Robbery Under Arms - Rolf Boldrewood (most important books of all time .TXT) 📗

be safe; but then there were not very many within a few hundred miles of Nomah. It appeared to him that the prisoner known as Starlight, though from old police records his real name appeared to be⁠—”

Here he drew himself up and faced the judge in defiance. Then like lightning he seemed to change, and said⁠—

“Your Honour, I submit that it can answer no good purpose to disclose my alleged name. There are others⁠—I do not speak for myself.”

The judge stopped a bit; then hesitated. Starlight bowed. “I do not⁠—a⁠—know whether there is any necessity to make public a name which many years since was not better known than honoured. I say the⁠—a⁠—prisoner known as Starlight has, from the evidence, taken the principal part in this nefarious transaction. It is not the first offence, as I observe from a paper I hold in my hand. The younger prisoner, Marston, has very properly been found guilty of criminal complicity with the same offence. It may be that he has been concerned in other offences against the law, but of that we have no proof before this court. He has not been previously convicted. I do not offer advice to the elder criminal; his own heart and conscience, the promptings of which I assume to be dulled, not obliterated, I feel convinced, have said more to him in the way of warning, condemnation, and remorse than could the most impressive rebuke, the most solemn exhortation from a judicial bench. But to the younger man, to him whose vigorous frame has but lately attained the full development of early manhood, I feel compelled to appeal with all the weight which age and experience may lend. I adjure him to accept the warning which the sentence I am about to pass will convey to him, to endure his confinement with submission and repentance, and to lead during his remaining years, which may be long and comparatively peaceful, the free and necessarily happy life of an honest man. The prisoner Starlight is sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment; the prisoner Richard Marston to five years’ imprisonment; both in Berrima Gaol.”

I heard the door of the dock unclose with a snap. We were taken out; I hardly knew how. I walked like a man in his sleep. “Five years, Berrima Gaol! Berrima Gaol!” kept ringing in my ears.

The day was done, the stars were out, as we moved across from the courthouse to the lockup. The air was fresh and cool. The sun had gone down; so had the sun of our lives, never to rise again.

Morning came. Why did it ever come again? I thought. What did we want but night?⁠—black as our hearts⁠—dark as our fate⁠—dismal as the death which likely would come quick as a living tomb, and the sooner the better. Mind you, I only felt this way the first time. All men do, I suppose, that haven’t been born in gaols and workhouses. Afterwards they take a more everyday view of things.

“You’re young and soft, Dick,” Starlight said to me as we were rumbling along in the coach next day, with hand and leg-irons on, and a trooper opposite to us. “Why don’t I feel like it? My good fellow, I have felt it all before. But if you sear your flesh or your horse’s with a red-hot iron you’ll find the flesh hard and callous ever after. My heart was seared once⁠—ay, twice⁠—and deeply, too. I have no heart now, or if I ever feel at all it’s for a horse. I wonder how old Rainbow gets on.”

“You were sorry father let us come in the first time,” I said. “How do you account for that, if you’ve no heart?”

“Really! Well, listen, Richard. Did I? If you guillotine a man⁠—cut off his head, as they do in France, with an axe that falls like the monkey of a pile-driver⁠—the limbs quiver and stretch, and move almost naturally for a good while afterwards. I’ve seen the performance more than once. So I suppose the internal arrangements immediately surrounding my heart must have performed some kind of instinctive motion in your case and Jim’s. By the way, where the deuce has Jim been all this time? Clever James!”

“Better ask Evans here if the police knows. It is not for want of trying if they don’t.”

“By the Lord Harry, no!” said the trooper, a young man who saw no reason not to be sociable. “It’s the most surprisin’ thing out where he’s got to. They’ve been all round him, reg’lar cordon-like, and he must have disappeared into the earth or gone up in a balloon to get away.”

XIX

It took us a week’s travelling or more to get to Berrima. Sometimes we were all night in the coach as well as all day. There were other passengers in the coach with us. Two or three bushmen, a station overseer with his wife and daughter, a Chinaman, and a lunatic that had come from Nomah, too. I think it’s rough on the public to pack madmen and convicts in irons in the same coach with them. But it saves the Government a good deal of money, and the people don’t seem to care. They stand it, anyhow.

We would have made a bolt of it if we’d had a chance, but we never had, night nor day, not half a one. The police were civil, but they never left us, and slept by us at night. That is, one watched while the other slept. We began to sleep soundly ourselves and to have a better appetite. Going through the fresh air had something to do with it, I daresay. And then there was no anxiety. We had played for a big stake and lost. Now we had to pay and make the best of it. It was the tenth day (there were no railways then to shorten the journey) when we drove up to the big gate and looked at