'Omeo, Omeo!' repeated Lance. 'Why should I go to Omeo?'
'Haven't ye heard? There's a big show struck close by the old township. They say they're leaving Ballarat, lots of 'em, to go there. It's the richest find yet, by all accounts; shallow ground too!'
'Omeo, Omeo!' Lance again repeated half unconsciously to himself. Had not Tessie made reference to it in the coach from Ballarat? Had she not said that Lawrence Trevenna was there, the man to whose baleful shadow he owed ruin and dishonour, the ineradicable disgrace which would always be associated with his name? He had a heavy account to settle with him. When they met all scores would be cleared off. This much he had vowed to himself in the prison cell at Ballarat, in the hulk President in the silence of midnight, in that fœtid hold of the prison-ship, where he could scarcely breathe the polluted atmosphere, laden with crime, heavy with curses. There, in that time of horror and dread, again and again had he sworn to take his enemy's life—that one or other should die when next they met, be it where it might.
And then again, as he hoped to efface himself, to feel secure from the pursuit which he heard in every breeze and feared in every echoing hoof, where could he find so safe and unsuspected a refuge as this new digging—wild, rough, isolated as Omeo must necessarily be? Far from civilisation of any kind, on a lone mountain plateau, snow-covered in winter, only to be reached by paths so devious and precipitous that wheels could not be employed, where every pound of merchandise or machinery was fain to be carried on pack-horses. There could be no better place for a hunted man to disappear, to obliterate himself. There he could remain for the present,—unknown, invisible to all who had known the former Lance Trevanion,—until he matured his plans and could make his way to a foreign shore.
Here, as he recovered health and strength under the influence of the mountain breezes and the wild woodlands which lay so near the river-sources and the snow summits, it would be comparatively easy to transmit his share of the Number Six washings, still safe in the Joint-Stock Bank in the custody of Charlie Stirling. Here, once located and established as Dick, Tom, or Harry—surnames were in the nature of superfluities at goldfields of the class which Omeo was pretty sure to be—he could make arrangements for selling out to Jack Polwarth. Quietly and without suspicion he could arrange to have the whole of his property transferred to him in cash, and some fine morning, under cover of a trip to Melbourne on business or pleasure, he would show Australia a clean pair of heels, and in America, North or South, in some far land where his name was never heard, would live out the rest of a life with such solace as he might, might even—when Time, the healer, should have dulled the heart-pangs which now throbbed and agonised so mordantly—might even reach some degree of contentment, if not of happiness.
And Estelle! Estelle! There was the sharpest sting—the bitterest grief—the direst pang of all. Could he ever look again into those lovely, trusting eyes, having undergone what he had done? Could he ask her—angel of purity that she was; the embodiment of the refinement of generations of stainless ancestors; sheltered, as she had been, by the conditions of her birth and education from all knowledge of the evil that there is in the world,—could he ask her to lay her head upon a felon's breast?—to take his hand in life-long pledge of happiness, when at any time, in any land where this long arm of extradition could reach, the hand of justice might seize him? No! Such companionship, such love, could never be his in the future. He had lost them for ever. On the lower level to which he had sunk he must remain. To its privations he must accustom himself; the surroundings he must endure. There was no help for it. If Tessie Lawless chose to share his lot he might not deny her. She knew the whole of his story. She loved him. She had been faithful and true. She deserved any poor recompense, such as the damaged future of his life, that of a nameless man, could offer, if she chose to accept it. For Trevanion of Wychwood was dead, and his early love, with all his high hopes and noble aspirations, lay deep in the grave of his buried honour.
From the day of Lance Trevanion's arrest at Balooka, no word, by letter or otherwise, had reached Wychwood of the fortunes of its heir. Days, weeks, months succeeded each other in the uneventful round into which country life in England has a tendency to settle when ordinary interests are withdrawn or unduly concentrated. It was pitiable to note the squire's anxiety when the Australian mail was due. For him, as for Estelle, there seemed to be but one man whose fortunes were worth following in the whole world—from whom letters were as the breath of life. And now these tidings from a far land, regular, if brief and sententious, up to this time, were suddenly withheld.
With the failing health of the Squire—for he suffered from one of the mysterious class of complaints before which strong men go down like feeble children—passed away much of his fierce obstinacy, his pride and arrogance. He thought of his son as he had last seen him,—haughty, tameless, defiant, with all his faults a true Trevanion,—and now, when he hoped to have seen him once again, grown and developed, though bronzed and possibly roughened by the rude life of a colony, when he had schooled himself to recall rash words and to make the amende as far as his nature would permit, here he was thwarted, bewildered, maddened by this sudden arrest of all knowledge of his fate.
'The boy has had the best of the fight,' he groaned out.