Page 303 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

safe with the Captain”; for, after drinking and joking with
them, as the Sir Oracle of some public-house whose hostess
he delighted to honour, he would disappear through a side
door just as the constables burst in at the back, and show
himself as remorseless, in his next morning’s sentence of
the captured, as if he had never entered a tap-room in all his
life. His superiors called this ‘zeal”; his inferiors ‘treachery”.
For himself, he laughed. ‘Everything is fair to those wretch-
es,’ he was accustomed to say.
As the time for his marriage approached, however, he
had in a measure given up these exploits, and strove, by
his demeanour, to make his acquaintances forget sever-
al remarkable scandals concerning his private life, for the
promulgation of which he once cared little. When Com-
mandant at the Maria Island, and for the first two years
after his return from the unlucky expedition to Macquarie
Harbour, he had not suffered any fear of society’s opinion
to restrain his vices, but, as the affection for the pure young
girl, who looked upon him as her saviour from a dread-
ful death, increased in honest strength, he had resolved to
shut up those dark pages in his colonial experience, and to
read therein no more. He was not remorseful, he was not
even disgusted. He merely came to the conclusion that,
when a man married, he was to consider certain extrava-
gances common to all bachelors as at an end. He had ‘had
his fling, like all young men’, perhaps he had been foolish
like most young men, but no reproachful ghost of past mis-
deeds haunted him. His nature was too prosaic to admit the
existence of such phantoms. Sylvia, in her purity and excel-

0 For the Term of His Natural Life