LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1616, 25 April 1879, Page 3

LITERATURE.

A WOMAN’S CONSTANCY. [From the “ Prairie Parmer,” “ Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn, And he alone is blessed who ne’er was born.’ ‘ Bouse up, George, old man ; you look as melancholy aa a dead-head witnessing a comedy.’ ‘Then, true to the dead principle, f must remain mournful. I can’t lanL?h to order, it is not the thing. Pass the beverage ; I’m a little ‘ off color. ’ ’ ‘ And the cause thereof P Hard hit over the ‘cup?’ Too much of the ‘flowing?’ Or—’ ‘ No, Garnet, no—the melody of the waltz they are playing next door awakening thoughts »nd remembrances of the long, long ago. More than a decade hia passed away, and yet I can picture the golden curls on my shoulder, the blue eyes raised lovingly to my own as I danced the night out and the daylight in with the one womaa who was to me—- ‘ The world’s light; so fair and bright, Ani the bonniest of them all.’ Confound that fog, it’s rough on the eyes. Shut the window.’ ‘ Fog! There’s no fog—the atmosphere’s as ch ar as crystal.’ ‘Ah ! will, it must been the brickfielder to-day; the dust was plaguily thick, and— ’ * Yes, I dare say. Here, clear your throat with this, fog seemt to have affected it —and spin the yam ; but make it one act.’ ‘ It’s not funny nor lengthy. Light up and take your eyes off me. ’ 4 All right—blaze away,’ ‘ Twelve years ago —no matter where—in the states? Yes—l was over “head and ears ” in love with the merriest gleam of sunshine that ever walked in the shape of a woman, to tantalise a man and send him in one moment to the depths of despair, to raise him in the next to the seventh heaven of delight. Don’t ask me to describe her ; she was ‘ Beautiful as sweet! And young as beautiful! and soft as young] And gay as soft! and innocent as gay ! ‘We loved each other very, very fondly* as only boy and girl just out of their teens can love—a happy, dreamy, ecstatic existence—till the awakening came. Nothing new. The old, old tale; I was too wild, unsettled, uncertain of position. Another suitor-well-to-do was favored by the relatives, whose dictates were commands. The girl lesisted bravely ; was true to the last ; but there was somewhat of the “ Auld Robin Gray ” in the story ; and the days of elopraent were over. ‘We parted—and for a time the light seemed to go out of my life. 4 For her —I knew she suffered—silently, patiently. No relief from the dull monotony ; no escape from the narrow home circle. She was a woman; she had to endure it—she did Uncomplainingly at last—she accepted her lot ‘ ’Twas but another early young life sacrificed at the shrine of duty. What matter 1 so that silk and satins replaced stuffs worn and threadare—delicacies and dainties were better than homely fare, even though purchased by the happiness of a lifetime. ‘ Somehow or other I went very nearly to the bad after that I drank heavily of course—l was too young to resist. I grew reckless and doubly improvident. I wandered aimlessly hither and thither, until at last I found myself on the West Coast of New Zealand, one of the countless thousands at the Hoiktika gold rush. A year or two pa'sed amid scenes of excitement at the various diggings on the coast sufficed to harden me somewhat I led a restless, devil-may-care sort of life, thinking not of the future, striving only to forget the past. ‘ Do you remember the great steamboat rush to the Haast river ? Thousands of miners left Melbourne and Sydney, bound for the new El Dorado. No reported find since the ‘ Port Curtis’ has equaled the excitement. I was one of the pioneers We lauded on a barren, trackless waste, skirting the seashore, backed by miasmatic swamps covered with dense undergrowth, supple Jack and saplings, with he.e and there a fully-developed tree. Rearward of all, the dividing range of mountains loomed drearily, a barrier, as ’twere, between us and the civilized world. Thousands of lawless men —some near akin to brutes—no police, no order, and—but one woman on the field. This, at the start of the rush, which set in with a never-ending ruin, a total absence of every necessary to bear existence, and a destitution that compelled hundreds of men ' to fish by night in a narrow creek for eels, with hooks bent from pins and lines made from flax. Afterwards, semi civilization obtained, the rush proved a duffer. Thourands, rendered homeless and penniless, had to make tracks for other fields, some by sea, some overland. How many perished in the latter endeavor none—save One—can ever tell 4 One night, wandering through the camp, I was attracted by the noisy revelry at one of the many gro 2-shanties. I entered, and midst the roai of blasphemy, the lewd Jests and drunken threats prevailing, I heard a toast proposed and. loudly re-eohoed ‘Here’s to the first woman on the field!’ Glasses, pannikins and mugs were raised, and the many heads towards one corner of the tent directed my attention that way. I looked, and saw the woman in whose honor they were drinking. The sickening horror that crept through me must have manifested itself in my face. The woman noticed it, and a half cry, half scream, drew the attention of all present upon us. There, standing behind the rude slab that served for a counter, was the girl I had loved, and the man who had taken her from me. ‘I knew him to be a swindler, an adventurer, that he had turned gambler and drunkard; that ho had ill-treated and illused the gentle creature, who had clung faithfully to him from first to last, solely because she was his wife ; but to find her thus, brought face to face with drunkenness, vice, debauchery, in its lowest and most repulsive aspects, was beyond all conception and understanding. Each recognised the other, as ’twere by instinct, for each was sadly changed. With a shout of taunting derision to me, the drunken brute turned to his wife, and, with an oath, bade her fill a g’ass, ‘ that her old flame might join the crowd and drink to the toast.’ The girl mechanically obeyed, but reeled back ere she could place the glass on the slab before m«. Roughly thrusting her aside, her husband handed me the tumbler. Maddened hy the patient, suffering, yearning look in her oyes —I can see it even now—l dashed the vessel and its contents into the man’s face Recovering himself on the instant, he drew and levelled his revolver at me; quick as thought the womau’a hand clutched the muzzle and turned it aside. A brief struggle, and the infuriated beast wrenched the pistol from her feeble grasp, then—then, down, down, with an awful thud, came the weapon upon the poor, supplicating, upturned face.

‘ With one bound I reached him; in another moment we were grappling in a death struggle. I but remember dashing his bead cruelly, mercilees’y against the ground, and then to me oame insensibility. T bad been kicked heavily and repeatedly during the scuffle by the man’s mates, and but for tl e assistance of some of the diggers present, in a'l probability, would have been b°atea to death You look incredulous. Ask any man who was an early-timer at Charlestown, Bruce B iy, Greenstone, or the like. ‘ The mauling I received, combined with a severe attack of swamp fever and incipient argue, laid me on my back for some months Shortly after my recovery—at Hokitika—several men were tried for supposed complicity in the murders perpetrated by the gang of fiends headed by Burgess and ‘■'ullivau. It happened that I attended the various trials in an official capacity as a jou'nalist. One day a man was tried for, I think, bearing arms with an illegal intent. He was suspected by the police of belonging to a gang of stickers-up that had just then taken possession of the coast. I had been out of court during th" trial, but as the man lef" the dock a convicted felon, I entered. A woman stepped to his side, from the body of the court, and with a low moan of angni°h she bade him good-by. I was blocking the path—eur eyes met —and once agaia husband and wife stood before ’me. Into the open street I followed them. One look from her—l saw the cruel scar on her forehead—then with a shudder she passed on. Recovering from the inactivity of surprise, I sought to follow her. In vain—she was lost to me in the assembled crowd. * In less than a week the man had broken jail. He was pursued hotly, he evaded his pursuers and escaped. * La*er on, in the early winter, Cobb’s coachman, plying on the Greymouth and Hokitika line, carried the news to the former township that the body of a man had been washed ashore from the Teramakau. Particulars were published and the body laid out for identification at a shanty some miles below the river. Next day a woman rold, starving, footsore and weary, drenched to the skin by the pitiless rain, applied fo permission to view the remains. She had walked from the Grey, crossing creeks toiling along tbe heavily-gravelled path by the sea, with the spray of the ocean beating in her face, and the storm-drops soaking her garments through and through. The elements combined to drive her back, but a stern sense of duty that seemed an inherent part of the woman drove her bravely on. One look at the dead face, and husband and wife were together for the last time. 1 1 was living in a cottage in the midst of the bush, about three miles from the township of Hokitika. The track leading to my section was somewhat undefined, bo 'gy, and plentifully dotted with swamps. I knew it well, and scarcely ever used the diggers’ lantern. One night, close to my own door, I tripped and fell heavily over something lying right in my trak. A low cry from the inanimate mass revealed the fact that I had fallen over a human form. Oently I raised the head—a woman’s—and the moon shed its faint light on the wan and worn face that had haunted me for years. She had made herself acquainted with the place of my abode, and her duty to the man she had married having been fulfilled, she had crawled back to die on the besom of her early love. As she recovered consciousness, the light of recognition flashed into her eyes, and for a moment the happy smile of yore beamed over her wasted, but still beautiful, features. Plaintively she murmured, ‘ There is no tie to keep me from you now, darling. I have come to you at last ’ ‘ And so she there on the bleak rang", pillowed in my arms. *We buried her in the little cemetery, the old sexton and I, in the evening of a winter’s day. There was no weeping over her grave Tears came not from me. No stone or cross marks the place and —no, I cannot trust myself to breathe her name, not even to you.’ ‘ There on the hillside she sleeps, and there, there in the cold, cold grave sleeps my heart. Youth, hope and love were buried with her that night.’