The Martyred Fool. A novel

Book I Tee Sowing Of The Seed Chapter

I Just fourteen years ago, in the July, that is to say, of the year 1879, a very small boy sat shivering on the bank of a swift-flowing, turbid stream, with his back to the trunk of a big tree, and his hands rammed deep into the pockets of his ragged trousers. If the small boy had peeped round the big tree almost due north east, he might have seen very dimly and very far away the last spur of the Australian Alps. If he had followed the turbid stream five miles, he might have stood on the shore of the South Pacific Ocean. Small as he was, he was aware of both of these facts already, and had no inclination either to look or to wander. It was early July, and mid-winter. He was bitterly cold, and still more bitterly hungry, and his young heart was filled with loathing of the world, and with anger at the B inequalities of fortune.

Across the swift-flowing waters of the creek, only four or five hundred yards away, stood the prosperous and rising settlement of Koollala, embraced all around by rising tracts of eucalyptus forest. The great changeless gums wore in dead winter the same solemn and sombre livery they showed in spring, in summer, and in autumn, and without in the least knowing why, the small boy felt hurt and dispirited in the face of this fact of nature. Around him and before him the great shapeless trunks rustled their cerements of grey bark, and their leafy boughs sobbed in answer to the uneven wind. The river had a voice of mourning, and the clouds that scurried over the tree-tops threatened rain. The prosperous and rising settlement of Koollala, so far as it was visible from the root of the big gum tree ou which the small boy sat, consisted of ten or a dozen houses built of weatherboard, and set on stilts, to save them from the rain which occasionally rushed down from the surrounding heights, or the waters which occasionally trespassed from the creek below.

The rudely split planks of which these scattered tenements were built had once been white, but were now purple grey, rusty grey, green grey, from exposure to all sorts of weather. Everywhere among the scattered houses were evidences of a rough cultivation, but in all the unfenced fields great charred stems of trees stood up like monuments of ruin, and the prosperous and rising settlement looked at least as much like a graveyard as a village. The land had been cleared to the water's edge, but behind the knoll on which the small boy sat, sinking in sombre bowl after sombre bowl of foliage, lay the unbroken primeval forest. The waters of the creek ran five or six hundred feet higher than the land in their immediate neighbourhood, but many a thousand years ago they had been caught in a cleft of granite, and, unable to break through that strong boundary, still held their first course towards the greater waters of the ocean.

What with cold and what with hunger, what with a certain eerie sense of loneliness and a certain bitter chafing against the world at large, the small boy gritted his teeth and had to close his eyelids very tight and hard to prevent the flow of tears. People are apt to think little of the sentimental woes of children, but Evan Rhys, ætat. seven, was as full of despair and rage against the world as he could well have been if he had been seven-and-twenty. He clenched his red fists tightly in his ragged pockets, set his teeth hard, and squeezed his eyelids as closely as they would go, and the whole declaration of the infant soul was in favour of no surrender. As he sat thus, a boy on a pony ap proached the creek from the civilised side, and, after staring about him awhile, sighted an old and stubborn antagonist. ' Holloa, you there ! ' he shouted in an imperious treble.

The small boy was on his feet in an instant. E ' Holloa, you ! ' ' How did you get over there ? ' said the boy on the pony. ' Find out ! ' said Evan Rhys. The boy on the pony was very nattily dressed, and the boy on the far side of the creek was in rags. They were of the same age within a month or two, and the dullest observer of their encounter could have seen an offensive patronage on the one side, and an angry repudiation of it on the other. ' Do you hear what I am saying ? ' asked the boy on the pony. ' I asked you how you got there.' ' Do you hear what L'm saying ? ' the enemy answered. ' I told you to find out. You dassn't come, any way ! ' ' Daren't I ? ' said the boy on the pony. ' I dare do anything you dare do. A lout can never beat a gentleman.' ' Can't he ? ' said young Evan Rhys, with a grimness beyond his years. ' You come across and see.' ' Come across yourself,' said the trim young Valen tine, disdainful of the woodland Orson before him. ' We'll jolly soon see who's master ! ' ' All right ! ' said Evan Rhys, accepting the chal lenge with alacrity. ' You go round the bend o' the crick.

There's a big gum fell over there. You climb over that crick, only you dassn't ! ' ' Oh, yes, I dare ! ' said the other boy coolly, dis mounting from his pony as he spoke. ' Oh, no, you dassn't ! ' responded the woodland challenger. The boy opposite hitched his pony to a shrub near at hand and walked alongside the creek. The enemy kept pace with him on the other side. Thirty or forty yards up stream the river swerved suddenly, and a little beyond the turning it was seen that a giant gum, some thirty feet in girth, had fallen from its rain soaked bed, and now lay prone across the raging waters, forming a rude natural bridge. The enormous breadth of the tree made it impossible for the intending intruder to climb it at any spot nearer than that at which the lower branches, vast as an English elm, stretched out on either side.

To reach the nearest of these, he had to turn his back upon his enemy, who took unfair advantage of that circumstance, and jeered at him. ' A gentleman wouldn't have done that,' the other shouted across the broiling water. ' Don't you think I'm afraid of you ! I've got to turn my back to get at you, but I shall get at you all the same.' Evan Rhys, in anticipation of battle, took off his ragged jacket, turned up his ragged shirt-sleeves, and began to beat himself about the chest and shoulders with both swinging hands. The enemy meantime climbed actively enough, reached the great flat back of the prostrate trunk, ran across it, and climbed down by the wet and slippery roots at the far end, growing very muddy and untidy in the process. Arrived, and being face to face with his enemy, he, too, took off his jacket, and rolled up his shirt-sleeves.

Then the juvenile combatants shook hands on the young gentle man's invitation, and set to work. The fortune of war was various, and now on the slippery and uneven earth one was down, and now another. On the whole, whether it were fortune, pluck, or skill, or that disdain of pain which poverty is early taught to feel, the ragged boy began to get a good deal the better of it ; but the other's pride was up in arms, and it was evident that so long as he had a grain of fight left in him he was not likely to ask for quarter. The war was not carried out according to the rules of art, and included a good deal of clinching. Once or twice the combatants fell out of breath together, and glared, exhausted, at each other, till one of them said ' time.' The word was talismanic, for the failure to respond to it would have been regarded as a surrender, and, whenever it was spoken by either, the other breathless infant struggled to his feet, and the strife began anew.

At length, in one of the unscientific clinches which marred the display from an artistic point of view, the ragged boy fell so heavily upon the young gentleman as to drive all the wind out of his body, and, rising, beheld him comatose, or thereabouts. ' Had enough ? ' asked Evan Rhys. The gentleman warrior gasped like a fish and rolled his eyes, but was in no condition for verbal answer. ' Say you've had enough ! ' said the conqueror, advancing vengefully. The other rolled over, face downward, on the ground, and the rustic touched him contemptuously with the toe of his ragged boot. ' There,' he said, ' you've been kicked, and you lie down to it. If you'll do that, you'll do anything. Don't you come a-nigh me any more, that's all.' The defeated combatant was at too great a disad vantage. He was unable to make answer, and when at last he came to himself he saw his late opponent perched high in the muddy roots of the fallen eucalypt above him, with the thumb of derision planted at the tip of a muddy and bloodstained nose. ' Had enough ? ' said Evan Rhys from that height of vantage.

The young gentleman said nothing, but rolled down his sleeves, and struggled into his jacket. He stood sullen and downcast for a full minute, hitching his feet here and there, and shrinking from an encounter with the victor's eye. ' Fair play up there ! ' he said at last ; ' no shoving when I'm not ready.' By way of sole response Evan Rhys arose from his perch among the clotted roots and slid down to the broad trunk of the tree, across which he sauntered with an air of irritating indifference to the other side. Thus left to himself, the vanquished followed in his footsteps, and mounting his pony rode off unmolested. Little Evan walked into the village. The miry, unmade road, full of deep cart-ruts, and pitted everywhere with the tracks of sheep and cattle, led him between mournful clearings in which the scanty stubble of the last harvest slowly rotted.

Here was a patch of black bean-stalk, and there a patch of scanty rye-straw ; here a segment on which wheat had been grown, and here another which had been sown with oats or barley — all easily recognisable to the accustomed eye. None of the crops were fenced, and among the desolate reminders of them all stood the huge charred stumps, some of them still retaining their tortured branches, and standing in such weird and writhen attitudes that they seemed still to retain the memory of the torment of their burning. The rain began to pelt down sharp and cold, and the small boy, tucking the ragged collar of his jacket about his ears, ran for the furthest house. Here a ladder of half a dozen steps led to the floor of a rotten verandah, about the supports of which twined a quantity of bare and dejected creeper, which had doubtless been grown there to give pleasure to the eye, but now played its part in adding to the decrepit and ruined look of the whole building.

The broken windows had been inefficiently pasted over with old rags of paper, which now fluttered disconsolate in the wet wind. The wail of an ill-tempered and neglected child sounded from the outer chamber of the house. A litter of pigs, in a ruinous lean-to attached to the building, fought and squealed. There had once been an attempt made at the arrangement of a garden about the building, but this had evidently been abandoned for some seasons past, and was now in a state of ruin and disorder, which fitted all the rest. An unkempt, ragged woman issued from the house at the sound of the boy's footsteps. ' Yew're back again,' she said, in a strong English west-country accent, and then a moment later, ' Yew've been a-fighting again, our Evan.' ' Yes, I have,' our Evan answered, edging away a little, and raising a defensive elbow.

The woman, with a shrug of resigned despair, turned back into the house, and ill-temperedly hitched out from its darkened recesses a tin bucket of potatoes. She made another entry, and returned with a tin bowl of somewhat muddy water and a knife. ' Peel them,' she said, ' and see as yew don't waste 'em like ye did yesterday. If ye do, I'll peel yew! The boy arranged the materials for his task before him, and sat down, half-sheltered from the rain, upon a three-legged stool. ' Who ha' yew been a-fighting with this time ? ' his mother asked, with a querulous tone of exasperation in her voice. ' I've give that young Penthearn a hiding,' Evan answered. ' Or else took one from him,' said his mother un graciously. ' I'm bad enough,' the boy responded, passing his sleeve gingerly across the tip of his damaged nose, ' but you should ha' seen him !

He won't come a-cheekin' me no more.' ' Oh ! ' said his mother, ' like father, like son ! There's no dealin' with ayther on ye. If I'd ha' known what I was a-doin', I'd ha' gone a long way afore I'd ha' married a Welshman. If I'd ha' known what he was a-doin' when he asked me to come out to Australia, I'd ha.' seen him further first, and then I wouldn't tile and mile from marnin' till night, and no rest ever, and nothin' to be got out of it.' A sudden squeal from the pigsty arrested her attention. ' We'll have to kill 'em to keep 'em from starvin', though where the salt's to come from to cure 'em, I don't know. They're askin' two shillings a peck for it, and there ain't sixpence in the house, nor sixpence worth, so far as I know. Do you see how you're a-wastin' them potatoes, our Evan ? My life here ain't nothin' but one continual grind.

Nothin' goes right, and nobody takes a minute's notice o' me.' Possibly the small boy was used to this dejected mood, and knew aforetime the voice of these re proaches. He worked on at least like a stoic, looking neither to right nor left, and paying no more apparent heed to his mother than he did to the equal meaning of the voices of the wind and rain. The woman curled her hands in her untidy apron as some refuge against the biting cold, and shrank back half within the door way. ' There's yew,' she said, evidently exasperated by the child's silence, ' a-fighting every day and all day with all and sundry, and there's your father away all day after politics. I never see such a family in all my born days. What's it matter to him who's M. L. A. for the districk ? 'Spose he does get Watson in ?

He says he will, but I don't believe he's got no more in fluence than you have. Will that mend these 'ere dratted winders, or find the wash to feed thickyer crowd o' pigs ? Oh, I'm sick o' you and him and everythin' and everybody. If I wasn't a Christian woman with a soul to save, I'd go this minute and drown myself in that there crick. I 'ouldn't live another hour, I 'ouldn't ! ' The youthful Evan, pausing only now and then to caress his injured nose with the palm of a dirt-grimed hand, peeled his potatoes, and dropped them one by one into the pannikin of dirty water, comforting him self as he did so with some distant view of an insuf ficient meal. His mother went indoors, and, snatching up the crying baby, spanked him with sudden ardour, and set him to nature's fount. She came back again with the child in a slatternly bundle at her breast, and nagged for half an hour.

By the end of that time the potatoes were all peeled, and Evan was despatched to the creek for more water. As he came back, staggering under the weight of the bucket, a man stepped on to the verandah and took his seat upon a three-legged stool. He was a tall, gaunt fellow, with a pale olive complexion, lank black hair, clear-cut and handsome features, and eyes which looked the very natural home of a permanent discontent. He was dressed in a suit of patched moleskin, which gleamed with moisture, and as he took his seat he struck his streaming wideawake angrily against his leg, and distributed a shower about the verandah. 'The people about here,' he said, with a marked Welsh accent, ' has no sense whatever. They has no character whatever. They see that eferypoty is going to the tefil, and they let eferypoty go.' ' I wish I'd never seen the country,' said the woman, sulkily nursing her child, half in and half out of the doorway. ' Inteet,' her husband answered, ' I tare say the country returns the compliment.' Young Evan came staggering to the steps of the brief ladder, and his father, rising and stooping, took from him with a strong hand the bucket he carried.

This, by a series of small misadventures on the way, had been half emptied, and, heavy as it was in the child's hands, the man lifted it as if it had been a feather. The man plunged both hands amongst the potatoes in the pannikin, and began to wash them in the fresher water brought from the creek. ' Young Efan Rhys,' he said to his son meanwhile, ' I want you to rememper this. You'll nefer get any goot out of the folks who call themselves chentlepeople. They co for their own interests, and they co for nothing else, and nefer will. The poor man's hant is akainst them from the pekinning, and will be till the endt. Nefer forget that.' He rose suddenly from the three legged stool, and bending down towards the boy put a forefinger under his chin, and by a series of little jerks edged his face upward. ' You've been fighting.' ' Well,' said young Evan, with a defiance which seemed to be a part of the family attitude, ' I'd got to.

I wasn't going to let young Penthearn cheek me and not cheek him back again.' ' Was he impertinent ? ' asked the father. ' He said " holloa " to me,' Evan answered, ' and I said " holloa " to him.' ' Quite right too,' said Papa Rhys. ' Then he said he'd come across and give me a hiding. I told him he dassn't, and he did, and I gave him one.' ' Quite right too,' said Papa Rhys. ' If efer you see a chance to hit a chentleman, hit him. You can't co wrong, my boy — you can't co wrong.' So saying, the gaunt man patted his son upon the head approvingly ; then, half rising, he passed the thumb and fingers of each hand strenuously from thigh to knee of his moleskin trousers, squeezing out the moisture from them in a thin discoloured stream, and, taking up the bucket full of potatoes, walked indoors.

Evan, a little comforted by the paternal approval, fingered his damaged nose with an inward sense of triumph. Out of the one track in the bush which led past the station of Merioneth to the great district town, twenty miles away, came a road-worn figure carrying an exagge rated-looking kind of knapsack. The bearer ofthe knap sack slipped on the rain-soaked clayey soil, and narrowly escaped a fall. Then he came zigzagging from side to side, hidden to the midriff by an intervening hillock. The hillock surmounted, he came skating down the clay counterside, and then, a little more at ease, butting at the wind and rain with crouching head and shoulders, approached the house. ' We don't want no tramps here ! ' said Mrs. Rhys, who still stood nursing her baby half in and half out ot the doorway. ' Who says not ? ' her husband demanded from inside.

The new-comer reached the verandah and paused, hat in hand, his hair tumbled by the streaming rain and roaring wind. ' What do you want ? ' asked Mrs. Rhys. The man's face was foreign, and when he spoke il was in a foreign tongue. Evan Rhys the elder emerged from the doorway and bade him enter. ' We're poor folks here,' he said, ' and has little to git to anypoty, but you're welcome to share what there iss.' Whether the man took in the words seemed doubt ful, but the master of the house made him a gesture which he understood. He mounted the ladder with an air of toil, and, releasing a strap on his right shoulder laid his burden to the ground, and smiled.

Chapter II

The smiling stranger read no welcome in the eye of Mrs. Rhys, who scowled at him with an open hostility and contempt, and turning her back upon him walked deliberately indoors. The new-comer's face fell, and he looked at Evan Rhys the elder with a childlike appeal and propitiation in his face. ' It's all right, Johnny,' said Rhys, laying a friendly hand upon his shoulder. ' Nefer you mind the missus. Sit down and rest. You look as if you'd travelled a long way whatefer.' He pushed the three-legged stool towards the stranger with his foot, and motioned him to be seated. The man drew back with bent head, and hands out stretched in polite protest, and spoke a word or two which conveyed nothing to the minds of his hearers. Rhys took him gently by the shoulders, and the man, obeying the impulse thus given him, sat down and smiled once more.

He was apparently about fifty years of age, short in stature and sturdily built. His long iron-grey hair, parted in the centre, fell almost to his shoulders without a symptom of a curl, until it curved inward at the ends. He had a remarkable mass of forehead, a nose of extreme brevity, as broad at the base as it was long, thick, protrusive lips, half hidden under a grey moustache, and a long bifurcated beard. He needed only the robe and head-dress peculiar to the craft to have stood as a type of the peasant priest of the Greek Church. His eyes were large, soft, and luminous, and they and the forehead together might have belonged to a saint and a poet. The squat nose and sensual lips were Tartar all over. The physiognomy was half angelic, half animal. ' Look here, you Efan,' said the master of the house to the small boy. ' Put that sack across your shoulders and run across to Frenchy.

If he iss at home, ask him to come ofer.' The boy took up a piece of old sacking from the floor, threw it about his head and shoulders, and was gone. The stranger drew from his pockets a pipe of well-blacked clay, a good-sized hunch of tobacco, and a formidable-looking clasp-knife. He began to shred the tobacco and to fill his pipe. Rhys involuntarily put a hand into his waistcoat pocket and drew out a well-used clay, but immediately returned it, with a look both furtive and ashamed. The new arrival noticed the gesture, and stretched out the tobacco and the knife. Rhys protested feebly, but the stranger insisting, he accepted the offer, and, having shredded for himself a very modest portion, stood rubbing it between his homy palms, and looking out at the slanting lines of rain which came down more and more bitterly. ' Fire ? ' inquired the stranger, touching the bowl of his pipe to make his meaning clear. ' All right, Johnny,' Rhys answered, and entering the house came back in a second or two with a lighted brand from the kitchen fire.

Each man lit his pipe, and for a while smoked in silence. It was Rhys's first taste of tobacco for a fortnight, and he sucked at his pipe with animal noises of satisfaction. ' Dobro ? ' said the stranger, looking up at him and laughing. Rhys stared. ' Good, eh ? ' ' You may well say that,' the Welshman answered. ' There is nothing petter than a pipe of topacco when you're hungry for it.' ' Good ! ' returned the stranger, understanding the tone, if not the words. After this conversation came to an end, but in about five minutes' time Evan the younger came whooping through the rain, waving his hand as if to indicate the prosperity of his mission. He reached the verandah out of breath, and pantingly announced that Frenchy would be there directly. In effect a man in a glistening wet waterproof was seen striding hastily along the main street as the boy made his announcement.

He waved a hand to Rhys, and, quickening his pace to a run, sprang nimbly to the floor of the verandah, and looked about him with a bright laugh. ' What is this ? ' he said. ' Your boy tells me you have some kind of foreign creature here who can neither c speak nor be spoken to. If he can speak French or German I am his man, but there my accomplishment in the way of languages comes to an end.' The foreign accent with which he spoke was so faintly marked that it would be unjust to attempt to indicate it by phonetics. The French rhythm was there, but the rhythm only, and his choice of words was made without approach at hesitation. The speaker himself was tall and blonde, animated to his finger-tips, and as obviously a gentleman as Rhys was obviously a peasant. He turned on the stranger with a bow which was part burlesque, part politeness, and part high spirits, and addressed him in German.

The stranger responded in the flat unaccented French which is so commonly noticeable among the Russians who speak that language. ' Aha ! ' cried the latest comer, ' nous sommes a notre aise ! ' The two fell into animated talk, and Rhys stared in a bewildered fashion from one to the other, striving in vain to separate a single word from its neighbours. He had spoken Welsh and English indifferently from his earliest childhood, but this was the first occasion on which he had ever heard a conversation in a language unknown to him, and he had a half-suspicion that there was no meaning in it. The two men became more and more eagerly engaged, and in a little while each was so animated and noisy that the onlooker foreboded a quarrel. To his utter amazement, and not a little to his disgust the scene ended by an embrace in which each kissed the other repeatedly upon either cheek.

To kiss a pretty girl had been all very well in its way once upon a time, as Evan Rhys could very well remember, but for a man to kiss a man, and for the man kissed to be a foreigner into the bargain, was nauseating to the stomach. The exhibition was no sooner over than the latest comer turned flashing on Rhys, with both hands gesticulat ing wildly overhead, and his eyes burning like coals of fire. ' My God ! ' he said, ' you have entertained angels unawares, my good friend Evan Rhys. Who do you think is this man who comes here in the guise of a pedlar, who, hoping to make a morsel of bread, tramps twenty miles to this rotten village on a day like this ? Who is it, do you think ? ' ' Well,' said Rhys, ' who iss it ? ' ' It is Boris Petrovna ! ' returned the other, with an air as regal as if he had introduced an emperor. ' I nefer heart of him,' said Rhys. ' This is the man,' the other declaimed, shaking the forefinger of his outstretched right hand under Rhys's nose — ' this is the man who for fifteen years was the mainspring, the brain, the right hand of revolutionary Russia.

This is the man who, ten years back, in the prime of life and the fulness of his kingly in tellect, was condemned for life to the mines of Siberia. This is the man who executed his jailer, who travelled on foot two thousand miles across the winter desert, who was recaptured, who escaped again, and with whose c name the ears of all lovers of liberty throughout the world have been made to tingle ! ' ' That iss all right,' said Rhys. ' I am fery glat to see you, sir.' He reached out a hand towards the pedlar, who accepted it warmly. ' Tell him,' said Evan Rhys, his olive skin flushing with a sudden passion, ' that my grandfather wass a Chartist, and wass killed py the tragoons at Peterloo. He wass my grandfather on my mother's side.' ' So I will, old Steadfast ! ' cried the Frenchman, clapping him boisterously on the shoulder. ' This is one of us,' he continued in his own language. ' This man's grandfather was a martyr in the cause of liberty in England fifty years ago.' Boris Petrovna rose solemnly from the three-legged stool and bowed. ' The good seed,' he said, ' is everywhere.