I shall not forget those hours of midnight and early morning:—the serene and amethyst-colored Australian sky strewn with star-dust and set with twinkling constellations, and the dark earth about us—across which, as from time to time we approached the house from which we had been expelled, the light from its windows and from its open door gleamed balefully. All was silent within, but we feared the lurking presence and dared not enter, and after one or two returns remained only within view of it until daybreak was well advanced. Our conversation throughout the vigil need not be recorded, but the reader may guess its import:—the awful experience through which we had passed had brought powerfully to our minds the thought of Deeming in the feature of the throttling hands, since in all his murders there was evidence upon the throats of his victims that strangulation had preceded the operation of the knife. But my wife opposed this grisly suggestion:—it was not the shade of the murderer, she affirmed, that had attacked her, although she could give no description of her assailants—they were dark, formless shapes—resembling neither man nor beast; things more felt than seen, even to her.
Yet in spite of this assurance, when I re-entered the house and saw in its usual place above my writing table the plaster mould which I had carried from the murderer's cell in the Melbourne jail, I recalled with a new appreciation of their appositeness the words of the worthy governor.
Whatever the influence was that had appalled us, we had not sufficient courage to oppose it, and so hastened our preparations for departure that we finally quitted the house a week before our lease expired; and within a month saw the shores of Australia fade behind us as our steamer turned its prow toward Aden, Suez, and Marseilles. There was one recurrence of the phenomenon I have just described during the last few nights of our possession, but we evaded it by taking to the street again, and again passing the night therein.
It was on a sunny morning in early March—the month answering in the inverted seasons of the Antipodes to September of northern latitudes—that we turned the key that locked us out for the last time from that house of shadows. As we reached the street we turned with one accord to look back upon it:—how inviting it appeared in the brilliant sunshine, amid its attractive surroundings of grassy lawn set with shrubs in flower, its smiling orchard and garden! We looked into one another's faces, and each saw therein the reflection of his own thoughts:—there was the relief such as they feel who awake from an oppressive dream; yet the place had been our home!
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This is in accordance with the terms of the English law in capital cases:—whereby a condemned prisoner is allowed two Sundays to live after the pronouncement of his sentence, and is executed on the morning following the second. Thus Deeming had the longest respite possible under the statute—twenty days. The shortest lease of life (fifteen days) would be allowed to a prisoner who had been sentenced on Saturday.
[2] This was the murderer's real name, as disclosed by investigations in England among relatives and acquaintances living there. His execution was, as the warrant for it recited, "upon the body of Albert Williams," this being the alias under which he came to Australia, as described later.
[3] This activity in building (which is still seen in concrete form in the palatial Parliament Buildings and other costly structures of Melbourne) was largely inspired by the published calculations of an enthusiastic statistician on the future growth of the Colonies:—which were, in effect, that by 1951 their population would be thirty-two millions, and by 2001, one hundred and eighty-nine millions!—some eighty per cent in excess of that of the United States at present. It speaks loudly for Australian enterprise that these Windsor builders, as well as many others, took such prompt measures to provide for this increase.