Chapter Twenty Eight. At La Nouvelle.

A wide, vast expanse of glassy sapphire sea.

The giant mountains rose in the west, sheer and steep—purple barriers between the land and the setting sun. A golden fire edging their white crests, that grew from their own dense, sombre shadows to the crimson light which flooded their heads, solemn and silent. And the calm Pacific Ocean lay unruffled in the brilliant blood-red afterglow.

Seated upon a great lichen-covered boulder on the outskirts of a dense forest, a solitary man gazed blankly and with unutterable sadness upon the magnificent scene. Above him the trees were hung with a drapery of vines and tropical creepers bearing red and purple flowers, and forming natural arches and bowers more beautiful than ever fashioned by man. Parrots and other birds of bright plumage were flying about among the trees—among them guacamayas, or great macaws, large, clothed in red, yellow, and green, and when on the wing displaying a splendid plumage. But there were also vultures and scorpions, and, running across the road to the beach and up the trees, innumerable iguanas. Great cocoanut and plantain trees jutted out and massed themselves to the right and to the left. A mountain torrent, sweeping swiftly over a moss-grown rocky ledge, seethed for a few moments in white foam, and then gurgled away down the bright shingles into the sea.

The man sat there stonily, voiceless, motionless, his chin fallen upon his chest, his hands clasped in front of him. Dressed in grey shirt and trousers that were ragged and covered with dust and dried clay, his appearance was scarcely prepossessing. On the back of his shirt was painted in large black numerals “3098,” and his ankles were fettered by two oblong iron links. He was a convict.

Under the broad-brimmed, battered straw hat that protected his head from the tropical glare was a ruddy, auburn-bearded face, with sad blue eyes which at times turned anxiously up and down the beach path—the sun-tanned face of Hugh Trethowen.

His pickaxe lay on the ground before him, for he was resting after his long day’s toil in the mine.

Toil! He shuddered when he thought of the weary monotony of his life. Down in the dark, dismal working he was compelled to hew and delve for twelve hours each day, and to satisfactorily perform the task set him by his warder before he was allowed his ration of food. Half an hour’s relaxation when leaving the mine was all that the discipline allowed, after which the convicts were compelled to return to the prison to their evening meal, and afterwards to work at various trades for two hours longer before they were sent to their cells. The French Republic shows no leniency towards prisoners condemned to travaux forces, and transported to the penal settlement in New Caledonia, consequently the latter live under a régime that is terribly harsh and oft-times absolutely inhuman.

Instead of chattering with the forcats, assassins, robbers, and scoundrels of all denominations and varieties of crime who were his fellow-prisoners, Hugh, in the brief half-hour’s respite, usually came daily to the same spot, to reflect upon his position, and try to devise some means of escape.

His conviction and transportation had been so rapid that only a confused recollection of it existed in his memory. He remembered the Assize Court—how the sun insolently, ironically, cast his joyous, sparkling beams into the gloomy, densely packed apartment. The hall, dismal and smoke-begrimed, is anything but imposing at best, but it was filled with the foetid exhalations from the crowd that had long taken up every vacant space. The gendarmes at his side looked at one another and smiled. The evidence was given—what it was he did not thoroughly understand—yet he, an upright man, resolute, honest to the very soul, and good-natured to simplicity, found himself accused of complicity in the murder of a man he had never heard of. Despondent at Valérie’s desertion, he took no steps to defend himself; he was heedless of everything.

Then the verdict was pronounced, and the sentence—fifteen years’ penal servitude!

He heard it, but in his apathetic frame of mind he was unaffected by it. He smiled as he recognised how mean was this noted Criminal Court of the Seine, with its paltry chandelier, the smoky ceiling, and the battered crucifix that hung over the bench on which the judges sat in their scarlet robes. Suddenly he thought of Valérie. Surely she would know through the newspapers that his trial was fixed for that day? Why did she not come forward and assist him in proving his innocence.

He strained his eyes among the sea of faces that were turned towards him with the same inquisitive look. She was not there.

“Prisoner, have you anything to say?” asked the presiding judge, when he delivered sentence.

The question fell upon Hugh’s ears and roused him. The thought that Valérie had made no sign since his arrest, although he had written to her, again recurred to him. The die was cast. What probability, what hope, was there of liberty? For the twentieth time, perhaps, this cruel agony, this doubt as to Valérie’s faithfulness, returned to him. She was absent; she had forsaken him.

“Will you answer me, prisoner? Have you anything to say?” repeated the judge sternly.

“I wish to say nothing, except that I am entirely innocent.”

Then they hurried him back to his cell.

He had a hazy recollection of a brief incarceration in the Toulon convict prison, after which came the long voyage to La Nouvelle, and the settlement into the dull, hopeless existence he was now leading—a life so terrible that more than once he longed for death instead.

Sitting there that evening, he was thinking of his wife, refusing even then to believe that she had willingly held aloof from him. He felt confident that by some unfortunate freak of fate she had been unaware of his arrest, and might still be searching for him in vain. Perhaps the letters he wrote to her to the hotel and to Coombe might never have been posted. If they had not, there was now no chance of sending a message home, for one of the rules observed most strictly in the penal colony is that letters from convicts to their friends are forbidden. The unfortunate ones are completely isolated from the world. The families of French prisoners sent out to the Pacific Islands can obtain news of them at the Bureau of Prisons in Paris, but nowhere else. When convicts are handed over to the governor of the colony, their names are not given; they are known henceforth by numbers only.

Convict number 3098 knew that it was useless to hope any longer, yet it was almost incredible, he told himself, that he, an innocent man and an English subject, should be sent there to a living tomb for an offence that he did not commit—for the murder of a person whose name he had never before heard.

“I wonder where Valérie is now?” he said aloud, giving vent to a long-drawn sigh. “I wonder whether she ever thinks about me? Perhaps she does; perhaps she is wearing her heart out scouring every continental city in a futile endeavour to find me; perhaps—perhaps she’ll think I’m dead, and after a year or two of mourning marry some one else.”

He uttered the words in a low voice, more marked by suffering than by resignation. He preferred the companionship of his own thoughts, sad as they were; his mind always turned to Valérie, to the sad ruin of all his hopes.

“And Jack Egerton,” he continued, resting his chin upon his hands; “he must know, too, that I have disappeared. Will he seek me? Yet, what’s the use of hoping—trusting in the impossible—no one would dream of finding me in a French convict prison. No,” he added bitterly, “I must abandon hope, which at best is but a phantom pursued by eager fools. I must cast aside all thought of returning to civilisation, to home—to Valérie. I’ve seen her—seen her for the last time! No, it can’t be that we shall ever meet—that I shall ever set eyes again upon the woman who is more to me than life itself!”

He paused. In his ears there seemed to ring a little peal of Valérie’s silvery laughter, which mocked the chill, dead despair that had buried itself so deeply in his heart.

The tears sprang to his eyes, but he wiped them away with a brusque movement, and looked about abstractedly. The sun had set behind the crags, and had been succeeded by the soft tropical twilight. A faint breeze was abroad. The sough of the leaves above was lost in the gurgling of the mountain torrent as it rushed over its rocky bed. The palms, played upon by the wind, made a sound of their own. It was silence in the midst of sound, and sound in the midst of silence—majestic, contradictory, although natural.

“And I shall never see her again!” he murmured. “I shall remain here working and living from day to day, a blank, aimless existence until I die. I’ve heard it said that Fate puts her mark on those she intends to strike, and the truth of that I’ve never recognised until now. I remember what a strange apprehensive feeling came over me on the night we left London for Paris—a kind of foreboding that misfortune was upon me, a strange presage of evil. Again, that warning of Dolly’s was curious. I wonder what was contained in that newspaper report that she so particularly desired me to see? I’m sure Dolly loved me. If I had married her, perhaps, after all, I should have been happier. It was inflicting an absolute cruelty upon her when I cast her aside and married Valérie. Yet she bore it silently, without complaint, although I’m confident it almost broke her heart, poor girl!”

Sighing heavily, he passed his grimy, blistered hand wearily across his forehead.

“To think that I’m dead to them; that we shall never again meet! It seems impossible, although it’s the plain, undisguised truth. That canting old priest told me yesterday that God would extend His mercy to those of us who sought it. Bah! I don’t believe it. If the circumstances of our lives were controlled by the Almighty, He would never allow an innocent man like myself to suffer such punishment unjustly. No,” he declared in a wild outburst of despair, “the belief that God is Master of the world is an exploded fallacy. What proof have we of the existence of a Supreme Being? None. What proof of a life hereafter? None. Religion is a mere sentimental pastime for women and fools. For priests to try and convert convicts is a sorry, miserable farce. There is no God!”

Several minutes elapsed, during which he thought seriously upon the mad words that had escaped him. The recollection of the religious teaching he had received at his mother’s knee came back to him. He had often jested at holy things, but never before had he been smitten by conscience as now.

“Suppose—suppose, after all, there is an Almighty Power,” he said thoughtfully, in an awed voice. “Suppose it is enabled to direct circumstances and control destiny. In that case God could give me freedom. He could give Valérie back to me, and I should return home and resume the perfect happiness that was so brief and so suddenly dispelled. Ah! if such things could be! And—why not? My mother—did she not believe in God? Were not the words she uttered with her dying breath a declaration of implicit trust in Him? Did she not die peacefully because of her firm, unshaken faith?”

Jumping to his feet with a sudden resolution, he stretched forth his hands in supplication to heaven, exclaiming, in a hoarse, half-choked whisper—

“I—I believe—yes, I believe there’s a Ruling Power. No! I’ll not abandon all hope yet.”

His arms dropped listlessly to his side again, and he sank upon the boulder where he had been sitting, silent and thoughtful, wondering whether freedom would ever again be his.

“Hulloa,” exclaimed a voice in French. “Why, what’s the matter? Any one watching you from a distance, as I’ve been doing, would think you’d taken leave of your senses.”

Glancing up quickly, he saw it was a bearded, unkempt prisoner who, condemned to a sentence à perpétuité, worked in the mine in the same labour gang as himself.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed the entertainment,” he said, in annoyance.

“Entertainment,” echoed the other. “There is scarcely entertainment in the mauvais quart-d’heure, is there? Bah! we all of us in this malarial death-trap have periods of melancholy, more or less. For myself, I’m never troubled with them. When you’ve been here a few years you’ll see the folly of giving way to gloomy thoughts, and the utter uselessness of entertaining any anticipation of either escape or release.”

“But we may still hope.”

“Hope! What’s the use? What can we hope for—except death?” he asked bitterly. Then, without waiting for a reply, he said, “Let’s forget it all; we shall die some day, and then we shall obtain rest and peace, perhaps.”

“We cannot all forget so easily.”

“There, don’t talk so dismally. Come, we must be going.”

“Where?”

“To the cage,” he replied, indicating the prison by the sobriquet bestowed upon it by the convicts. “The gun has sounded. Did you not hear it? Come, we must hasten, or you know the penalty.”

Hugh sighed again, rose to his feet, took up his pickaxe, and, placing it upon his shoulder, walked with heavy wearied steps beside his companion in misfortune. Both trudged on in dogged silence, broken only by the clanking of their leg-irons, for nearly a quarter of a mile along the rough beach path, until they came to a broader path leading inland, with dense forests on either side.

Here they were met by two armed warders, who roundly abused them for their tardy appearance, and who escorted them within the grim portals of the long, low stone building which stood upon the side of the bare, rugged mountain overlooking Noumea.