She might have continued rooted like the sapling, had he not dragged her away. It was the only outcome for hands which were welded together.
He was as steel to her more passive lead, but when she was not a painful lump condemned to bumping behind, and at intervals, against him, she thought to hear an insubstantial tinkling as she flitted over the uneven ground.
Always joined: it was ordained thus by the abductor become her rescuer.
That he had chosen to play the latter role was doubtless the subject of an unintelligible mumbling such as she remembered from their first meeting. On this present occasion she felt too dazed to help him out, but he succeeded at last in breaking into speech of a kind through his own efforts.
‘The crick,’ she heard. ‘… leave no tracks i’ the crick—’
Shortly after, she stumbled, and felt water round her ankles, at times up to her knees as she floundered in unsuspected potholes; sand, soothing to the feet, gave place to more deceptive mud, with the occasional rock or log against which she stubbed herself. She imagined the rosy veils the water must be weaving from her blood.
‘Do you know the way?’ she asked in the course of their silence, and thought he mumbled back, ‘I oughter know unless I forgot.’
If allowed, she would have been happy to subside anywhere in this dark world, since exhaustion was making their journey, finally her life, pointless. But he forced her on, and by degrees, sensing that it was neither will nor physical strength, but a superior mechanism which drove him, her mind and clockwork limbs learned to cooperate with his.
At last when light began to thin out the solid but no longer painful darkness (she had grown too numb to react humanly to the most vicious blows and scratches) she heard him say, ‘I reckon we’ll camp here for a bit in the gully,’ and felt at liberty to fall down where she was. She lay there as grey and indeterminate as the early light surrounding them.
She did not doubt but that her companion would know what to do next. In the circumstances she could not afford to be distrustful. Beyond her numbed physical condition, her blurred vision, and mere tatters of thought, he was chopping at branches with the hatchet he carried in his belt, driving stakes into the ground, building a shelter of sorts, low and shapeless, scarcely distinguishable from the living bushes. She saw that the bark cloth he had worn across one shoulder and through the belt, had been torn off during their flight through the scrub. That he was stark naked apart from the belt and a few remnants of feathers in his hair, did not, or rather, must not, disturb her. In her own case she had the satisfaction of knowing that the swathes of vine about her waist were to some extent intact, and her wedding-ring still where she had knotted it.
Comforted by what amounted to a major dispensation of grace, she dozed off.
She awoke only under compulsion. He was prodding at her with horny toes. ‘… if you want to get inside. We’ll be safer, anyways, for not showin’ ourselves.’
She should have thanked or smiled at him, but her face and voice had lost the power to do so. Yet she must summon up the strength to reach the hut since he made no attempt at assisting her. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt put out by evidence of what she knew to be uncouthness, but Ellen Gluyas crawled gratefully enough into the luxurious privacy offered by this shelter.
She lay aching, smiling after a directionless fashion, even when the entrance was darkened by her companion’s figure stooping and following her in.
Without any further communication, he lay down, turned his back, and was still.
She slept, and woke, and slept, and woke. The sun must have climbed high. She was conscious of a criss-cross of bird-song imposed on light and silence. Fingers of sunlight intruding through the green thatch stroked her body and that of the man stretched beside her. The incongruous had no part in the world of limitless peace to which her senses had been admitted, perhaps by divine compunction, until some invisible bird derided human simplicity with an outburst of ribald mockery.
Returned to a rational state of mind she was at once aware of her companion’s snores. The hut, moreover, was filled with a stench which might have become intolerable had she not remembered kneeling in her pinafore beside a fox’s earth. She too, would be smelling pretty foxy were she able to smell herself. She sighed, and snorted, and thought how foolish she must look, naked and filthy, beside the naked filthy man.
When he started a broken yelping, his body twitching, his free shoulder warding off whichever the danger pursuing him.
He sounded in such obvious distress she put out a hand and touched his back to break the nightmare.
‘It’s a dream,’ she tried to persuade him. ‘Jack!’ she raised her voice in a command.
But neither her voice nor her hand was able to restrain his desperate twitching, and she realized she was touching the scars she had noticed on his first appearing at the blacks’ camp, when their apparently motiveless welter distinguished them from the formal incisions in native backs.
He let out a single yelp more bloodcurdling than any of those preceding it, and she snatched back her hand and put it for safety between her breasts. She felt perturbed for having touched on an area of suffering he might have wished to keep from her.
Nor was she reassured by his calling out soon after, ‘… lay off, can’t yer? — ‘Twasn’t me! — I only give’er what she asked for—’ He fell to drivelling and sobbing; anything further was meaningless.
Then he wrenched himself round. He lay on his back, waking, she could see from the lashes risen on the lids, before the face turned and he was staring at her out of pale eyes, as remote as those of the dead.
‘It was a nightmare, Jack,’ she explained feebly, ‘which I tried to free you from.’
‘It was no dream. I could feel it. They’d strung me up to the triangle, and started layin’ inter me. I was in for a good ’undred stripes. Treadmill after.’
She began counting on herself as he spoke, but only got as far as two: it was her nipples.
‘Are you afraid’, she asked, ‘that I’ll not keep my word if you take me to Moreton Bay?’
His answer to that was but a snuffling as he ground his head back and forth against the earth floor of their refuge.
He is an animal, she decided, but for all that, tractable.
She put out her hand and touched him on the wrist. ‘You must trust me,’ she said.
He neither stirred nor answered.
Thought of her own husband’s not wholly justified trust made her avert her face so that her rescuer might not see it swelling.
‘If you have a wife,’ she found herself exploring, ‘you will surely understand.’
‘She was not what you would call my wife, but as good as one, in the Old Country.’
‘How she must have suffered losing you!’ He showed no sign of being moved; it was she who suffered for the woman separated from her convict lover.
Had it not been for his detachment, she might have re-lived against her will the last moments of what represented her real life. As it was, she only re-enacted them, brightly lit as for a troupe of actors on a stage seen from the depths of a darkened theatre, a woman stepping forward to drag a spear from out of the throat of a man lying wounded upon the sand.