The Recluse of Rattlesnake

“Live forgotten and die forlorn.”
TENNYSON.
Am I, living in or rather off the land of magnificent distances, entitled to claim as a neighbour a friend one hundred miles away? Sentiments obliterate space. With the lonesome individual who dwelt in an oven-like hut of corrugated iron on rocky, sunburnt Rattlesnake Island, and who lost the habit of living a few years ago, I was on social terms — terms of vague but cosy intimacy. On occasions of our rare meetings we found ideas in common. Peradventure similarities of environment focussed similar thoughts. Perhaps abnormal temperaments gave rise to becoming tenderness and sympathy. Whatsoever and howsoever the mutual sentiment, it is of the past.
The history of the Recluse of that undesirable island, a mass of granite and thin, unkindly soil is far removed from the prosaic. His was the third life sacrificed because of the lust of man to own the unromantic spot. He came to be known as “The Recluse of Rattlesnake,” but the pain of his life lies in the fact that his seclusion was not voluntary.
The earlier history of the “Recluse” embodies nothing very extraordinary. Men have fallen in love as impetuously as he. The prologue of the little drama in which he played the leading part was neither new nor strange. The originality came after, and then only was it understood how completely the divine passion had shattered his soul.
This, then, is the record of a part of his life — its dominating theme — its dramatic and pathetic ending.
A fine young fellow they were wont to call him — blue-eyed, fair-haired, sharp and shrewd and up to all the moves as becomes a man alert and successful in business. Truly a universal favourite, for he was good-humoured and amiable, full of wit and smart sayings. They say, too, that she who had pledged her troth to him was just as fine a girl as he was man. There came news to him of the death of a relative in Old England, with a summons thither to take his share of a fortune. He tarried no long time, for had he not left his heart behind him? But — and so the story goes, whether true to the letter I do not vouch — when he landed in Australia once again it was to learn that he had been slighted. His love affair hopelessly damned, he at once began to drift. The drift ended pitiably after half a lifetime — to him a lifetime and a half.
“God! we living ones — what of our tears When a single day seems as a thousand years?”
For a decade or more he lived on the Island, his resources slender and uncertain. Often he was on the verge of starvation. Once he told me that, driven by the pangs of hunger, he had trapped quail, which he had trained to come to his whistle to eat the crumbs which fell from his table during those rare times when he fared sumptuously. Then his tender-heartedness forbade him to kill them. But hunger is crueller than either jealousy or the grave, and one by one his plump pets were sacrificed. He had two faithful companions — mongrel dogs, “Billy” and “Clara”— and the wistful, beseeching inquiry in the gaze of those two dogs when he talked at them before strangers significantly showed how frequently and earnestly he talked to them when there was none else to share his confidences.
Now Rattlesnake Island, though close to a populous port, is one of the more remote parts of the State of Queensland. News travels to and from it at uncertain, fitful, and infrequent intervals. The Boer War had progressed beyond the relief of Ladysmith stage ere the Recluse of Rattlesnake knew that the Old England he loved so well and proudly was up and asserting herself. At odd times a sailing boat would call, but the Recluse was beginning to be what the polite folks benevolently term “strange,” and he would not always appear unless he knew his visitors. Then he was among the most agreeable and entertaining of men, full of anecdote and episode and quiet but true humour. A shrewd observer of natural science, he availed himself of unique opportunities for practical study. He conned first-hand the book of Nature, written large and fair, and illuminated with living designs. My one memento of him is the stiletto of a prodigious sting-ray. He had never seen a larger, nor have I nor any one to whom I have shown it. The weapon measures 9? inches by an average width of half an inch. The birds that came to his island, the reptiles, the frogs, and the fish of the sea — he knew them all — and could tell quaint, fairy-like stories of his association with the creatures that had become too familiar to be the least afraid of him.
One day a boat anchored off his bay, but the Recluse was not to be seen, nor was the punt that he used found, nor were there any recent signs of occupation about the exterior of the hut. In due course official search was instituted. We may neglect or be indifferent to a man while he is known to be in the land of the living; when he is not and until the mystery of his fate is cleared up he becomes the object of earnest solicitude.
In the comfortless dwelling was found a diary which told its own............