Since the first human eyes saw the first timid
stars break through Heaven and shine,
Surely never a man was bowed down with
the cross of a curse such as mine;
They of all the dead millions of millions
whose dust whirls and flees in the wind,
Who were born helpless heirs of the hate
of a fate that is bitter and blind
All whose lives pain has smitten with
fire since God first set the sun to its
course
What have they known of woe like to mine?
What of grief? Of despair? Of remorse?
Oh! to cancel one hour of my past!
Oh! to shut out all thought, to forget,
Then go forth as a leper to die in hot wastes!
Listen! Over us yet,
Her and me, in the heart of the North,
hang the glamour of Love at its height,
Joy of things unperceived of the rest,
holy hours of unwaning delight;
Joy of selfless devotion to each in each heart;
joy of guiding the feet
Of our babe, our one daughter, our May,
by three summers of childhood made sweet!
I had dared overmuch in the battle for wealth,
I had ventured alone
Upon verdurous tracts that lay fronting
the edge of a desert unknown;
Fifty miles further out than the nearest
I chanced on a green width of plain,
In a time when the earth was made glad
by a grey year of bountiful rain;
Fifty miles from Maconochie's Gap.
They had warned me. Some three years gone by,
In a night when the flames of his home
reddened far up the heights of the sky,
With a hard ragged spear through his heart,
and a tomahawk blade in his head,
Lay the Master, in death, and his wife
Ah! how better had she, too, lain dead !
Dark the tale is to tell, yet it was but a cruel resentment of wrong,
The fierce impulse of those who were weak,
for revenge upon those who were strong
Cattle speared at the first, blacks shot down,
and the blood of their babes, even, shed;
Blood that stains the same hue as our own.
It is written, red blood will have red !
But an organised anger of whites swept the
bush with a fury unchained,
Till the dead seemed as thick as the trees,
and the black murdered corpses remained,
Till the black glutted crows scarce could
rise from their feast at the sound of a foot,
And the far-away camps through the nights
lay unlighted, and ghastly, and mute!
And a terror ran out through the tribes.
Since that devilish crime had been done;
Not a dusk stealthy savage had crossed
the wide bounds of Maconochie's run;
But the white sky in pitiless scorn
stared at waterless plains that implored
For the mercy of clouds that passed,
mocking them. "Vengeance is mine," said the Lord!
They had warned me. "Out yonder," they said,
"there's abundance of water and grass,
You've Brown's Ranges beside you, they
draw down and drain all the rain-clouds
that pass,
(We are outside the rainy belt here).
But remember the words we have said
If you will go, prepare to have trouble;
take plenty of powder and lead!"
And I went, with my trustworthy helpers,
and lived through a desolate year
Of suspicions, and vigils, and hunger for
her of all dear ones most dear;
But a year crowned with utmost successes,
and crowned above all things in this,
That it brought her again to my side with
the gift of a new face to kiss!
And a blessedness came with her feet,
and our life was a prosperous peace,
And the years as they passed shed upon
us a fair meed of worldly increase;
But a thousand times better to me than
assurance of silver and gold
Was the measureless love of a wife,
mine for ever to have and to hold!
Oh! the pang of remembering then!
Oh! could madness dishevel my mind,
Till I babbled of wry tangled things,
looking neither before nor behind!
But I shrink from the slumberless thought
of one deed, as the first of our race,
In the shame of his wrong-doing, crouched
from the light of God's terrible face!
We had hardly been vexed by the blacks
in our work, though all through the first year,
And the second, we stood upon guard with the disciplined earnest of fear,
But the summers and winters went by, and
the wild tribes gave never a proof
Of their hate, and our vigilance slept,
and security came to our roof.
So, unwarned, fell the night of my doom.
There was smoke in the west through the day,
And an hour after noon all the hands had
been mustered and sent out to stay
In its course the red wave that approached,
for the high grass was yellow and sere
With the withering breath of the dense
sullen heat of the last of the year.
They took rifles to shoot kangaroo, as it
chanced. My two darlings and I
Sat together at night by the door, with our
eyes on a fringe of the sky
Where the light of the late sunken sun was
replaced by a wide lurid glow,
Which pulsed high or grew pale as the fire
underneath it waxed fierce or waned low.
We had spoken glad-voiced of the time,
soon to come, when our exile would be
At an end, and our feet once again in the
quiet lands over the sea,
Till the large, lovely eyes of the child
felt their lids grow despotic. She drew
To her mother and slept in her arms, and
the new risen moon kissed the two.
I was looking beyond them to where the
broad columns of tree-shadows slept,
Stretching west twice the length of the
trees, when a horror of something that crept,
Something blacker than shade, through
the shade, struck my heart with a hammer
of ice,
And with eyeballs dilated and strained,
and hands clenched with the clench of a vice,
I leapt up; but a clear sudden whirr
cleaved the night, and with scarcely
a groan
From her lips, the white soul of our
child passed among the white souls at
the Throne!
"To the house!" with the dead and the
living, half dead, clasped before me,
I sprang
Through the strong door, and bolted
and barred it before, on the stillness,
out rang
A wild-volumed malignance of yells.
To have light might be death. In the dark,
On the floor, the poor mother groped
madly about the dead child for a spark
Of the hope of faint lingering life,
till the blood that was mine and her own
From the boomerang gash, warmed her
hands, and she knew that we two were alone!
Yell on yell of the monsters without!
crash of shutters behind!but I knew
How the wall that divided was built;
that, at least, they could never get
through
Crash of manifold blows on the door!
but, I knew too, how that had been made;
And I crawled to the corner and found
my revolvers, and hoarsely I said :
"Kiss me now, ere the worst comes to
pass, O most stricken and dearest of wives
They will find out the windowI hold
in my hands but a dozen of lives.
In the storehouse the arms are,
God help us! Fold hands in the dark,
dear, and pray!"
But she sobbed from my feet,
"God forgets us, and I have forgotten
the way!"
Crash of spear through the window!
an answering flash with the message of lead
From my hand!and dull answer to that
of a lean demon-form falling dead!
Crash on crash of a dozen of spears!
till they lay in a sheaf on the floor!
Red rejoinder of fire, as the moonlight
revealed them "But one bullet more!"
I had hissed to myself. But she heard me,
and seizing my arm, held it fast,
And a hard, altered voice that I knew
not at once, cried "Hold! I claim the last!
Dearest love, from your hand the divorce!
One last kiss till the Infinite Life
Once again, on my lips! Hold it close,
and remember Maconochie's wife!"
By the white sickly light of a match,
she had bared that true bosom, all red
With the blood of her slain one.
I looked in her eyes. "God forgive me!"
I said ....
And the sound of the thing that I did
was repeated outside by a sound
Not as awful to me the dread Trump,
when the time of my sentence comes round
Rifle shots close at hand! devil-cries!
counter-cheers of the voices I knew!
They were back! I was saved! Lost! lost!
lost! Can the blood of the Saviour they slew
Upon Calvary's hill wash out her's
from my hands? For I trusted not God
To the full in the hour of my need,
and my lips will not cleave to the rod
Of his wrath, and I fall in the
sand with the weight of the cross that I bear
Who has ever gone out with a burden of
pain, of remorse, of despair
Like to this? Let me stumble to death,
or through lifeit is equally well;
Doubly damned, what can death bring
to me but translation from Hell unto Hell?
