Basil and Annette: A Novel

by B. L. Farjeon

"I will go this time," he said, but he could not. He remained an hour--the longest hour in his life. At length he went down to the river, and as he gazed upon it thought, "Men die by drowning. What does it matter the kind of death? Death is death: it is always the same."

The interminable hours lagged on till night came. He sat in the tent weighing the gold and getting ready for flight. Once in Sydney he would take the first ship for England. The flickering candle cast monstrous shadows upon the walls and ceiling, and in his nervous state he shrank shudderingly from them, and strove to ward them off, as though they were living forms hovering about him with fell intent. The silence appalled him; he would have given gold for the piping of a little bird.

Thus passed the miserable night, and in the morning he visited the shaft again. The same awful stillness reigned.

"It is all over," he said. "Newman Chaytor is dead; I, Basil Whittingham, live. No one will ever know. Now for England!"

[CHAPTER XXV.]

Occasionally in a man's life comes a pause: as between the acts of a drama action slumbers awhile--only that the march through life's season never halts. The pulse of time throbs silently and steadily until the natural span is reached, or is earlier snapped, and the bridge between mortality and immortality is crossed. Meanwhile the man grows older--that is all. For him upon the tree of experience there is neither blossom nor bloom; bare branches spread out, naked of hope, and he gazes upon them in dumb wonderment or despair. The hum of woodland life, the panorama of wondrous colour, the unceasing growth of life out of death, the warlike sun, the breath of peace in moon and stars, the eternal pæn that all nature sings, bear no message to his soul. He walks, he eats, he sleeps, and waits unconsciously for the divine touch that shall arouse him from his trance.

Something of this kind occurred to Basil. Recovering from the physical injuries he had sustained, he sank into an apathetic state which, but for some powerful incentive, might have been morally fatal. Friends he had none, or the effort might have been made; so for a year after Newman Chaytor had left Australia he plodded aimlessly on, working for wages which kept him in food, and desiring nothing more. Upon the subject of his mate's desertion he preserved silence, as indeed he did upon most other subjects, but it might reasonably have been expected that upon this theme in which he was directly interested he would have been willing to open his mind. It was not so. To questions addressed to him he returned brief and unsatisfactory answers, and after a time nothing further was asked of him. Curiosity died out; if he chose to keep himself aloof it was his business, and in the new world, as in the old, every man's affairs were sufficient to occupy him without troubling himself about strangers. Thus it would appear that the scheme upon which Newman Chaytor had bent all his energies was destined to be in every way successful.

With respect to the desertion and the disappearance of the gold, an equal share of which was rightfully and lawfully his, Basil had arrived at a definite conclusion. He entertained no doubt that the rope had broken naturally; suspicion of foul play did not cross his mind. He argued that Chaytor, believing him to be dead, had taken the gold and left the claim they had been working in disgust. "He made no secret," thought Basil, "that he was sick of the life we were leading. To have gone away and left my share of the gold behind him--I being, as he supposed, dead--would have been an act of folly. I do not blame him; good luck go with him. He stuck to me to the last, and proved himself my friend when most I needed one. Let my life go on as it will; I will think nothing and say nothing to his injury." A vindictive man would have argued otherwise, would have thought that it was at least a comrade's duty, before he left the spot, to convince himself by ocular proof that the fall was fatal. But Basil was not vindictive; he believed he had the best of reasons to be grateful to Chaytor, and if the gold his mate had taken was any repayment for services rendered in the past, he was welcome to it. The strong moral principle in Basil's nature kept him from yielding to temptations against which not all men struggle successfully when misfortune persistently dogs them. He led an honest life of toil, without ambition to lift himself to a higher level. But happily an awakening was in store for him, and it came through the sweetest and most humanising of influences.

Princetown throve apace; its promise was fulfilled, and twenty thousand men found prosperous lodgment therein. The majority delved, the minority traded, most of them throve. To be sure some were unfortunate, and some idled and dissipated, but this must always be expected. New leads were discovered, quartz reefs were opened, crushing machines were put up, streets were formed, a fire brigade was established, a benevolent institute and a lunatic asylum were founded. Not even a mushroom town in these new countries can exist without something in the shape of a municipal council, and one was formed in Princetown, over the elections for which there was prodigious excitement. Churches and chapels, even a synagogue, were erected by voluntary contributions, and there were churchyards in which already wanderers found rest. All the important buildings were now of wood, and there was a talk of stone, the primal honour of erecting which was presently to fall to John Jones, the enterprising proprietor of the Only Beehive. The Princetown Argus shared in the general prosperity. First a weekly, then a bi-weekly, then a tri-weekly, finally a daily. First, two pages, the size of the Globe, then four pages ditto, finally four pages, the size of the Times. Not a bad sample of enterprise this. The Saturday edition was eight pages, to serve the purpose of a weekly as well as a daily, and in it was published a novel, "to be continued in our next," which the editor took from a London monthly magazine, and for which, in the innocence of his heart, he paid nothing. Of course there was an opposition journal, but the Princetown Argus had taken the lead, and kept it in the face of all newcomers. The shrewd editor and proprietor did one piece of business with a more than usually obstinate rival which deserves to be recorded. He bought up an opposition paper, the Princetown Herald, whose politics were the reverse of those he advocated, and for a considerable time he ran the two papers on their original lines, each attacking the other's principles and policy with fierce zest and vigour. Thus he occupied both fields of public opinion, and threw sops to all who took an interest in local and colonial politics. And here a word in the shape of information which will surprise many readers. England is overrun with newspapers; the United States is more than overrun, having nearly three to our one; but in journalistic enterprise Australasia beats the record, having, in proportion to population, more newspapers than any other country in the world. An astonishing fact.

Two circumstances must be mentioned which bear upon our story. The first is that Basil's surname was not known; he called himself Basil, and was so called. The second is that in the column of the Princetown Argus in which births, marriages, and deaths were advertised, there was recorded the birth and death of a baby, the child of the editor and his wife, born one day and dying the next. This was the first birth and burial in Princetown. The child left to them, the little girl of whom we have already spoken, whose name was Edith, took the loss of her baby sister much to heart, and never a week passed that she did not visit the churchyard and sit by the tiny grave.