"I see to it that she got it," said Micky with reserve. "You'll find it all correct, just as I say." This attitude was more important than the bald, unqualified statement that he had left the letter when he fetched the beer, and Micky enjoyed himself over it proportionately.
Aunt M'riar was easier in her mind, as she felt pretty confident that the letter would reach its destination. She had killed two birds with one stone—so she believed. She had saved Daverill from the police, so far at least as their watchfulness of Sapps Court was concerned, and had also saved Uncle Mo from possible collision with him, an event she dreaded even more than a repetition of those hideous interviews with a creature that neither was nor was not her husband; a thing with a spurious identity; a horrible outgrowth from a stem on which her own life had once been grafted. Could woman think a worse thought of man than hers of him, when she thanked God that at least the only fruit of that graft had been nipped in the bud? And yet no such thought had crossed her mind in all these years in which he had been to her no more than a memory. A memory of a dissolute, imperfect creature—yes! but lovable enough for all that. Not indeed without a sort of charm for any passing friend, quite short of any spell akin to love. How could this monstrous personality have grown upon him, yet left him indisputably the same man? The dreadful change in the identity of the maniac—the maniac proper, the victim of brain-disease—is at least complete; so complete often as to force the idea of possession on minds reluctant to receive it. This man remained himself, but it was as though this identity had been saturated with evil—had soaked it up as the sponge soaks water. There was nothing in the old self M'riar remembered to make her glad his child was not born alive. There was everything in his seeming of to-day to make her shudder at the thought that it might have lived.
The cause of the change is not far to seek. He had lived for twenty years in Norfolk Island as a convict; for fourteen years certainly as an inmate of the prisons, even if a period of qualified liberty preceded his discharge and return to Sydney. He was by that time practically damned beyond redemption, and his brilliant career as a bushranger followed as a matter of course.
Those who have read anything of the story of the penal settlements in the early part of last century may—even must—remember the tale told by the Catholic priest who went to give absolution to a whole gang of convicts who were to be hanged for mutiny. He carried with him a boon—a message of mercy—for half the number; for they had been pardoned; that is to say, had permission now to live on as denizens of a hell on earth. As it turned out, the only message of mercy he had to give was the one contained or implied in an official absolution from sin, and it is possible that belief in its validity occasioned the outburst of rejoicing that greeted its announcement. For there was no rejoicing among the recipients of His Majesty's clemency—heart-broken silence alone, and chill despair! For they were to remain on the rack, while their more fortunate fellows could look forward to a joyous gallows, with possibilities beyond, from which Hell had been officially excluded. It is but right to add that the Reverend Father did not ascribe the exultant satisfaction of his clients—if that is the word—to anything but the anticipation of escape from torture. He was too truthful.
If the nearest dates the story has obtained are trustworthy, Daverill's actual term in Norfolk Island may have been fourteen years; it certainly came to an end in the early forties. But he must have been there at the time of the above incident, as it happened circa 1836-37. The powers of the sea-girt tropical Paradise to sterilise every Divine impulse must have been at their best in his time, and he seems to have been a favourable subject for the virus of diabolism, which was got by Good Intentions out of Expediency. The latter must have been carrying on with Cowardice, though, to account for Respectability's choice, for her convicts, of an excruciating life rather than a painless death. Possibly the Cowardice of the whole Christian world, which accounts Death the greatest of possible evils.
The life of a bushranger in New South Wales, which fills in the end of his Australian career, did not tend to the development of any stray germ of a soul that the prison-fires had not scorched out of old Maisie's son. Small wonder it was so! Conceive the glorious freedom of wickedness unrestrained, after the stived-up atmosphere of the gaol, with its maddening Sunday chapel and its hideous possibilities of public torture for any revolt against the unendurable routine. We, nowadays, read with a shudder of the enormities that were common in the prisons of past times—we, who only know of their modern substitutes. For the last traces of torture, such as was common long after the moyen âge, as generally understood, have vanished from the administration of our gaols before a vivified spirit of Christianity, and the enlightenment consequent on the Advance of Science.[A] After fourteen years of such a life, how glorious must have been the opportunities the freedom of the Bush afforded to an instinctive miscreant, still in the prime of life, and artificially debarred for so long from the indulgence of a natural bent for wickedness; not yet ennuyé by the monotony of crime in practice, which often leads to a reaction, occasionally accompanied by worldly success. There was, however, about Daverill a redeeming point. He was incorrigibly bad. He never played false to his father the Devil, and the lusts of his father he did do, to the very last, never disgracing himself by the slightest wavering towards repentance.
[A] This appears to have been written about 1910.
Probably his return from Sydney to England was as much an escape from his own associates in crime, with whom some dishonourable transactions had made him unpopular, as a flight from the officers of Justice. A story is told, too intricate to follow out, of a close resemblance between himself and a friend in his line of business. This was utilised ingeniously for the establishment of alibi's, the name of Wix being adopted by both. Daverill had, however, really behaved in a very shady way, having achieved this man's execution for a capital crime of his own. Ibbetson, the Thames police-sergeant whose death he occasioned later, was no doubt in Sydney at this time, and may have identified him from having been present at the hanging of his counterpart, whose protestations that he was the wrong man of course received no attention, and whose attempt to prove an alibi failed miserably. Daverill had supplied the defence with a perfectly fictitious account of himself and his whereabouts at the time of the commission of the crime, which of course fell to pieces on the testimony of witnesses implicated, who knew nothing whatever of the events described.
There is no reason whatever to suppose that a desire to see his mother again had anything to do with his return. The probability is that he never gave her a thought until the money he had brought with him ran out—or, more accurately, the money he got by selling, at a great sacrifice, the jewels he brought from Australia sewed into the belt he wore in lieu of braces. The most valuable diamond ring should have brought him thousands, but he had to be content with hundreds. He had drawn it off an amputated finger, whose owner he left to bleed to death in the bush. It had already been stolen twice, and in each case had brought ill-luck to its new possessor.