AT THE ELEVEHTH HOUR.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue XXI, 25 May 1895, Page 493

AT THE ELEVEHTH HOUR.

[BY

VAI HIRST,

AUCKLAND.]

I MUST tell it, doctor —now, before I die. I should have no respite in my grave with such a weight upon my soul. Sleep ? Rest ? I tell you I can’t sleep, I can’t rest. ’Tis twenty years since it happened, and I have been in torture night and day. Not a living soul was in the secret, save only Jem and I. And Jem is dead, dead in his prime, of consumption, you doctors said. But I know better. What sapped his life and made him old before his time is killing me—an abiding horror of a deed of blood.

*Do you know what that means ? Can you realise how it feels always to have one ghastly, bloody face before your eyes, now shutting out the landscape on a cloudless summer morn, now rising ghost-like in the impenetrable darkness of the night ? To have your hands, nay, your very life stained with a man’s blood ? To know no peace, no oblivion ? To have your life cursed by a crime which yet was not a crime, for God knows I had no thought of murder in my heart. It was Jem’s life or his —so it seemed to me, and in my fright I struck him that he died. We buried him, we two, and told no man the story—never till to-day. Peach ? Jem ? Why, man, he was my mate, and I had saved his life ' Many a bush contract we had worked out together, sharing the same food, the same hut, the same dangers, aye, and the same awful solitude.

‘ Now, when the great Overseer of all is soon to look into the contract of my life, I tremble. Surely he cannot pass it. Has it not been for twenty years a living lie ? Justifiable homicide do you call it ? That may be. But what did we know of the niceties of the law in those days ? We were but ignorant country lads, and ‘ a life for a life ’ was all the notion of justice that we had. I had slain a fellow-man, and if it should ever be known my life would pay the penalty, and so we swore to keep the secret as long as we both should live. Jem kept his word and died, worried to the grave by a haunting horror of my deed. lam dying now, and feel that I shall know no rest till I have made a confession of my crime. *We were bush-falling for old Thorne. He’s dead now is Thorne, and not a stone remains to mark the spot where Jem and I had built our little whare. The very tree-stumps that were left have rotted from the ground, and the train goes shrieking over the plains which in those days were covered with stately forest monarchs and an impassable tangled growth of scrub.

• It was a cold, frosty night in mid-winter, and we were sitting by the fireside smoking—Jem on a stool placed between the table and his bunk, and I on my bed stripping a manuka log and throwing the bits of bark into the blaze. The bunks, you know, on either side of the hearth ; the table between them, and the door at the opposite end of the room. “Do you hearthat?” said Jem suddenly, looking up at me with a startled face. “ What the devil can it lie ?’ I didn't know of course. So we both held our breath and listened. We thought there wasn’t a living soul within five miles of us, and yet we could hear steps and the snapping of dead twigs as they were trodden on quite distinctly. And there was a noise of scrambling over fallen logs and strange, uncanny groanings as of some animal in pain. “ It cannot be a pig,” I muttered, and as I spoke, the door was burst open and a man stumbled blindly in. ‘ Did I say a man ? Surely human being was never in so pitiable plight before ! His garments, rent and torn in all directions, saturated with water, and covered with mud, were stiff with ice. His fleshless limbs were quivering with cold. The skin of his face yellow as a dead leaf, seemed to have shrunk up, and his teeth were exposed like the fangs of an angry dog. His hair, matted and foul with dirt and moss, overhung his eyes, which, deepset within their sockets, shone beneath like little globes of fire. But it is no use. Words cannot paint the horror of that sight. We could not move or speak. We were stupefied, paralysed. We could only stare at him with wide-open startled eyes. For a moment hestood still, dazzled by the light ; then he tried to speak, but no words came. He mouthed at us ; he shrieked ; he beat the air with hands, lean as the talons of a bird. A bloody foam stood on his lips. He gnashed his teeth together, and his glittering eyes rolled hideously. * Suddenly he moved, snatched something from the table and sprang forward. The next instant he was standing over Jem, who, fascinated with horror, was looking up at him with awful eyes and face as pale as death. The maniac raised his arm aloft, and I saw a knife-blade glitter in the firelight. The sight of the steel roused me from my stupor. I jumped to my feet. With my whole strength, nay more, with the added force that terror lent me, I hurled the log I had been playing with full at his head. It struck him fair across the temple. He gave one dreadful yell of pain ; the knife dropped from his nerveless fingers. For a second his body swayed to and fro in the air ; then he lurched backwards and fell with a dull thud upon the floor—motionless—dead. ‘ That was the scene, Doctor, which burned itself indelibly upon my brain and marred for me all Nature’s beauties ; his dying shriek the sound which made me deaf to all her glorious melodies. A long punishment ! For twenty years to suffer all the torments of

the damned ! The very secrecy of it made my torture worse. I became a voluntary outcast from society, doomed to live apart lest I should babble in my sleep arid be myself the instrument of justice. ‘ Who was he ? We never knew precisely. A few days afterward a search party passed our hut. A stranger had been staying at Meldon’s, they said—a botanist. One morning he had gone out into the bush as usual and had not returned. Had we seen anything of him ? And we lied to them and they left us. Thev were close beside his grave as they were speaking. The man must have been without food for several days before he reached our whare, and want and exposure had driven him mad.

‘ That is the story, doctor. In the eyes of men lam a murderer. But what in the eyes of God ? I shall soon know. I shall soon know !’