," she added, her voice lowering to a whisper, " I feel that she is near me. It's at night sometimes, in the dark, when father has got his fits on, or when I'm walking alone by the sea, or sittins^ beside her o-rave." " That's an uncanny notion, ]\liss Esther," said Joe ; " it's of a piece with your mooning ways, and it ain't healthy for a gell like you to be thinking of such things. You should be working at your sampler or redding up the house, as I said afore, instead of wandering about and making play ^vith your bits of seaweed and shells like any daft creature. I'm not for saying," added Joe with an air of deep wisdom, *' that there ain't no truth in sperrits. There's many things I've seen in my life as 'ud make me un- willing to deny them ; but there's no good in over-much dwelling upon the thought of them that's dead. Sometimes, may be, as is but nat'ral, they like to have a look at the old places ; and who's to say them nay ? — for sperrits is not bound by or'nary rules of coming and going. There was the admiral, my old master — you've heerd me talk of him, perhaps ? " " Yes," said Esther, deeply interested ; " but 10 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. go on, Joe ; if it's about his coining back, tell me agaio." "I served him, Miss Esther, afore I ever thouD^ht of comino^ out to Australia. I was a lad then, but he was mortal fond of me, and took me into his domestic service. I was odd- job man about the place, and used to sleep in his room, when he got that infirm that he could not wait upon himself. I was beside him when he died, going off in his sleep as quiet as a child. Often I've thought that he wanted perhaps to say good-bye to me ; for oftentimes after he was dead and I was working in the garden, or doing a bit of carpentering in the shed, Td hear his step behind me, shuiSling his feet just as he used. ' Joe,' says he, ' we'll take a littJe turn.' * All right, Admiral,' I answers, not a bit sheered, and he leans upon my arm ; but I sees nothing, and we walks round by the vegetable garden. * Joe,' says he, ' them seeds won't come up,' and sure enough they never do ; or ' Joe,' he says, ' them roses won't blow,' and as certain as I stand here there wouldn't be a bloom upon the bushes. That was how it was. Miss Esther, and if I put out my hand to touch him, he was gone. Who's to say after that as there ain't no sperrits 1 " Joe had been talking on abstractedly with his eyes fixed upon the sea-line, and Esther was ESTHER. 11 listening, lier breath coming and going in deep inspirations, and a rapt, dreamy expression upon her face which imparted to it a spiritualised beauty. Joe paused. He suddenly wrinkled up his brows and drew his hand to his forehead, peering eagerly out from beneath it. '^ I see some smoke upon the horizon," he said ; " maybe it's a steamer that'll need to be signalled. You had better go back to the hut, Esther, and be in hearing to work the telegraph wires, for I'm thinking the pilot won t be up to much to-day. I must go and see about the old boat that's had her side stove in." Esther cast a regretful look at the fairy house she had been building, and then, after putting on her stockings and shoes, turned round the cliff and ascended it by a steep path which led, zigzag- fashion, up to its summit. CHAPTER II. THE PILOT STATION. MuNDOOLAN Island is a long strip of land some forty miles in length, and varying from seven to fourteen in breadth, lying parallel with the north- eastern coast of Australia. Its northern extremity forms a bluff narrow cape upon which stands a lighthouse and a pilot and telegraph-station ; the business of the officials being to guide ships past the great barrier reef and to signal and report vessels bound northward, and such small coasting steamers as find their way up the Frazer river to the town of Frazerville. The Frazer river discharges itself into the bay which is commanded by the Mundoolan Island lighthouse. Frazerville w^as intended by its pro- jectors to be the capital of Northern Australia, but from various causes has disappointed the expectations of its well-wishers, and is rather in a state of decadence than of development. THE PILOT STATION. 13 Muncloolan Island is divided from the mainland by a strait called the Narrows, four miles wide or thereabouts at its northern and southern ends, and differing at the middle, according to tidal changes, from two miles to less than a mile. At this narrowest portion the o^vTiers of Bully Wallah are able twice in the month, at full and new moon, to swim their cattle across to the mainland. At the opening of this story the greatest part of the island was merged in a large cattle station called Bully Wallah, upon which grazed the herds of Andrew Overstone, Esq., and the remainder, to be topographically exact, about six thousand acres, comprised the pilot station above men- tioned, and an extensive tract of land formerly appropriated by the government for a mission- station for the conversion of aboriginals, but never used for that purpose. The country, except where it fringes upon the sea, is extremely fertile and well wooded and watered, undulating in sloping hills and grassy plains, while, like the Isle of Calypso, perpetual spring seems to reign in its borders, and sea- breezes temper the otherwise tropical heat ; yet at that time, except the huts at the pilot station and the owner's residence at Bully Wallah, there was not a habitation upon it. 14 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. It may appear strange that so inviting a territory should be so thinly populated; but land is illimitable in Australia, and the island did not afford those facilities for transit and transport that are desirable for the settler. Mr. Overstone's predecessor at Bully Wallah had been, fourteen years previously, the first pioneer of civilisation upon this northern shore. He had (by the terror of his firearms) driven the aborigines on to the mainland, had built the head station, and had been an enthusiastic assistant in the formation of Frazerville. But both the island and the town had disappointed his hopes. Plagues of pleuro-pneumonia had decimated his herds. Frazerville had sunk by the discovery of gold-fields a little higher north, and the enterprising explorer had been glad to sell his station at a low price to Mr. Overstone. In his time it had been thought advisable to build a lighthouse and to establish a signal station at the cape, and upon its completion the pilot Hagart, his wife and daughter, a child of six, and four sailors, had first taken up their abode upon Mundoolan Island. Though many ships and steamers passed the pilot station, it w^as rare indeed for one to put in there, and the cape w^as almost as lonely as a reef in the midst of the Pacific. THE PILOT STATION. 15 The headland stretched out in a narrow tongue into the sea, and before the erection of the light- house had evidently been a point of danger ; for the ribs of wrecked vessels lay embedded in the sand and wedged in between the rocks, and it could be plainly seen that the earliest and rudest of the huts, built by a missionary who had lost his life in trying to convert the blacks, had been constructed of the planks that had formerly clothed these skeletons. A flock of goats browsed upon the cliff. In times of extremity, when meat was scarce, the kids' flesh furnished food for the pilots and the dams provided milk for their slender households. The herd found but scant subsistence, for herbage was not plentiful upon the cape. Stunted grass, creeping marine plants and rock lichen, and round the well-manured goat yard a miniature forest of fat-hen, as it is vulgarly termed — that was all. A few gaunt cocoa-palms, the offspring of nuts washed ashore by the gales, grew low down upon the beach, and here and there a clump of bread- fruit trees, whose roots, stretching out like the spikes of an inverted umbrella, caught hold of the slender stratum of soil and resisted the keen winds from the south-east. Neither flowers nor vegetables w^ould grow in that barren spot, and the hardy creeper which with infinite care Esther had 16 AN AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. succeeded in training over the verandah of the pilot's cottage, was often torn down by the violence of the tempests. Anything more desolate can scarcely be imagined, and yet it was a picturesque desola- tion, to which the eye never grew accustomed, and compared with which, the grassy slopes and spreading foliage of the country behind seemed tame and monotonous. Sometimes the ligrht- house stood out against a background of stone grey fluctuating with emerald green, while through little rifts overhead the sun seemed to mock at an angry sea. Sometimes the wind struggled, as it were, to tear up the huts from their foundations, and vented its futility on the waves, which it lashed into a fury equal to the overwhelming of the lighthouse itself. Some- times the sun baked every inch of the dry soil till it resembled the cracked surface of a lava field, and at others just warmed it in a genial way, dancing lightly over blue waves and distant sails ; and occasionally rain blended sea and sky, and turned both into the mistiness of smoke ; so, although the cape was wild and dreary, it was never for long the same. There were not more than half-a-dozen huts in the settlement ; of these the chief pilot's dwelling was the most pretentious. It was built of slab THE PILOT STATION. 17 and had a shingled roof, whereas the rest were covered with bark, and a verandah all round it ; but it consisted only of four rooms, a scullery, and an abutting lean-to, which served as telegraph office. It was to this cottao'e that Esther returned after her interview with Joe upon the beach. She stepped on to the verandah with an air of apprehension, as though she knew not what violence might await her, and looked timidly into the sitting-room, before she ventured to cross the threshold. There was no trace of her father's presence, and with an air of relief she entered, laid down her hat and began to spread the cloth for the pilot's breakfast should he recjuire it ; but when brandy flowed freely, the consumption of solid food diminished in proportion. She had not seen her father since the previous evening, when he had shut himself up for a booze, and then had wandered forth in the night for a ramble along the sea-shore or in the bush, from which he had not returned. Esther placed bread and meat upon the table, and went into the little back kitchen, where she replenished the fire and saw that the kettle was on the boil. Then she re-entered the sitting- room, and her work done, sat down and began to dream. Poor Esther! in all the wanderings of VOL. L c 18 AX AUSTRALIAN HEROINE. her spirit, her face never lost its anxious depre- catory expression, the look of a child to whom the happiness of well-cared-for youth is unknown, and who has had no education save that of hardship to fit it for womanhood. The room in which Esther sat was, save for the presence of several wild cat and kangaroo skins, carpetless. The walls were plainly lined with canvas, and the windows were guiltless of glass. Upon stormy days, it was a choice between closino; the shutters and sittino; ia darkness, or of being at the mercy of the wind. A few books were arranged upou hanging shelves over the mantelpiece, but they were not of a nature to attract a girl of Esther's tendencies, whose reading had as yet been confined to the fairy tales which she borrowed from the little Over- stones, or such stray novels as found their way to the pilot station. Upon a rudely fashioned side- board stood a bowl of ferns and wild flowers gathered in a scrub some distance off. There was also a roughly carpentered couch, and two or three squatters' chairs in canvas and pine- wood were ranged by the fireplace. The only remark- able objects in the room were two unglazed crayon drawings which hung upon the wall. These were curious, both from the subjects and their mode of execution. They appeared to be THE PILOT STATION. 19 studies in black and white for painting in oil, and were full of odd contrasts of light and shade, and though dashed off carelessly, had an intensity of conception which was almost genius. One represented the semi-nude figure of a drowned woman, floating with face upturned in a still pool surrounded by high rocks, which seemed almost to shut out the light of day. A gleam of sunshme piercing through lurid clouds, illuminated the face of the dead woman, and disclosed at its source the same features glorified into a supernal beauty. Upon the other side of the picture, a Cain-like figure, crouchinor ao;ainst a rock, looked down with despairing, remorseful eyes upon his victim. The second was equally sensational in character. A man stood dismayed and trembling, in a night of gloomy darkness, the space immediately surrounding him peopled by shapes of inde- scribable loathsomeness, of which the outlines were indistinctly revealed by the ghastly light of a torch held in his hand. He appeared to have entered a region of horrors, and to be shrinking appalled from the noxious creatures with which it abounded. The shadow}^ form of a woman, with an angel's face like that in the picture already described, stretched forth a re- straining hand, and sought to draw him back, c 2 20 AN AUSTEALTAN HEROINE. while lie, witli eyes straining into the darkness beyond, seemed unconscious of the ineffectual grasp. Esther was looking at these pictures in a dreamy way. As a child she had puzzled over them, and had now but a vague recollection of their composition. They had been drawn about two years after the pilot's arrival at Mundoolan Island, before cbink had completely enslaved him, and when there had been days of remorse and of forced abstinence. He seldom now touched chalk or drawing-board. Esther knew that the woman's face was that of her dead mother, and she understood now what the subjects were vaguely intended to convey, and wondered at her father's insensibility in allowing them to remain upon the walls. Perhaps he was too em- bruted to care, for there they had hung as long as she could remember, and had been the inspiring source of many an imaginary picture of her own. The scenes which passed before her mind's eye were realistic enouoh. She had lono^ed for a mode of expression, and had often taken up pen or pencil in the vain endeavour to embody her conceptions, but she lacked executive power, and had found it sweeter to dream waking, and to watch the groups flitting by without making an effort to retain them, than to struggle after THE PILOT STATION. 21 a permanent acquisition which must inevitably fall short of the ideal. While she was think- ing vaguely and not unpleasantly, her father's shambling, uncertain footstep struck the verandah, and, as his figure darkened the doorway, Esthers face changed from its expression of abstraction to one of apprehension. The tide had evidently crept in upon him and had warned him to rise, for his clothes were wet and stained with sand aDd sea-slime. Hagart's features were fine, though his eyes were bleared and his lips coarse. His shirt was open at the breast, his hair and beard were dishevelled, and his hand trembled as he clutched at the table to steady himself. His look was wild and uneasy, and his face bloated ; yet in spite of outward degradation, he had in his bearing the traces of having fallen from a higher station, and after looking at him, it was impossible to feel surprise that his daughter's appearance gave evidence of more innate refinement than her position warranted. Here was another of those tragedies only too common in Australia, that refuge for improvidence and vice. Joe Bride declared his conviction that Hagart was '^not one of our sort," and that if he could only keep clear of drink, he might sit down to dinner with the Governor himself and not feel ashamed ; but Hagart sober was a rare 22 AN AUSTE ALIAN .HEROINE. phenomenon. He nipped more or less all day and night, carrying liis flask in his breast, taking sly pulls whenever the insatiate demon Thirst got the better of him. He spent almost all his salary in grog, contriving to have it brought down from Frazerville in the cutters and small steamers, that passed close to the pilot station. Sometimes accident limited the supply, and then he had fits of delirium tremens more or less violent, and more or less dangerous to his daughter. Joe Bride upon these occasions watched over Esther with fatherly care, an