# Outlaw and Lawmaker/Chapter 31

CHAPTER XXXI.
"CAMPING OUT."
"It puts me a little in mind of a view from the Chabet Pass Algeria," said Lady Waveryng, "if you could imagine a coach road here."
"Not the least in the world," said Trant, bluntly. He did not now say "My Lady," having got over his first awe, being one of those persons who, too obsequious at a distance, figuratively speaking, become familiar to ill-breeding when the social barriers are at all lowered. Lady Waveryng looked at him a little haughtily, but did not reply to him, only saying, as she turned to Elsie, "It is wild enough for anything, anyhow."
Yes, certainly, it was wild enough for anything. The mountains rose so close that the sense of size was lost—Mount Luya and its spurs to front and right, the jagged peaks of Mount Burrum barring the horizon on the left, so that they seemed in a cul-de-sac closed in by gigantic walls. Behind them were the forest wolds broken by volcanic-looking hills sparsely covered with hoary gums, and in places with nothing but the weird jagged speared grass-trees, with here and there a great lichen-grown rock or cairn of grey ​stones peculiar to the district. The loneliness was intense. The men had set the camp on a little clear plateau, on one of the mountain spurs, with a ravine on each side, from which came the sound of a torrent rushing over stones. This torrent was one of the heads of the Luya river, forming in places a wide rocky bed bordered with dense scrub. All round, except from whence they had come, rose thick black scrub, up to where the mountains rose sheer—both Luya and Burrum being somewhat of the same conformation, their peaks girdled with ribbed precipices. But Mount Luya had this peculiarity, that the summit was flat—indeed the flatness seemed a depression, and was in truth the hollow of an extinct crater, now a lake. A lower peak, evidently also a dead volcano, stood out from the higher one like a huge flat-topped excrescence, completely surrounded, except where it joined the mountain, by a perfectly bare wall of rock and absolutely inaccessible. The pines grew up to this wall, but there were none above it—only the desolate grandeur of the naked rock. Beyond this projecting platform, as it seemed, the precipice shelved into the heart of the mountain, with the river running below it and another inaccessible wall of rock upon the other side narrowing into a V, so that the cleft had the appearance of a slice cut bodily from the mountain, and the hollow was black, with what appeared to be impenetrable scrub. Here was the Baròlin Fall, and some of the party fancied that they could hear in the distance the thunder of the waters.
A few white gums, with peeling bark and long withes of grey moss, had a spectral look against the pyramidal blackness of the bunyas and the spinnifex jungle. The camp fires looked cheerful in the gloom of this shut-in region, though the summits of Burrum and Luya were golden in the setting sun. Great boulders of rock strewed the little treeless place. Some rose like misshapen monoliths to a considerable height, some were piled as though by design one upon another, and smaller stones lay pell mell, grass and ferns growing between them. On the slope of the pinch were a few twisted grass trees, and Frank Hallett, ​with the bushman's forethought, went to these, and directed one of the men to cut a quantity of the grassy tufts, which he spread in one corner of the tent that was being put up for the ladies to sleep in. Minnie Pryde's squatter had already cut and fixed the tent poles and was spreading the canvas.
The pack horse was unsaddled, and from the gaping saddlebags protruded provisions and cooking implements. The tin "billys" and pint pots and jack-shays, strung together by a saddle strap, lay on the ground. The black boys carried a dipper to the creek to be filled. As the sun sank, the stars came out all glorious in a cloudless sky, Sirius like a far-off beacon and the bright evening star and familiar constellations, with the brilliant pointers of the Southern Cross dipping below the left peak of Burrum. The men set to work to gather dead bunya cones and sticks and dry logs to make a blaze that would give all the light they needed. But Frank Hallett had brought lanterns for the ladies' tent, and it was he who, assisted by Elsie and Minnie Pryde, spread the blankets and carried in the valises and hung a red blanket for a curtain at the doorway, while Lady Waveryng and Mrs. Allanby laid the table and unpacked the provisions.
And then came the merry meal. Oh, it was merry, in spite of Elsie's sad heart and Trant's melodramatic love, and the other love that was scarcely innocent between the two who to gratify it must overleap barriers. Elsie's knowledge of this secret love drowned the sense of her own pain. But was it possible that Lord Horace could feel for any woman a serious and absorbing attachment? Was his light nature capable of any tragic emotion? If not, Mrs. Allanby 's nature certainly was. Elsie watched the two. Her brother-in-law was haggard and pale, and evidently consumed by a hidden anxiety. Lady Waveryng noticed that he was unlike himself, and asked him if anything were amiss, and if he was fretting for Ina. Lord Horace laughed, and became feverishly gay. A quarter of an hour afterwards he was plunged in thought. Mrs. ​Allanby's mood, too, was fitful. In both were the signs of repressed excitement. They appeared to avoid each other. But their eyes were continually meeting.
It was a curious and romantic scene. The lonely night and solemn mountains, the black forest in which perhaps white foot had never trodden, the fire-illumined patch and grey boulders that seemed to belong to primeval times. And in contrast, this little group of nineteenth-century people, all young—almost all handsome, the outside band of stockmen and the two half castes and this inner circle—the men in their bushmen's dress. Frank Hallett and Trant stalwart and splendid with animal health and vigour; Lord Horace with his Apollo face and that nameless stamp of the old world aristocracy; Lady Waveryng, with the same stamp—highbred, and yet simple, the natural product of centuries of civilization; Mrs. Allanby—a perfumed exotic, not altogether wholesome; Elsie—wild, tropical flower, and Minnie Pryde—typically Australian, reminding one with a tendency for floral simile of a sprig of her own fresh native wattle.
Someone suggested songs. Trant's rich voice rose and fell on the luxurious night in those exquisitely passionate words of Shelley, "I arise from dreams of thee," his eyes fixed all the while on Elsie. It was to her that he was singing: it was for her that his soul was thrilling. Poor Dominic Trant! He was almost poetic when he sang.
Lord Horace's neat tenor went well with his sister's mild but cultivated soprano, in some of the Gilbert and Sullivan airs. They both liked modern opera. One song led on to another— Gilbert and Sullivan and nigger melodies, and old English glees, till somebody—it was Lady Waveryng—cried out that it was a shame and a treachery on this Australian night, under these Southern stars, and in this lonely Australian bush, not to sing one truly Australian song.
Then Trant lifted his voice again, in that favourite bush lament for the dead stockman, Lord Horace and the others joining in the refrain:—
For he sleeps where the wattles Their sweet fragrance shed, And tall gum trees shadow The Stockman's last bed.
And when the music ceased there came the wild sounds of the Australian night, the curlew's moan, the howl of the dingoes, the strange sad plaint of the native bear, which is like the cry of a lost child; and through all the clank of the horses' hobbles and the "poo-mp, poom-p" of their bells. It was a long time before Elsie, on her grass-tree bed, fell asleep, and then she dreamed unquiet dreams.
How wild and wonderful it was! They had left their horses in charge of one of the stockmen, and were threading their way through the scrub to the foot of Baròlin Fall. It was not quite so difficult as Sam Shehan's description would have made them believe, but it was still sufficiently hard going for even a stout bushman, to say nothing of delicate women. They tried to follow the bed of the river, diverging only when the water-side track became impracticable. For there were quicksands, slimy and treacherous, in which at any moment they might have got engulfed, and of which the half castes showed a curious knowledge; and there were giant trunks of fallen trees, and there were landslips and impassable rocks and impenetrable thickets of the horrible prickly spinnifex. And there was always the especial danger to beware of—the dreaded piora, of which they heard much, but which as yet they had not seen. They had, however, seen more than one dead adder, more dangerous than the pursuing piora, for squat and sluggish and of colour and shape resembling a bit of dead wood, it may be trodden on or kicked aside with consequences, alas, too fatal.
Lady Waveryng's stout hunting habit was torn in many places, and her smart, high boots were scratched and blistered. She was the most adventurous of the party, and kept ahead with Frank Hallett, between whom and Trant there was a friendly rivalship as to which should best guide the fair being committed to his care. Perhaps more than once Frank envied Elsie's cavalier, but Elsie insisted that, for the honour ​of the Luya, he must in no wise desert his English charge. She herself had no reason to complain. Trant was deference itself. Whatever there may have been of underlying passion, outwardly he was quite composed and showed nothing of the desperation of the day before. Lord Horace and Mrs. Allanby lagged somewhat. She was fragile, and he was unused to such rough climbing. But she had the spirit of race, and she would not be outdone by Lady Waveryng and Elsie.
From the spot where they had encamped, it was not really any great distance to Baròlin, it was the roughness of the country that made the expedition so difficult. They had left the camp almost at daylight, and some three hours of arduous walking brought them within sight of their destination. The noise of the Waterfall had partly guided them, increasing with every step they took. They had kept on the edge of the bunya scrub. Once, when Frank Hallett had tried to push his way through the thickness of the trees in order to avoid a stony ridge hard to scale, Trant and Sam Shehan had interposed in an uneasy manner, and had assured him that it was dangerous to venture within the mazes of the scrub, and that progress was impossible on account of the density of the prickly foliage. Frank had resented the imputation on his bushmanship, but Trant and the stockman carried their point, and they had climbed over the rocks of the river bed instead of going round.
And now, at last, they were at the base of the V. The mountain towered straight overhead. The precipice took a slight curve to the left, making another side nick in the mountain, and giving to the secondary platform the appearance of an island, or of an extremely narrow-necked peninsula. They could almost fancy that they saw the waters of a lake in the slight depression of the summit. But Trant, who had keener eyes than the others, declared that it was only the sun making a rocky surface glisten.
"By Jove," cried Lord Horace, excitedly, " I'd give anything to get to the top of that peak," and he went off to consult the half castes. But both Pompo and Jack Nutty shook ​their heads and declined to budge a step further. Even they had their superstitions.
"Ba'al, me go. Black no like this place. Debil-debil sit down alongside Baròlin," sulkily replied Pompo; and Sam Shehan pointed to a smooth, treacherous bed of sand, where the river course widened and wound round the precipice, and explained with a greater fulness of detail than might have been expected from his usually taciturn demeanour, that no doubt the tales of Baròlin Rock and the second Waterfall—the existence of which he flatly denied, having, he said, gone as far round the precipice as it was possible for human being to venture—and the legend of the petrified chief waking to lure his victims to destruction had arisen from the fact of the quicksand which made it impossible for man or beast to cross the river bed.
"Well, at any rate," said Lady Waveryng, who was more tired than she had expected, and not altogether inclined for further exploration, "this is well worth having gone through so much to see."
The waterfall, fed it was said by a subterranean channel from the lake on the top of Mount Luya was of no enormous height or volume, but could hardly be equalled in picturesqueness, as it stole from the black masses of the scrub, with the grand girdling precipice just above—a sharp wavy line against the sky—its colour a greenish white, the band broken into a foamy zig-zag midway in its course, and thundering in a cloud of spray into a round pool of deepest in tensest blue churned into froth where the waters met. The jagged pines gave a certain weirdness to the scene, and the utter absence of any sign of humanity added to its extreme wildness and desolation. A few giant gums hung with moss grew a little back from the river bed. Here and there was a funereal cedar, and the ti-trees on the lower banks were twisted and bent with the force of floods, which had left their mark on the precipice and had swept into the watercourse huge boulders of stone, great tree-trunks, and wrack of every kind. In places the river bed glistened with crystals as bright almost as diamonds. Close on each side ​the mountains rose, and always till the naked rock began, that dense black wilderness of scrub.
Pouches were unstrapped, and the half castes, who had been the beasts of burden, undid their rolls of provisions, while flasks were dipped in the ice-cold water of the pool. There was an hour to spare when the light repast was over. The Kodak came into requisition again. Minnie Pryde and Mr. Craig wandered off to collect crystals. Lady Waveryng, anxious to secure a root of a curious fern which she saw growing on a rock beside the waterfall, claimed Frank Hallett's services, and Trant turned to Elsie.
"Will you do me a favour?" he said with repressed emotion; " it's the last favour I shall ever ask you."
"What is it?" she asked, snatching at a straw of excitement. A dull dead depression seemed to have settled upon her, a nausea of everything. The watching of Frank Hallett's square well-knit figure as he piloted Lady Waveryng had got on her nerves. She was grateful to Lady Waveryng for keeping him. To have talked to him would have driven her mad with irritation. All the time she was in imagination seeing Blake. Oh, why was he not here?
"You know that I love you," Trant spoke with a deadly quietude; "I quite see that my love is hopeless. You are going to marry Frank Hallett in a month's time. For myself, I am leaving Australia, you are driving me away, you have to a certain extent spoiled my life, you owe me something, even if it's only indulgence of a sentimental whim."
"Well, tell me; if I can I will grant you the favour."
"You mightn't think me a man of sentiment. But I assure you that I have fancies that are not unpoetic. Do you remember speaking about the legend of the Baròlin rock, and that you were determined at any cost to reach it? You are at the Fall, but your keenness to see the petrified chief seems to have left you."
"Sam Shehan says there's no such rock," she answered.
"There is. I have seen it, it's exactly as you told me Yoolaman Tommy described it, a rock like a man's head with a beard and long hair of grey moss."
​"How did you find that out?" she asked, interested.
"Because I came here. I was determined that I, and no other, should stand with you before that rock. I meant' to tell you there of my love; you see, however, that I couldn't wait for that. Now I want you to let me bid you there my last good-bye. No other white woman will ever have stood there, Elsie," he went on. "There's a secret track through the mountain known only to one or two of the blacks. Pompo showed it to me. At one time the blacks had their mysterious Bora grounds here, and then something happened. I think from Pompo's description that it must have been an earthquake shock, and since then they have had a superstitious terror of the place and will never speak of it. They look upon it as the abode of the Great Yoolatanah, and it's sacrilege to give any information about it. But as I have told you, Pompo would do anything for me."
"Oh! go on. This is quite interesting. Is it far?"
"Not half a mile. We could go and come back before it is time to start for the camp. Elsie, will you come?"
She looked doubtful. The man's eagerness frightened her a little. And yet she loved danger. Why do you want me to go? May Minnie Pryde come?"
"Minnie Pryde!" He gave a gesture of disgust.
"Then Lady Waveryng. Think of her book!"
"No, to rob the whole thing of its poetry, it's one especial charm to me. I have thought of this and nothing else since we planned the picnic. I am thankful Blake is not with us," he went on, "for now I can have you to myself—no one to interpose. Oh, I know you love Blake; you need not deny it. He has been here too. And you, he, and I will for ever be associated with this wild poetic spot. Elsie, you are the one poetic element of my Australian life—you are the goddess of these wilds. I want you to be enshrined in them as it were—enshrined in my heart—in my memory. It is a fitting scene for an everlasting farewell." He laughed in a grim way, yet his face twitched with emotion.
"Well?" he said. "Are you afraid of me?"
​"No. I have often told you that I am not afraid of you."
"Prove it then."
"Besides," she added, laughing, "look here, Frank gave me this, and I have been practising. It is a precaution against Moonlight."
She showed him a tiny pocket pistol, which she took from under the jacket of her habit.
He laughed again, too. "You won't need it. And I don't believe you could hit a haystack if you tried, I promise that I won't even ask you to kiss me. I'll take your hand in mine, and I'll look into your eyes, and I'll say 'Good-bye, Elsie Valliant'——"
"No, no; not that," she cried—"not good-bye, Elsie Valliant. Only good-bye."
"As you like. Will you come. They are all going off except Mrs. Allanby."
It was so. Frank Hallett turned as he followed Lady Waveryng. "Won't you come with us, Elsie?"
"No," she said, and laughed. "Two is company, you know, and three is trumpery: and I don't fancy climbing the waterfall."
"I daresay you are right," he said, a little wistfully: "you must not tire yourself, and you mustn't lose yourself if you wander about. Don't let us miss each other, we ought not to be too long."
"Oh, Mr. Trant has promised to take care of me," she said lightly.
"And as I have been here before," said Trant, "and know the country, Miss Valliant would be quite safe even if we did miss each other. I could take her back to the camp."
Frank looked a little uneasy. "You had better stay quietly here," he said, "like Mrs. Allanby, who is too tired to stir another step."
Mrs. Allanby was reclining in a graceful attitude against a rock, and Lord Horace not far from her was in an absent manner prodding the crevices of a ​natural rockery out of which grew ferns and strange spiky plants.
"For goodness sake look out for snakes," said Trant to him. "This place swarms with them."