John Tincroft, bachelor and benedict

by George E. Sargent

If Mr. Sedley was disappointed in his fancy-drawn pictures of an emigrant life (on which he ought never to have entered, because totally unfitted for it), his wife and children were confirmed in their prophetic dread of it. To have exchanged a respectable family mansion in a quiet country town, a bevy of well-conducted servants, a circle of friends and acquaintances, the delights of leisurely occupations, the conveniences of life in general, for a rough log-house in what to them was a desert, with all its disadvantages and drawbacks, was simply disgusting.

They had not been accustomed to hardships, and the freedom they might have exercised and enjoyed in their new home, and which to many others would have been a boon of price, was to them mere slavery. We have thought proper to drew attention to, and to dwell for a minute or two on, this state of things at Sedley Station, as the settlement was called, for a reason of our own. It is a benevolent one: let this suffice.

To go on with our episodal sketch.

The Sedleys were to pass through deeper trials than the disappointments and coarse toils of an emigrant life. Not many years after their settling down at the station, a fever (introduced, as was supposed, by a miserable, half-starved wretch who was loafing his way from settlement to settlement professedly in search of work, and who was taken in out of charity, and suffered to remain for some days to recruit his strength) broke out among them. Only those who have passed through a like experience can fully enter into the terrors of that time.

At first, recourse was had to the family medicine chest which the Sedleys had brought out with them from London. This failing, the nearest doctor was sent for. He lived full thirty miles away, and he came to find two of the stricken ones already dead, two in a state of collapse, the remaining two in the earlier stages of the fever, and the parents, who had been deserted by their faithless helps at the outbreak of the sickness, in almost speechless agony of mind, and worn out with bodily fatigue.

A few weeks later, and the home was desolate. Of all who had, a few years before, left a happy home in England, only two remained—the father, prematurely aged, and Helen, a maiden of fifteen; the fever had carried off all beside—the mother last of all. She had been spared, upheld as it seemed by the strength of a mother's devotion, till her services were no longer needed, and then she too was stricken down.

Time softens sorrow, especially to the young. Helen Sedley had felt, with all the poignancy of a daughter's and a sister's grief, the bereavement of which we have told. But as months, and afterwards years, passed away, her tears ceased to flow as she thought of the lost ones; and she bent herself with more determination to the duties in life which lay before her.

She had need enough to do this, for her path was rough, and her duties were severe. The infirmities of age were fast gathering and concentrating themselves upon Mr. Sedley, and through these the infirmities of his natural temper became more and more glaring. To Helen, indeed, he was gentle and loving; to his dependents, he was as morose and arbitrary as the conditions of their service permitted or enabled him to be, and the kind-hearted girl had constantly to watch for those outbursts of anger, so as both to moderate their fury and to prevent their worst consequences.

We have hinted that some of the servants at Sedley Station were of the convict class. Indeed, the labour market of the colony was, at the time of which we write, in a great measure supplied by convicts on ticket-of-leave. Many of these turned out valuable servants. In fact, knavery, at any rate on a small scale, was too bad a trade to fall back upon; it paid a transported housebreaker or pickpocket much better to practise honest labour. The spell, therefore, was to a great extent broken. At the same time, there were desperate characters among the convicts whom no discipline could tame, and whom experience could not teach; and there is no doubt that such as these were an element of danger to all concerned.

The men whom Mr. Sedley first engaged, or rather obtained from the proper authorities, as his bond-servants, had worked out their time and disappeared soon after the terrible blow fell on him and Helen. But others of the same class succeeded, and it was between these and her father, when in his moods of obstinate despotism, that Helen had so frequently to mediate, or afterwards to interpose the balm of soft and kindly words to the chafed and galled.