wedding, after a reward of a thousand pounds has been offered for his capture, are scenes which remain vivid in the memory long after the more commonplace adventures of the lords of Terrible Hollow have lost their distinctness or been forgotten.
Next to his humour and courage, the qualities which most endear this picturesque marauder to the reader are the happy fierceness with which he commands the respect of his retainers, and his politeness and gallantry to women. When a robbery is to be effected, the plans are laid with sound generalship, but there is no unnecessary violence or loss of good manners. His conduct at the plundering of the gold-escort is fully equal to the traditional suavity of Claude Duval. ‘Now, then, all aboard!’ he calls out to the passengers when the contents of the coach have been removed. ‘Get in, gentlemen; our business matters are concluded for the night. Better luck next time! William, you had [p 213] better drive on. Send back from the next stage, and you will find the mail-bags under that tree. They shall not be injured more than can be helped.’
The bushranger of real life, as known to the pioneer colonist, would have bagged his booty with much fewer words. That Starlight should have ‘treated all women as if they were duchesses,’ and have made it a point of honour to keep his pledged word with them, in however slight a matter, seems only natural. Not even the women-folk of his enemy are allowed to want a protector. When Moran and his gang of ruffians take possession of Darjallook station during the absence of the male members of the household, Starlight and the Marstons ride twenty miles across country and rescue the ladies before the worst has been done. Starlight bows to them ‘as if he was just coming into a ball-room,’ and, retiring, raises Miss Falkland’s hand to his lips like a knight of old.
These passages are only a few of the many which might be cited to show how far the author, fired with the spirit and romance [p 214] of the story, gave freedom to his imagination in shaping the proportions of his leading character. Starlight, though he is not, and cannot be, a portrait of any single colonial outlaw of real life, is sufficiently natural to consistently represent in both his conduct and adventures much that was typical of Australian bushranging forty years ago and later.
Some of his characteristics, and at least one of the concluding episodes of the story, were suggested by the career of a New South Wales horse-stealer who became known as ‘Captain Moonlight.’ So much is certain. Boldrewood has himself narrated to a contributor of the Australian Review of Reviews his recollections of Moonlight and his end: ‘Among other horses he stole was a mare called Locket, with a white patch on her neck. We had all seen her. This was the horse that brought about his downfall, and he was actually killed on the Queensland border in the way I have described in Robbery under Arms. Before that, Moonlight had had some encounters with Sergeant Wallings [p 215] (Goring); and this day, when Wallings rode straight at him, he said: “Keep back, if you’re wise, Wallings. I don’t want your blood on my head; but if you must——” But Wallings rode at him at a gallop. Two of the troopers fired point-blank at Moonlight, and both shots told. He never moved, but just lifted his rifle. Wallings threw up his arms, and fell off his horse a dying man. As Moonlight was sinking, the leader of the troopers said: “Now you may as well tell us what your name is.” But he shook his head, and died with the secret.’ He was ‘a gentlemanly fellow,’ probably one of that unhappy class of young Englishmen of good birth and no character who are exiled to the colonies for their sins, and there often acquire new vices or sink into obscurity.
When Archibald Forbes was in New Zealand a few years ago, he met a peer’s son who was earning his ‘tucker’ as a station-cook. A Chinaman, aspiring to better things, had vacated the billet in his favour! It is interesting to note the use Boldrewood makes in his novel of the suggestion afforded by [p 216] the bushranger’s concealment of his identity. When Starlight is overcome in his last attempt at escape, the curiosity long felt concerning his past life seems for the third time in the story about to be gratified. But the reader is once more and finally disappointed. The bushranger has given his last messages, and is dying with some of the indifference to existence which has characterised him throughout the story.
‘I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon-match you and I shot in, at Hurlingham?’
‘Why, good God!’ says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into his face. ‘It can’t be! Yes; by Jove! it is——’
He spoke some name I couldn’t catch, but Starlight put a finger on his lips, and whispered:
‘You won’t tell, will you? Say you won’t.’
The other nodded.
He smiled just like his old self.
‘Poor Aileen!’ he said, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight was dead!
Boldrewood’s characters, as he has said himself, are constructed from many models. And the Marstons are, it seems, the only personages he has drawn solely from life. Gardiner, with whom some readers have [p 217] identified Starlight, was, it is recorded, ‘a man of prepossessing appearance and plausible address, who had many friends even among the settlers never suspected of sympathy with criminals, while many of the fair sex regarded him as a veritable hero.’
That the romantic life of this noted criminal furnished Boldrewood with some material there cannot be any doubt, but the fictitious bushranger is far from being in any respect a mere copy of the real one. In Starlight’s relations with women, for instance, there is nothing but what is manly and honourable, whereas one of Gardiner’s exploits was the seduction of a settler’s wife, a beautiful woman whom he induced to elope with him to a remote district in Queensland. And, further, none of the sensational incidents connected with his capture—his escape under a legal technicality from the death-penalty suffered by some of his associates, his imprisonment for twelve years and subsequent exile—are made use of in the novel.
The narrative method adopted in Robbery [p 218] under Arms has so much contributed to the success of the story as to be worthy of some comparison with the ordinary style of the author. The limitations imposed by the choice of a narrator with no pretensions to education or sentiment, and writing in the first person, proved in this case salutary rather than disadvantageous. They repressed Boldrewood’s usual tendency to excessive detail, and kept his attention closely fixed on the drama of the story.