At this point overcome by emotion, the old man fell on his face and united his bubbles with those of the receding tide.
As for Austin Roxburgh, he resolved to follow the captain’s example, and give thanks, but privately, to God (more private still to his more convincing ipse Pater) at some later date. The present was not auspicious: he felt stunned by a silence of the earth as opposed to the thundering silence of the sea; his ears were left ticking and protesting.
Round them shimmered the light, the sand, and farther back, the darker, proprietary trees. Where the beach rose higher, to encroach on the forest, great mattresses of sand, far removed from the attentions of the tides, were quilted and buttoned down by vines, a variety of convolvulus, its furled trumpets of a pale mauve. Mrs Roxburgh might have thrown herself down on the vine-embroidered sand had it not burnt her so intensely, even through the soles of her dilapidated boots.
She was, besides, growing conscious of a smell, of more, an obscene stink, and saw that she was squelching her way towards the putrefying carcase of what she took to be a kangaroo.
‘Phoo!’ she cried; then her wits took over. ‘Can it be used, though? There’s plenty game that stinks as high on the best-kept tables.’
Hunger effected it quicker than it might have been. Mr Courtney succeeded in coaxing fire out of some dry twigs and vine with the help of flint and steel he had found in a shammy-leather bag strung round the late Spurgeon’s neck. Roasting somewhat quenched the stink of putrefying flesh, and in those who waited, greed quickened into ecstasy.
There was not one who failed to claim his portion. The meat tasted gamey, as Mrs Roxburgh had foreseen, and was singed-raw rather than cooked. But Mr Roxburgh declared he had never tasted a more palatable dish, ignoring the frizzled maggot or two he scraped off with a burnt finger, and sat there when he was finished, sucking at a piece of hide as though he could not bear to part with it.
One of the men added to their comfort by discovering during a short reconnaissance of the adjacent forest several pools of only slightly brackish water, to which the party trudged, and scooped water by the handful, or lay with their faces in it, sucking up injudicious draughts. Mrs Roxburgh contemplated bathing her face and hands, for the stench of rotten kangaroo had been added to the smell of salt grime accumulated over weeks spent in an open boat, but on glancing round at her companions she suspected that such behaviour might appear ostentatious, and in any case, it could produce only superfical results. Since her return to land she had become aware of whiffs given off by wet clothes and the body inside them.
Seeing that evening was approaching it was decided to camp beside the water-holes, which in normal picnic circumstances would have provided an admirably restful setting, upon an upholstery of moss, inside this vast green marquee, its sides just visibly in motion as a breeze stirred the creepers slung from somewhere high above. The scene lacked only the coachman and a footman to produce the hampers.
Now at any rate Mr Roxburgh would have given thanks, in peace and quiet, after settling himself against a hummock, hand in hand with his dear wife, some little way apart from the others, had it not been for a curious noise, of animal gibbering, or human chatter, slight at first, then sawing louder into the silence.
Every head among them was raised as though functioning on sadly rusted springs, and there on a rise in the middle distance appeared one, three, half-a-dozen savages, not entirely naked, for each wore a kind of primitive cloth draped from a shoulder, across the body, and over his private parts. The natives were armed besides, with spears, and other warlike implements, all probably of wood; only their dark skins had the glint of ominous metal.
The two parties remained watching each other an unconscionable time before the blacks silently melted away among the shadows.
As soon as it was felt that the aboriginals had removed to a safe distance, the voice of speculation raised itself in the white camp: it was wondered what kind of dirty work the ‘customers’ would get up to.
Captain Purdew was of the opinion that ‘Christian advances should meet with Christian results,’ but sighed and added, ‘unless our sins are so heavy they will weigh against us.’ In any event, he sought to impress upon his command to refrain from opening fire on those who were no more than ‘natural innocents’.
Despite the captain’s injunctions, Mr Courtney and one of his men decided on their own account to overhaul the armoury of two muskets and a pistol, all probably unserviceable from exposure in the boat. They went so far as to load the weapons in case of an ambush during the night, and discouraged those who were in favour of kindling a fire to rouse their lowered spirits.
When he had exhausted his surprise at the black intrusion, and disposed of a dubious aesthetic pleasure in their muscular forms and luminous skins, Mr Roxburgh began to find the whole issue a tedious one. Reality had always come and gone in his presence with startling suddenness, and never more capriciously than since the wreck of Bristol Maid. So he could take but a fitful interest in the question of defence. His real, sustaining, and sustained life would only begin again on his return to the library at ‘Birdlip House’.
Even Mrs Roxburgh was inclined to look upon the loading of firearms by Mr Courtney and his henchman as an example of the games men-as-boys see it their duty to play. She lowered her eyes at last, and with a blade of grass helped an ant struggle out of a depression in the moss.
Peace and drowsiness began to prevail; an idyll might have been reinstated but for the cold creeping on them through the trees, and if almost every member of the party had not been racked by diarrhoea. There was a continual tramping through the undergrowth and silence, in which a private condition was made distressingly audible.
‘That infernal kangaroo!’ Mr Roxburgh groaned at one stage. ‘Why do you suppose you were spared, Ellen?’
‘Who am I to explain? Unless I swilled less of that water than some of you others.’
Mr Roxburgh came to the conclusion that it was minerals dissolved in the water, and not the gamey kangaroo, which had caused their indisposition.
But he seemed to hold it against her that she had not suffered, and during the night when his spirits were at their lowest, confessed, ‘I’ve often thought that I’d willingly die — there is not all that much to live for — but have wondered how you would manage without me.’
Mrs Roxburgh pretended she had fallen asleep.
In the morning the party, most of them considerably weakened, rose without encouragement before the light.
Captain Purdew — or was it Mr Courtney? decided they should return to the beach and there set course for Moreton Bay, which they must reach eventually on foot if indeed they had landed on the mainland and not an island.
Captain Purdew’s wits took a turn for the worse when it came to abandoning the incapacitated long-boat. Like Bristol Maid it lodged in his conscience and would probably fester there for as long as he lived.
Whereas Mrs Roxburgh, who glanced back once as they trudged along the beach, resolved to put it out of her mind, together with the sufferings she had endured while confined to its wretched shell. Or had she the power to govern her thoughts? She must cultivate a strength of will to equal that of her sturdy body. The latter mercifully withstood every material imposition; for her clothes were weighing her down, and her husband dragged on the arm she had offered as a support in his debility.
So they struggled on, the men for the most part barefoot, and every one of them a shambles of appearance and behaviour.