Chapter XVII: Helen

SOME years before the occurrence of the events recorded in the former part of our narrative, Mr. Sedley, a professional gentleman, pretty well off in the world, and with a good position in society, having taken umbrage at some slight offered him in the county town where he had imagined his influence to be paramount, hastily made up his mind to leave the country.

In pursuance of this design, he first of all disposed of his practice; sold the house in which he lived, and the greater part of his furniture; went into lodgings; and then, when all these steps had been taken, began to study the science of emigration in connection with the numerous and various British colonies scattered over the face of the globe.

If Mr. Sedley had had only himself to please, the matter would have been of smaller consequence than it was. But he was a married man, and was, in sequence, the father of some half-dozen sons and daughters. Of these appendages, or encumbrances as they are sometimes called, such as were old enough to have any opinions of their own were at first rather rebellious; at least, they thought it hard to have to give up the comforts and luxuries of a genteel home in England for the uncertain prospects and advantages, and the certain toils and sacrifices, of an emigrant life.

But Mr. Sedley had a strong will of his own, and was especially liable to attacks of obstinacy which sometimes seemed to lead on to remorselessness of purpose, and which, as is usual in such cases, gained strength by opposition. It was natural enough, therefore, though not necessarily judicious, that he should silence the objections of these younger members of his family, by the unanswerable argument wrapped up in Le roi le veut.

As to Mrs. Sedley, the meek-spirited wife, it was sufficient for her to know that she must follow in her husband's wake. Had she not vowed to "love, honour, and obey"? So, without any fruitless remonstrances, she prepared quietly to fulfil her duty.

As, however, my story is about John Tincroft, I must follow the fortunes of the Sedley family only so far as they relate indirectly to the continuance of his history. Briefly, then, after long pondering on the subject, and consulting as many authorities as he thought expedient, the ex-lawyer fixed on the then almost terra incognita of Australia as his general, and the part of it known as New South Wales as his particular, destination.

Those were not the times of fast clippers, to say nothing of ocean steamers. As Mr. Sedley, however, could afford to pay good passage-money, he and his set sail one day in late summer from Gravesend, under comparatively comfortable circumstances.

The voyage was attended with the usual variety of monotonous incidents. It was long and wearying, but it came to an end; and about the commencement of the Australian summer, the party landed at Sydney. Not long to remain there, but to proceed a good way up the country to a farm or settlement, which, on the representation of an advertisement, and forgetting his professional caution, the gentleman had purchased without seeing.

The bargain probably was not a bad one, after all; or it might not have been, in the hands of one who understood the ins and outs of a pastoral life at the Antipodes. But, unfortunately, Mr. Sedley would have been at his wits' ends on an English farm; for farming comes no more by nature than gig-driving. Very soon, therefore, he found himself altogether beyond his wits on an Australian settlement. In other words, misfortunes rapidly set in upon him; and to add to his embarrassments, one of those periodical times of depression, to which all now colonies are more or less subject, fell upon New South Wales.

Happily for the Sedleys, their whole property was not invested in land and stock, and they outrode the storm. After the lapse of a year or two, their circumstances began to mend; and they had their share in the returning and increasing prosperity of their adopted country.

But while regaining his lost ground in this respect, Mr. Sedley had still reason to regret the course into which he had been driven by the impulses of his unreasoning obstinacy. In England he had maintained a certain position in social life for which he was very well suited, and in which were combined and concentrated a good many rational pleasures, counterbalanced, it is true, by a liability to be slighted and mortified occasionally.

In Australia, he had none with whom to dispute precedence, or to stand up for his rights, simply because he had no such neighbours. He was "monarch of all he surveyed," it is true; but then it was because he had no equals or fancied superiors his "right to dispute." Wife and children—an ignorant and awkward and untoward woman-help who had come out to the colony under the pressure of circumstances, and at the expense of the home Government—a shepherd and hut keeper (obtained under similar advantages or disadvantages), who drew monthly rations and smoked strong tobacco, and otherwise comported themselves as free and independent savages in a shanty some three miles away—a rough-and-ready bush carpenter and blacksmith, with a rather more civilised groom of the stables at home, and one or two farm labourers, who called Mr. Sedley their "boss," obeying him when it suited them, and setting him aside when it did not, formed the whole of the community within a radius of some ten miles in every direction.

Now, this was not, in all respects, pleasant to Mr. Sedley. Authority is gratifying, no doubt, under certain conditions, and when it can be enforced. But in this case, those conditions were wanting, and all that Mr. Sedley got for his occasional outbreaks of despotic temper was the timid fear of those to whose confiding love he thought he had a right, and the contempt and daring rebellion of the few to whom he looked for unlimited obedience.

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.

"Your father may thank you, Helen Sedley, for being in a whole skin at this present," said a man to her one day, when Sedley had been mare than usually violent in his language and bearing towards him for having, in some trivial matter, disobeyed his orders. "He taunted me with having been lagged, as you heard, Miss Sedley; and it isn't the first nor the second time, and my opinion is that he will do it once too often. He threatened me with Norfolk Island, too, did he? Let him take care that he isn't sent to a darker and narrower hole than Norfolk Island one of these days."

"You must not speak so to me, Styles," said Helen, firmly, though her heart secretly fluttered at seeing the dark eyes of the man glisten, as with the wild fire of rage and vengeance, while he was speaking. But Helen, though scarcely twenty years old, was wise and brave as well as good and kind; and she knew that she must not show signs of fear.

"I must speak, Miss Sedley," rejoined the man, respectfully enough so far as Helen was concerned, but doggedly and fiercely too; "if I don't speak here and now, I shall talk to another purpose somewhere else, and at some other time, not far-off, perhaps. Look here, Miss Sedley, in the old country I was as good a man as your father, I reckon, though I mightn't have had his education. At all events, I wasn't a lawyer as he was—so I have heard, at least. But I was a gentleman's son, and might have been a gentleman myself at this time if it hadn't been for—there, never mind. But I don't forget what I was once; and 'tis hard lines to be treated worse than a dog, as your father treats me."

"I have told you many times, Styles, how much I feel for you—for all who are in your unhappy position," said Helen, softly; "and now I ask you for my sake to make allowances for my father."

"He makes precious few allowances for me," retorted the man, gloomily. Nevertheless, he remained waiting to hear what more Helen had to say.

"You know what a loss he—what a loss both of us had to bear five years ago. My mother, my sisters, my brothers—there were six of us then—" Helen's firmness gave way here.

"I know—that is, I have heard it all," said Styles, more mildly than he had before spoken; "and I am a brute not to make allowances, as you say. But it is hard, Miss Sedley, for all that, to be a—to be what I am, and to feel what I feel at times. It gets over me. Do you know why I was sent out and am here, Miss Sedley?"

"I have never inquired, and I have never been told," the young woman answered.

"It was not for dishonesty; I never stole a penny, I never cheated any man out of a farthing to my knowledge; but I struck a man when I was in a passion, and I struck him hard. I didn't mean to do mischief; I didn't know what I was doing till it was too late. The man insulted me, but not so bad as your father has done the same thing, and I was too high-spirited to stand it. Before he could speak another word, the deed was done; he fell down like lead, and he never spoke again."

The perspiration broke out on Styles's forehead, and his lips quivered as he spoke; and then presently he added, more quietly and softly—

"I tell you, Miss Sedley, it isn't safe for your father to go on as he does with others as well as with me. I don't want to hurt him. It is bad enough to have one man's death on the mind, to want to have another. But what has happened once unawares might happen a second time. There's some of the old grit left, I sometimes feel; and setting myself aside, there are others who wouldn't care a straw so they could have their revenge."

"I thank you for your warning, Styles," said Helen; "and I will do what I can to make your position—I mean to shield you from trouble of any sort. I did not before know what you have now told me; but as you are feeling now the consequences of rash anger, you surely would not give way again to the same temptation?"

"I don't know why not, Miss Sedley. Life such as mine out here is not so valuable as to be worth keeping. But you speak about my feeling the consequences, you don't know all."

The man's voice faltered here, and the muscles of his face were painfully moved.

"I had a wife—I hadn't been married a year." The poor ticket-of-leave man here broke out into a passionate cry, and hastily turned away.

"Don't speak of it to me, Styles. It only distresses you. Pray to God to give you pardon and strength to bear your sorrow. The Lord Jesus will give you rest and peace. Go to Him."

"Yes, I know, I know," said the man, again facing his monitress; "but I think for all that, the devil would long before now have got the mastery, if it hadn't been for you. Helen Sedley, you are like my Caroline, like what she was; and when I look on you, my heart seems to soften."

"And have you no hope of being restored to her?"

"No hope. She is dead; she died on ship-board the year after our last parting in prison. She was following me out." And the man walked slowly away when he had said this.

It was with experiences such as these that Helen Sedley became familiar in her life in the Australian bush. Let it be borne in mind that I am writing of what is now long past. Australian life, whether in bush or towns and cities, has strangely altered since then. But is it to be wondered that, under such circumstances, a feeling of desolation sometimes made the solitary young woman sad, while the need for constant watchfulness and daily labour, not always of the most feminine kind, made her seem and feel older than her years.

As time wore on, Helen had to take active superintendence of her father's concerns, even to the occasional visiting of the out-station, for he was becoming feeble and forgetful. It was in fulfilment of this duty that she had, soon after the conversation just recorded, to take cognisance of a plot she had discovered (but in which the man Styles had no part), and which had some time been in operation, for seriously damaging the livestock on the distant run.

On making this discovery, there was no alternative but to lodge an information with the nearest district magistrate; and Helen had, reluctantly enough but courageously, to be a witness against the conspirators. These were convicted, principally on her evidence, and heavily sentenced. Being remitted to headquarters to undergo a lengthened imprisonment, these men were replaced in the station by others of the same class.

But thenceforth it could not be concealed from the Sedleys (father and daughter) that they were surrounded by greater dangers than ever. Is it to be wondered that, in the bitterness of her loneliness, Helen sometimes uttered the mournful plaint within herself, "Oh, why did we ever leave England?"