It was the way of the O'Haras to do things first and to consider afterwards whether it were well or ill that they should be done. Many a ruined O'Hara might have fared differently in life's battle had he thought before he acted.
Lady Bridget was no exception to the rule of her family. She had accepted Colin McKeith in a blind impulse of escape from the old hedged-in existence of her order, of which she was quite tired and where-in she had proved herself a failure. She had been attracted by the idea that he represented, of wide spaces and primitive adventures. She had always longed to travel in untrodden ways, and had loved stories of romantic barbarism. And then, too, some queer glamour of the man had got hold of her. She was intensely susceptible to personal influence—his bigness, his simplicity, his strength and daring, and the feeling that he was quite capable of mastering her, not only by brute force—which always appeals to a certain type of woman—but by power of will, by a tenacity of passion which she recognised even through the shy reserve with which McKeith tried to cloak his adoration. For she was goddess to him, as well as lady-love—and that she realised plainly. A look from her would make him go white and his large hands tremble; an unexpected grace from her would fill him with reverent ecstasy.
The thing happened one soft moonlit evening after dinner at Government House, when she had strolled out alone to a secluded part of the terrace, and he had followed her after the men left the dining-room. She was in a mood of tempestuous raging against her ordained lot. Letters had come from England that day which had irritated her and made her wonder how she could endure any longer her galling state of dependence. Eliza Countess of Gaverick had sent her a meagre cheque, accompanied by a scathing rebuke of her extravagance. Some cutting little sarcasms of Molly Gaverick's had likewise annoyed her, and she fretted under the miserable sense of her inadequacy to the demands of a world she despised and yet hankered after. Then Sir Luke had been tiresomely pertinacious over some small dereliction on Bridget's part from the canons of Government House etiquette, which he had requested should not be repeated. Rosamond Tallant had been tiresome also and had made her feel that even here she was no more than a dependent who must conform to the wills of her official superiors. Joan Gildea might have served as a safety-valve, but Joan was away in or near the Jenolan Caves, and could not be got at unless Bridget chose to throw up other things and go to her, which Bridget was not inclined to do.
The whole thing was a tangle. If only it were possible to find a way out that would not prove still more painfully complicated.
At the moment the ting-tang of a steamer bell bound outward to the northern coast, borne to her on the river-breeze, intensified her desire for escape from conventional limitations. Oh! to find herself under totally new conditions! The heavy fragrance of magnolia and gardenia blossoms seemed freighted with exotic suggestion. The tropical odours blended with the perfume of autumn roses, which made a trellis over her head and overran the balustrades. The subtle mingling of perfumes that float in the clear air of an Australian garden, when the fierce heats of summer are gone, gave her a sense of almost intoxication.
In fact, Bridget was in the mood for any desperate leap into the Unknown. Such was her unconscious thought as she crunched a spray of verbena in her fingers and inhaled the scent which had always a faintly heady effect upon her imagination. She was leaning on the stone kerb of the balustrade, vague emotions stirring her, when she heard McKeith's step on the gravel. Presently he stood beside her, his tall form, in the well-cut evening suit which always became him best, towering head and shoulders above her small stature. It was always a satisfaction to Lady Bridget, fastidious in such masculine details, that he was particular about his tailoring, and tonight he exhaled the scent of one of Sir Luke Tallant's excellent cigars. There used to be a good deal of chaff between them about one of his personal predilections which jarred a little upon Bridget—his pipe and, particularly, the quality of his tobacco. But he did not change it in spite of her chaff. She was beginning to find a certain mule-like obstinacy about him in unimportant details.
'If you object to this, what WOULD you say to the store tobacco smoke when I'm in the Bush?' he said. And then he had explained that, when camping out with the stockmen on their expeditions after cattle, he always smoked the same tobacco that he supplied to his hands. That was according to HIS rule of social equality by the camp fire, he said.... And where was all Lady Bridget's vaunted socialism if she jibbed at such a simple illustration of the first principles of socialism? Of course, Bridget had taken his banter in good part, and with a pretty grimace had told him she would get out a consignment of the stuff her Aunt Eliza gave at Christmas to the old men in their Irish village and present him with it.
He threw away the butt end of Sir Luke's cigar when he joined her. For several moments he stood watching her—the picturesque little figure in its dainty frock, the grace of the small head with its crop of untidy hair, the pale pointed face—chin resting in the cup of one flower-like hand, red lips—the upper one like Cupid's bow—slightly parted, strange deep eyes gazing across the dark expanse of river to the scattered lights on the high land opposite. Above, the Southern Cross, set diagonally, in the dark clear sky gemmed with its myriad stars.
There could be no doubt that Colin McKeith was in the grip of an infatuation such as he had never known before in his life. It staggered him. His breath caught in his throat and ended in an uncertain laugh. He stuttered in sheer awkwardness.
'I—I say ... you seem to be up in the clouds. You've been awfully down in the mouth—all through dinner. Won't you tell me? Is anything the matter?'
Bridget turned and looked at him. Her eyes were softly glistening, her lips trembled. He thought of her as of a child seeking sympathy in a strange land, where nobody understood her and somebody had been unkind. He was intensely stirred by her impulsive appeal.
'Oh! I'm worried. I'm so alone in the world. Nobody wants me—here or in England either. I was just wondering if I couldn't go off and join Joan Gildea.... But she wouldn't want me either, perhaps.'
He went closer, stooping over the balustrade. Magnetic threads seemed to be drawing them to each other. He wanted to say, 'I want you,' but dared not. He blurted forth instead?
'What is it? I'd cut off my right hand if that would be of any use to you. Good Lord! That does sound cheek! Only—you know—I'm big enough to bully the whole of Leichardt's Land from the Governor down—and I'd do it if you wanted me to. Just tell me what's worrying you?'
'It's everything—the whole set of conditions from the day I was born into them.'
'Conditions are easy enough things to break, if you're determined to do it. Look here—talk it out.... you can trust me.'
Then she recklessly set the flood gates open—laughed with tears in the laughter; drew a tragically amusing picture of her life—her anomalous position, her dependence, her hatred of the pretences, the shifts, the sordid bravado by means of which her impoverished Gaverick relatives clung on to their social birthright, the toadying of the Dowager, the worldly admonitions of Rosamond Tallant and her set—she used some of the phrases he had himself read in that letter. Had he been in any doubt as to its authorship that doubt must now be at rest. But he would never tell her of that episode. For one thing, his promise to Joan bound him. Like a stab came the remembrance of that man of whom Biddy had written—the man towards whom she had confessed a violent attraction—and who had behaved as a cad and a fortune-hunter would naturally behave. That he could have weighed money in the balance with THIS! She could not have cared for the fellow, or he MUST have thrown over everything else for her. Was it possible that she had cared—that she still cared?
'Tell me,' he asked hoarsely. 'Is it that you are fretting after somebody over there who—someone you can't marry? There must have been a lot of men in your life. Perhaps there was one who—whom you—loved.'
His voice dropped, as it had a way of doing when he touched the sacred subject.
'There have been a lot of men,' she admitted frankly. 'But there has never been one true Man among them. I've never really in my heart wanted to marry any of them, if that's what you mean—I don't like marriage—OUR system of marriage—a bargain in the sale shop. So much at such a price—birth, position, suitability, good looks—to be paid for at the market value. Or else it's just because the man happens to have taken a fancy to one, and while the fancy lasts doesn't think whether or not it's a fair bargain—on either side. I've seen people fall madly in love and marry like that. Then before very long the love turns to hate and it's a case for the Divorce Court.'
'Nothing of that is—love—not as I—and you—understand it.'
She gave him one of her inscrutable looks and then turned again to the stars. There was silence; Colin thought she must hear his heart thumping, but she seemed lost in her dreams. He put out his big hand and timidly, reverently, took hers, crushed verbena and all, as it lay on the balustrade. It rested like a prisoned bird within his; he could feel the nervous twitch of the little fingers.
'There's another system of marriage—a better one, I think—where the man doesn't ask for anything but the right to love until—until he has compelled the woman's love in return.'
'Compelled! I like that word. I could yield to my master. But he would have to prove himself my master.'
'Will you let me try?' McKeith said boldly. He grasped her hand tightly as he spoke; she gave a little cry, for he had hurt her. He was all compunction and gentleness in a moment.
'Oh, you are strong!' she said. 'I almost think you could make me do anything you chose.'
'No—that isn't what I meant.' He seemed trying to steady himself. 'I'm damned if I'd ever give up my free-will to anybody, and I wouldn't like even the woman who was my mate to do it either. But love—that's a different thing....'
'Your mate!' she repeated.
'You don't know the Bush idea of a real mate—shoulder to shoulder, back to back—no getting behind one or the other—giving up your life for your mate, if it came to a pinch.'
'And that's your idea of—love?'
'Something like it, only closer, dearer—a thing you couldn't talk about even to your mate—unless your mate was your wife—a flower that blooms once in your life, and that would never—if it were cut off—come to bloom again. Look here,' he said fiercely, 'have you ever felt for any one of the lot of men you spoke about just like that?'
'N—no,' she answered slowly.
'If you told me you had, I'd walk away now down those steps—' he pointed to the flight of stone steps leading from the terrace to the drive—'and you wouldn't see me any more.... But I'm not going to leave you now, I mean to stick on for all I'm worth, so long as I see the faintest chance of your giving me what I've set my heart on.'
'Yes—well?' She stared at him in a fascinated manner.
'Well—Bridget—I can't milady you. We're man and woman and nothing else to-night....'
She interrupted. 'I like you to say that. I feel now that WE, at least, are real—not social shams.'
'Bridget—you said you'd never found yet a Real Man to love you. Here's one.' He patted his broad chest with his open palm. 'I'm a rough Bushy and there's not a frill about me, but I'm bed-rock if you come to Reality. I'm a lode you've never struck in your life before. There's payable gold here, if you choose to work me.'
She laughed nervously, considering him.
'Mr McKeith, I'm sure that you're a perfect Mount Morgan, and you certainly have a most original way of putting things. Do you happen to own a gold mine, by the way?'
He drew in his breath slowly, as if he were considering the check, then he took her cue.
'Oh, well! I have pegged out a good many claims in my time and never got much more than my tucker out of any of them—though there was a show I came on once up the Gulf way that I've always been a bit sorry I didn't stop and look into. But rations were short and the Blacks bad.... However, that's neither here nor there, now. Gold mine or not, I'm positive that I shall be a rich man before many years have passed—all the richer for a true mate to stand by me.'
'Yes, of course,' she said hastily—'I wasn't thinking of that—whether you were rich or not, I mean.'
'I know you weren't. All the same, I suppose your grand relations would consider me a presumptuous boor for daring to lift my eyes to you. And yet, if I could make you love me, it wouldn't count for a blade of grass that your father was born in a castle and mine in a crofter's cabin.... Only—you know too—' he became timid and hesitant again—'you know it isn't that I don't feel you as far above me, almost, as those stars in the sky....'
'Oh don't, don't, Mr McKeith. It isn't true, you know. I've told you how I despise all that—all the life I've led.'
'Yes, I know. There's not such a difference between us when we stand as we are now, right on the bed rock. You're like me in having a strain of working-folk's blood in you. It's Nature you're hankering after—God's sweet air and the breath of the gum trees and freedom for your soul.'
'Freedom for my soul! How strange that you should understand.'
'I understand better than you might think. You want more than freedom to make you content. You want a kind of bondage that is the truest freedom—Love—a strong man's love, a strong man's worship. And that's what I'd give you, Bridget. Are you angry with me for saying it?'
'No.' She turned her face straight to him without any shadow of embarrassment. 'Mr McKeith, I'm too honest to pretend that I didn't half expect this. I felt you were beginning to care for me, and I was wondering whether I ought to let you go on.'
'Whether you ought to let me! As if you would be able to hinder it! Why, you couldn't stop me loving you. You might as well try to dam up the river Leichardt with this little hand I'm holding.'
She would have withdrawal it, but could not.
'No, no. It isn't strong enough—this tiny, trembling hand, which I could break to bits in mine if I wanted to. And could you prevent me from taking you in my arms—you wee great lady—and carrying you right away—away, out into the Bush where I'm on my own ground and where not one of your swell men folk would have a chance to find you.'
'I don't think any one of them would want to.' she laughed again tremulously. 'If it comes to that though, I fancy you'd have some trouble in disposing of me against my will.'
'Do you think I'd ever want you against your will! No. I'd sooner cut the whole show, and let you scorn me at a distance as much as you pleased.'
'I—scorn you! ... I wouldn't scorn you.'
'And even your scorn wouldn't kill my love,' he said, in that moved voice that was so unlike his ordinary utterance—'because there's nothing in the Universe, so far as I know it, that would be able to do that. Why, it seems to me that my feeling for you is as much a part of myself as the very blood in my heart. I knew you were the only woman in the world for me the moment I saw you—so slim and small and strange, the very contrary of what I'd always thought would be the kind of woman I'd be in love with—that day when you came walking along that gangway behind Lady Tallant. It was just a revelation, and then I bolted straight off to Alexandra City.'
'Which seems rather odd, doesn't it, in the circumstances?'
'No, it's this way. I had to take a few days for getting over the shock—for rubbing in the fact that what I wanted more than anything on God's earth, now I'd seen it, was utterly beyond my reach.'
'One might think I was an enchanted princess—a sort of Brunhilda guarded by a fiery dragon.'
'That's a good bit of how I looked on you—though I've never made much out of Wagner—he isn't human enough for me.... And how could I have dreamed then that you'd ever let me come as near you as I am this evening!'
'I must say, Mr McKeith, you haven't shown such extreme diffidence in approaching me.'
'Ah! Because you soon showed that Brunhilda's dragon was only pasteboard and blue fire after all—one of the shams you despise. I'm not afraid of him now.... Oh, it's wonderful.... It's beautiful....'
He took her other hand and held the two covered over by his own as he said with an odd solemnity:
'Lady Bridget O'Hara will you come away with me to the Bush, leaving everything else behind you?'
She stood very slender and erect, her eyes shining in the moonlight out of her small pale face and fixed upon him thoughtfully as if she were weighing his proposition. After a few minutes, she answered deliberately.
'Yes, Mr Colin McKeith, I will go away with you into the Bush, leaving everything else behind me—the old "Lady Bridget O'Hara" included.'
He gave an indescribable ejaculation—joy, surprise, triumph—all were in the utterance. Dropping her hands, he stooped to her and his arm went round her.
'Oh! Biddy ... darling.'
She knew he wanted to kiss her, and that he scarcely dared so greatly.... As his beard brushed her cheek, she shrank and moved a step from him. He, too, shrank, hurt by her rebuff.
'You mustn't be—ardent,' she said. 'You must give me time to get accustomed to—the fate I've chosen. You know the dragon isn't altogether a sham. He's got a few kicks in him—yet.'
On other occasions also Lady Bridget made McKeith feel that she preferred good fellowship to love-making. She was perfectly charming, always excellent company, and she had a sense of humour which delighted him, but she did not encourage effusiveness. She seemed to want to hear about the Bush a great deal more than she wanted to hear about his feelings towards herself, and appeared anxious to show him that she meant to be a thorough-going 'mate.' The phrase had taken her fancy.
There was not much opportunity however, for exchanging sentimental confidences. Everything was rush and hurry during the few weeks between the engagement and the marriage. It was plain that Lady Tallant wished to get the wedding over before she and the Governor started upon a tour of the important stations in the settled districts round Leichardt's Town, officially contemplated. Bridget had a shrewd suspicion, which she confided to Colin, that Lady Tallant was getting tired of her. Perhaps Bridget did not keep herself sufficiently in the background to please the lady of Government House. Her unpunctuality too often annoyed Sir Luke.
Another reason for not delaying the marriage was that the Leichardt's Land government was expected to go out of office on a Labour Bill, and that an appeal to the country would certainly follow its defeat. In that case McKeith's re-election would have to be considered, and an electioneering honeymoon in one of the out-back districts was an inspiring prospect to Lady Bridget. Then the preparation of a Bush trousseau needed thought and discussion. She had not much money, either, to buy her trousseau with. Bridget would have none of Sir Luke's suggestions of conciliatory letters and cablegrams to Eliza Lady Gaverick on the subject of settlements. She said she did not intend to cadge any longer upon her rich relative, and that she preferred to marry without settlements. Sir Luke was not satisfied with McKeith's views upon the financial question, and had some difficulty in getting him to tie up even the insignificant sum of three thousand pounds in settlement upon his wife. Colin pointed out that his capital was all invested in cattle, and that though things would be all right as long as there were good seasons, a bad one would cripple him, and he would need money to recoup his losses and buy fresh stock. Bridget took his view and Sir Luke frowned, but did what he considered his duty so far as the paltry settlement went. At all events, it was a satisfaction to Colin McKeith's shrewd Scotch mind that nobody insisted upon getting the better of him in the matter. He knew that Bridget never gave it a second thought. She was much more interested in the social and racial problems of this new country of her adoption, and especially in the blacks. What time she could spare from her trousseau she spent in reading books about them, which some of her official friends got her from the Parliamentary Library, and had already learned to think of herself as a 'bujeri* White Mary,' whose mission it might be to compose the racial feud between blackman and white.
[*Bujeri—Black's term of commendation.]
To Colin, knowing now the tragedy of his youth, she did not speak much on this subject. The time went with startling rapidity. The two were borne on the tide of Colin's wild elation and Bridget's more impersonal enthusiasms. They were like travellers steaming through strange seas, not knowing what they were going to find at the end of the voyage and too excited to care.
That was the way of Bridget O'Hara, but it was not the way of Colin McKeith.
Yet his closest intimates would scarcely have known him at this period. He was as a man bewitched, with intervals only of his ordinary commonsense. In these intervals the consciousness of glamour made him vaguely uneasy.
Had Joan Gildea been there she would have seen all this and would have observed signs of over-strain in Bridget—something faintly apprehensive yet obstinately determined. And Joan would have understood that when an O'Hara woman gets the bit between her teeth, she will not stop to look back or to consider whither she is galloping. Bridget kept herself continually on the go. Latterly, even Colin was warned by her nervous restlessness. When they were alone together, which was not long, nor often, her body seemed never still, her tongue rarely at rest. Sometimes her talk was brilliantly allusive; at others it was frothy chatter. One day it really irritated him. She had been fluttering about the sitting-room opening on to the terrace, which Lady Tallant had made over to her guest. An English mail had come in. She read him bits of a letter from Molly Gaverick and made explanatory, satiric comments upon those impecunious, aristocratic relatives who were on the fringe of the London smart set of which Bridget herself had lately formed a yet more outside part.
'Chris Gaverick has gone into the wine business, and they've taken a tiny house in Davies Street, Berkeley Square, and the Eaton Place house pays its rent ... You don't understand? ... No.... Molly and I talked it out when they were married. Of course, it seemed madness, with their means to take a house in Eaton Place. They ought to have had one in Bayswater. But it has answered splendidly. You see, they put their wedding presents into it and let it for the season, and managed to live rent free and have the use of other people's motors and all the going about they wanted without paying even for their food ... and no expense of entertaining, outside a dinner or two at Hurlingham.... Cadging!... In London Society everybody cadges except the millionaires—and they're cadged upon... You see, as Molly said, you can't entertain in Bayswater, or know the right people, and go about to the right houses, which is the most important thing for a poor couple who want to keep their heads up. Now the result is that Chris is able to bring in quantities of clients and gets a commission on all the wine he sells.... What's the matter, Colin? You look quite fierce.'
'And that,' commented McKeith, 'is an English belted Earl!'
'Irish—there's a difference. And are they belted—really? Isn't it a figure of speech?'
'I don't know, and I don't care.'
'But wouldn't you care to hear Molly's account of their visit to the Duke and Duchess of Brockenhurst to meet the King and Queen of Hartenburg? Molly is very sorry I wasn't there. She says that it would have made everything so much nicer for her and Chris, and that the King might have ordered some wine from his firm.'
She was teasing. He knew it, and it infuriated him.
'Oh, no doubt you're sorry too that you weren't there with the Duke and Duchess, and the King and Queen, and your cousins, the Earl and Countess,' he flung at her.
'They'll be your cousins too—by marriage. And if you ever become a very rich man and take me back to England, you'll have to "Chris and Molly" them and to give him a big order for wine....'
That mollified McKeith.
'And if I wasn't a rich man, and didn't give a big order, they wouldn't care a twopenny damn for me.'
'Molly mightn't—unless by chance you were taken up in high quarters and made the fashion—like Cecil Rhodes and "Doctor Jim," or some new edition of Buffalo Bill. Then she'd call you "one of nature's uncrowned kings." But Chris Gaverick isn't a bad sort, if his wife would let him be natural.... They hadn't got my cablegram about you, Colin, when this was written,' she went on. 'I wish I could have told the Queen myself. I'm sure she would have been sympathetic. And now I don't suppose I shall ever meet her again.'
He rejoined with clumsy sarcasm.
'I see. The Queen of Hartenburg was an intimate friend of yours—the sort of chum who'd have been likely to drop in any day for a yarn and a cup of tea!'
'She often did when she hunted with our hounds in Ireland, and it IS true that the Queen of Hartenburg was quite an intimate friend of mine—for two winters, anyhow. But I assure you, it hasn't made me proud, and if the Queen of Hartenburg bores you, let us talk of something else.'
She gave another glance at the last sheet of Lady Gaverick's letter and thrust it into a pigeon-hole of the writing-table, then came back to the long settee on which he sat. All the time, his gaze had never left her. She saw that he was disturbed.
'What is the matter?' she asked again, and sat down, a little way from him, on the settee. He turned sideways to her, bending forward, one large hand twisting his fair beard. There was a hungry look in his eyes, but his passing ill-humour had melted into a deep, adoring tendeness.
'Biddy—my mate—will you answer me a question—truthfully?'
'I believe I can say honestly, that truth is one of my strong points,' she parried lightly.
'I want you to be serious. I mean it seriously. I want you to tell me what determined you on marrying a rough chap like me? That letter—thinking of you among those grandees, you talking a language that's worse than Greek to me, brings the wonder of it home. As I look at you, the thing seems just incredible.'
'I can't understand why it should seem so surprising.'
'WHY! You know what I mean. It's not only that your birth and bringing up are so superior to mine, and that you had a right to look for a husband in a very different sort of position—I can see plainly that is what Sir Luke thinks....'
'I don't care—a twopenny d-a-m-n—as you said—for what Sir Luke thinks. I've got my own ideas as to the kind of husband most likely to suit me.'
'There's the marvel of it. For you must have had dozens of men wanting you. You are so beautiful.'
'Oh, Colin, I've told you what I feel about the English marriage system. And, PAR PARENTHESE, I'm not beautiful. I don't come up in the least to the artist's standard. My measurements are wrong. I'm too small.'
'That's rot. There's a fascination about you no man can resist—or woman either. I see it in the people who come here.'
'If I happen to have drawn them into what Rosamond used to call my mysterious sphere of influence—which I seem to do without knowing it. I'm not sure, though, that either Rosamond or Luke approve of my drawing the Leichardt's Town people into my mysterious sphere of influence.'
'I think, if you ask me, that Lady Tallant is a bit of a cat, and Sir Luke more than a bit of a prig.'
'No. You mustn't say a word against them.' It was not in Bridget to be disloyal. 'They've given me the time of my life.'
'When you smile like that, you remind me of a photograph of a picture I've seen—a woman, I don't remember her name.'
'Mona Lisa—La Gioconda. I know—I've been told that before.'
'Yes, that's it. Mona Lisa. People have written about her.'
'Reams. Some day I'll read you what Pater says of her, unless you've read him already—by your camp fire.'
For he had talked to her, as he had talked to Joan Gildea, about his readings and his dreamings under the stars in the Bush.
'Eh! you shall teach me about these new writing chaps. I don't understand your up-to-date theories. I've always gone in for plain facts—standard reading—history—great thoughts of great minds—old books brought out in people's editions. I'm up a tree—downright bushed when you begin upon your queer ideas—all those new-fangled religions and notions—Theosophy, spooks—about the earth being alive, and thoughts making a sort of wireless telegraph system—I do believe in that, though—to a certain extent. And your Brotherhood of Man! Bosh! We're all like a lot of potatoes thrown into a sack and shaken about by circumstance. And the big ones come to the top, and the little ones—because they're little—sink to the bottom. I've always wanted to be one of the big potatoes, and mean to be.'
Bridget laughed. She had a ringing laugh when she was amused.
'Oh! go on, Colin. I grant that you're a very big potato and I'm a very little one.'
'You know I didn't mean it that way. You're the biggest potato in the whole bag as far as mind goes, and you make me feel the smallest. You're so wonderful that the marvel of your being contented to marry me is a bit staggering. And that brings me back to my question, which you haven't answered.'
'How have I brought myself to the incredible enterprise of marrying an Australian bushman? Do you know?'—she became suddenly serious—'I have asked myself that question once or twice, and I haven't been able to answer it.'
The light of adoration in his eyes faded a little.
'I've been afraid of that,' he said slowly. I've been afraid that you might be rushing into the business without reasoning it out—weighing all the sides of it.'
'If I were, it would only be the way of the O'Haras.'
His blue eyes became more troubled.
'I've been afraid of that,' he repeated. 'Bridget—suppose—my dear, suppose it was to turn out a mistake.'
'Well, I've made so many mistakes in my life and lived through them that one more wouldn't matter,' she rejoined lightly.
'This one would matter—because it would be irretrievable. Suppose that you were to find that you couldn't put up with the Bush life—I've told you that you are letting your imagination and your enthusiasm run a bit away with you, and that there may be hardships you don't reckon on. For though it all looks to me plain sailing now, and I hope it will only be a year or two before I can put on a manager, and give you the home and the climate that are more suited to you, one can't tell in Australia that there may not be a drought or that a cattle boom may not turn to a slump—do you see?'
'I shan't mind in the least, Colin—that is, I shall mind immensely, but if there comes a drought it will be quite exciting helping you to drag out the poor, thirsty beasts, when they get bogged into the waterholes as you were describing the other day.'
He laughed.
'YOU—helping to drag out bogged beasts! Why! they'd drag you in.'
'Well, there are other things. Riding! I could help you to break in horses. All the O'Haras are good on horseback'—at which he laughed immoderately and told her that when she had seen one, Zack Duppo, on a buckjumper, she would not be keen to try that game. But it might amuse her to help cut out a few tame bullocks on a drafting camp if she had a good old station mount that knew its work.
She shuddered. 'I love horses, but I should run away from the first bullock that looked at me. I'm frightened of beasts, and, on second thoughts, I should not want to pull out bogged ones. And I loathe cooking—domestic work—in a house. It would be different out of doors. You've promised to teach me the first time we camp out how to make—what do you call them—johnny-cakes?'
'Ah! The first time we camp out together. If you knew how I've dreamed of that. Biddy, I've got plans in my mind for that—' He caught her two hands in a fierce grasp, and as he looked at her, his eyes full of love, he would—greatly daring—have held her close to his breast and kissed the provocative lips, as yet almost virgin to his. But she made a shrinking movement, and he, acutely sensitive, dropped her hands, and the love that had flamed in his eyes gave place to the dour look she did not know so well.
'Why do you always keep me at a distance?' he said, and drew abruptly away from her.
'Dear man, you mustn't be importunate. It—it's constitutional with me. I've always hated love-making at close quarters.'
'Always! Does that mean that you've been in the habit of letting men kiss you?'
'Colin, you are rude—brutal.'
'D'ye think so? It seems to me that I'm only as Nature made me. Biddy—if you feel like that now—how will it be when you're my wife?'
She flushed a little, but as her way was, evaded him.
'Perhaps I shall have grown more used to it all by that time.'
'The time is not so long—only a fortnight from now. And when you hold me off from the touch of your hand—the feel of your lips—well, it makes me wonder....'
She gave a little alarmed shiver.
'Don't wonder, Colin. Don't worry.... And oh! before everything, don't drive me—it isn't safe with an O'Hara woman. I can see that you don't understand women—of a certain type.'
'Oh! I grant you women haven't stood for a great deal in my life, and the few I've known well have been of the humble, human sort. But I do know this, Bridget'—his face softened—'I do know that a proud, sensitive woman—which is what you are and what I love you for being—is like a thoroughbred mare, out the first time in harness. You must keep your hands tight on her and let her go her own pace. I can tell you, too, the cart-horse kind that has to be driven with a whip and a "gee-up" all the time wouldn't be the type for me.'
She laughed gain, but shakily. There was an appeal in her voice.
'Colin, you've told me a lot about breaking in young horses, and how patient one has to be with them. Be patient with me.... Now, I'll try and answer your question—truthfully. I only know in a very confused sort of way WHY I want to marry you.... I think you must understand what a lonely sort of life I've led, really—and what a dreadful muddle I've made of it—Well, I've told you how I hated everything. And though I can laugh, and be interested, too, in Molly Gaverick's way of looking at things, and in her determination not "to be out of the swim"—I was just as determined myself, when I had the mood to be in it—and though one side of me hankers after the push and the struggle and the worldliness—yet the other side of me revolts against it, and longs to be washed clean of all the sordid social grime. There! I've felt about marrying you that it would be a new baptism into a bigger, fresher, purer life—do you see?'
'Yes—I see.' His tone was doubtful. 'You've tried it before—that idea of bigger interests—a different kind of life—in other ways, Biddy, haven't you?'
'Oh! in ever so many ways. Of course, that wasn't only in the sense of love—hero worship, you know. It was the schemes, ideas, plans for living in the higher part of one. Tolstoy, Prentice Mulford—that kind of thing.... Colin, you blame me for not GIVING; yet, all my life, I've been blamed for giving too freely.'
'For giving too freely!' He repeated sharply.
'You mustn't misunderstand me. I said it hadn't only to do with men making love to me—my ideas about a different life. It was my general attitude—expecting to meet something great and being disappointed.... Of course, I've suffered—suffered horribly—in my heart—in my pride. And I've often found that my attitude towards things brought me into difficulties. The average person, if it's a man—supposes that because one has such ideas one must be a kind of abandoned creature. And, if it's a woman, that one has some mean, ulterior motive. I've always seemed to be looking for largeness and finding only what was small. You attracted me because you're like nature—big, simple, elemental.'
'Now, what the deuce do you mean by elemental?'
'Primal, unadulterated—closer to the heart of life and nature. It's a sort of cosmic quality. You are large—your surroundings are large.'
He laughed, only half comprehending, gauche in the expression of his deep-hearted satisfaction.
'One thousand square miles, two thirds of it fair grazing country in good seasons, and will be first-rate when I've worked out my artesian bore system. Plenty of space there for a woman to swing her petticoats, in—your riding skirt it'll have to be.'
'There! You see!' she cried. 'COULD one be mean or small in such conditions? It's glorious, the thought of riding over one thousand square miles—and tapping Mother Earth for your water supply! It will be just what I said—a new baptism—a washing in Jordan. But you will be patient, Colin; promise me that you will be good to me, and not ask too much—at first.'
There came a note into her voice which intoxicated the man with hope and joy. But he restrained himself. He would not frighten her again.
'Good to you! Biddy—you know you're sacred to me—I'll do everything—I'll be as patient as you could wish until you get so used to me that everything comes naturally. You understand? So long as you'll trust me and open your heart to me, I'm not afraid that you won't love me, my dear, in the end.'
'I WANT to love you, Colin.'
She moved a little closer to him and put her hand up, timidly, to his shoulder. His breath came quickly, but he did not lose his self-control. He knew that he must go gently with her. She drew her hand down his coat sleeve and let it rest like a snowflake on his—a contrast in its smallness and whiteness to the great brown hand beneath. She looked at that, smiling whimsically, and he saw her smile, and reddened. But he did not know that she found a pleasure in the sight of his hand—scrupulously kept, the nails as well trimmed as a bushman's nails can be, while showing the traces of manual labour.
'How ridiculous they are together!' she said softly 'But I like your hand, Colin. It's different from the other men's hands.'
He was glad she said 'the other men's,' and not 'the other man's'. Through all the gusts of passionate tenderness that went out to her, there was always rankling the thought of 'that other man.'
They had only one more talk, in the real sense, before their marriage, and that was an unpremeditated but natural outrush of the vague jealousy which slumbered at the core of McKeith's love. It was on the last evening, and it made an ineffaceable impression upon him.
They were standing, after dinner, close together by the balustrade of the terrace.
It was a clear night, with a young moon, and the stars set deep in blue so dark that the sky gave an impression of solidity. The air was full of scents and of a soft balminess, with the faint nip of an early May in the Southern hemisphere.
He had folded her light scarf round the child-like shoulders. The touch of his big hand stirred her—it had not often done so in that peculiar way. It roused something in her that she had thought dead or drugged to sleep, and took her back for an emotional moment to a certain late summer evening at Hurlingham, when she and Willoughby Maule had stood in the garden together under the stars. There came to her an almost fierce reaction against that moment. She felt a distinct emotion now, but it was different—less tumultuous, and bringing her a soft sense of enfoldment.
She slipped her hand gently into McKeith's, and they remained thus for nearly a minute without speaking. He was the first to break the silence.
'Bridget,' he said impetuously, 'we're going to be husband and wife to-morrow. It makes me tremble, darling—with happiness and hope, and with fear, too. What have I done, a rough Bushy like me—to win a woman like you? Well you know how I think about that. And I don't believe in a man belittling himself to the woman he loves, though it's just because he loves her so that he feels unworthy of her. And then it comes over me again—badly sometimes—how little I really know of you, and of your life, and of your feelings towards the other men you must have had to do with—one other man in especial, may be, that you've loved, or may have thought you loved. That's what I want to know about, my dear.'
Her face was turned from his as she answered:
'What's the good of your knowing, Colin? Whatever there was is past.'
'But IS it past. Over and over again, I've started to ask you and have pulled back. Now it's got like a festering sore in my heart, and I'm afraid it will go on festering unless I'm satisfied. There WAS somebody in especial—a man you cared for and might have married if he had been a finer sort of chap than he turned out to be?'
She looked at him sharply.
'How do you know? Has Rosamond Tallant been telling you?'
'No,' he said, with complete candour. 'There wasn't a word of that sort passed between us—and I wouldn't have heeded it if there had.'
'Joan, then? No, I'm sure Joan Gildea wouldn't have talked behind my back.'
'You may bet your life on that. Joan hasn't said anything about whatever love-affairs you may have had.'
'Every girl has had love-affairs. I'm no exception to the rule. There's been no real harm in them. Let them lie—buried in oblivion. They're not worth resurrecting.'
'No, but,'—he persisted—thinking all the while of that letter—'Bridget, I must ask you this one thing. Is there any man in the world you care for more than you care for me? I know,' he added sadly, 'that you don't love in the way I love you—in the way I'd like to be loved by you. I know that's too much to expect—yet.'
The melancholy note in his speech touched her.
'I told you that I do WANT to love you, Colin—only I can't help being what I am,' she said softly. She looked up at him in the pale brightness of the thin moon and myriad stars. He stood with the faint illumination from the open windows of Government House upon his fine head and his neat fair beard. It intensified the gleam in his earnest blue eyes, while it softened his angularities and bush roughness, and as she looked up at him, she could not help feeling what a splendid fellow he was! What a MAN! So much finer than that other man to whom she had nearly given herself! Ah, she had had an escape! Under all his show of romantic adventure, his ardent protestations, his magnetic charm, that other man had been utterly sophisticated, worldly, self-interested. He had shown this in his money-grabbing, in his disloyalty both to the woman he had professed to love, and to the woman he had married for her fortune. Thinking of him in this way, Lady Bridget felt that in time she might come to care a great deal more for Colin McKeith.
He caught up her last words.
'Yes, I know that you WANT to love me Biddy, and I hope with all my heart and soul that you will—or else—' he broke off, his face darkening.
'Or else—what?'
'I don't know. It would be hell. I can't think such a thing at this moment. If it comes—well, I'll face it as I've had to face other ugly things. Don't let us speak of the possibility!'
She sensed some quality in him that she had not realised before.
'You frighten me a little, Colin. It's as if I may any day come up before something I wasn't prepared for; and yet—I rather like it.'
He smiled at her.
'I'm glad you like it, anyway. You seem to me such a child, Biddy, though you are always telling me you are such an old soul. I can't for the life of me make out what you mean by that.'
'Oh! A soul that has come back and back, and has lived a great many—perhaps naughty—lives.'
'H'm! Yes! Well, one life is good enough for me, and as we can't prove the other thing, what does it matter anyhow? I wouldn't want you in another life if you were going to be quite a different person. I want you as you are in this one. And so I reckon would any man who has ever been in love with you. Let us go back now to what I was asking you. Biddy, there WAS a man—one man that you did care for? You've admitted as much.'
'Yes—I suppose there was.'
'And not so long before you came out here?'
'I suppose that's true too.'
'Bridget!—do you know what's been festering in my mind—the thought that you might be marrying me in a fit of pique—a sort of reaction. Biddy—tell me honestly, my dear, if it's anything of that sort?'
She seemed to be considering.
'I don't quite know how to answer you, Colin—if I'm to be absolutely honest. And I'd always rather tell you the truth.'
'Thank God for that. Let there be truth between us—truth at any cost.'
'You see,' she said slowly. 'My whole coming out here—everything I've done lately, has been done in reaction against all I've done and felt before.'
'Would you have married that man—if everything had been on the square?'
'What do you mean by "on the square"? I've done nothing to be properly ashamed of!'
'No—no—I was thinking only of him, Biddy, did you love that man?—really love him?'
'I'm not sure yet whether I'm capable of what you'd call loving really. I had a violent attraction to him,'—he remembered the phrase—'I confess I did feel it dreadfully when he married someone else. Now it doesn't hurt me. And of course, he has gone out of my life altogether. I'm glad he has, and I hope he will keep on the other side of the world.'
'Well, let it stop at that.' He drew a breath of relief. 'I don't believe you really cared for him. If you had, you couldn't take it as you do. I'll never bother you again about that man. And, oh, my dear—my dear—it doesn't seem to me possible that you shouldn't come to love me, when I love you as I do—with my whole heart and soul—I worship you, Biddy. And I'll not say again that I'm unworthy of you—a man who loves a woman like that CAN'T be unworthy.'
He took her in his arms and kissed her. And this time she did not resist the caress.
They were married with much flourish of trumpets and local paraphernalia. Never before in the annals of Leichardt's Land had a wedding taken place from Government House. This one was regarded as quite an official event. The Executive Council—at that moment about to undergo the pangs of dissolution—attended in a body. There were a great many members of parliament present also. It became even a question whether the official uniforms worn at Sir Luke's 'Swearing In' should not lend eclat to the occasion. But Colin McKeith vetoed that proposition.
The bridal party drove straight from the Church to that same extemporized wharf by the Botanical Gardens which had been put up for the Governor's State Landing. It had been re-constructed and redecorated for to-day's event. Thus the embarcation of the bride and bridegroom, of the viceregal party and the wedding guests, in the Government yacht, which was to take the new-made pair to the big mail-boat in the Bay, was almost as imposing a ceremony as the Governor's Entry into his new kingdom. The day was glorious—an early Australian winter's day, when the camellia trees are in bud, and the autumn bulbs shedding perfumes, and garlands of late roses, honeysuckle and jasmine are still hanging on trellis and tree.
As the bridal party came down the avenue of bunyas, and the band played the Wedding Chorus from LOHENGRIN a feeling of dream-like incongruity came over Bridget. She laughed hysterically.
'What a pity Joan Gildea isn't here!' she said. 'Think of the "copy" she might have made out of this!'
Lady Tallant had conceived the original idea of having the wedding breakfast on the deck of the Government yacht, while it steamed down the forty miles between Leichardt's Town and the river bar, beyond which, in those days, large vessels could not pass. There, the repast was laid on tables decorated with white blossoms and maidenhair fern, under an awning festooned with flowers and exotic creepers, and supported apparently, by palm trees and tree ferns which had been taken from the Government Gardens.
The bride looked small, pale, and quaint in her white satin dress and lace veil, now thrown back and partly confining the untidily curling hair. Some of the reports described her as being like an old picture; others as a vision from Fairyland. She came barely up to her husband's shoulder as they stood together, and the adoring pride of his downward gaze at her, stirred all the women's hearts and roused a sympathetic thrill in the men's breasts. Colin made a good show in the regulation bridegroom's frock coat, and with a sprig of orange blossom in his buttonhole. There was no doubt that he was extremely happy. He gave a short manly speech in response to Sir Luke's rather academic oration proposing the health of the wedded pair. The Premier too made a speech, and so did the Attorney-General, who was best man. Bridget's bridesmaids had been selected from the daughters of the Executive with as much attention to precedence as though she had been a royal princess. All this had delighted the Leichardstonians, and when Sir Luke read out the congratulatory cablegrams received that morning from the Earl and Countess of Gaverick, Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, and one or two other members of the British aristocracy, the enthusiasm was great.
The speeches were over; the wedding cake had been cut; the river-bar and the liner were in sight, when Lady Bridget went below and changed into sea-going blue serge. The mail-boat, beflagged in honor of the occasion, dipped a salute. The Governor led the bride along the gangway, introduced the captain of the mail-boat, and there were more congratulatory speeches, and still more of official ceremony as the bride passed by a line of inquisitive and admiring passengers—fortunately there were not many—and down to the state-room prepared for her. Then the curtain seemed to fall that divided her from her past, and when the Governor stepped again on to the Leichardt's Land yacht, and the last farewell had been waved, Lady Bridget felt thankfully that she had become a private individual at last. Only just Bridget, wife of Colin McKeith, Bushman, now starting upon her voyage towards the Wild.
She could not get away from the bewildering sense of unreality. It dominated every other feeling. She did not even reflect that there was no going back; that her fate was sealed, and that the Bush was henceforth to be her prison or her paradise.
All the way up the river, Rosemary Tallant congratulated herself upon having done the best that was possible for poor Biddy the failure. It was all entirely satisfactory. She wove a halo of romance round Colin McKeith, and, after reading her laudation of him, and her description of Bridget's send off, old Lady Gaverick and the impecunious Chris and his wife declared to each other that Biddy had done as well for herself as the family had any reason to expect.
Eliza, Lady Gaverick, was highly pleased, though she would not for the world have let her niece by marriage know it. Being Scotch herself she approved of the Scotch bridegroom, and began now to think seriously of the alteration she subsequently made in her will.
It was a four days' passage to Leuraville the port at which the McKeith's were to be dropped. Not being a good sailor Lady Bridget retired to her berth when the steamer got into a choppy sea.
Of course she had no maid. Colin unpacked the cabin trunk and dressing bag and arranged things so far as he could understand his wife's dainty toilet equipments, and his mistakes made them laugh and got them over the first awkwardness of close quarter.
Then he said:
'Now I'm going to stow away my own traps. My cabin is just facing this and you've only got to call out if you want anything. Eh, but my word! Biddy, it's a fine thing to be marrying from Government House. The Company has done us both proud.'
They were landed at Leuraville on the evening of the fourth day. A tender took them off with the mails—as it happened, they were the only passengers for that small sea-township. Ordinary business folk going north, preferred the smaller coasting steamers which put in at every port. The postmaster, the portmaster, the police magistrate, and a few local notables were waiting to receive them at the wharf. McKeith greeted them all heartily and rather shyly introduced them to his bride. The local men were shy also. They mostly addressed her as Mrs McKeith. The police magistrate—Captain Halliwell, lean, dark, sallow, with a rather weak mouth, but more carefully dressed than the others, and with an English voice, called her Lady Bridget. He was a retired officer of the ROYAL ENGINEERS. She had been told and now remembered that men in the ROYAL ENGINEERS were popularly said either to be religious or cranks. This man was a Christian Scientist which he announced when apologising for not offering the hospitality of his house, a new baby having arrived the day previously, ushered into the world, he explained, by prayer and faith and without benefit of medical skill.
Bridget knew something about Christian Scientists. She plunged at once into faith-healing ethics with the police-magistrate, while Colin saw about getting the trunks off the tender. How odd it seemed to be talking about London and Christian science in a place like this!
Leuraville too seemed part of a dream. But her face soon lost its bewildered look. She became interested in her surroundings, although there was no suggestion here of savage freedom or romantic adventure.
Leuraville showed low and hot and ugly. A red sun near its dropping, drew up the miasmic vapours from the mangrove-fringed reaches stretching on either side of the wharf. Some light crafts were moored about. A schooner was loading up with cattle—wretched diseased beasts. Bridget watched them with shuddering repulsion—being hoisted up and slung aboard with ropes. The men at their task swore so abominably that the police-magistrate stepped up to them and remonstrated on the plea of a lady's presence. Bridget had never heard such swear-words. She was used to the ordinary 'damn,' but these oaths were so horribly coarse. Colin, who was asking local questions of the other men appeared to take it all as a matter of course. The men stopped their work to stare at Lady Bridget. They wore dirty corduroys hitched up with a strap over flannel shirts that were open at the neck and left their brawny breasts exposed. There were other loafers in flannel shirts, hitched up trousers and greasy felt or cabbage-tree hats, and there were two or three blacks of the demoralised type seen in coast townships. Now, one of the bullocks got loose and rushed blindly down the wharf, and Bridget shrieked and clung wildly to her husband's arm until it was headed back again.
Colin laughed at her terror.
'It's all right, Biddy. But how's that for a Bushman's wife. You'll see lots of cattle up at Moongarr.'
Moongarr was the name off his station which was to be her future home.
'I hate cows. Once I was charged by a wild cow and I've been afraid of them ever since.'
'That isn't a cow. It's Mickey Field's poley-tailed bullock being shunted off to the Boiling-Down Works on Shark Island,' said a local man.
The police-magistrate found his opportunity.
'You wouldn't be afraid, Lady Bridget, if you realised that cow as an expression of the Divine mind.'
Bridget laughed. Her sense of the queerness of it all was almost hysterical. She had the Irish wit to make the men grin at her prompt answer, which when it became bruited up and down the Leura, earned her the reputation of being sharp at repartee.
'But do you think,' said she confidingly, 'that the cow would be after realising ME as an expression of the Divine Mind?'
'Eh, you needn't think you're going to knock spots off my wife, any of you,' cried Colin delighted at the sally. And now he walked and talked like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came about—extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders, really trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet handkerchief doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour organiser addressing a knot of station-hands out of work—even a Chinaman—a Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a nondescript store. That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the battle cry of 'White Australia.'
All of them showed the deepest interest in the small, pale, picturesque woman walking by Colin's side.
It seemed incredible to Biddy that she should be walking like that beside the big Bushman, in this sort of town, and that he should be her lawful protector.
The street they walked up began from the wharf with two-storied respectable buildings—the Bank, the Post-Office, the police-magistrate's residence, some dwelling houses, within palings enclosing gardens—clumps of bananas, pawpaw apple trees, a few flower beds, bushes of flaunting red poinsettia, and so forth. There were stores, public houses, meaner shanties straggling along a dusty road that lost itself in vistas of lank gum trees.
The Postmaster hoped that Mr McKeith's lady would not find the hotel too rowdy. It was one of the two-storied buildings, and had a bar giving onto the street, and a veranda round both upper and lower storey. A number of Bushmen and loafers were drinking in the bar, and others were on the edge of the veranda dangling their legs over it into the street. All of them stopped their talk and their drink to stare at Lady Bridget. The landlady—a big, florid Irish-woman in black silk, with a gold chain round her neck came out onto the veranda and greeted McKeith as an old friend, holding out her hand to Lady Bridget. She took the husband and wife up to their rooms, a parlour opening on the balcony, a bedroom over the bar and a little room at the back of it.
'It's a rough sort of shop, Biddy,' said Colin, when the woman had departed. 'But it will do for a shake-down for to-night. If the steamer had come in earlier I'd have taken you straight up to Fig Tree Mount, where the buggy will be waiting for us; and after that we'll begin our camping out, and you'll be in the real Bush. But we've lost the train, and must wait till daylight to-morrow. You'll be tired my dear—and you must be feeling strange,' he added kindly. 'I'll go and have your traps brought up and leave you to fix yourself. I want to see one or two chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for stores and what's going on up along the Leura.'
Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated. His manner was more curt and decided—rougher than before. He appeared to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks. Yet she admired him. She did not dislike the roughness.
But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her own things. And the rooms were horrible—the meagre appliances—the course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted walls. And then the dreadful noise of the men drinking below in the bar! If this was the Bush! But Colin had said it was not the Bush.
He left her again after dinner which was horrible likewise—burned up steak, messy fried potatoes and cabbage, an uneatable rice pudding. He did not seem to mind. The result of his enquiries had left him grim and preoccupied. Yes, he had taken on the Bushman, and had more or less dropped the lover. The practical Scotch side of him was uppermost, and he appeared more disturbed over station affairs than at her want of appetite. She resented this unreasonably. She had not wanted him to play the lover in these surroundings, they would have been fatal to romance, but she had not bargained for his glumness. He was angry at the non-arrival of his draymen and the probability that they were drinking at a grog-shanty on the road. He would certainly sack them, he said if that were the case. And he had disquieting news from Moongarr. Pleuro had broken out among the cattle. What was Pleuro? Lady Bridget wondered, but she was not sufficiently interested in cattle to ask the question. And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a nuisance—going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who employed non-Union stockmen and shearers—in one instance, threatening to burn a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a month past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought.
It was dreadfully prosaic and boring. After he had gone out again to transact further business, Lady Bridget went to bed and squirmed between the cotton sheets, remembering ruefully the luxuries of Government House. Never in all her life had she slept between cotton sheets or washed herself in an enamelled tin basin. The noise in the bar became intolerable. She could hear the swear-words quite distinctly. They were disgusting. She tried to stop her ears .... Oh what a dreadful life this was into which she had plunged so recklessly!
Her thoughts went back to the old-world—to the luxurious veneer covering the younger Gavericks' petty economies—stealing the notepaper at country-houses for the sake of the address—cadging for motors and dinners—'keeping in' with the people likely to be of use; pulling strings in a manner which Bridget knew would have been too utterly galling to Colin McKeith's self-respect. And she thought of her father and his financial unscrupulousness! But none of these could have conceived of life without certain appurtenances of that position to which they and she had been born. The only one who was self-respecting among the lot was old 'Eliza Countess' as they designated her. It struck Bridget that Eliza Countess and Colin McKeith had points of character in common—it was true they both came from Glasgow. She thought of the parsimonious rectitude—which had of course included linen sheets and fine porcelain and shining silver—of old Lady Gaverick's establishment, of its stuffy conventionality—though that had been soothing sometimes after a dose of Upper Bohemia; and Bridget wept, feeling rather like a wilful child who had strayed out of the nursery among a horde of savages.
At last she could bear it no longer. They were singing now—a terrible thing with a refrain of oaths and GEE-UPS, and whistling noises like the cracking of whips—a bullock drivers' camp ditty. Bridget shudderingly decided that a row in Whitechapel could be nothing to this in the matter of bad language. She got up and paced the sitting-room in her dressing-gown, wondering when her husband would come and rescue her from these beasts. Watching for him she could see through the uncurtained French windows the starry brilliance of the night, and the moon now in its middle quarter. And down below, the houses and shanties along the opposite side of the street, the fantastic tufts of the pawpaws, the long white road stretching away into the ragged blur of gum-forest.
Presently a firm step sounded on the veranda and came up the stairs.
When Colin opened the door, he saw standing by the table, which had a kerosene lamp on the red cloth, and, even at this time of the year, winged insects buzzing around, and sticking to its greasy bowl—a small white figure like an apparition from another world, in its wonderful draperies of lace and filmy white, the little pale face framed in a cloud of shining hair, and the strange eyes wide, scared, and with tears glistening on the reddened lids.
She cried out at him.
'How could you have left me alone here with those horrible drunken men down there making such a noise that I thought every minute they would break in on me? And swearing! I've never dreamed of such dreadful language; and I can't stand it—I won't stand it a moment longer.'
'You shan't. It's abominable, I've been a thoughtless beast.'
He swooped out through the open door, down the wooden stairs which creaked under his wrathful steps. Bridget heard him call the landlady, 'Mrs Maloney! Come here!' in a voice of sharp command. Presently she heard him speaking to the men in the bar, not abusively, indeed almost good humoured tone, but imperatively.
'Look here, mates.' The uproar stopped suddenly. 'You're decent blokes I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well, there's a lady up there—she's my wife, and she's never heard bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps.'
Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say—one more word and out you go, whether you like it or not.'
On that, came the noise of a scuffle and the fall of a heavy body across the veranda. And of McKeith, once more breathing satisfaction:
'All right! I haven't killed him—only given him a lesson .... But just you understand I'm not taking any of your bluff. You've GOT TO GO. If you don't, it'll be a case of the lock-up for some of you. And if you do—quietly mind, there'll be a shout all round for the lot of you to-morrow. Drink my health and my wife's, d'ye see? Here Mrs Maloney, chalk it down.'
In five minutes he was back in the sitting room, looking rather dishevelled, and with his coat awry. But there was silence below except for the putting up of shutters, the sound of shuffling feet along the road and snatches of the bullock drivers' chorus which gradually died away in the night.
McKeith went up to his wife who was still standing by the corner of the table, and put his arm round the little trembling form.
'Oh! Biddy—my darling. I've been a brute. I'm not fit to take care of you. I ought to have thought of all that. But one gets used to such goings-on in the Bush, and they aren't bad chaps—the bullockys, and you've got to discount their lurid language a bit. I don't know whether it is that bullocks are more profane than most animals, but it's certain sure that you can't get them to move without swearing at them.'
Then, as she said, half crying, half laughing, 'I see. So this is my baptism into the Bush! You should have taught me the vocabulary, Colin, first.'
'Don't be too hard on me. You won't have this kind of thing at Moongarr. That's the worst of these cursed coast townships. I shouldn't have left you alone, but if I hadn't, we couldn't have got off properly to-morrow, and I'd set my heart on having things ship-shape for our first camping out. Everything's fixed up now—I've been wiring like mad up the line .... The buggy's at the Terminus all right, and I've got the black-boys there, and the tent and all that. It's going to be an experience you'll never forget. THAT'S to be your baptism into the Bush, my dear .... If only there's water enough left in the Creek yet .... But if there isn't we can dig for it. Oh, Biddy, think of it—a night like this—moonlight and starlight—MY starlight—MY star, that I used to look up at and wonder about, come down to earth. No, no, I won't maunder, I won't be a romantic zany—not till to-morrow night—I know the very spot for our camp ....'
He began to describe it—a pocket by the river bed—pasturage for the horses—then pulled himself short. No! He wanted it all to be a surprise .... She was to have just the very thing she had often said to him she would like best .... And now it was getting late and they must be up in good time to-morrow. Would she go to bed and try to sleep....
He took her to the door of her room .... Was she as comfortable as she could be here, anyhow? .... He knew it must seem cruelly rough to her; but it wouldn't be his fault in the future if she didn't have things as she liked them—so far as conditions would permit .... And after all, there women who enjoyed a wild life with their husbands. There was Lady Burton—and scores of other women—Biddy had asked him to have patience—and he meant to be patient—he worshipped her too much not to be patient. Well, she must be patient too with him, and with this queer old Bush which she would get to feel as much at home in as he did himself—in time.
He left her at her bedroom door, kissing her hand with the native chivalry that sat well upon him, and went back to his pipe and the waking dreams of an ardent but self-restrained lover who had practical as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with the smell of his tobacco—and yet did not seem to mind it in the least—coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her nostrils. She too dreamed—a vivid dream, but by some law of contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land. She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice—a medley of dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white green-shuttered houses—flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque pageantry, the merry music of the South. And though he had never been with her at Nice, Willoughby Maule came into her dream. They were doing impossible things—dancing together in the Carnival crowd, flinging confetti, bobbing and grimacing before the comic masks. Then the carnival scene seemed to turn flat, and to become a painted picture on the drop curtain of a stage, and she started up at the sound of knocks such as one hears before the curtain rises in a French theatre.
Her husband was at her door calling her in the grey of dawn. He had everything ready he said. She dressed fumblingly as if she were still in her dream, and they walked to the station-shed whither the baggage had already gone. The sun was only a little way above the horizon when they took their places in the bush train that was to bear her on the second stage of her journey into the Unknown. Such a wheezy, shaky little train, and such funny, ugly country! Sandy flats sparsely grown, mostly with gum trees, where there were no houses and gardens. Near the township there were a good many of these wooden dwellings with corrugated iron roofs—some of the more aged ones of slab—and with a huge chimney at one end. They were set in fenced patches of millet and Indian corn or gardens that wanted watering and with children perched on the top rail of the fences who cheered the train as it passed. Sometimes the train puffed between lines of grey slab fencing in which were armies of white skeleton trees that had been 'rung' for extermination, or with bleached stumps sticking up in a chaos of felled trunks, while in some there had sprung up sickly iron-bark saplings.
Now and then, they would stop at a deserted-looking station, round which stood a few shanties, and the inevitable public house. Maybe it had formerly been a sheepfold, abandoned when the scab had destroyed the flocks; and there were enormous rusty iron boiling-pots to which a fetid odour still clung, and where the dust that blew up, had the grittiness and faint smell of sun-dried sheeps' droppings.
At one of the more important stopping places, they had early lunch of more fried steak, with sweet potatoes and heavy bread and butter and peach jam. Most of the other passengers got out for lunch also.
There was a fifth-rate theatrical company cracking jokes among themselves, drinking brandy and soda at extortionate prices, and staring hard at Lady Bridget. Colin pointed out to her a lucky digger and his family—two daughters in blue serge trimmed with gold braid, and a fat red-faced Mamma, very fine in a feathered hat, black brocade, a diamond brooch, and with many rings and jangling bangles. There were some battered, bearded bushmen who seemed to be friends of Colin's, though he did not introduce them to his wife, and who talked on topical subjects in a vernacular which Lady Bridget thought to herself she would never be able to master. There was a professional horse-breaker whom McKeith hailed as Zack Duppo, and to whom he had a good deal to say also. There were some gangs of shearers or stockmen or what not, who appeared to be the following of two or three rakish, aggressive looking males upon whom the bushmen scowled. Union delegates, Strike Organisers, McKeith explained.
After that station, marks of civilisation diminished. The Noah's Ark humpeys in their clearings became few and far between, and the long lines of grey two-railed fences melted into gum forest. Now and then, they saw herds of cattle and horses. Once, a company of kangaroos sitting up with fore paws drooping and a baby marsupial poking its head out of the pouch of one of the does. Then, taking fright in a second, all leaped up, long back legs stretched, tails in air, and, in a few ungainly bounds they were lost to sight among the gum trees. Early in the afternoon the train reached the temporary Terminus, for the line was being carried on by degrees through the Leura district. This was a mining town called Fig Tree Mount—why, nobody could tell, for there were no fig trees, and not a sign of a hill as far as the level horizon—except for the heaps of refuse mullock that showed where shafts had been sunk. A good many years ago, Bridget was told, there had been a rush to the place, but the gold field turned out not so good as had been expected, and it was only lately that the discovery of a payable reef had brought the digging population back again. From one direction came the whirr of machinery, and there was in the same quarter a collection of white tents and roughly put up humpeys. Otherwise, the township consisted of a long dusty street cutting the sandy plain and, out of the two score or so of zinc-roofed buildings, twenty were public houses.
Lady Bridget had been very silent all day. To Colin's anxious enquiries she answered that it was enough to take in so many new impressions without talking about them. Through the crude blur of these impressions her husband stood out definitely, a dominant influence. She seemed to be only now beginning to feel his dominance. Yet all the time, she could not get away from the sense of living in some fantastic dream—an Edward Lear nonsense dream. The sight of the kangaroos in the Bush brought a particular rhyme of her childhood to her mind. She half said, half sang it to an improvised tune:
'Said the Duck to the Kangaroo,
"Good gracious! how you hop!
Over the fields and water too,
As if you never would stop!"'
She caught her husband looking at her in a fascinated, puzzled way, and paused and gave him her funny little smile.
'That's a very pretty song,' he said. 'But I can't make out what it means. What is it about a duck or a kangaroo? They're nonsense words, aren't they?'
'Nonsense—oh yes, frightful nonsense. Only it struck me that there's sometimes a lot of truth in nonsense. Listen now,' and she went on:
'"My life is a bore in this nasty pond,
And I long to go out in the world beyond.
I wish I could hop like you!"
Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.'
He still looked puzzled—but adoring.
'You've got no sense of humour,' she said, 'Don't you see that you and I are as incongruous as the duck and the kangaroo?'
'That is so,' he answered gravely. 'But I'll be a kangaroo with pleasure if it makes the Bush more attractive to you.'
She fell suddenly silent again, and sat gloomy and staring at the endless procession of gum trees as the train lumbered on through that fantastic forest, which made her think of all kinds of ridiculous things. And she was conscious all the time of his furtive watching from the corner opposite, and of his readiness to spring forward at the least indication of her wanting anything. It bewildered her—the strangeness of being alone with, entirely dependent upon this big man of the Bush, who had the right to look after her, and yet of whom she knew so little.
He did look after her with sedulous care. He had natty bush dodges for minimising the discomfort of the hot, dusty train journey. He manufactured a windsail outside the carriage window, which brought in a little breeze during the airless heat of mid-day. He contrived to get cool drinks and improvised for her head a cushion out of his rolled up poncho, a silk handkerchief and a large cold cabbage leaf against which she leaned her hot forehead. In all his actions she watched him with a curious blend of feelings. There was a satisfaction in his largeness, his commonsense, his breeziness. She liked hearing his quaint Bush colloquialisms, when he leaned out of the window at the small stations and exchanged greetings with whomsoever happened to be there—officials, navvies, miners, even Chinamen—most of whom saluted him with a 'Glad to see you back, sir!' ... or a 'Good-day, Boss. Good luck to you,' as if they all knew the significance of this wedding journey—which no doubt they all did.
Bridget kept in the background and smiled enigmatically at it all. She was interested in her husband both in the personal and abstract sense, and was a little surprised at herself for being pleased when he paid her any attention or sat down beside her. At moments, she even hankered after the touch of his fingers, and had a perverse desire to break down the restraint he was so manifestly putting upon himself. Once, when he had been sitting very still in the further corner, thinking she was asleep, she had looked at him suddenly, and had found his eyes fixed on her in a gaze so concentrated, so full of intense longing, that she felt as if he were trying to hypnotise her into loving him. She knew that if he were, it must be unconscious hypnotism on his part. There were no subtleties of that kind in Colin McKeith. No, it was the primal element in him that appealed to her, dominated her. For she was startled by a sudden realization of that dominant quality in him as applied to herself. In their courtship it had been she who dominated him.
He reddened guiltily when he caught her eyes. His long upper lip went down in obstinate resistance to impulse. But if he had kissed her then, she would not have rebelled.
'Colin, what are you thinking of?' she said, and he answered in a tone, husky with pent emotion.
'I was thinking of our camp to-night—of how we should be alone together in the starlight.... And of how I want to make you happy and of how wonderful it all is—like some impossible dream.'
'Yes. I've been feeling too that it is like a dream,' she replied gravely.
'A bit of nightmare so far, I'm afraid, for you, Biddy,' he said shaking himself free from sentiment. 'But this part of it will soon be over.'
He got up, pulled the blind down behind her, and readjusted the cabbage leaf under her head. Just then, the train pulled up at a station where there were selectors' holdings, and a German woman was lugging along a crate of garden produce. He jumped out and bought another cabbage from which he shredded a fresh cool leaf for her pillow. And at that they laughed and he relapsed into normal commonplace.
When she got out at Fig Tree Mount, he took her across the sandy street to the nearest and largest of the public houses which had 'Station Hotel' printed on it in big blue letters—a glaring, crude, zinc-roofed box with a dirty veranda that seemed a receptacle for rubbish and a lounge for kangaroo dogs, to say nothing of drunken men. The dogs took no notice of the male loungers, but started a vigorous barking at the sight of a lady. There was the usual bar at one end, the usual noise going on inside, and the usual groups of bush loafers outside. Several riding horses were hitched up to the palings at a right angle with the Bar, and a bullock dray loaded with wool-bales—on the top of which a whole family appeared to reside under a canvas tilt—was drawn up in the road. The beasts were a repulsive sight, with whip-weals on their panting sides, their great heads bowed under the yoke and their slavering tongues protruding. Bridget looked at everything with a wide detached gaze, as she followed her husband along the hotel veranda. McKeith, motioning to his wife to proceed, stopped to peer at the faces of two men lying in a drunken sleep on the boards.
'Not my men, anyway,' he said, rejoining her. 'But that will keep.' The place seemed deserted and in disorder. There were glimpses through the open windows of unmade beds within, and, on the veranda, lay some red blankets bundled together. Colin took his wife into a parlour, where flies buzzed round the remains of a meal and some empty whisky bottles and glasses. After considerable shouting and knocking at doors along the passage, he succeeded in arousing the landlady, who came in, buttoning her blouse. Her obviously dyed yellow hair was in a dishevelled state, her eyes were heavy and her face sodden. She had evidently been sleeping off the effects of drink.
'Had a night of it, I suppose, Mrs Hurst?' observed McKeith glumly. 'This is a nice sort of place to show a lady into.'
The woman burst out on the defensive, but McKeith silenced her.
'That'll do. Clear away all that mess and let us have a clean cloth and some tea. And I say, if you have got a decent room for my wife to wash the dust off and take a bit of a rest in, I'll be obliged.'
The landlady blinked her puffed eyelids, muttered an uncourteous rejoinder and went off with some of the debris from the table. Bridget laughed blankly. She looked so small and flower like, so absolutely incongruous with her surroundings, that the humour of it all struck McKeith tragically.
'Good Lord! I wonder what your opinion is of this show! Here is the beginning of what is called the Never-Never Country, my dear. Do you want to go back again to Government House?'
'No, I don't,' and she touched him to the heart's core by putting her little hand in his.
'That's my Mate,' said he, his blue eyes glistening. 'But I'll tell you what I think of your splendid pluck when we're quit of these beastly townships, and have gone straight into Nature. Now, I've got to go and see after the buggy and find my boys, and I shall have all my work cut out to be ready in an hour. You just make the best of things, and if the bedroom is impossible spread out my poncho and take a rest on that sofa there, and don't be frightened if you hear any rowdiness going on.'
The bedroom was impossible, and the sofa seemed equally so. Bridget drank the coarse bush tea which the landlady brought in, and was glad that the woman seemed too sulky to want to talk. Then she sat down at the window and watched the life of the township—the diggers slouching in for drinks, the riders from the bush who hung up their horses and went into the bar, the teams of bullocks coming slowly down the road and drawing up here or at some other of the nineteen public houses 'to wet the wool,' in bush vernacular. She counted as many as twenty-four bullocks in one of the teams, and watched with interest the family life that went on in the narrow space between the wool bales and the canvas roof above. There were women up there and little children. She saw bedding spread and a baby's clothes fluttering out to dry, and tin pannikins and chunks of salt beef slung to the ropes that bound the wool bales together. Then, when the wool was wetted, or when some other teams behind disputed the right of way in lurid terms which Lady Bridget was now beginning to accept as inevitably concomitant with bullocks, the first dray would proceed, all the cattle bells jingling and making, in the distance, not unpleasant music.
It was the horses that interested Lady Bridget most, for, like all the O'Haras, she was a born horsewoman. Though she was moved almost to tears by the spur scars on the lean sides of some of them—spirited creatures in which she recognised the marks of breeding—and by the unkempt condition of some that were just from grass, she decided within herself that there could never be a lack of interest and excitement in a land where such horseflesh abounded.
Presently she had her first sight of the typical stockman got up in 'township rig.' Spotless moleskins, new Crimean shirt, regulation silk handkerchief, red, of course, and brand new, tied in a sailor's knot at the neck, leather belt with pouches of every shape and size slung from it, tobacco pouch, watch pouch, knife pouch and what not. Cabbage tree hat of intricate plait pushed back to the back of the head and held firm by a thin strap coming down to the upper lip and caught in two gaps on either side of the prominent front teeth—there are very few stockmen who have kept all their front teeth. Stockwhip, out of commission for the present, with an elaborately carved and beautifully polished sandal-wood handle hanging down behind, a long snake-like lash coiled in three loops over the left shoulder.
Lady Bridget knew most of the types of men who have to do with horses—huntsmen, trainers, jockeys, riding masters and the rest, but the Australian bush-rider is a product by itself. She liked this son of the gum forest-tanned face, taut nerves, alert eyes piercing long distances—a man, vital, shrewd, simple as a child, cunning as an animal. And the way he sat in his saddle, the poise of the lean, lanky muscular frame! No wonder the first stockman seemed to the wild blacks a new sort of beast with four legs and two bodies. And the clean-limbed mettlesome creature under him! Man and beast seemed truly a part of each other. Lady Bridget O'Hara's soul warmed to that stockman and to his steed.
He was looking at the windows of the bar-parlour. As soon as he saw the lady, the cabbage tree hat was raised in a flourish, the horse was reined in, the man off his saddle and the bridle hitched to a post.
Now the stockman stepped on to the veranda.
'Mrs McKeith—or is it Lady McKeith I should say—I haven't got the hang of the name if you'll pardon me—Mr McKeith sent me on to say that he'll be here with the buggy in a minute or two.... I'm Moongarr Bill.... Glad to welcome you up the Leura, ma'am, though I expect things seem a bit rough to you straight out from England and not knowing the Bush.'
Lady Bridget won Moongarr Bill's good favour instantly by the look in her eyes and the smile with which she answered him.
'I'm from Ireland, Moongarr Bill, and if we Irish know anything we know a good horse, and that's a beauty you're riding.'
'Out of a Pitsford mare by a Royallieu colt, and there's not a finer breed in the Never-Never. My word! you've struck it there, ma'am, and no mistake,' responded the stockman enthusiastically. 'I bought 'im out of the yard at Breeza Downs—that's Windeatt's run about sixty miles from Moongarr, and I will say that though it's a sheep-run they've beat us in the breed of their 'osses.... Got 'im cheap because he'd bucked young Windeatt off and nearly kicked his brains out, and there wasn't a man along the Leura that he'd let stop on his back except me and Zack Duppo—the horse-breaker who first put the tackling on 'im.'
After the interchange of one or two remarks, Lady Bridget had no doubt of being friends with Moongarr Bill, and Moongarr Bill decided that for a dashed new-chum woman, Lady Bridget had a remarkable knowledge of horseflesh.
The quick CLOP-CLOP of a four horse team and a clatter of tin billys and pannikins—as Lady Bridget presently discovered slung upon the back rail of an American buggy—sounded up the street.
'There's the Boss,' said Moongarr Bill. 'Look alive, with that packhorse, Wombo.'
Lady Bridget now perceived behind the stockman a black boy on a young colt, leading a sturdy flea-bitten grey, laden with a pack bag on either side. He jumped off as lightly as Moongarr Bill and hitched his horses also to the veranda posts. Except that he was black as a coal, save for the whites of his eyes and his gleaming teeth, he seemed a grotesque understudy of the stockman—moleskins, not too clean and rubbed and frayed in places, fastened up with a strap; faded Crimean shirt exposing a wealed and tattooed breast; old felt hat—not a cabbage tree—with a pipe stuck in its greasy band; an ancient red silk handkerchief with ragged edges, where whip crackers had been torn off, round his neck, and a short axe slipped among a few old pouches into the strap at his waist. He jumped on to the veranda, clicked his teeth in an admiring ejaculation as he gazed at Lady Bridget.
'My word! BUJERI feller White Mary you! ... new feller Mithsis belonging to Boss. My word!' Then as McKeith drew up his horses in front of the hotel, Wombo and Moongarr Bill sprang to the heads of wheelers and leaders.
It seemed to Bridget that there was a change in her husband even since he had left her. He looked more determined, more practical, wholly absorbed in the unsentimental business of the moment. He had changed into looser, more workmanlike rig—was belted, pouched, carried his whip grandly, handled his reins with a royal air of command, as if he were now thoroughly at home in his own dominions, had already asserted his authority—which she found presently to be the case—and intended the rest of the world to knock under to him. There flashed on Lady Bridget an absurd idea of having been married by proxy—like the little princesses of history—and of being now received into her lord's country by the monarch in person. Her face was rippling all over with laughter when he joined her in the veranda.
'What! Another delicious black boy! He looks like a Christy Minstrel. I thought you hated blacks, Colin.'
'So I do. You've got to have 'em though for stock boys, and I keep my heel on the lot at Moongarr. Wombo and Cudgee aren't bad chaps so long as they are kept clear of their tribe. How do you like the new buggy, my lady? A dandy go-cart, eh?'
He looked as pleased as a child with a new toy carriage. The buggy was quite a smart bush turn-out—comfortable seats in front—a varnished cover, now lying back; a well behind, filled with luggage; a narrow back seat whence Cudgee—a smaller edition of Wombo—sprang down. Cudgee, too, stared at Lady Bridget and clicked his teeth in admiration, exclaiming:
'Hullo! New feller Mithsis.'
Afterwards, Lady Bridget remembered the greetings and wondered why the black boys had said: 'New feller Mithsis!' Who had been the old feller Mithsis? she asked herself.
McKeith sternly quashed the black boys' ebullition and told them to mind their own business. Bridget agreed that the buggy was first rate and became enthusiastic over the horses, four fairly matched and powerful roans.
'Oh! what beauties! I'd like to go and make friends with them.'
He was delighted. 'Good 'uns, ain't they? But wait and make friends when you're behind 'em. We've twenty-five miles to do before sundown. Got your traps fixed up? That's right. Here, Bill, take her ladyship's bag and stow it safely at the back of the buggy. Handle it gingerly—it's full of silver and glass fallals—not what we're much used to on the Leura.'
The stockman grinned and carried the dressing-bag—one of Sir Luke's and Lady Tallant's wedding presents—as if it were dynamite. Colin seemed anxious to impress his wife's dignity upon her new subjects. She felt still more like a queen of comic opera. He helped her into her dust cloak, paid the bill, cut short the landlady's sulky apologies—she had done her hair and recovered herself a little. Then he settled Lady Bridget into the buggy after the manner of a bush courtier—her feet on a footstool, the rug over her knees, a cushion at her back. His whole air seemed to say:
'This is the Queen, and I, the King, expect that proper homage be paid her.'
The loafers at the bar all came out to see the start. The family on the top of the bullock-dray peered forth from under the tilt. The barkeeper shouted, 'Good luck to you and your lady, Mr McKeith.' The drunken reprobates, awakened from their slumber on the boards, called out, too, 'Goo-luksh!' There was an attempt at a cheer, but before McKeith had got out his answering, 'Thank ye—Good day, mates,' a shower of opprobrious epithets rained upon him from a little band of discontented bush rowdies—the advance guard of that same Union delegate who had come up with them in the train from Leuraville.
Three of these men lurched on to the bar veranda, and, so to speak, took the stage. In front was a stumpily-built bullock driver with a red, truculent face, a ragged carrotty beard and inflamed narrow-ridded eyes. A little to the rear stood a lanky, muscular bushman in very dirty moleskins, with a smooth loose-lipped face, no eyelashes, and a scowling forehead, who was evidently the worse for drink; next to him, a shorter man of the drover type, older, eagle-beaked and with sinister, foxy eyes. This one hailed McKeith.
'Yah! Look at him and his spanking team! What price honest labour, you blamed scab of a squatter? Just you wait a bit. It'll be our turn soon to burn all you blanked capitalists off the Leura.'
The lanky bushman took up the jeering note.
'Pretty flash turn-out, ain't it! My word, you think yourself a bloated fine gentleman now you've married into the British hairystocracy, don't you, Mister Colin McKeith? You can take it from us, boys, he's the meanest cuss that ever downed a harmless nigger.... Ask him what the twenty-five notches on his gun stand for?'
'And I tell YOU what it is, Steve Baines. There'll be another notch on my gun, and it won't be for a nigger, if you give me any more of your insolence,' said McKeith coolly. 'Get out of the way, men. Let the horses go, Cudgee. Ready, Biddy?'
But Cudgee, out of malice or stupidity, did not let the roans go or else someone else put a restraining hand on the reins. The man with the ragged beard roared out.
'Ho, you think you're going to ride over us!—you and your fine ladyship! Wot do we care about the British hairystocracy. What we're asking for is the rights of labour, and we mean to have 'em. Do you want to know what he's done to us boys? Fired us out straight away cos we was 'avin' a bit of a spell and a drink to keep the life in us after we'd close up killed ourselves lifting that there ladyship's blanked hundred-ton weight of pianner on to the dray....'
Moongarr Bill's chivalrous instinct flamed to a counter attack. He had just mounted, but swung down from his saddle and made a rush at the speaker. McKeith's stern voice stopped him.
'Don't be a fool, Bill. Let the brutes alone and push on with the pack. This is not the time for a row. As for you, Jim Steadbolt—you know me, and you know that if this was any other sort of occasion, you'd pay on the nail for your infernal cheek.... Leave go of those reins. D'ye hear'; for the man of the ragged beard was jerking the near leader's bit and putting the mettlesome animal on its haunches.
'Damn you! Let go.'
He leaned forward to strike at Steadbolt with his riding whip, but the lash had caught round the pole-bar of the buggy, and he could not extricate it. Bridget tried to help him. He turned to her for an instant, a soft gleam of tenderness shining through the steely anger on his face.
'No. Keep still, my dear. Don't be frightened.'
'I frightened!' She gave a little laugh. Her form stiffened. The small pale face poked forward between the folds of her motor veil, and all the O'Hara spirit flashed as she spoke to the group of malcontents.
'How dare you! Stand back. I thought Australian men were men, and that they didn't insult women.'
There was an uproar in the veranda, and more cries of 'Shame, Steadbolt, you! ... You just git, Gumsucker Steve. We ain't got no use for you, Micky Phayle.... Can't you see a lady as is a lady?' sounded from the bar and parlour. It was the landlady who asked the last question. The two reprobates who had been asleep, lunged off the veranda, and made a feeble assault on Steadbolt, who still clung to the reins. The man, lashed to fury by the scorn ringing in Lady Bridget's voice, made a last envenomed attack.
'It ain't us GENUINE Australians that insults you.... Takes a mongrel Scotchy for that.... Say, Ladyship, just you ask your husband what a sort of an insult he's got ready for YOU up at his Bachelor's Quarters at Moongarr.'
The words had not left his mouth when McKeith's driving whip whizzed in the air and raised blood on the speaker's cheek. Steadbolt dropped his hold of the roan leader's bridle and fell back screaming imprecations. At a touch, the buggy-horses bounded forward.
'Sit tight, Biddy,' said her husband. 'Up you get, Cudgee,' he shouted. The black boy leaped to the back-seat, and in a moment the buggy swerved by the bullock-dray that was drawn up a little further down the road, and the excited horses galloped past the nineteen public houses and the zinc-roofed shanties, past the new quarter of tents and whirring machinery, past the deserted shafts and desolate mullock heaps, then way out along the sandy wheel-track into the unpopulated Bush.
For the first mile scarcely a word was exchanged between husband and wife. The horses were fresh and McKeith had enough to do to keep them from bolting. Moreover, even in emotional phases, he was always silent while chewing the cud of his reflections. Bridget was thinking, too. She had an uneasy sense of startlement, without exactly knowing why she felt startled in that inward way. It was as though some great obscene bird of flight had brushed her with its wings, and brought vaguely to her consciousness unpleasant possibilities. But presently she became interested in watching Colin's handling of the team. She had often sat behind such a team, but never beside such a splendid whip. Impulsively she made some such remark, and he looked down at her, the hard face breaking into a smile.
'That's good.... Wait a bit, my dear, until they've steadied down again.... Y'see they take a lot of driving, and I don't want to lay an accident on top of that unholy shindy....' He spoke in jerks. The roans were inclined to 'show nasty' as Moongarr Bill came abreast of them, and Wombo's pack jingled behind. McKeith gave Moongarr Bill directions about the camp in Bush lingo, which again turned Bridget's thoughts. The black boy and the stockman spurred on as the roans slackened pace. McKeith was able to relax the strain.
'My word! we scooted pretty quick out of that piece of scenery,' he said. 'I felt downright mad at your being let in for such a disgraceful bit of business. I hadn't time to tell you that I'd sacked those men half an hour before. Found them in the lowest of the grog shanties, their horses not looked after, dray only half loaded, and the three of them—Gumsucker Steve was to have come and taken off our leaders when we got into broken country—thick with the Union delegates and sticking for higher wages. I paid them off and filled their places on the spot with two chaps off a wool-drive.... So I left the brutes vowing vengeance, and I suppose they thought they'd lose no time in giving me a taste of it.... Well, they're no loss.' He had been explaining things in jerks while he brought the team to an harmonious jog-trot along a piece of uneven road. 'That fellow Steadbolt is a wrong 'un—not good even at his own job of wood and water joey—which means, my dear, the odd cart-driving on a place—and not to be trusted within ten miles of a public house.'
Lady Bridget asked suddenly:
'I want to know, Colin—what did that man mean by saying you had an insult ready for me at your Bachelor's Quarters? What insult?'
It seemed as though blue fire leaped from McKeith's eyes.
'Insult! Good God! Biddy you can't hold me responsible for the foul insinuations of a beast like that. Insult YOU! my wife!'
The passionate tenderness thrilling his voice, the honest wrath and bewilderment in his face must have silenced any doubt, had doubt existed in Lady Bridget's mind.
'I don't know, Colin. I don't even know what Bachelors' Quarters mean. Have you an army of Bachelors at Moongarr, and what do they do when they're at home?'
He laughed. 'It's a shanty I put up for the new-chums when I've got any—and for the gentlemen-sun-downers that come along, and visitors that I don't want to be bothered with at the House. There's a woman up there....' He stopped suddenly and his face grew grim again. 'That's it, I suppose—I'm sorry I didn't sling the whip harder and cut the fellow's cheek open. I would if I'd thought....!'
He stopped again.
'What woman? Have I a rival? This is becoming dramatic!' Lady Bridget's voice was amusedly ironic, but she carried her head erect. 'Tell me about the woman at the Bachelors' Quarters, Colin.'
'There's nothing to tell, except that's she's the widow of a man who went up with me on my last Big Bight expedition, and was killed—partly through his own, and partly through my, fault. That's why I've made a point of looking after her, and I built my Bachelor's Quarters chiefly to give her a job. I thought she was too young and too good looking to be drawing grog for diggers at Fig Tree Mount—which was what she set out doing.'
'I see.... So she's young—and handsome.'
'Oh, in a coarse sort of way.... No, I wouldn't say that; she's rather refined for her upbringing. Anyway, Steadbolt as well as a lot of other men fell in love with her—Steadbolt was pretty well off his head over it. She wouldn't have him at any price—naturally—and I had to give the fellow work outside the head-station to keep him away from her. That was before I went south. Very likely he's been trying it on again, and knew I should have to get rid of him as soon as I came back.'
'Why doesn't the woman marry again?'
McKeith shrugged. 'Too jolly comfortable perhaps—or perhaps the right man hasn't turned up. Florrie Hensor is several cuts above a malingering lout like Steadbolt. Well there, poor devil! Maybe, it's not unnatural that I should feel a sneaking sympathy for an unsuccessful lover. That abominable lie was a bit too strong though—and before you! The man must have been downright mad from drink and fury and bitterness. It—it's all funny—isn't it? One of the queer sides of the Bush. Good old Bush! I am glad to be back in it again, Biddy.'
He lifted his head and seemed to draw in the strong odour of the gum trees and the pure vitality of the weltering sun. His anger appeared to have left only compunction behind it. And again he begged her to forgive him for having subjected her to an experience so disagreeable. They were on a stretch of clear road now, and the roans trotted pleasantly along. Lady Bridget took up his words.
'Yes, it's all funny—that kind of thing—in this setting.... I never supposed that I should be howled at by a revolutionary mob in the Australian Bush.... A BAS LES ARISTOCRATS. It's quite exciting. I think I should have enjoyed the Reign of Terror.'
'Eh! You're only frightened of four-footed beasts. If you'd lived then, you'd have gone up to the block with that smile on your lips, and the proud turn of your little head—just as I used to dream of you...'
'Of ME!'
'You don't know—I'll tell you some day. I remember talking to Joan Gildea once.... It's queer.... But never mind now. D'ye like this, Biddy?'
'I love it. I wish we could drive on through the forest all day and all night—a dream drive. I think I might be able to place myself at the end of it.'
'To place yourself!'
'I've never been able to find my true pivot inside. All my life I've been howling in my soul and haven't known what I was howling for. I thought to-day that you might teach me.'
'Is it only to-day that you have thought that?' he said wistfully. 'Well, anyway, I'm glad of it.'
'Colin,' she said abruptly, 'wasn't it funking a little bit, don't you think—running away?'
'No—not with YOU beside me. You'll have other opportunities for seeing whether I've got much of the funker in me. No doubt those brutes will give trouble some time.'
'What can they do?'
'Fire my run—spoil my cattle sales—get hold of my stockmen....But I'm not so badly off as my "sheep" neighbours at Breeza Downs. They've got to have their shearing done.... Though I've had a lot of bother to-day,' his face became gloomy, 'and I foresee more ahead.'
She asked what other sort of trouble.
'Why! there's been no rain at Moongarr since I left it five months ago. And Pleuro means innoculation and short sales.... Ah well! ...'
He flicked the wheelers gently. 'Shake it up, Alexander! Look alive, Roxalana.... I named 'em when I was reading ROLLIN'S ANCIENT HISTORY, my dear ... my dear!' He looked down at the little woman by his side with deep tenderness in his blue eyes and a smile that banished the shade from his face. 'Oh, my dear, there ain't going to be any bush worries for us this blessed afternoon and evening. It's the poetry and romance'—he pronounced it romance—'of the bush that's got hold of me now. I'm just longing for us to strike the camping place—and then—just you and me together—just man and woman—alone with Nature!'
He put his hand on hers and she pressed it in return. The Woman in her thrilled to the Man in him.
Cudgee, on the hind seat with his back to them, broke the spell.
'My word, Massa! You look out, Mithsis—big feller goanner sit down along a tree.' And for the first time in her existence, Lady Bridget beheld a monster iguana dragging its huge lizard tail and turning its stately, brown crocodile head round at her from the safe vantage place of a thick gum branch.
After that, the way led off the main road, on by a less used track through wilder country. Here Wombo, the black boy, was waiting—Moongarr Bill having gone on with the pack horse to the camping place—and helped to unharness the two leaders which he drove before him ahead. The trees thickened, the buggy wheels caught on stumps. Cudgee had to get down at intervals and, with his axe, lop and clear fallen timber. Every mile the progress grew slower and the forest more lonely. No sign now of a selector's clearing, or of any human occupation.... But there was a pack of emus hustling and shaking their big bunches of feathers like startled ballet girls.
'I feel as if part of the Zoo had been let loose,' said Lady Bridget when again there bounded along in the near distance a pair of kangaroos with a little Joey kangaroo taking a lesson in locomotion behind its parents.
They were still in the gum forest, but now and then came a belt of gidia scrub—mournful trees with stiff black trunks and grey green foliage and a pale sort of wattle flower smelling like dead cattle when rain is about, as McKeith explained. But there was no rain about now, and, in truth, he would have welcomed the unpleasant odour. Perhaps it was that which made the ground so stark and bare beneath these trees where no grass will grow. The sun was lowering when they left the gidia. Out in the gum forest again, the birds were chattering before retiring to rest. All life is still in the bush at mid-day, but now there were curious scutterings among the grass tussocks, and the whirr of its insect population sounded all round. The country got prettier—swelling pastures and stony pinches and a distant outline of hills. They could see the green line of a water course.
'Plenty water sit down along a creek?' McKeith asked the black boy. But Cudgee shook his woolly head.
'Ba'al* mine think it, Massa. No rain plenty long time.'
[*ba'al—the Aboriginal negative.]
McKeith sighed. The dark shadow of coming drought is a fearsome spectre on the Never-Never Land.
A COO-EE sounded long, clear, vibrant. Moongarr Bill and Wombo, who had gone on ahead, were fixing camp. Lady Bridget's musical voice caught up the note. She answered it with another COO-EE, to Cudgee's delight.
'My word! Ba'al newchum, that feller white Mary,' said he.
They had rounded a knoll abutting on the green line of ti-trees and swamp oak. It was a barren hump; upon its crest, and alone in barbaric majesty, stood a row of grass trees silhouetted against the sunset sky. Weird sentinels of the bridal camp they seemed—tall, thick black trunks like palm-stems, from each of which spread an enormous tuft of gigantic grass blades green and upright in the middle, grey and jaggled and drooping where they hung over at the bottom. Out of each green heart sprang a great black spear many feet in height.
The stony knoll dropped sheer like a wall. On the other side of it was a space the size of an amphitheatre, a large part of it spread with soft green grass, like a carpet, and the rest of the floor scattered with low shrubs and big tussocks. Amongst them was a herb giving out a fragrance, when the feet crushed it, like that of wild thyme. The whole air seemed filled with a blend of aromatic perfumes.
Here was a roofless room, open on one side where a break in the ti-trees showed the sandy bed of the creek, which, at first, to Lady Bridget's fancy, had the appearance of a broad shallow stream. On this side, low rocks with ferns growing in their crannies, edged the stream. On the opposite shore, one giant eucalyptus stood by itself and cast its shadow across. Beyond, lay the gum-peopled immensity of the bush. The stony walls of the knoll, curving inward and sheltering a thick growth of ferns and scrubby vegetation, closed in the bridal chamber. Creepers festooned the rocky ledges and crevices. Here and there, a young sapling slanted forward to greet the morning sun when it should rise behind the hummock.
Moongarr Bill had undone the pack-bags and was building a fire between two large stones. The flames leaped up, the dead twigs crackled. Long years after, Lady Bridget could recall vividly the smell of the dry burning gum leaves—her first experience of a bush campfire.
Close to the fire, under the flank of the rocky knoll the tent was pitched, a roll of blankets and oilskin thrown just within it.
Presently, from the hummock above came the sound of Cudgee's axe. He had felled the youngest of the grass-trees, and was now chopping off its green tuft. Soon he appeared, carrying a huge bunch of the coarse blades of foliage, which he brought to the tent. With an odd mixture of emotions, Lady Bridget watched her husband take the grass tops from the black boy and spread them carefully on the floor of the tent, heaping up and smoothing the mass into a bed, upon which he laid the oilskin and then one of the blankets—they were new white blankets, fresh from the store. After that, he set the cushions from the buggy, covering them with the rug, at the head of the couch, making a bolster, and, over that, the one she had had at her back.
'No down pillows or linen sheets allowed in a bush camp-out, my lady Biddy,' he said with a laugh, a half timorous glance at his wife, but her answering smile reassured him.
'You'll never sleep on a sweeter bed,' he said, sniffing the resinous fragrance of the grass-tree tops. He would not let her help him with the upper blankets when she wished to lend a hand.
'No, this camp is my own show. Go and look at the scenery until I've got our wigwam in order.'
And she submissively obeyed.
Against the other side of the rock wall, the black boys had built a second fire. The horses were hobbled and grazing along the green border of the creek. The buggy propped up, was covered with a tarpaulin. The pack-bags had disgorged their contents. A miscellaneous heap of camp properties lay on the ground. And now, Cudgee's axe was at work again, stripping a section of bark from a gum tree, for what purpose Lady Bridget did not divine.
She walked down to the creek and stood among the rocks at its edge. She had expected a rippling stream, and, to her disappointment, saw only a broad strip of dry sand, along which Moongarr Bill was mooching, a spade in his hand.
'What are we going to do for water?' she exclaimed.
'Dig for it, my ladyship,' answered Moongarr Bill. 'That's one of the upside-down things in 'Stralia. Here's two of them—mighty queer, come to think of it—the rivers that run underground and the cherries that grow with their stones outside.'
Lady Bridget observed that she was already acquainted with that oft-quoted botanical phenomenon. In her rides around Leichardt's Town she had been shown and had tasted the disagreeable little orange berry which has a hard green knob at the end of it and is, for some ironical reason, called a cherry. She also told Moongarr Bill that in England she had seen a dowser searching for hidden springs by means of a forked hazel twig carried in front of him which pointed downwards where there was water and asked why Australians didn't adopt a similar method. At which Moongarr Bill laughed derisively, and said he did not hold with any such hanky-panky.
'Bad luck, Biddy,' McKeith said behind her. 'If there had been the proper amount of rain in these last three or four months, we'd have had the one thing that's wanting now to make this the ideal camp I've had on the top of my fancy—a running creek of pure water. But never mind—the water's there, though you can't see it.... That's got it, Bill!'
For already the sand was darkening and moisture was oozing in the hole Moongarr Bill had been digging, and which he widened gradually into a respectable pool of water. When it had settled down, all the billies were filled and the horses driven to it, whinnying for a drink.
Lady Bridget watched the evening meal being prepared between the two fires—only watched, for she was sternly forbidden to set hand to it.
'No canned goods, nor cooked food,' McKeith said, were allowed at this lay-out. Moongarr Bill was first-class at frying steak. He himself was going to boil the quart-pot tea and would give Biddy a demonstration in johnny-cakes, made bush fashion at their own camp fire. The sheet of bark had been cut into sections—one sub-divided into small squares to serve as plates. The inside looked clean as paint, and smelled of Mother Nature's still-room. Colin mixed the flour and water upon the larger sheet and worked up a stiff dough. He kneaded it, slapped it between his broad palms, cut it and baked the cakes in the ashes; then, butter being the only luxury permitted, he split them and buttered them; and Lady Bridget found in due time that not even the lightest Scotch scones taste better than bush johnny-cakes.
Quart pot tea, likewise—made also in true bush fashion. First the boiling of the billy—Colin's own particular billy, battered and blackened from much usage—half the battle, he explained, in brewing bush tea. Then, regulation handfuls of tea and brown store sugar thrown in at the precise boiling moment. Now the stirring of the frothing liquid with a fresh gum-twig. Then the blending and the cooling of it—pouring the beverage from one quart pot into another, and finally into the pannikins ready for the drinking.
Proudly, round the rock-flank of the hummock, Moongarr Bill brought fried steak and potatoes steaming in a clean tin dish and done to a turn, then went to cook more for himself at his own camp. They ate off the bark plates. Salt, sugar and mustard came out of small ration bags. McKeith produced black-handled knives and forks—the last a concession. And good to taste were the fizzling johnny-cakes and the strong, sweet, milkless tea.
Such was Lady Bridget's real marriage feast.
They were hungry, yet they dallied over the repast. It was the most delicious food she had ever tasted, Bridget said. They made little jokes. He was entranced by her happiness. Joyously she compared this banquet with others she had eaten in great houses and European restaurants, which were the last word in luxury. Oh! how she loved the dramatic contrast of it. Nature was supreme, glorious.... Oh no, no! never could she hanker after that which she had left behind—for ever. Because, if ever she were to go back again to the old life, she would be an ugly dried-up old woman for whom the smart world would have no further use....
Then suddenly she became quiet, and busied herself in the tent, while McKeith took out his pipe and smoked in ruminative bliss. When she came back she had no more talk of contrasts or of her old life, no more fantastic outbursts. Indeed, there seemed to have come over her a mood of sweet sobriety, of blushing, womanly shyness.
'Mayn't I be your squaw and help you to wash up?' she said, when he collected the tin pots and pannikins and proceeded to get the camp shipshape. No, she was not to stir a finger towards the dirty work. It was HIS job to-night. Another camping-out time she might play the squaw if she liked. She was not on in this act.
He amused her greatly by his tidy bush methods. The billies were refilled, the ration-bags laid ready for the morning.
Now darkness had fallen. He put more logs on the fire, and the flames blazed up. Then he made up a little pile of johnny-cakes that he had not buttered, and covered it with the bark plates. 'We shall have to make an early start, and there'll be no time to bake fresh ones—and no more use for these things,' he said. The square of bark on which he had mixed the dough was in his hands and he was about the fling it among the bushes, but she stopped him.
'No—don't throw it away.... I—I want it for a keepsake, Colin.'
He stared at her in surprise. The red flames threw a strange glow on her face, and made her eyes look very bright.
'My dearest! A sheet of bark!' Then a great light broke on him. The strip of bark dropped from his hands. His arms went out and enfolded the small woman, lifting her almost from the ground as he crushed her against his breast and kissed her lips with the first passionate lover's kisses he had ever given her.... 'Oh, my dear—my sweetheart!' He gave a big, tremulous laugh.... 'There was never any woman in the world like you.... To think of your caring about just a sheet of bark!'
'You made me my first johnny-cakes upon it.... And to-night is the beginning of our married life—and oh, Colin, it is the first time I have felt really married to you, and I want a bit of the bush to remember it by.'
He kissed her again.... The miracle was accomplished. He seemed to have no words in which to say all that filled his heart.
The night sounds of the bush stirred the vast silence. For the first time, Lady Bridget heard the wail of the curlew—a long note, weirdly melancholy. It startled her out of her husband's arms. There were uncanny swishings of wings in the great gum tree on the other side of the creek. And now the clanking of the horses' hobbles which had been dilatory, intermittent, became sharply recurrent. A shout from Moongarr Bill cut short the monotonous corroboree tune which the two black boys had been singing at their camp some little distance away.
'My word, I believe YARRAMAN* break him hobble!'
[*Yarraman—horse.]
At which the boys scampered off through the grass, and presently came the cracking of a stock whip among the trees.
'It's all right, Moongarr Bill's after them,' said McKeith, as his bride released herself from his arms. 'But if you don't mind darling. I'd better just see if anything has started the beasts.'
Lady Bridget watched him disappear round the knoll. The curlews went on wailing, and as if in answer a night owl sent forth his portentous HOOT—HOOT!... Apparently nothing was much amiss with the horses; they had quieted down again. Lady Bridget picked up the strip of bark and carried it in her arms into the tent, laughing to herself as she did so.
'Only a sheet of bark! What a fool I am—But it's quite appropriate, anyway.'
She put it beside her dressing-bag, and then went out once more into the night. Through the interlacing gum branches she saw a great coppery disk, and the moon rose slowly to be a lamp in her bridal chamber. How wonderful the stars were!... There was the Southern Cross with its pointers, and the Pleiades. And that bright star above the tops of the trees, which seemed to throw a distinct ray of light, must be Venus.... The moon was high enough to cast shadows—black—distorted. The low clumps of shrubs beyond the carpet of grass looked like strange couched beasts....
As she stood by the rocks at the creek edge, she heard her husband speaking to Moongarr Bill, who seemed to be walking down along the sandy bed.
'Horses all right, Bill?'
'Oh, ay—just a possum up a tree gev Julius Caesar a start.... Been digging a decent bath-hole for the ladyship in the morning, boss. There's plenty there.'
'I wish it was as near the surface at Moongarr, Bill. We shall have our work cut out making new bores, if the dry weather lasts.'
'My word, it's no joke going down three thousand feet. Amazing queer the amount of water running underground on this dried-up old earth.'
'But we can always strike it, Bill; no matter how dried up the outside looks, there's the living spring waiting to be tapped. And how's that in human nature too, Bill. Same idea, eh?'
Moongarr Bill emitted a harsh grunt.
'My best girl chucked me a month back, boss, and as for your darned sentiment and poetry, and sech-like—well, I ain't takin' any just at present.'
'Bad luck, Bill! Struck a dead-head that time, eh?... Well, good-night.'
'Good-night, boss—and good luck to you. I reckon your spring ain't a dead-head, anyway.... Say, Mr McKeith, me and the boys are shifting our fire over to the other side of the creek.... Keep the 'osses from hevin' any more of their blessed starts.... Handier for gettin' them up in the morning.'
[* Yarraman—Horse.]
Lady Bridget McKeith had been married about a year and a quarter. Winter was now merging into spring. But it was not a bounteous spring. That drear spectre of drought hung over the Never-Never Land.
Lady Bridget stood by the railing of the veranda at Moongarr, looking out for two expected arrivals at the head-station—that of her husband, who had been camping out after cattle—and of the mailman—colloquially, Harry the Blower—who this week was to bring an English mail.
Perhaps the last arrival seemed to her at the moment most important of the two. The bush wife had long since begun to feel a sort of home sickness for English news. Yet, had you asked her, she would have told you that barbarism still had a greater hold than civilisation.
There did not, however, appear to be much of the barbarian about Lady Bridget. She still looked like an old picture in the high-waisted tea-gown of limp yellow silk that she had put on early for dinner, and she still trailed wisps of old lace round her slender shoulders. There was the same touzle of curly hair, like yellow-brown spun glass or filaments of burnished copper, which was shining now in the westering sun. The finely-modelled brows and shadowy eyes were as beautiful as when Colin McKeith had first beheld his goddess stepping on to Australian earth.
But for all that, a change had taken place in her—a different one from the indefinable yet significant change which is felt in almost every woman after marriage. There is usually in the young wife's face an expression of fulfilment, of deepened experience—a certain settled, satisfied look. And this was what was lacking in Lady Bridget's face. The restless soul within seemed to be peering out through hungry eyes.
She could see nothing human from the veranda except the blue-smocked figure of Fo Wung, the Chinaman, at work in his vegetable garden by the lagoon. There was one large water-hole and a succession of small ones, connected by water-courses, now dry, and meandering from a gully, which on the eastern side broke the hill against which Moongarr head-station was built. The straggling gum forest, interspersed with patches of sandal-wood and mulga, that backed the head-station, stopped short at the gully, and beyond, stretched wolds of melancholy gidia scrub. Looking up from the end of the veranda, Lady Bridget could see an irregular line of grey-brown boulders, jagged and evidently of volcanic origin, marking the line of gully. These gave a touch of romantic wildness to the otherwise peaceful scene.
Lady Bridget's gaze went along a track skirting the gidia scrub, and crossing the lower end of the gully near the lagoon, to the great plain which spread in front of the head-station. Except for some green trees by the lagoon, a few ragged belts of gum and sandal-wood or single isolated trees dotted about, the plain was unwooded to the horizon. There were also silhouetted upon the sky the grotesque-looking sails of one or two windmill-pumps. In the foreground the plain was intersected by lines of grey fencing, within which browsed straggling herds of lean cattle, mostly along the curve of the lagoon.
Neither plain nor lagoon formed altogether pleasing objects of contemplation just now, for they spoke eloquently of the threatened drought. When Lady Bridget had come up a bride, the plain had been fairly green. The sandal-wood blossoms were out and wild flowers plentiful. The lagoon was then flush with the grass, and its water, on which white, pink and blue lilies floated, had reflected the vegetation at its edge. Now the lagoon had shrunk and the water in the gully was in places a mere trickle. Of course, the trees were there—ti-tree, flooded gum, and so forth—but they looked brown and ragged. One standing by itself, a giant white cedar, which in spring was a mass of white and mauve bloom and in winter of scarlet berries, had a wide strip of brown mud between it and the water that had formerly laved its roots.
Lady Bridget had thought that the rocky gully, the lagoon and the vast plain made as pretty a landscape as she had ever seen, when she had first looked upon it in the early morn after her homecoming. Now, as she paced up and down the veranda—for she was in a restless mood—her mind went back to that bridal homecoming. They had not arrived at the head-station till after dusk, but it had been visible from the plain a long way off, and she had examined it with ardent curiosity through her field-glasses in the clear light of sunset.
She had seen a collection of rough buildings backed by the forest, and from different points of view, as they drew nearer, had made out that the three principal ones formed three sides of a square. Two of these—the side wings—were old and of primitive construction—slab walls, bark roofs, and low verandas, overgrown with creepers. Colin explained that these were the Old Humpey—as he called the original dwelling house—and the kitchen and store building opposite. Lately, the New House had been put up at right angles with the old buildings, and fronting the plain. It had been begun before his trip south and practically finished during his absence. Colin was very proud of the New House.
It was made of sawn wood and had a high-pitched roof of corrugated zinc, turned to gold by the sunset rays upon it. There was a deep veranda all round the New House, and it was much taller than the wings, being raised on blood-wood piles, that had been tarred to keep off white ants, and with a flight of wooden steps leading up to the veranda.
The details of Moongarr head-station became familiar enough later to its new mistress. Besides the dwelling houses were various huts and outbuildings. The stock-yards lay on a piece of level ground behind at the side of the gully, and between the yards and the House stood a small slab and bark cottage—the Bachelors' Quarters.
Even though glorified by the sunset, it had given Lady Bridget a little shock to see how crude and—architecturally speaking—unlovely was her new home. But her Celtic imagination was stirred by the weirdness of the grey-green gum forest, and of the mournful gidia scrub, framing the picture.
Then, as dusk crept closer, and the great plain, along which the tired horses plodded, became one illimitable shadow out of which rose strange sounds of beasts and eerie night cries of birds, the spell of the wilderness renewed itself and she felt herself enveloped in world-old mystery.
She remembered how the lights of the head-station against the forest blackness had looked like welcoming torches and how she had roused herself out of her weariness at the last spurt of the equally weary buggy horses. Then the jolt in the dark over the sliprails, the slow strain of the wheels up the hill, the cracking of Moongarr Bill's stock-whip, and the sound of long drawn COO-EES. Also of dogs barking, of men running forward. Then how Colin had lifted her down and half carried her into the parlour. She remembered her dazed glance round and the rushing thought of how she could soften its ugliness. Yet it had looked welcoming. A log fire blazing, the table spread, a Chinese cook in baggy blue garments—pigtail flowing; a Malay boy; her bewildered question—was there no woman in the establishment? Then Colin's strident call from the veranda—'Mrs Hensor. Where's Mrs Hensor!' And the appearance presently of Florrie Hensor—youngish, tall, a full figure; black hair, frizzed and puffed, a showy face, red cheeks, redder lips, rather sullen, flashing dark eyes—who had received Lady Bridget almost as if she had been her equal, and of whom the bride had at once made an enemy by her frigidly haughty response. From the first moment, Lady Bridget had disliked Mrs Hensor. But she had felt a vague attraction towards the little yellow-headed, blue-eyed boy clinging to Mrs Hensor's skirts. As for any uneasiness on the score of Steadbolt's insolent insinuations, she had absolutely dismissed that from her mind.
Yes—that bridal homecoming—how strange it had seemed! How rough everything was! How impossible the whole thing would have appeared to her had any fortune-teller in Bond Street prophesied the end of her marriage journey!
And how, in the first moment of settling down, she had laughed with Colin at the thought of what Chris and Molly Gaverick, and 'Eliza Countess' would have said! But with what dauntless energy she had worked in transforming her new abode and in making it reflect her own personality. She had felt really grateful, she said, to the Union delegates for having enticed away the builders before the inside furnishings were complete. Soon they got hold of a bush carpenter, and she was provided with occupation for a good many months.
Lady Bridget had been very happy in those early days. Colin had seemed so thoroughly in the picture—strong, chivalrous, adoring—like a Viking worshipping his conquered bride. The romance of it all appealed tremendously to the Celtic blood in Bridget. It was her nature, when she gave, to give generously. She had become genuinely in love with her bush husband during that wonderful honeymoon journey.
Ah, that journey! What an experience! If she could have written it down as a new adventure of 'The Lady of Quality,' how the great Gibbs would have jumped at her 'copy!' Well, she had practically done so in her letters to Joan Gildea—now back in her London flat. But the true inwardness of the adventure was a thing never to be put into words.
No sign yet of the men. Lady Bridget ceased her restless pacing and swung herself slowly to and fro in a hammock at the end of the veranda. As she swung she traversed over again in her imagination the stages of that honeymoon journey.
Two hundred and twenty-five miles of it, after the first camp out. Many more nights under the stars. Then out of the gum forests they had gone through the great western plains, covering ground fairly easily, for McKeith had arranged to have fresh horses on the road, and they always drove a spare pair ahead of the buggy. Occasionally they stopped at a head-station. Once at night they pulled up at a bush house, and a strange old man had put his head out of a window and shouted to them in the darkness. 'If ye've come to see me, I'm drunk,' he had said, 'and if you've come to drink, the rum-keg's empty, but ye'll find a pint pot outside and a little water in the tank.' And then he had shut the window again and refused further parley.
They had camped, hungry, in the paddock—for provisions had run out, and on that account, and because the horses had strayed in the night, they had to go again to the house. The old man, sober and ashamed, captivated likewise by Lady Bridget's beauty and charm, apologised almost on his knees—he made Biddy think of Thackeray's picture of Sir Pitt Crawley proposing to Becky Sharp. Old Mr Duppo, it was—the father of Zack Duppo, the horse-breaker, who had recently been breaking in colts at Moongarr.
They stayed till the horses were found. Mr Duppo had a housekeeper—now if Mrs Hensor had been like that housekeeper there could have been no cause for jealous scandal. An aged dame, long, bony—dressed in a short green petticoat and tartan jacket, with a little checked shawl over her head and pinned under a bearded chin. She poured tea out of a tin teapot and leaned over her master's chair at meal times to carve the salt beef.
Lady Bridget sketched the pair. The old man roared over the sketch, but the housekeeper bore her a grudge for it, and afterwards had not a good word for the 'Ladyship' who had slipped out of her proper sphere into the Never-Never country.
There were plenty of other small adventures which would have made the hair of Lady Gaverick and her friends stand on end. A dream-drive indeed, full of sort of 'Alice in Wonderland' episodes. Bush life Out Back—a jumble of odd characters and situations. Fencers' camps, cattle-drivers' camps, bullock-dray camps. There had been a baby born unexpectedly under the tilt of a bullock-dray, on one occasion, the night before McKeith's party appeared on the scene, and Lady Bridget had a trunk down from the buggy, and there in the road tore up some of her fine-laced smocks and petticoats to provide swaddling clothes for the poor little scrap of mortality. And there were tramps 'humping bluey' on the track likewise, and diggers carrying their picks. Bridget liked seeing Colin hail-fellow-well-met with them all—sharing tucker and quart-pot tea. She wished that her socialistic friends of the old played-out civilisation could see this shrewd, practical humanitarian of the Bush.
They came very close to each other in those long days of the dream-drive. He talked to her as he had never talked before, and as he talked rarely afterwards. He drew aside curtains from recesses of his real nature, the existence of which she had not suspected, and, in truth, at a later time, doubted. Then, if in broad sunlight the shy, rough exterior of the man would close suddenly over those secret chambers, when evening came, it would seem as though the camp fire illuminated them once more.
After the first time or two, he allowed her to boss the camp 'lay-out.' It was she who spread the blankets on Wombo's beds of grass tree tops and dry herbage. Wombo and the 'big feller White Mary' (the adjective used metaphorically as expressive of distinction) made great friends in those days—out of which friendship sprang, alas! in due time, certain tragic happenings. It was Lady Bridget who would set the billy boiling and who, after one or two failures, succeeded in making excellent johnny-cakes. She remembered her first performance in that line under the eyes of a small group of admiring spectators—her husband 'just waiting to see how the new-chum cook shaped,' and, as he said the words, she, glancing up from the sheet of bark and the dough she was kneading, caught a look in his face which was something she could never in all her life forget. And Moongarr Bill with the horses' reins over his arm, and the two black-boys agape, beady eyes twinkling, white teeth glistening, emitting their queer guttural clicks of approbation, and an occasional 'My word! Bujeri you, Lathy-chap,' the nearest they could get to Moongarr Bill's accepted form of address. There was joy, glory to Lady Bridget in this playing of the squaw and fending for her man, ceasing to be the goddess and becoming the primal woman.
And the sports, and songs, and stories by the camp fire! Moongarr Bill's yarns, Colin's exploring tales, Wombo's and Cudgee's dances and corroboree-tunes—strange, weird music that had a fascination for Lady Bridget. She, too, would get up and sing CARMEN'S famous air, and the Neapolitan peasant songs of her mother's youth. Never, for sure, had the gaunt gum trees echoed back such strains as these.
But time came when all the romance of barbarism seemed to have fizzled out and only cruel realities remained—when work and worry turned McKeith from the worshipping lover into the rough-tongued, irritable bushman—when his 'hands' deserted him, his cattle died and things generally went wrong, and when he showed himself something of the hard-headed, parsimonious, ill-conditioned Scotch mongrel that Steadbolt had called him. When, indeed, he seemed to have forgotten that Lady Bridget O'Hara had graciously permitted him to worship her, but had not bargained for being treated—well, as many another out-back squatter—treats his help-mate. Then Bridget would tell herself bitterly that it might have been better had she married a civilised gentleman. There would sometimes be scenes and sometimes sulks, and those times no doubt accounted for the hungry look in Lady Bridget's eyes and the slight hardening of her mouth.
She was loyal though, in spite of her many faults, and 'game' in her own way—and when Colin came out of his dour moods, she was generally ready to meet him half way.
For, through all, the memory of the dream-drive honeymoon lingered. And the bit of bark, sapless, brown, curled up by the heat into almost a tube, and partially eaten by white ants—before the desecrating assault had been discovered and the termites' nest destroyed with boiling water—was still cherished as a sacred symbol.
While she swung in the hammock the memory pictures came and went like a cinematograph show—the dream-drive presently merging into an electioneering trip through McKeith's constituency a few weeks after her bridal homecoming.
The 'Lady of Quality' might, had she been so minded, have also made spicy capital out of the humours of that political contest—in which, unhappily, the Labour Party had triumphed. Steadbolt had had his say on the occasion, and there had been a free fight—Lady Bridget was not present, and only heard darkly of the occurrence—when Steadbolt had got the worst of it in an encounter with his late employer.
But all that was but a small side-show, and not likely to affect in any great measure Lady Bridget's life. Except that the loss of McKeith's seat in the Legislative Assembly made it no longer necessary for him to spend at least part of the winter session in Leichardt's Town. Nor would Lady Bridget have the opportunity to resume her old intimacy at Government House. In any case, however, she was not destined to see more of her old friend in Australia. A few months previously, Lady Tallant had developed symptoms of grave disease—it was said that the Leichardt's Land climate did not agree with her, and she had gone back to England, leaving Sir Luke to perform his duties without her help.
At last, Lady Bridget heard the unmistakable sound of cattle in the distance—the low, multitudinous roar of lowing beasts and tramping hoofs and the reverberating crack of stock-whips. It came from the gidia scrub. She knew that they had been mustering SCRUBBERS—otherwise, wild cattle from the broken country at the foot of Moongarr Range.
She left the hammock and went again to the veranda railing. Looking along a side path from the Chinaman's garden she saw that Mrs Hensor and her boy—the yellow-headed urchin of about six—were hastening towards the Bachelors' Quarters. The woman carried a basket of vegetables, the boy hugged a big pawpaw fruit which he held up proudly as his mother responded in her free-and-easy, rather sulky fashion to Lady Bridget's stiff nod. 'It's for the House,' cried the child. 'Fo Wung said I was to bring it up.'
Lady Bridget made a wry face—she did not like pawpaws.
'Very well, Tommy, and if you're good you can have what's left tomorrow.'
'That's all right,' responded Tommy in bush formula.
'Have you seen anything of your master—or the postman?' asked Lady Bridget of Mrs Hensor.
'I believe Mr McKeith is coming on ahead with Harry the Blower,' said Mrs Hensor. 'Look sharp, Tommy, the cattle will be at the yard directly, and I've got my dinner to cook for the whole lot of them, seeing that some visitors aren't good enough for the house.'
The woman pointed her last sentence by a malicious glance at the mistress of Moongarr.
'I suppose that is what your master keeps you here for—to cook for the visitors at the Quarters, Mrs Hensor,' said Lady Bridget, with incisive sweetness.
Mrs Hensor flushed scarlet, but she checked an impudent reply. Pulling Tommy angrily along, she hurried up to the four-roomed, zinc-roofed humpey and its lean-to kitchen, protected by a bough shade, which lay between the head-station and the gully, with the stockyard close to it, and which constituted her domain. It annoyed Mrs Hensor to hear McKeith called her master. She always spoke of her late husband as having been the Boss-mate on that—to him fatal—exploring expedition. Also, she resented having all the bachelors 'dumped down'—as she phrased it—on her, while the 'Ladyship's swell staff' was spared the trouble. At present the Bachelors' Quarters was fairly full. Mr Ninnis, store-keeper and overseer in the owner's absence, abode there permanently, and just now, there were Zack Duppo, the horse-breaker, and a young man from Breeza Downs—a combined cattle and sheep station about fifty miles distant—who had come to help in the mustering and to collect any beasts strayed from the Breeza Downs' herd.
The gully crossing lay below the boulders of rock at the head of the lagoon. Presently, two horsemen appeared on the rise. One was McKeith; the other Harry the Mailman—otherwise the Blower—a foxy, browny-red little man on a raw-boned chestnut, carrying his mail-bags strapped in front and at the side of his saddle.
Lady Bridget supposed they had met at the turn-off track just above the crossing. McKeith was carrying a leather mail-bag, from which he appeared to have extracted a bundle of letters, with one hand. He held his bridle and coiled stock-whip in the other. He was listening to the mailman, who seemed to be talking animatedly. As they neared the house, he gave the usual COO-EE, that set all the dogs barking, and put the Chinaman-cook and black-boys on the alert.
The riders passed by the end of the veranda where Lady Bridget stood. McKeith looked up at her. He seemed preoccupied and angry, and merely nodded to his wife, but did not take off his hat as he had done in earlier days—and, somehow, to-day she noticed the omission.
'All right, eh, Biddy?' he called out casually. 'Here's your mail—I've taken out mine,' and he pitched the leather bag, with the string cut and the official red seal broken, on to the veranda at her feet. 'I say—you might bring the whisky out to the back veranda. I daresay you could do with a nip, eh, Harry?'
'That I can, Mr McKeith. Riding along these plains is dry work. Good day, Ladyship. I'm a bit behind time, but I lost an hour looking for a hole to fill my water bag at—And then I could not drink out of it—for a demed old pleuro bullock had got there first and died in it. My word, Boss, you'll be in a fix if it don't rain before long.'
McKeith made an angry gesture. He spoke sharply to the horses. The two men rode round the kitchen-wing and dismounted at the paling fence, which made the fourth side of the little square. The back veranda of the new house, with steps ascending to it, in the middle, the Old Humpey, with its veranda, along one side, the kitchen and store building along the other, and a rough slab and bark outhouse beyond it. Native-cucumber vines and other creepers partially closed in the older verandas. In the centre of the square was a small flower bed with a flowering shrub in the middle.
Lady Bridget brought the whisky decanter from the dining room to the back veranda, and McKeith mounted the steps, the mailman remaining beside them. A canvas water-bag, oozing moisture, hung from the rafters, and there were tumblers on a table beneath it. McKeith took the decanter from his wife's hand, too preoccupied, it seemed, even to notice the little satirical smile on her lips. She was thinking how funny it seemed that she should be playing Hebe to Harry the Blower. She soon realised, however, that serious things had happened. As McKeith mixed a liberal allowance of whisky with water from the water-bag and handed it to the mailman, he asked curtly:
'This isn't one of your blowing yarns, Harry? You're positive about the fact?'
'Saw the thing with my own eyes, Boss. As fine a team as ever I'd wish to own, lying with their throats cut, and the trees black with crows all round. There was the dray-load all turned over, and two cases prized open. I bet that the rum-kegs and spirits that couldn't be carried off, are buried in some handy dry water-hole close by. I saw two or three empty brandy bottles with the heads of 'em smashed to show that the rascals had wet the wool before starting off.'
McKeith cursed in his throat. 'No sign of my men?'
'Scooted clean out of the scenery—the whole lot. I reckon that's what they shook hands on with the Union chaps, and that the natural consequences of absorbing your grog will be another woolshed or two burned down before long. Here's your health, Boss, and the Ladyship's.' And the mailman gulped down his 'nobbler' and turned to remount the lean chestnut, which was standing hitched to the palings, observing cheerfully:
'Well, so long, Sir. Go'day, Ma'am. This sort of argufying ain't going to carry my mail-bags along the river.'
'Go up to the Quarters and ask Mrs Hensor for a feed,' called McKeith. 'And look here, Harry, you can tell them at the Myall Creek out-station as you go by, to have two good horses ready in the yard for me. I'm off to Tunumburra to put the police on to those devils straight away.'
'All right, Boss. You'll find it will take some tall calculatin' though. Them Unionists are getting too strong for the police to tackle. Windeatt up at Breeza Downs is in a mortal funk, and sending word everywhere for a squad of Specials to protect his woolshed.'
'It seems,' said Lady Biddy to her husband, when the mailman had gone, 'that there might be some use after all for Luke Tallant's Maxims.'
'It seems that Jim Steadbolt has been taking his revenge,' he answered, 'and that I must be in the saddle in an hour's time. Mix me a drink, Biddy, and order in some grub, while I go and have a bath.'
He looked as if he needed one. The dust of the drafting camp was caked upon his face and clothes. His was the appearance of a man who had been riding hard after stock and sleeping, between his blankets only, under the stars.
Lady Bridget mixed him his drink and went to see Chen Sing in the kitchen. When she came back, Colin was in the front veranda. He had tumbled the rest of the letters and papers out of the mail-bag, and was hastily and eagerly scanning the last LEICHARDT'S TOWN CHRONICLE.
'Any news, Colin?'
'I don't know, I was looking to see if the Government were going to act against the strikers—I see they are sending troops.'
'And is Luke Tallant coming at the head of them, in official uniform, to read the Riot Act?—if there is a Riot Act in Australia. I'd like to see Luke maintaining the supremacy of the British Crown on the Leura.'
He looked up at her in vague rebuke of her levity, and there was suppressed tenderness in his eyes, notwithstanding his preoccupation with his own troubles.
'No, no. But there's something in the paper about Lady Tallant being ill and having an operation. Poor chap! He wouldn't have been bothering much about strikes in the Never-Never and the supremacy of the British Crown, any more than I should in similar circumstances.... Well, there! I must go and bogey*.'
[*Bogey—in Black's language, 'bathe out of doors']
Sudden compunction overswept Bridget.
'Oh, Colin! You would care... really... even though they had cut the throats of your four best dray-horses?' But he had disappeared into a little veranda room, against which a corrugated iron tank backed conveniently, and in a minute she heard the splash of water.
She picked up the paper and looked at the English Intelligence before examining her own letters. It was quite true. There was a paragraph stating that Lady Tallant's health had not improved since her arrival in England, and hinting at the likelihood of an operation being advisable. Bridget reflected, however, that Sir Luke would probably have received a cablegram by this time, one way or other—which would have put him out of suspense, and, presumably, there had been no later bad news.
A letter from Molly Gaverick confirmed that item of the English Intelligence. Rosamond Tallant's condition was certainly far from satisfactory. Molly, however, seemed much more taken up with a recent illness of Eliza Countess of Gaverick than with that of Lady Tallant. Being a tactless and absolutely frank young person, she had no scruple in proclaiming her hope that 'old Eliza' would make Lord Gaverick her heir. This was the more likely, wrote young Lady Gaverick, because the old lady had lately quarrelled with her own relatives, and never now asked any of her stuffy provincial cousins to share the dulness of Castle Gaverick and of the house in Brook Street. If she did not leave her money to Chris Gaverick, there was not, conceivably, anyone else to whom she would leave it.
'By the way,' Molly continued, as if it had been an afterthought 'Old Eliza is immensely interested in you and your cow-boy husband—ranch-owner is what, I suppose, I ought to call him. She asked Mrs Gildea so many questions about you both that Joan read her your account of your honeymoon journey through the Bush, and all the rest of it. How you can endure such a life is incomprehensible to me—but Aunt Eliza says it shows you've got some grit in you, and that evidently your husband has cured you of a lot of ridiculous nonsense—I am quoting her, so don't be offended, and you needn't show this to Nature's gentleman, which is what Aunt Eliza calls him. I can't help feeling though, that it's rather a pity you didn't wait a bit before taking the Irrevocable Step. I don't know whether you ever heard about Mrs Willougby Maule's death—eleven months after their marriage.'
No, Bridget had not heard. Molly Gaverick was an uncertain correspondent, and, no doubt, Joan Gildea and Rosamond Tallant, if they had known of the event, had thought it wiser, in writing to her, to suppress the news. For a moment, Lady Bridget sat meditating, and all the blood seemed to rush from her brain to her heart—she could almost hear her heart pounding. Then she went on again with Lady Gaverick's letter.
'It was a motor accident—nothing serious at the time, but the baby was born prematurely, and she lingered a week or two, and then died. I must do him the justice to say that he seemed to feel her death very much. It looked as though, after all, the marriage had been quite a success. Her money gave him a lift and they were going out a good deal in the political set. She left her quarter of a million to him, ABSOLUTELY. I heard that some remote Bagallys were going to contest the will, but they found that they hadn't a leg to stand upon. I wish now that we hadn't been so sniffy about W.M. As Chris observed with unconscious cynicism, there's a good deal of difference between a penniless adventurer and the possessor of quarter of a million. Unattached men with money can be so useful. As soon as Rosamond Tallant gets better—if she does—I'll make her ask him to meet us. I know he used to be a great friend of Luke's....'
Lady Bridget had read so far when the door of the bathroom opened and McKeith came out, clean again in fresh riding gear, and with a valise ready packed and strapped in his hand.
The noise of the cattle became much louder, though the mob was not yet in sight.
'I wish I hadn't got to go off before the branding,' he said. 'These Breeza Downs people always want to claim every cleanskin*. You might tell Ninnis and Moongarr Bill, Biddy, to keep a sharp look-out. And now let me have my grub—I'm sorry, dear, to have you hurry up your dinner.' He strode along to the dining-room, too absorbed in his own annoyances to notice his wife's face or to ask any questions about her letters.
[*cleanskin—unbranded calf]
Lady Bridget gathered them up and followed him. The Malay boy waited at table with the assistance of a servant girl from Leuraville, the only female domestic—with the exception of Mrs Hensor—on the head-station.
McKeith swallowed his soup and ate the savoury stew prepared by the Chinese cook with the appetite of a man who had been all day in the saddle. Lady Bridget, who was an extraordinarily rapid eater, as well as a fastidious one, had finished long before he was half-way through. She sat silent at first, while he growled over the outrage upon the horses. Then suddenly visualising the poor beasts lying stiff in congealed blood, and the mailman's exaggerated description of trees black with crows, she flamed out in wrathful horror, and was as anxious as her husband that the perpetrators of the crime should be brought to justice. He seemed pleased, and a little surprised at the ebullition.
'I thought you weren't taking it quite in, Biddy. I am glad you think like me, though I expect yours is the humanitarian view and mine's the practical one. This touches my pocket, you see. Well, anyway, you won't be so keen now on defending the Unionists.'
'I think they've got as much right to fight for their principles as we have for ours, but I don't think they've the right to torture horses,' she rejoined. Her sympathy with oppressed shearers and dispossessed natives struck always a jarring note between them. His long upper lip closed tightly on the lower one, and he hunched his great shoulders.
'Well, that sort of argufying won't muster the cattle,' he observed drily, plagiarising Harry the Blower. She changed the subject.
'Did you have a good muster?'
'Oh, fair! Between three and four hundred head. The water is running still up in the range. We should have done better if that skunk Wombo hadn't bolted.'
Lady Bridget leaned forward with interest.
'Oh! Then he HAS gone after the black-gin. Brave Wombo!'
'I wouldn't care a cuss whether he went after the black-gin or not; she's a half-caste, by the way, and all the worse for that. And he might stop with her, if it wasn't that he knows the country, and can spot the gullies where the cattle hide. I've no use for sentiment—especially black sentiment—when it's a case of a forced sale to keep me going. My heavens! there's only one thing, Biddy, that could break me, and it's drought. I believe we're in for a long one, and unless I can make sales quickly and get money to sink new bores on the run, things will go hardly with me. Harry the Blower spoke naked truth for once in his life.'
'Oh! but there's sure to be rain soon. It looked so like it last night,' she answered lightly.
'LOOKED so like it! Yes, and ended in wind and dust. Sure sign of drought! I must be off.... Here, give me the LEICHARDT LAND CHRONICLE, and don't expect me till you see me.... And by the way, Biddy, I hear there's a Unionist Organiser going the round of the stations and pretending to parley with the masters. Don't you be philanthropic enough to let him open his jaws—I've told Ninnis he's to be hounded off before he has time to get off his saddle.'
'Colin, you are unjust all round. You were very unjust to Wombo. Why shouldn't the poor black-boy marry as well as you or anyone else?'
McKeith gave a hard laugh.
'I'm not preventing him from marrying. I only said I wasn't going to have his gin on my station.'
'You wouldn't listen when he told you that he didn't dare go back to his tribe—because his gin's husband threatened to kill him.'
'My sympathies are with the gin's husband. What business has Wombo to steal another man's wife?'
'The husband broke her head with a nulla-nulla, and she loves Wombo and Wombo loves her. I consider that any woman, whether she's black or white, who lives with her husband while she loves another man is committing a sin,' said Lady Bridget hotly.
McKeith stopped in the act of filling his tobacco pouch from a jar on the mantelpiece and looked sharply at his wife.
'You think that, Biddy. I remember long ago you said something of that sort to me. It isn't my idea of morality or of justice. But I'm one with you this far. If I'd ever reason to believe that you loved another man and wanted to go off with him—you might go—I wouldn't put out a hand to stop you. And then....'
'And then?' She had grown very white.
'Well, I think I'd make another notch in my gun first—and it would be a previous one—for myself that time.'
'No, you wouldn't, Colin. Because you know I shouldn't be worth it—and you are not the man to funk.'
'I'm not. But where YOU come in—Good Lord! Mate! What would there be left for me to live for?'
Her heart thrilled to the old term of endearment, to which in their early honeymoon days she had attached a sentimental value. Of late it had fallen into disuse, and when she had heard him on occasions greet the foreman, may be of some stray party of drivers or surveyors with the bush formula: 'Good day, mate!' she had felt with deep aggrievement that she no longer desired the appellative. She had not yet realised that while the word 'mate' in Australese, like the verb AIMER in French, may be used as a mere colloquial term, it implies in the deeper sense a sanctity of relation upon which hangs the whole code of Bush chivalry.
'Oh, Colin!' Her eyes glistened with tears. She felt ashamed of her neurotic fancies and her resentment of his lacks in the matter of conventional courtesies—of his outward hardness, his want of sympathy with her ideals.
He came to her, taking her two hands while keeping his pipe in one of his own so that the whiff of the coarse 'Store-cut' tobacco made her wrinkle her nose and stemmed the tide of emotion. But he did not seem to notice this.
'No, you're not going to put that theory into practice, Mate.... I'm not afraid. So we'll leave it at that. And now what's this about the black-boy to do with my being unjust to that Organiser? There's no beastly sentiment in his case. He's out to make money, that's all.'
'You won't hear what he's got to put forward on his side any more than you would listen to poor Wombo.'
'No, I won't. I'm not taking any—either in gins or in organisers. Let 'em show their faces here, and they'll pretty soon become aware of the fact.'
Lady Bridget took away her hands and moved to the veranda. Outside, McKeith's horse was waiting. He strapped on his valise, finished ramming the tobacco into his pipe, then going behind his wife, bent downward and hastily kissed her cheek. She did not turn her head.
'Good-bye, Biddy. Don't you go worrying over the blacks or the Unionists. And if you're dull and want a job there'll be a spice of excitement in helping to tail that mob of scrubbers. I had to hire two stray chaps, we're so short-handed.' He went down the steps to the outer paling. Still she made no response, though now she turned and watched him vault into the saddle. She also saw his face lighten at sight of Mrs Hensor's boy with the great pawpaw apple. Tommy Hensor was a favourite with the Boss.
'Bless you, boy, it's as big as yourself. Take it back to the Quarters and tell your mother to give you a slice, or perhaps her ladyship will cut it for you.'
He trotted off in the direction of the gully and of the roar of cattle. Lady Bridget could see the heaving backs of the mob, and could hear the shouts of the stockmen as they rounded the beasts to the crossing. Tommy Hensor looked up pleadingly to her, holding out the pawpaw apple. His yellow hair flamed to gold in the sunset, his blue eyes were as bright almost as Colin's. Lady Bridget shook her head.
'No, I don't want you this evening, Tommy. Take that back to your mother.'
She settled herself in the hammock and read Molly Gaverick's letter over again. Then she read one from Joan Gildea. Joan was in the full swing of London journalism again. She gave Bridget rather fuller news of Eliza Countess of Gaverick, and dwelt at some length upon the old lady's interest in Bridget's wild life and in Bridget's husband.
'You may be sure,' wrote Joan, 'that I had nothing but good to say of Colin, and oh! Biddy, dearest, how rejoiced I am to know that he is making you so happy. I could read between the lines of all your amusing descriptions and sketches of "the Dream-drive." I had my doubts and my fears, as I never concealed from you, but I believe that you have found the true, well-beloved at last.'
There was a good deal, too, in the letter about Rosamond Tallant, who was in cheerful spirits, it seemed, in spite of the impending operation, and would not hear of Sir Luke's asking for leave to be with her—and so on—and so on. Not a word about Willoughby Maule and his bereavement—which, after all, could not be so very recent. Why had Joan never mentioned it? Was she afraid of rousing regret and of awakening painful memories.
* Cleanskin—Unbranded calf.
McKeith's absence was longer than he had expected. Lady Bridget heard from Harry the Blower on his return round with the down-going mails that the little bush township of Tunumburra had become the scene of a convocation of Pastoralists called to concert measures against the threatened strike. The mailman reported that the district was now in a state of great commotion, and the strikers, gathering silently in armed force, prepared to defend their rights against a number of free labourers whom the sheep-owners were importing from the South. The men who had killed McKeith's horses were, according to the mailman, entrenched in the Range, awaiting developments. It was thought that nothing would happen on a large scale until the arrival of the free labourers and the troops, which it was said the Government was sending. Harry the Blower talked darkly of marauding bands, ambushed foes and perilous encounters on his road, all of which waxed in number and blood-thirstiness after the manner of Falstaff's men in buckram. But nobody ever took Harry the Blower's yarns very seriously.
It would have been natural for Lady Bridget to work herself up into a state of humanitarian excitement—the O'Hara's had always espoused unpopular causes—but since the arrival of the English mail a curious dreaminess had come upon her. She spent idle hours in the hammock on the veranda, and would only rouse herself spasmodically to some trivial burst of energy—perhaps a boiling water skirmish against white ants, or a sudden fit of gardening—planting seeds, training the wild cucumber vines upon the veranda posts, or watering the shrubs and flowers within the rough paling fence that enclosed the house and garden. A new-made garden, for ornament rather than for use, for the staple produce was grown in the Chinaman's garden by the lagoon. Young passion-fruit vines barely concealing the fences' nakedness, a mango, a few small orange trees now in flower. A Brazilian cherry, two or three flat-stone peach trees and loquets—all looking thirsty for rain—that was all. The Old Humpey, as it was called, had creepers overgrowing its roof, a nesting-place for frogs, lizards, snakes—and Lady Bridget, brave enough for doughty deeds, could never overcome her terror of horned beasts and reptiles. McKeith's office, where he entered branding tallies and posted the station log, was in the Old Humpey, and two or three bachelor bedrooms opposite the wing with kitchen and store. But Lady Bridget lived chiefly in the new house—less picturesque with its zinc roofing and deficiency of green drapings, but, being built on sawn lengths of saplings, more or less fortified against snakes. In front there was a great vacant space between the ground and the floor of the house—pleasant enough in summer, when a gentle draught could find its way through the cracks between the boards, but cold in winter, though the northern winters were not sharp enough or long enough for this to be a serious discomfort.
Nor, when Lady Bridget slept alone in the new house, did she mind much the dogs and harmless animals that couched under the boards, they gave her a sense of companionship. But there was a herd of goats—some of them old and with big tough horns—which McKeith had started in his bachelor days to provide milk when, as sometimes happened, the milch cows failed; also to furnish savoury messes of kid's flesh—a pleasant change from the eternal salt beef varied with wild duck. Occasionally it happened, especially in mustering times, that nobody remembered to pen the goats in their yard by the lagoon, and on these occasions they would get under the house, and the noise of their horns knocking against the floor of her bedroom would so effectively destroy Lady Bridget's chances of sleep that she would rise in the night and drive them into their fold. These were incidents which added variety to the monotony of her life in the Bush.
The head-station was very quiet one afternoon, most of the hands being out with the tailing mob; and Lady Bridget, in a restless mood, went for a roam through the bush. She walked past the Chinamen's garden and Fo Wung, carrying up buckets of water to his young cabbages, stopped to smile blandly and report on his produce. But she was in no mood for the interchange of remarks in pidgin English.
It was lonelier at the head of the lagoon. She could hear the trumpeter geese tuning up in shrill cornet-like notes and the discordant shriek of native-companions, as the long-legged grey birds stalked consequentially at the water's edge. She disturbed a flock of parrots in the white cedar tree, and a covey of duck rose with a whirring of pinions and a mighty quacking, shaking the drips off their plumage so that they glittered like diamonds in the sun. From the limbs of the dead gum tree hung flying foxes, their bat-like wings extended limply, and a gigantic crane stood in melancholy reflection upon one leg.
Lady Bridget crossed the gully and roamed the borders of the gidia scrub. Here, in an occasional open patch, were wattles breaking into yellow bloom, and sandalwood trees already in blossom, scenting the air faintly and making bright splashes upon the grey and black background of the mournful gidia. She filled her arms with flowers and wandered on, long past the stockyards, into the fastnesses of the gully, where lay dark pools almost empty now and where grey, volcanic looking rocks seemed to make a rampart between the scrub and the head-station.
She was sitting there, her back against a boulder, the forest behind her, so motionless that inquisitive bower-birds and leather-heads came quite close to her feet, her small pointed chin poked forward, her eyes shadowy and mysterious as the still waterpools below. She was visioning in space that man who had once undoubtedly cast a strong spell upon her. The spell had been broken by his own infidelity—if it WERE infidelity of the real man. For she could never believe that he had not truly loved her. Broken, secondly, by the counteracting influence of her husband. But now it seemed that the news of him in Lady Gaverick's letter had started the old vibrations afresh. It was as if an iron wall between them had suddenly been knocked down and he had gained access to her inner self. For months she had scarcely thought of him. Last night she had seen him in a dream, and he had spoken to her. He had said, 'Of course, I loved you. I never loved anyone better, but I felt that you were not of an accommodating disposition—that I could not give you anything you really wanted, and that we should not be happy together.' That was all of the dream she had brought back. But she KNEW that there had been a great deal more. The impression had been so vivid that she could not rid herself of the fancy that he was within actual reach of her. It was impossible to imagine him fourteen thousand miles distant.
She did not try now to fight against this haunting, but yielded herself to the power of the dream. When she heard a footstep in the forest behind her, she started and turned and stared into the dim aisles of the gidia, as though she expected to see his ghost.
'Mithsis—mithsis—me Wombo—plenty my been look out for you. Plenty mine frightened to go along a head-station.'
Lady Bridget laughed hysterically. What a contrast between the romantic hero of her dreams and the figure of the black-boy before her. Wombo had been in the wars. Very little was left of the trim understudy of Moongarr Bill. He was hatless; his Crimean shirt was torn into ribbons; his moleskin breeches were covered with blood and dirt; the strap belt, with its sheath-knife and various pouches, was gone, and this, judging from the state of his legs and feet, had been forcibly removed.
A gash from a tomahawk disfigured his head; the woolly hair was matted with blood. But there remained still something of the PREUX CHEVALIER about Wombo.
'Mine bring it gin belonging to me,' he announced with dignity, making an introductory gesture towards what appeared almost an excresence upon the black trunk of a gidia tree except for an old red blanket slung round one shoulder, which only half covered a woman's dusky form.
'That Oola. Mine want 'im marry Oola. Black teller belonging to that feller plenty COOLLA*. My been sneak camp. Me catch 'em Oola. Black feller look out, throw 'im tomahawk, NULLA-NULLA*. My word! big feller fight. Me YAN plenty quick. Oola YAN* plenty quick. Black feller come after—throw 'im spear—close up MUMKULL*. BA'AL* can pull out spear, Oola plenty cry.'
[*Coolla—in Blacks language, meaning Angry.]
[*Nulla-nulla—A black's weapon.]
[*Yan—To go away.]
[*Mumkull—To kill.]
[*Ba'al—No—Not.]
Oola joined in with the black's plaintive wail.
'YUCKE*! Poor fellow, Oola!'
[*Yucke!—Alas!]
Wombo pulled her forward. A comely half-caste who, as a child, had been partially civilised by a stockman's wife on one of the Leura out-stations, but who had, later, gone back to her tribe and married a Myall, as the wild blacks are called. She was very young, soft and round of outline, with hair straighter and more glossy than is usual among her kind, and large black eyes now raining tears. She wiped them away with a sooty hand, pink in the palm. Her left arm hung limp by her side.
Lady Bridget jumped to her feet, all concern.
'Oh, you poor thing! You poor, poor thing,' she cried. For Wombo, tweaking aside the concealing blanket, showed the smooth shaft of a spear transfixed in the quivering flesh of Oola's arm, above the elbow. He had broken off the long end of the spear to expedite their flight—so he explained in his queer lingo—but Oola had cried so much that he had not been able to draw out the rest of the shaft.
'BUJERI* YOU, white Mary!' pleaded Oola in the native formula. 'You gib it medsin.... You gib it one old fellow skirt.... BA'AL, Oola got 'im clothes... BA'AL got 'im ration... plenty sick this feller....' And she beat her breast with the arm that was unhurt.
[*Bujeri—Very good.]
'Of course, I'll give you medicine—and food, and I'll look out something for you to put on. Only for heaven's sake, stop crying,' said Lady Bridget. 'Come along. You must have that spear pulled out and your arm seen to. Come with me to the Humpey. Quick—MURRA* make haste.'
[*Murra make haste—To run quickly.]
But Wombo drew back, casting an affrighted glance down the gully towards the crossing.
'Ba'al me go long-a Humpey—I believe Boss PHO-PHO*, Oola,' he said.
[*Pho-pho—To shoot.]
'Wombo, you are foolish. What for Boss shoot Oola?'
'YOWI*—I believe when Boss say PHO-PHO, my word! that one PHO-PHO. Plenty black feller frightened.'
[*Yowi—Yes.]
Bridget pushed the unhappy gin along the track.
'You needn't be frightened. Boss has gone away.'
'Boss no sit down long-a Humpey?' Wombo looked relieved, and while Bridget reassured him, the three moved on towards the crossing. In answer to Lady Bridget's questioning the black-boy told his story as they went. She already knew of Wombo's passion for the young gin, who was within the prohibited degree of relationship, therefore TABU to him, and who, moreover, was already legitimately wedded to a warrior of the tribe. She knew also that McKeith had forbidden the black-boy, under pain of severe penalty, to seek the coveted bride. Of course, it was all nonsense about his shooting the poor creature, though no doubt, in ordinary circumstances, he would have sent them off the station. But hard as he was—and Lady Bridget had learned that her husband could be very hard, he would never be inhuman, and, naturally, Oola's wound must be dressed.
Lady Bridget hurried them over the crossing and up the hill. The white men were all out with the cattle. She needed assistance, and seeing Mrs Hensor at the kitchen window of the Bachelors' Quarters, called to her.
'Please come out at once, I want you.'
The woman's face became sullen on the instant.
'I can't come now. I'm in the middle of my baking.'
'But don't you see? The thing is important. This poor gin has a spear through her arm—it must be attended to immediately. Wombo is hurt too. The wounds must be washed and dressed.... Look at the poor creatures.'
Mrs Hensor contemptuously surveyed Wombo and his erring partner.
'Serve them right. He's stolen her from her husband and the Blacks have given them what for. They don't need any fussing over, these niggers. They are used to being knocked about.'
Lady Bridget's eyes blazed, but her tone was icy.
'I suppose you understand that I've given you my orders to attend to a wounded fellow-creature.'
'Well, I don't call Blacks fellow-creatures. Do you suppose we should not all be having spears thrown at us if the niggers weren't afraid of Mr McKeith's gun?'
'You have my orders,' repeated Lady Bridget sharply, her wrath at white heat.
'I take no orders from anybody but the Boss, and his orders were that if Wombo brought the gin here, they'd got to be driven off,' retorted Mrs Hensor.
'They will not be driven off. You will answer to your master for this disobedience!' said Lady Bridget.
Mrs Hensor laughed insolently.
'Oh, I'm not afraid of Mr McKeith finding fault with ME,' and she withdrew out of sight into the kitchen.
Lady Bridget made as dignified a retreat as was possible in the circumstances. She could have slain Mrs Hensor at that moment. She took the blacks to the veranda of the old Humpey and went to look in the office for antiseptics, lint and bandages. Chen Sing, the Chinese cook, came at her call, and rendered assistance with the bland phlegm of his race. The spear had been pulled out of Oola's arm by the time Lady Bridget came back with the dressings. In her spasms of East End philanthropy she had learned the first principles of surgical aid. When Oola's arm and Wombo's gashed head had been washed and bandaged, the trouble was to know what to do with the pair.
Now that they were comfortable and out of pain, fed and given tobacco to smoke and a tot of rum apiece, they had time to remember superstitious fears kept at bay while they had been running for their life. Both were afraid to show themselves in the open. On one hand, there was the terror of McKeith; on the other, of Oola's husband. Lady Bridget gathered that Oola's husband was a medicine man, and that he had 'pointed a bone at his faithless wife and her lover.' To 'point a bone' at an enemy—the bone having first been smeared with human blood, and subjected to magical incantations—is the worst spell that one aboriginal can cast upon another. It means death or the direst misfortune. All that the afflicted one can do is to fly—to hide himself beyond the sorcerer's ken and the reach of pursuit. For this reason, Wombo and Oola had fled back to Moongarr. No outside black dared venture within range of McKeith's gun. Now Wombo and Oola besought Bridget to hide them from the vengeful furies. There was that slab and bark hut at the end of the kitchen and store wing. Nobody was likely at present to want to go into it. The door had a padlock, and it was used as a store-house for the hides of beasts that had been killed for the sake of the skins when in the last stage of pleuro. The key was always kept hung up in McKeith's office.
Here Lady Bridget installed Wombo and Oola. She brought them cooked meat, bread and a ration of tea and sugar, provided them with a pair of blankets, and found for Wombo some old moleskins, a shirt, and a pair of boots, while Oola almost forgot the medicine man's evil spell in her puzzled delight over a lacey undergarment and a discarded kimono dressing-grown, which had been part of Lady Bridget's trousseau. That excitement over, the lonely mistress of Moongarr went back to her own habitation. She ate her solitary dinner and paced the veranda till darkness fell and the haunted loneliness became an almost unbearable oppression. Vast plains, distant ranges, gidia scrub and the far horizon melted into an illimitable shadow. The world seemed boundless as the starry sky—and yet she was in prison! She had longed for the freedom of the wild, and her life was more circumscribed than ever. A phrase in an Australian poem, that had struck her when she had read it not long ago came back upon her with poignant meaning. 'Eucalyptic cloisterdom'—that was the phrase, and it was this to which she had condemned herself. The gum trees enclosed for her one immense cell and she had become utterly weary of her mental and her spiritual incarceration. Oh! for the sting of love's strong emotion to break the monotony. The most sordid sights and sounds of London streets, the most inane babble of a fashionable crowd would be more stimulating to her brain, sweeter in her ears than the arid expanse, the weird bush noises—howl of dingoes, wail of curlews, lowing of cattle—that a year ago had seemed so eerily fascinating.
Even her marriage! The romance of it had faded, as it were, into the dull drab of withered gum leaves. The charm of primal conditions had been overpowered by their discomfort. Nature had never intended her for the wife of a backwoodsman. At times she felt an almost unendurable craving for the ordinary luxuries of civilisation. The bathing appliances here—or rather, the lack of them—were often positive torture to her. She hated the food—continual coarse beef varied by stringy goats' flesh or game from the lagoon. She had come to loathe wild duck—when the men had time to shoot it. She could never bring herself to destroy harmless creatures, and was a rank coward over firearms. Talk of the simple life! Why, it was only since they had got Fo Wung that there had been any vegetables. And the climate—though the short winter had been pleasant enough as a whole—was abominable. The long summer heat, the flies and the mosquitoes! What had she not suffered the first summer after her marriage! And now the hot weather was coming again. That was not the root of the trouble, however—Bridget was honest enough to confess it. The root lay in herself—in her own instability of purpose, her mercurial temperament. She had been born with that temperament. All the O'Haras loved change—hungered after strong sensation. She was spoiling now for emotional excitement.
Well, the little human drama of the Blacks' camp had taken her out of herself for an hour or two. It had been so funny to see Oola stroking the lace frills of Lady Bridget's old petticoat and looking up at Wombo with frank coquetry as she mimicked the 'White Mary's' gestures and gait. Lady Bridget meant to stand by the savage lovers. She would not allow Colin to treat them badly when he came back.
Ninnis, the overseer, broke upon her restless meditations. He was a rough specimen, originally raised in Texas, who, after knocking about in his youth as a cow-boy in the two Americas, had come to Australia about fifteen years previously, had 'free-selected' disastrously, and, during the last five years, had been in McKeith's employ. He was devoted to his master, but he looked upon McKeith's marriage as a pernicious investment. His republican upbringing could not stomach the 'Ladyship,' and he persisted in calling Lady Bridget Mrs McKeith. He considered her flighty and extravagant in her ideas, and was always divided between unwilling fascination and grumpy disapproval. To-night he was in the latter mood and this incensed Lady Bridget.
'I've been writing up the log,' he began in a surly, aggressive tone, 'and I thought I'd better make a note of Wombo and that gin having come to the head-station, in case of there being trouble with the Blacks.'
'Why should there be trouble with the Blacks?' she asked, in manner equally unconciliatory.
'Well, ye know—though, I daresay, it wouldn't seem of much consequence to you—Wombo's gone agen the laws of the tribe, and that's a serious matter. If they know he's skulking here under protection, they'll be spearing the cattle, and the Boss won't like that.'
'I'll explain to Mr McKeith,' said Lady Bridget haughtily.
'Well, I reckon it's best not to keep them on the head-station against the Boss's orders,' persisted Ninnis.
Lady Bridget set her little white teeth. 'Naturally, Mr McKeith's orders don't apply to ME—as I had to tell Mrs Hensor.'
'Mrs Hensor knows the Boss better than most people,' said Ninnis, at which Lady Bridget flashed out.
'We need not discuss that question, Mr Ninnis.'
Ninnis' jaw stiffened underneath his shaggy goatee.
'Well, I guess you know your own business, Mrs McKeith, and it's up to you to square things with the Boss.'
Lady Bridget reared her small form and bent her head with great stateliness.
'But I'll just say, though,' went on Ninnis, 'that I hear Harris of the police is coming along. And what Harris doesn't think he knows about the heel of the law being kept on Blacks—and every other darned unit in the creation scheme'—muttered Ninnis in parenthesis—'ain't entered in the Almighty's Log-book.'
Ninnis expectorated over the veranda railings—a habit of his that jarred on Lady Bridget.
'Well, what about Harris?'
'He's had his eye on Wombo and would be glad of an opportunity to best him—on account of a little affair about a colt Wombo rode for him at the last Tunumburra races—and lost the stakes—out of spite, Harris declares.'
'Oh, I know about that—and I told Mr Harris what I thought about his treatment of the Blacks. But he can't punish Wombo if I choose to have him here. I don't think Mr McKeith would bring Harris to Moongarr—he knows I can't bear him.'
'Well, I reckon that's up to you to square with the Boss,' repeated Ninnis surlily. 'I'm told Harris is on the look-out for desperate characters going along the Leura—these unionist organisers—dropping in at stations on pretence of getting rations and spying out the land, and calling on the men to join them. There was a boundary rider from Breeza Downs to-day—caught us up with the tailing mob and fetched back their new chum and Zack Duppo, leaving us awful short-handed—so that if Joe Casey doesn't fetch in the milkers so early to-morrow you'll know it's because I've had to send him out herding. They're doing their shearing early at Breeza Downs with shearers Windeatt has imported from the south, and he wants police protection for them and himself.'
Lady Bridget laughed.
'Harris and his two constables will have enough to do if they are to protect the district.'
'That's just what Windeatt has been clamouring about. Now the Government have sent up a military patrol, I believe. But they say it isn't strong enough, and all the able-bodied men on the Leura are enrolling as specials. No doubt, that's what been keeping the Boss. You may be sure if there's fighting to be done—black or white—he'll be in it.'
Lady Bridget angered Ninnis by her apparent indifference, and he bade her a cross good-night. Had it been anybody else she would have encouraged him to stay and talk. As it was, she resumed her lonely pacing, and did not go to her room till the whole station was abed.
When at last she went to sleep she dreamed again vividly of Willoughby Maule.
McKeith returned, without warning, the following afternoon. He was not alone, but had spurred on in advance of the other two men he had brought with him. Lady Bridget, reading in her hammock at the upper end of the veranda, heard the sound of a horse approaching, and saw her husband appear above the hill from the Gully Crossing. She got to her feet, expecting that he would ride up to the veranda, calling 'Biddy—Biddy,' as he usually did after an absence. But instead, he pulled up suddenly, turned his horse in the direction of the Bachelors' Quarters, and passed from her line of vision.
She supposed, naturally, that someone at the Quarters had attracted his attention, then remembering that Ninnis and the white men were out with the cattle, wondered, as the minutes went by, who and what detained him.
Tommy Hensor, running up from the garden with his evening dole of vegetables, enlightened her.
'Boss come back, Ladyship. I can see him. He is up, talking to Mother.'
Lady Bridget was too proud a woman to feel petty jealousy, nor would it have occurred to her to be jealous of Mrs Hensor. Her sentiment of dislike towards that person was of quite another order. But she was just in the mood to resent neglect on the part of McKeith.
She went to the veranda railing, whence she had a view of the Bachelors' Quarters, and was able to see for herself that Tommy's report had been correct. She called to the child:
'Go at once, Tommy, and tell the master that I am waiting.'
Tommy flew off immediately on his small, sturdy legs, and Lady Bridget watched the scene at the Bachelors' Quarters. McKeith had dismounted, and with one foot on the edge of the veranda, was facing Mrs Hensor, who looked fresh and comely in a clean blouse and bright-coloured skirt. The two seemed to have a good deal to say to each other, though Lady Bridget heard only the voices, not the words. Her Irish temper rose at the thought that Mrs Hensor might be giving him her version of the Wombo episode. She felt glad that the black-boy and his gin were comfortably sleeping off the effect of their wounds, and of the plentiful meals supplied them in the hide-house, and thus were not in evidence. When McKeith spoke, it was in a dictatorial, angry tone—that of the incensed master. Clearly, however, Mrs Hensor was not the object of his wrath. Lady Bridget saw little Tommy run excitedly up to deliver her message, and almost cried out to him to keep away from the horses' heels, to which he went perilously near. As things happened, the beast lashed out at him, and Tommy had a very narrow escape of being badly kicked. Lady Bridget heard Mrs Hensor shriek and saw her husband drag the child to the veranda and examine him anxiously, Mrs Hensor bending with him. Then McKeith lifted up Tommy and kissed and patted him almost as if he had been the boy's father. It always gave Bridget a queer little spasm of regret to see Colin's obvious affection for the little fellow. He was fond of children, specially so of this one. Lady Bridget knew, though he had never said so to her, that he was disappointed at there being no apparent prospect of her having a child.
And she—with her avidity for any new sort of sensation, although she scoffed at the joy of maternity—felt secretly inclined sometimes to gird at fate for having so far denied her this experience. She herself liked Tommy in her contradictory, whimsical fashion; but now, the fuss over, the boy—who clearly was not in the least hurt—made her very cross, and she became positively furious at seeing McKeith delay yet further to unstrap his valise and get out a toy he must have bought for Tommy in Tunumburra. Then, his grievance aparently coming back on him, he put the child abruptly aside, and leaving valise and horse at the Bachelors' Quarters, walked with determined steps and frowning visage down the track to the veranda. There, his wife was standing, very pale, very erect, her eyes glittering ominously.
McKeith was through the gate and up the flight of steps in three or four strides.
He seemed to sense the antagonism in her, and demanded at once, without waiting to give her any greeting.
'Biddy, what's this I'm hearing about Wombo and that gin?'
'I think you might have asked me before going to Mrs Hensor for information,' she answered with equal curtness.
He stared at her for a moment or two as if surprised; his face reddened, and his eyes, too, glittered.
'I don't know what you mean. I had to speak to Mrs Hensor about beds being wanted up there, and of course I asked her how things had been going on.'
'And did she tell you that she had been inhuman and insolent?'
'Inhuman... Insolent!'
'She spoke to me impudently. She defied my orders.'
'I am given to understand that she was carrying out mine,' said McKeith slowly. 'And if that's so, Mrs Hensor was in the right.'
'You put that woman before ME—before your wife?'
'There's not another woman in the universe I'd put before my wife. But that's no reason for my giving in to her when she does what I know to be folly.'
'I see. You call an act of common humanity folly—doing what one could to relieve the agony of a fellow creature. I am glad that I differ from you—and from your servant. Mrs Hensor refused to help that poor gin who had a spear through her arm and was shrieking with pain.'
'Oh, you don't know black-gins as well as I do. They'll pretend they're dying in agony just to wheedle a drop of rum or a fig of tobacco out of a white man; and they'll take it quite as a matter of course when one of their men bashes their head in with a NULLA-NULLA.'
'I suppose you'll allow that a spear wound may hurt a little,' said Bridget. 'I believe that you yourself suffered from the effect of one at least, you once told me so.'
And memory—so active these late days, brought suddenly back the vision of him as he had approached her that evening at Government House. What a great Viking he had looked!—in modern dress, of course, but bearing mark of battle in a slight drag of the left leg, only noticeable, she knew now, when he was shy and proud, and under, to him, difficult social conditions. But what a MAN she had felt him to be then, among the other men!
It seemed an outrage on her idealised image of him to hear him speaking in that dry, caustic manner.
'Ah, that's different. The Gulf natives have a nasty way of barbing and poisoning their spears. An ordinary spear-thrust is nothing to either black or white. Wombo could have pulled the thing out, and in a few hours the gin would have been all right again.'
'You think so—well in a few hours she was in a high fever. I took her temperature this morning when I re-bandaged the wound.'
McKeith laughed shortly.
'It wouldn't be surprising, if you had given her grog and tobacco and as much meat as she wanted. That what you did, eh?'
'Yes, it was. They were both starving.'
'Well, I wouldn't bank on your stock of medical knowledge, Biddy—not if I was down with fever or otherwise incapacitated. But that's not the point—which is that those blacks have been kept here against my express orders.'
'They've been kept here by MY orders,' flamed Lady Bridget.
McKeith's jaw squared, and there showed in his eyes that ugly devil which many a black and white man had seen, but never his wife before.
'Look here, milady—there can be only one boss on this station. And now you'll excuse me if I act according to my own discretion.'
Without another word he walked up the veranda and down the few steps connecting it with the Old Humpey. She heard him go into his office, and presently the door of it slammed behind him. She knew that he was going to the culprits in the hide-house, and wondered what punishment he would mete unto them. Had he gone to the office for his gun? At this moment, anything seemed possible to Lady Bridget's heated temper and excited imagination.
She stood waiting, absorbed in her fears, so abstracted from her ordinary outside surroundings that she was unaware of the approach of two horsemen from the Gully Crossing. They did not stop at the garden gate, but made for the usual station entrance at the back. One of them, lingering behind the other, gazed earnestly at Lady Bridget's tense little figure and bent head, poised in a listening attitude and conveying to him the impression that something momentous had happened or was about to happen. And just then, appalling shrieks, from the rear of the home, justified the impression.
Lady Bridget ran through the sitting-room to the veranda behind, which again connected on either side the new house with the Old Humpey and kitchen and store-wing—the hide-house standing slightly apart at the end of the store building. The shrieks in male and female keys came from the hide-house and mingled with McKeith's strident tones fulminating in Blacks' lingo. The noise brought Mrs Hensor and Tommy down from the Bachelors' Quarters, and the Chinese cook, the Malay boy and Maggie the housemaid from the service department. The three verandas and garden plot made a kind of amphitheatre; and now, into the arena, came the actors in the little tragedy.
From the hide-house, McKeith dragged the prisoners, and through the gateway in the palings which made the fourth side of the enclosure. With one hand he clutched Wombo, with the other Oola, who in her lace-trimmed petticoat and flowered kimono was truly a tragi-comic spectacle.
McKeith carried his coiled stockwhip in the hand which held Wombo. It was plain, judging from the state of Wombo's new shirt, that he had given the black boy a thrashing; Oola was unscathed. Of course, Colin could not lift his hand to a woman, though he was a brute and the woman only a black-gin. Lady Bridget felt faintly glad at this.
She watched the scene, half fascinated, half disgusted, all her attention concentrated on these three figures. She had but a dim consciousness of two men riding round the store-wing and dismounting. One of the two remained in the background screened by the trails of native cucumber overhanging the veranda end. The other—a wiry, powerful figure in uniform, with a rubicund face, black bristling moustache and beard and prominent black eyes, reminding one of the eyes of a bull—walked forward and spoke with an air of official assurance.
'Can I be of any use to you, Mr McKeith, in dealing with that nigger? A bad character, as I've reason to know.'
'No, thank you, Harris. I can do my own dirty jobs,' said McKeith shortly.
He had released the pair and now stood grimly surveying them. Oola was crying and squealing; Wombo stood upright—a scowl of hate on his face. His whole nature seemed changed. A flogging will rouse the semi-civilised black's evil passions like nothing else. There was something of savage dignity in the defiant way in which he faced his former master.
'What for you been take-it stockwhip long-a me? BA'AL me bad black boy long-a you, Boss. What for me no have 'em gin belonging to me? Massa catch 'im bujeri White Mary like it gin belonging to him. What for no all same black fellow?'
McKeith cut short the argument—sound logic it seemed to Lady Biddy—by an imperious, silencing gesture, and a sudden unfurling of his stockwhip, which made a hissing sound as it writhed along the ground like a snake. The black boy sprang aside. McKeith pointed to the gidia scrub and issued a terse command in the native language.
'YAN' (go). 'BA'AL YOU WOOLLA' (don't talk any more). 'YAN.'
Wombo turned appealingly to Lady Bridget.
'Lathychap!'
'YAN,' stormed McKeith again, and, as Lady Bridget made a movement of sympathetic response towards the black fellow, he added sternly: 'You'll oblige me by not interfering in this business. The Blacks know that what I say, I mean, and I'll have no more words with them.'
Bridget stood quite still, her attitude and expression all indignant protest, but she said nothing. Her face was turned full towards the man hidden by the creepers, who was watching her with intense interest, but she was unconscious of his gaze.
Wombo retreated slowly. Oola, cowed, whimpering, behind him. Then, she made an appeal to Lady Bridget, stretching out her unbandaged arm imploringly.
'White Mary—you PIDNEY (understand). That fellow medsin man—husband belonging to me. Him come close-up long-a srub—throw 'im spear, NULLA-NULLA—plenty look out Wombo. BA'AL, Wombo got 'im spear—ba'al got 'im NULLA-NULLA. Suppose black fellow catch 'im Wombo—my word! that fellow MUMKULL (kill). Wombo—mumkull Oola—altogether BONG (dead). YUCKE! YUCKE! Lathychap suppose Massa let Wombo sit down long-a head-station—two day, three day—black fellow get tired—up stick—no more look out. No catch 'im Wombo. Lathychap!' she pleaded, 'BUJERI you PIALLA (intercede with) Boss.'
Lady Bridget came down the steps from the veranda and went up to McKeith.
'Colin, what the gin says is true. Her tribe will kill them, and they have no weapons and no means of protection. Will you, as a favour to me, let them stay for a few days? At least, till her arm is healed and the danger past?'
McKeith hesitated perceptibly, then the consciousness of weakening resolve made him harden himself the more, made his speech rougher than it might have been.
'No, I can't, Biddy. I never break my word. They've GOT to go.'
He turned fiercely on Wombo, who stood sullen and defiant again, and from him to Oola, who crouched in the dust, sobbing pitifully and rubbing her damaged arm.
'Plenty me sick, Boss—close up TUMBLEDOWN' (die), she wailed.
'Stop that! YAN—do you hear? YAN—YAN—BURRI—BURRI—' (go quickly).
The whip lashed out again. It stung Wombo's bare leg, and flicked Oola's petticoat. The two ran screaming lustily towards the rocks and scrubby country at the head of the gully.
Lady Bridget uttered a shuddering exclamation and made an impetuous movement with arms partly outstretched as if to follow the pair. Then her arms dropped and she stood stock still.
There was a dead silence. In all the relations of husband and wife, never had there been a moment more crucial as affecting their ultimate future. They looked at each other unflinchingly, neither speaking. McKeith's lips were resolute, locked, his pugnacious jaw set like iron. Here was the stubborn determination of a fighting man, never to admit himself in the wrong. And his eyes seemed to have a steel curtain over them—which, however, had Bridget's spiritual intuition been awake to perceive it, softened for an instant, letting through a gleam of passionate appeal.
But Bridget's soul was steel-cased also. He saw only contempt, repulsion in her gaze. The larger issues narrowed to a conflict of two egoisms. It seemed to both as though, in the space of that last quarter of an hour, they had become mortal foes.
The police inspector broke in upon the tense silence. Here was another egoism to be reckoned with—malevolently officious.
'They'll be hiding in the gully, Mr McKeith. No fear of them taking to the outside bush with the tribe hanging round. I'll just round 'em up and drive 'em into the scrub and strike the fear of the Law into them. I'll do it now before I turn out my horse into the paddock.'
'No,' flamed Lady Bridget. 'You'll leave those unfortunate creatures alone—or—if you molest them—whether it's by my husband's permission or not—well—you'll find I'm a bad hater, Mr Harris.'
The police inspector flushed a deep red.
'Maybe I'm not such a bad hater either, my lady—but with my respects....'
'That will do, Harris,' interposed McKeith. 'I told you that I'd do my own dirty jobs. There's no occasion for you to go against her ladyship's wishes.'
Harris touched his helmet to Lady Bridget and, leering with veiled enmity, replied:
'I'm never one to put myself up against the ladies, except where my duty comes first—and that's not the case—yet. But as I was saying, with my respects, my lady, Mr McKeith knows very well how to treat the blacks. He knows that you've got to keep your word to them, whether that means a plug of tobacco or a plug of cold iron.'
Lady Bridget drew back and looked at Harris for a second or two with an expression of the most withering haughtiness. Then, without a word she turned her back on him. The inspector infuriated, muttered in his throat. McKeith interposed sharply:
'Bridget, Harris is going to stay the night.'
'Ah! at the Bachelors' Quarters,' Lady Bridget smiled with distant calm. 'Of course, Mrs Hensor knows. I'm sorry I can't ask Mr Harris to dinner at the house this evening.'
Now, by the social canons of the Bush, the police inspector, being technically speaking of higher grade than the casual traveller, should have been accepted as a 'parlour visitor.' He would thus have occupied one of the bachelor spare rooms in the Old Humpey and would have joined the Boss and his wife at dinner. Harris had never before stayed the night at Moongarr, and he had confidently expected to be received with honour. Thus he regarded Lady Bridget's speech as an insult.
'Oh, I'm not one to force my company where it is not wanted,' he blustered. 'I'm quite content with a shake-down at the Quarters, though if I'd known I might have gone by the short cut with the Specials—it's rather late, however, to push on to Breeza Downs, where—though perhaps I say it as shouldn't—I'm sure of a welcome from Mr and Mrs Windeatt, being, so to speak—for law and order—the representative of His Majesty in the Leura district.'
Lady Bridget smiled with detached amusement, as she turned again and patted the head of an elderly kangaroo dog, which came up to her with its tongue out and a look of wistful enquiry in its bleared eyes, scenting plainly that something was amiss. 'Good dog, Veno,' she murmured.
Harris bridled.
'I'll bid you good evening then, my lady,' he said stiffly. 'No doubt, Mr McKeith, you'll spare me half an hour in the office by and by. Just to concert our measures for the proper protection of the Pastoralists and the safeguarding of the woolsheds this shearing season.'
'Yes, yes, or course,' McKeith answered mechanically. The spunk had gone out of him, as Harris would have phrased it; and the Inspector, looking at Lady Bridget, guessed the reason.
'And what now about the gentleman from Leichardt's Town, Mr McKeith? Will I be taking him up with me to the Bachelor's Quarters? Or may be,' Harris added unpleasantly, 'her ladyship won't object to having him in the house.'
McKeith muttered angrily, 'Damn! I'd forgotten.'
It was not like him to lose himself during working hours in even a momentary fit of abstraction—except, indeed, when he was riding without immediate objective through the Bush. His eyes were still upon his wife's slight figure as she moved slowly towards the veranda, with the air of one who has no more concern with the business in hand. Her graceful aloofness, which he knew to be merely a social trick, stung him inexpressibly, the faint bow she had given Harris when he bade her good evening had seemed to include himself. It galled him that he did not seem fitted by nature or breeding to cope with this kind of situation. The half consciousness of inferiority put him still more at disadvantage with himself.
'Biddy, wait please,' he said dictatorially.
She paused at the steps, her hand on the railings, her eyes under their lowered lids ignoring him.
He went closer and spoke rapidly in a harsh undertone.
'I didn't tell you—though I rode ahead on purpose—I met a man at Tunumburra who said he knew you. He's out from England—been staying at Government House, and brought a letter from Sir Luke Tallant. I hope that at any rate you'll be civil to him.'
She flashed a quick glance at him, and her eyelids dropped again.
'But naturally. I'm not in the habit of being uncivil to—my friends.'
And just then—Mrs Hensor, who loved cheap fiction, said afterwards it was all like a scene out of a book—there appeared in the space between the two wings, a man who had strolled unobserved from one side, out of the background of creepers, and who advanced with quickened step to where the husband and wife stood.
A striking individual. Tall—though not as tall or as massively built as Colin McKeith, firm boned and muscular, but with a sort of feline grace of movement. There was the unmistakable stamp of civilisation, and, at the same time, an exotic suggestion of the East, of wild spaces, adventure, romance. Not in the least a Bushman, but wearing with ease and picturesqueness, a backwoods get-up. Clothes, extremely well cut; riding breeches and boots; soft shirt and falling collar with a silk tie of dull flame colour knotted at the sinewy throat, loose coat, Panama hat. So much for the figure. The face ugly, but distinguished, sallow-brown in colouring. Nose long, fine, with a slight twist below the bridge; cheeks and chin clean-shaven, an enormous dark moustache concealing the mouth. Hair black, slightly grizzled, and when he lifted his hat forming a thick lightly frosted crest above his forehead. Eyes black—peculiar eyes, sombre, restless, but with a gaze, steady and piercing when concentrated on a particular object, as, just now, it was concentrated on Lady Bridget.
The gaze seemed compelling. Lady Bridget suddenly lifting eyes that were instantly wide open, became aware of the man's presence. The effect of it upon her was so marked that McKeith, watching her face, felt a shock of surprise. The change in her was noticed by the Police Inspector, with malevolent curiosity. So also by Mrs Hensor, a little further away.
The new-comer saluted her with a low bow, his hat in one hand, the other extended.
'You haven't forgotten me, I hope, Lady Bridget, though I should think that I am the very last person in the world you would have expected to see in these parts.'
Lady Bridget had turned very white. She stared at him as if he had been a ghost, and at first seemed unable to speak. But her confusion lasted only a few seconds. Almost before he had finished his sentence she had pulled herself together. Her hand was in his, and she spoke in her old fluty voice and little grand manner, with the old slow, faintly whimsical smile on her lips and in her eyes. It came over McKeith that he had not of late been familiar with this aspect of her, and that she was exhibiting to this man the same strange charm of her girlhood which had been to him, in the full fervour of his devotion, so wonderful and worshipful, but of which—he knew it now—the Bush had to a great extent robbed her.
She laughed as she withdrew her hand from that of the newcomer. And standing on the steps, her head almost on a level with his, met his eyes with challenging directness.
'Really, Mr Maule, you shouldn't startle a nervous creature in that uncanny way—appearing like the unmentionable Personage or the angel if you prefer it, only with this difference, that we weren't speaking of you. I hadn't the most distant notion that you were on this side of the equator. If my husband had mentioned your name I should not have been so taken by surprise.'
'Were you really so surprised? I thought I MUST have sent my shadow on before me—because I've been thinking so tremendously of you these last few days, and of the prospect of seeing you again. I daresay you know,' he added, turning politely to McKeith—'that I had the pleasure of meeting your wife when she was Lady Bridget O'Hara, one winter at Rome, with her cousins, Lord and Lady Gaverick. And later, we saw something of each other in London.'
'No, my husband doesn't know,' Bridget gave a reckless laugh, and her eyes challenged those of McKeith before he could answer. 'You see, Colin and I, when we married, came from opposite poles geographically, morally and mentally. He did not understand or care about my old environment any more than I understood—or cared about his. So we agreed to bury our respective pasts in oblivion. Don't you think it was a good plan?'
'Quite admirable. I admire your mutual courage in adopting it.'
'You think so! It has its drawbacks, though,' said McKeith dryly. 'I must apologise for having left you to announce yourself. The fact is, those Blacks put other things out of my head. They had to be taught they couldn't disobey orders without being punished for it.'
'Poor wretches! Yes! I know the popular idea of asserting British supremacy over coloured races, by the force of the whip. I have not always seen it answer; but then my experience has been with natives rather higher in the scale of evolution than the Australian aboriginal.'
'You believe in the power of kindness—as I do,' exclaimed Lady Bridget. 'My husband and I take different views on that subject. But we need not discuss them now. Come and have some tea, and tell me about the Tallants.'
Maule followed her to the door of the living room where she turned to give some orders to Maggie, the maid-servant, and to the Chinese cook. McKeith went off with Harris to see after the horses and have a talk with Ninnis at the stockyards. Thus, Maule was left alone for a few minutes to study and form his own opinion as to Lady Bridget's setting. She was a woman who, whatever her surroundings, must always impress them with her personality. This bush parlour was original in its simplicity. Walls lined with unvarnished wood which was mellowing already to a soft golden brown. Boards bare, but for a few rugs and skins. A fine piece of tappa from the Solomons, of barbaric design in black and orange, made the centre of an arrangement of South Sea Island and aboriginal weapons. Divans heaped with cushions flanked the great fireplace. Two writing-tables occupied spaces between French windows—one the desk of a business-like roll-top escritoire; the other, the flap of a Chippendale bureau, with a Chippendale arm-chair before it. There were a few other pieces unmistakable English. In fact, Eliza Countess of Gaverick, in addition to a handsome present of plate, had sent her niece the furnishings of her old room at Castle Gaverick. A few pictures and etchings hung on the other walls—among them several wild seascapes—reminding one a little of Richard Doyle's exquisite water colours—in which green billows and foamy wave-crests took the shape of sea-fairies. Also some weird tree studies—mostly gum and gidia, where gnarled limbs and bulbous protuberances turned into the faces of gnomes and the forms of strange monsters. Maule had no doubt that these were Lady Bridget's own. There was an upright grand piano—the alleged cause of Steadbolt's conversion to Unionism, and all about the place a litter of newspapers, books and work. The room was filled with flowers—sheaves of wattle and of the pale sandal-wood blossoms, as well as many sub-tropical blooms with which he was not familiar. Blending with, yet dominating the mixture of perfumes, a peculiar scent resembling incense, appealed to him; and this he did not a first trace to a log of sandal-wood smouldering on the open hearth more for effect than warmth, for the early spring evenings had scarcely a touch of chill. The French windows stood open to the veranda, a room in itself with its many squatters' chairs, hammocks and tables. Beyond, stretched the green expanse of plain, utterly lonely, the waters of the lagoon taking a reddish tinge where they reflected the lowering sun. It seemed an inconceivable environment to have been chosen by the Lady Bridget he had known in London, one of whose chief attractions to him had been that she represented a certain section of the aristocracy of Great Britain, decadent perhaps, but 'in the swim.'
She cam now along the veranda from the Old Humpey with the light, rather hurried tread he remembered, talking rapidly when she joined him.
'I've been seeing about your room. I suppose you know enough now of the Never-Never to understand that we are quite primitive in our habits. You won't find a spring mattress—or water laid on—or any other convenience of civilisation.'
'May I remind you that I've roughed it pretty well in the Andes.'
'Yes, but you have had so many luxuries since then that you will have forgotten what roughing it feels like—just as I've forgotten now that I was ever anything but a barbarian—I see you shave still.'
'Yes—why?'
'Only that I discovered just now the white ants had eaten all the woodwork of the spare-room looking-glass. The thing crumbled in my hand and fell on the floor and was broken. A bad omen for your visit, isn't it?'
'I hope not. So you are superstitious as ever?'
'I haven't ceased to be a Celt—though I've become a barbarian. I'll borrow the overseer's looking glass for you.'
'Pray don't. I've got one of sorts in my razor case. Is dinner regarded in the Never-Never as a sacred ceremonial?'
'The men don't put on dress clothes, if that's what you mean. As for the repast, for a long time, as a rule, the menu was salt junk and pumpkin. We've improved on that a little since the Chinese cook and the Chinese gardener came back from the goldfields—there was another rush at Fig Tree Mount that fizzled out. To-night, you will have kangaroo-tail soup, and kid EN CASSEROLE. If you make believe very hard you might possible imagine it young venison.... Here, Kuppi!' The Malay boy brought in the tea-tray and she signed to him to put it on the table between the fire and the window.
'Tea,' she asked, 'or would you rather have whiskey and water? I can't offer you soda water because, till the drays come, we have nothing to run the seltzogene with.... Do you know that the Unionists cut our dray horses' throats? We're lucky to have whiskey in the store. They broke open the cases of spirits and stole a lot of things.... Vicissitudes of savage life, you see!'
She rattled on, scarcely pausing. She was seated on a divan, the tea before her—he in a squatter's chair with long arms, in which he sat silent, leaning forward, his hands on the chair-arms, his eyes fixed upon her. She avoided looking at him. Her small sun-browned hands fidgeted among the cups. If anything remained of her anger and emotion, she hid it under a ripple of absurd housewifely chatter, not waiting for him to answer.
'Well, is it to be tea or whiskey?'
'Tea, please,' and then at last she stopped and looked at him and could not turn her eyes away, or did not want to do so. His black orbs stared with a disquieting fixity—a sort of inhuman power—from out of his foreign-looking face. That stare was his chief weapon in the subjugation of women—they called it magnetic, and no doubt it was so. It increased the fascination of his ugly good looks.
The gaze of each one seemed to fuse in that of the other. Hers, at first coldly curious, tentative, caught light, warmth, intensity from the sombre fire of his. Suddenly he said:
'In God's name, Biddy, how did you come to marry that rough brute.'
'IS he a rough brute! It's very rude of you to say so. But do you know, just for a half minute to-day, I rather thought so myself. I don't pretend to agree with Colin's methods of treating the Blacks, though I'm told it's the only way to treat them—you know they did commit terrible atrocities up here.... Still to flog a black man, a wild, warlike, human creature, seems to me nearly as bad as shooting him. Do you know—the first thing I ever heard about Colin was that he had a great many notches on his gun, and that each one meant a wild black-fellow that he had shot dead.'
'And now he flogs tame ones,' Maule observed quietly. Her brilliant eyes searched his face for a sign of malevolent sarcasm, but not a muscle quivered. Her own eyes wavered under his steady look. She busied herself among the tea things.
'Sugar?'
'Please.'
But she paused, the tongs balanced in her delicate fingers.
'It is frightfully thrilling—life in the Bush.'
'What part of it? The shooting or the flogging?'
She burst out: 'You know I hated that. You know I was furious about the flogging. You know'—She pulled herself up.
'I know nothing—except that you must have changed enormously in a very short time to have been thrilled with anything but horror—by that sort of thing.'
'Yes, I have changed. But it isn't time that changes one. Time never counts with me. It's only feeling that counts. Oh, of course, I think it all horrible—about the Blacks up North. They're not allowed on this station—except one or two half civilised stock-boys—and this one fell in love and carried off his gin, and brought her here against my husband's orders.'
'Yes? And you had befriended them—I gathered that. But it doesn't explain YOU.'
She took up a piece of sugar with the tongs, holding it suspended as she spoke, jerkily.
'Why should I be explained? As for my finding life in the Bush thrilling.... I was dead sick of falsities when I left England, I wanted to be thrilled by something real.'
'And you found that—in your husband?'
'Yes; I did. He IS real, at least. He is true to himself. So few men have the strength of their goodness or the courage of their badness, when it comes to a big test.'
'Oh! I grant you. Yes; I know that's what you're thinking. I wasn't true to myself in the big test.... But YOU were to blame for my having been false to the higher ideal.'
'I! Oh—what makes you—' But she thought better of the impetuous questions that trembled on her lips, and went on in a different tone.
'What does that matter! I'm not saying anything about high ideals. What is high? .... What is low? .... You've just got to invoke truth and freedom—as far as your conception of them goes.... And there's a reason for Colin's hatred of the Blacks.'
'Ah! Is it permitted to ask the reason?'
'His family were all massacred by the natives—father, mother, sisters—all. Well, one admires a man steadfast in revenge—going straight for what he wants—and getting it—doing it—in love or in hate. Now I have answered your question.'
The gesture of her head seemed a defiance. She dropped the sugar into his tea, and he took the cup from her hands, and slowly drank it without saying a word.
It was she who broke the silence.
'You provoke me. You make me say things I don't want to say. You always did.'
'Ah! Then marriage has not changed you so immensely, after all!'
She bit her lip and rose abruptly.
'Do you want any more tea? No. Then come to the veranda and tell me how it is that Luke Tallant has allowed you to exchange Government House for the Never-Never?'
He had followed her through the French window.
'I see you haven't heard the bad news.'
'No—what? We only get a mail once a week.'
'I thought McKeith would have broken the shock. He came on, he said, to do so. Poor Lady Tallant.'
'Rosamond! The operation?'
'She died under the anaesthetic. Sir Luke got the news by cable the day before I left Leichardt's Town. He wired at once for leave and has started for England by this time.'
'Oh? poor Rosamond! Poor, poor Rosamond!'
'Is she to be so greatly pitied! She has been saved much suffering!'
Then as Bridget went on murmuring, 'Oh, poor Rosamond, she did love life,' he added gently. 'Life can be very cruel.... I myself have had cause for gratitude to Death, the great Simplifier. If my wife had lived she must have been a hopeless invalid doomed to continual pain.'
Lady Bridget gave him a swift look of reproach.
'Oh, do you expect me to congratulate you?' she exclaimed bitterly. 'Yes,' she went on, 'perhaps, to HER Death was merciful—but not to Rosamond. And Luke did care for his wife. He will be broken-hearted.'
She stood gazing out upon the plain, on which the mist was gathering. From across the gully sounded the cattle being driven home.
When she turned to him, her eyes were full of tears.
'I think I'll go now.' She said simply. 'Colin will show you your room. He's there—coming up from the lagoon.'
She went through a French window lower down the veranda into her bedroom, and Maule descended the steps into the garden and presently joined his host.
A little later, McKeith having tubbed and changed his riding clothes, came to his wife's room. He looked very large and clean and fair, and the worst of his temper had worn off in a colloquy with Ninnis, and the imparting and receiving of local news. But his eyes were still gloomy, and his mouth sullenly determined. And he had remembered with remorse that he should have softened to Bridget the sudden news of her friend's death. The sight of her now—a small tragic figure with a white face and burning eyes, in a black dress into which she had changed, deepened his compunction.
'I am very sorry, Biddy.' He tried to put his arm round her shoulder, but she drew back.
'What are you sorry for, Colin—that Rosamond Tallant is dead, and that you forgot to tell me, and let me hear it from—Willoughby Maule?' She paused perceptibly before pronouncing the christian name, 'Or that you behaved like an inhuman monster to those wretched Blacks, and refused me the only thing I have asked you for a good time past?'
Her tone roused his rancour anew.
'I think we'll drop the subject of the Blacks; there is no earthly use in talking about them, I make it a rule never to threaten without performing, and I'd punish them again, just the same—or more severely—under similar circumstances.'
'Very well. You will do as you please, and I shall do as I please, too.'
'What do you mean?'
'Just what I say. I agree with you that there's no use in discussing things about which we hold such different opinions. Quite simply, I can't forgive you for this afternoon's work.'
'Biddy, you exaggerate things.'
'Perhaps. But I don't think so in this case. Let me go out, Colin. Dinner must be ready by now.'
'No. I've got something to ask you first. I want to know why you looked so upset—as if you were going to faint—when that man came up to you to-day?'
'Naturally, I was startled. I had no idea he was in Australia.'
'But why should that have affected you. One might have imagined he had been your lover. Was he ever your lover, Biddy? I must know.'
'And if he had been, do you think I should tell you,' she answered coldly.
McKeith's face turned a dark red. His eyes literally blazed.
'That's enough.' He said, 'I shall not ask you another question about him. I am answered already.'
He stood aside to let her pass out into the veranda, and she walked along to the sitting-room.
Dinner went off, however, more agreeably than might have been expected. Lady Bridget's manner was simple and to the guest charming. The black dress, the touch of pensiveness was in keeping with the shadow of tragedy. But she spoke in a natural way, and with tender regret of Lady Tallant—questioning Maule as to when he had last seen her, and learning from him how it had been at Rosamond's instigation that he had cabled proposing himself as a companion in Sir Luke's loneliness. It had been only a week after his arrival in Leichardt's Town that the blow had fallen.
'You know, Tallant and I always hit it off very well together,'he observed explanatorily, addressing McKeith. 'It was at their house that I used to meet Lady Bridget during the few months that I had the honour of her acquaintance in England.'
McKeith looked at his guest in a resentful but half puzzled way. A spasm of doubt shook him. Suppose he had been making a fool of himself—insulting his wife by unreasoning suspicions? A vague contempt in her courteous aloofness had stung him to the quick. And the other man's easy self assurance, the light interchange of conversation between them about things and people of which McKeith knew nothing—all gave the Australian a sense of bafflement—the feeling that these two were ruled by another social code, belonged to a different world, in which he had no part. He had been sitting at the head of his table, perfunctorily doing his duty as host, wounded in his self-esteem—almost the tenderest part on him, morose and miserable. Now he snatched at the idea that he had been mistaken, as if it were a life-buoy thrown him in deep waters. He began to talk, to assert himself, to prove himself cock of his own walk. And Maule suavely encouraged him to lay down the law on things Australian, while Lady Bridget withdrew into herself, baffling and enraging McKeith still more hopelessly. He did not seem now to know his wife! A catastrophe had happened. What? How? Why? .... Nothing was the same, or could be the same again.
It was a relief when dinner was over. The men pulled out their pipes in the veranda. Lady Bridget, just within the sitting room window, smoked a cigarette, her small form extended in a squatter's chair, listening to, but taking scarcely any part in the conversation. The two outside discussed local topics—McKeith's failure to trace the perpetrators of the outrage on his horses. Maule's impressions of Tunumburra—where he had met McKeith in the township hotel, and the two had apparently, in the usual Bush fashion, got on intimate terms—the rumours of an armed camp of Unionists, and the expected conflict between them and the sheep owners and free shearers at Breeza Downs, whither the Government specials were bound. Lady Bridget gleaned that Maule had placed himself under McKeith's directions.
'What are your immediate movements to be?' he asked his host. 'Remember, I am ready to fall in with any plans you may have for making me useful.'
McKeith did not answer at once. He took his pipe from his mouth, and knocked the ashes out of it against the arm of his chair, while he seemed to be considering the question. Then, as if he had formed a definite determination, he leaned forward and addressed his wife in a forcedly matter-of-fact tone.
'I don't suppose you know much about what has been going on, Biddy. The same boat that brought up the specials brought a hundred or more free labourers, and they're on their way up to the different sheep-stations along the river—a lot of them for Breeza Downs, where Windeatt has begun shearing. Windeatt is in a blue funk because a report that a little army of Unionists, all mounted and armed, are camped that way and threatening to burn down his wool-shed and sack his store. The burned old Duppo's wool-shed last week.'
'He's a skinflint, and I'm sure he deserved it,' put in Lady Bridget indifferently.
McKeith check a dry sarcasm. He became aware of Maule's eyes turning from one to the other.
'Well—' He got up and leaned his great frame against the lintel between Maule and Lady Bridget. 'The Pastoralist Executive at Tunumburra have asked us cattle-owners who—are more likely to be let alone than the sheep-men, to help in garrisoning the sheep-stations; and I've promised to ride over to Breeza Downs to-morrow and do my share in protecting the place. Harris and I are going together.'
Lady Bridge seemed more interested in blowing smoke-rings than in her husband's news.
'I may have to be away several days,' continued McKeith. 'Then there's the new bore we're sinking—the water is badly wanted—cattle are dying—I can't run any risk of the bore-plant being wrecked. The men who are working there must be sent off because we're short of rations—thanks to those murderous brutes keeping back the drays—and the muster has to be stopped for the same reason. I won't answer for when I can be back.' ... As she made no answer, he asked sharply: 'Do you understand, Biddy?'
'Yes, of course. I have no doubt, Colin, that you'll find it all highly stimulating. And perhaps you will be able to shoot somebody with a clear conscience, which will be more stimulating still. Really Mr Maule, you are lucky to have come in for a civil war—I heard that in South America that was your particular interest. Do you carry civil wars about with you? Only, there's nothing very romantic in fighting for mere freedom of contract—it seems so obvious that people should be free to make or decline a contract. I wonder which side you would take.'
Her levity called forth an impatient ejaculation from McKeith.
'I'm afraid in my wars it's generally been what your husband would consider the wrong side,' said Maule with a laugh. 'I've usually fought with the rebels.'
'Then you'd better not go to Breeza Downs. You'd better stop and fight for me,' exclaimed Bridget.
'That's just what I was about to propose your friend should do,' said McKeith in hard deliberate tones. He looked straight at his wife—shoulders and jaws squared, eyes like flashing steel under the grim brows. The expression of his face gave Bridget a little sense of shock. She raised herself abruptly, and her eyes flashed pride and defiance too.
'How very considerate of you, Colin—if Mr Maule LIKES to be disposed of in that way. HE is to be allowed freedom of contract I presume, though the shearers are not.'
'You needn't be afraid that I shall strike, Lady Bridget,' laughed Maule. 'It will suit my general principles to keep out of the scrimmage. I don't know anything about the rights and wrongs of your labour question, but I confess that, speaking broadly, my sympathies are usually rather with Labour than with Capital.'
'Capital!' echoed McKeith derisively. 'It's blithering irony to talk of us Leura squatters as representing capital. We're all playing a sort of battledore and shuttlecock game—tossed about between drought and plenty—boom and slump. A kick in the beam and one end is up and the other end down. There's Windeatt, who will be ruined if his wool-shed is destroyed and his shearing spoiled. No rain, and the banks would foreclose on most of us. Take myself. Two years ago the skies were all smiling on my fortunes. This last year, it's as if the hosts of heaven had a down on me.'
'The stars in their courses fought against Sisera,' murmured Lady Bridget.
'I'm Sisera, am I?' He gave her a fierce look and crossed to the veranda-railing, where he began cutting tobacco into the palm of his hand. 'Well, there is something in that. But the stars have never licked me yet. Sisera was a coward, or they wouldn't have DOWNED him.'
'Ah, but there was Jael to be reckoned with,' put in Maule softly.
'Jael!' McKeith plugged his pipe energetically. 'The more fool Sisera for not giving Jael a wide berth. He should have gone his way and kept her out of his affairs.'
A hard little laugh rang from the depths of the squatter's chair. Maule got up and strolled into the sitting-room, where he seemed engrossed in the pictures on the wall. Just then Cudgee, the black boy, hailed McKeith from the foot of the steps.
'That fellow pollis man want'ing Massa. He sit down long-a Old Humpey.'
'All right.'
McKeith looked into the parlour. 'My wife will entertain you, Maule. I daresay you've got plenty to talk about. I'll see you later.'
Presently they heard him outside speaking to the Police Inspector. 'Come into the office, Harris, and have a smoke and a glass of grog.'
Lady Bridget and Willoughby Maule were alone again. She got up from the long chair, and as she did so her cigarette case dropped from her lap. He picked it up and it lay on his open palm, the diamonds and rubies of her maiden initials glistening on the gold lid. They looked at each other across it.
'I gave you this,' he said, 'and you have kept it—used it?'
He seemed to gloat over the bauble.
Her fingers touched his hand as she took the case from him, and he gave a little shiver of pleasure.
'Let me have it; I want another cigarette.' She selected two and gave him one of them.
They moved to the divan near the fireplace, where some red embers remained of the log of sandalwood. Its perfume lingered faintly in the atmosphere.
'That's good,' he said. 'It's like you; the only thing in the god-forsaken desert that IS like you.'
'Oh, you don't know me—now.'
'Don't I! Well, your husband has given me the chance of knowing you—better—and I warn you that I shall not scruple to avail myself of the opportunity.'
She shook her head dubiously. 'Give me a light.'
He stooped and lit his own cigarette, then, bending, held its tip to her. They both inhaled a few whiffs in silence. Presently, he said:
'I find it difficult to understand McKeith.'
'Don't try. You wouldn't succeed. I observe,' she added, 'that you must have become rather friendly at Tunumburra?'
'Oh, yes. I can generally get on with open-air men. Besides, I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to ask me here.'
'Well—and what do you thing of it, now that you are here?'
'Great heavens! What do you imagine that I should think of it! The whole thing seems to me the most ghastly blunder—the most horrible anomaly. You—in these surroundings! Married to a man so entirely beneath you, and with whom you don't get on at all.'
'You have no right to say that.'
'The thing is obvious; though you tried to carry it off before dinner. Your manner to each other; the lack of courtesy and consideration in him; his leaving you....'
'Stop,' she interrupted. 'There's one thing you MUST understand. I don't mind what you say about yourself—I want to hear that—but I can't allow you to criticise my husband.'
'I beg your pardon. It isn't easy in the conditions to preserve the social conventions. I will try to obey you. At any rate, you allow me to be frank about myself.... It was sweet of you to keep this—more than I could have dared hope for.'
He fingered tenderly the cigarette case on her lap.
'I suppose I ought to have sent it back to you. But I didn't want to. You see it was not like an engagement ring.'
'No, worse luck.'
'Why, worse luck?'
'The ring would have been the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond. If you had been really engaged to me—formally, officially engaged, you couldn't have thrown me over so easily.'
'I—throw you over! Is it quite fair to put it that way?'
'No, I admit that. Let us be honest with each other—this once.'
'This once—very well—but not at this moment. I daresay there will be time for a talk by and by.'
'I wait your pleasure.'
'There are some things I should like to understand,' she went on, '—about you—about me, it doesn't matter which. And, after all, I only want to know about you out of a sort of perverse curiosity.'
'That's so like you. You always managed to infuse a bitter drop into your sweetness. And you COULD be so adorably sweet... If only I could ever have felt sure of you.'
'Where would have been the use? We never could spend an hour together without hurting or annoying each other. It's a very good thing for us both that neither cared enough to make any real sacrifice for the other.'
'There you wrong me,' he exclaimed. 'I did care—I cared intensely. The touch of your hand—the very sweep of your dress thrilled every nerve in me. I never in all my life loved a woman as I loved you. That last day when you walked out of my rooms....'
'Where I never ought to have gone. Fancy the properly brought-up English girl you used to hold up to me doing such a shocking thing as to visit you alone in your chambers! ... Oh! Is that Colin back again?'
For Maule had started visibly at the sound of quick steps mounting to the veranda, and McKeith's towering figure appeared in the doorway, looking at them.
Lady Bridget turned her head, her cigarette in her hand, and glanced up at his face. What she saw in it might have made a less reckless or less innocent woman feel uneasy. She was sure that he must have heard that last speech of hers about visiting Maule in his chambers. Well, she didn't care. Besides Colin hadn't the smallest right to resent any action of hers before her marriage... She did not turn a hair. Maule admired her composure.
'BON SANG NE PEUT MENTIR,' he thought to himself, and wished they had been talking in French.
'You look as grim as the statue of the Commander,' said Lady Bridget. 'What is the matter?'
'Lady Bridget and I have been exchanging unconventional reminiscences,' put it Maule with forced lightness.
McKeith took no notice of either remark, but strode across the room to the roll-top escritoire, where he usually wrote his letters when in his wife's company. He extracted a bundle of papers from one of the pigeon holes.
'This is what I came for. Sorry to have interrupted your reminiscences,' and he went out again, passing along the back veranda.
Maule had got up and was standing at the fireplace. Lady Bridget rose too.
'I'm going to bed. We keep early hours in the Bush.'
'What! Already!' he exclaimed in dismay.
'I was up at six this morning. Well, I hope you won't be too uncomfortable with the white ants in the Old Humpey—they are perfectly harmless. Your room is next to the office, as I daresay you've discovered. And you'll find Colin there I suppose, with your friend the Police-Inspector.'
'Don't call that man Harris my friend. We've had one or two scraps at each other already. He was pleased to take it for granted that I'm what he calls a "new chum," and didn't like my shewing him that I knew rather better than he does what police administration should be in out-of-the-way districts.'
Lady Bridget nodded. 'Then we're both under ban of the Law. I DETEST Harris.... Good-night.' And she flitted through the French window without giving him her hand.
The station seemed in a state of unquietude till late into the night. The lowing of the tailing-mob in the yard was more prolonged than usual. And the horses were whinnying and answering each other down by the lagoon as though there were strangers about. Lady Bridget, lying awake and watching through her uncurtained windows the descent of the Southern Cross towards the horizon, and the westward travelling of a moon just out of its first quarter, could hear the men's voices on the veranda of the Old Humpey—that of Ninnis and the Police Inspector; Maule seemed to have retired to his own room.
McKeith was evidently busy upon preparations for his absence from the station. He must have been cleaning guns and pistols. There were two or three shots—which startled and kept her in a state of tension. At last she heard the interchange of good-nights, and the withdrawal of Ninnis and Harris to the Bachelor's Quarters. Finally, her husband came to his dressing-room—not along the front veranda, as would have been usual, but by the back one, through the bathroom. Even this deviation from habit seemed significant of his mood—he would not pass her window. He moved about for a time as if he were busy packing. Then came silence. She imagined him on the edge of the camp bed, so seldom used, smoking and ruminating.
Whiffs from his pipe came through the cracks of the door between the two rooms, and were an offence to her irritated nerves. She had grown accustomed to his tobacco, but, as a rule, he did not smoke the last thing at night. He had seemed to regard his wife's chamber as a tabernacle, enshrining that which he held most sacred, and would never enter it until he was cleansed from the grime and dust of the stockyard and cattle camp, and had laid aside the associations of his working day. That attitude had appealed to all that was idealistic in both their natures, and had kept green the memory of their honeymoon. It angered her that to-night, of all nights, he should disregard it.
In personal details, she was intensely fastidious, and at some trouble and cost had maintained in her intimate surroundings a daintiness almost unknown out-back. Her room was large, and much of its furnishings symptomatic of the woman of her class—the array of monogrammed, tortoise-shell backed brushes and silver and gold topped boxes and bottles, the embroidered coverlet of the bed, the flowered chintz and soft pink wall paper, the laced cambric garments and silk-frilled dressing gown hanging over a chair. When service lacked, and there was no one to wash and iron her cambric and fine linen, she contrived somehow that the supply should not fail, and brought upon herself some ill-natured ridiculed in consequence. The wives of the Leura squatters thought her 'stuck-up' and apart from their kind. If they had known how much she wanted sometimes to throw herself into their lives—as she had thrown herself into the lives of her East-End socialistic friends! But the stations were few and far between, and the neighbours—such as they were—left her alone.
Letting her mind drift along side-tracks, she resented now there having come no suggestion from the Breeza Downs women that she should accompany her husband and share the benefits of police protection, or—which appealed to her far more—the excitement of what might be going on there. Of course, though, there was nothing for her to be nervous about here—she wished there might have been. Any touch of dramatic adventure would be welcome in the crude monotony of her life.
But the adventure promised to be of a more personal kind.
Suddenly, she jumped out of bed and softly slipped the bolt of the door into her husband's dressing room. She did it on a wild impulse. She felt that she could not bear him near her to-night. He should see that she was not his chattel.... But, perhaps, he did not want to come.... Well, so much the better. In any case, she wanted to show him that she did not want him. She wondered if he would venture.... She wondered if he did really care....
He appeared in no hurry to test her capacity for forgiveness.... Or it might be that the minutes went slowly—laden as they were with momentous thought. She lay in a tumult of agitation, her heart beating painfully under the lawn of her nightgown. She had a sense of gasping wonderment. She felt, as Colin had felt, that something tremendous had happened—and with such bewildering suddenness—altering all the conditions between them.
Yet, through the pain and bewilderment, her whole being thrilled with an excitement that was almost intoxicating—like the effect of an insidious drug, or the fumes of heady wine. She knew it was the old craving for sensation, the fatal O'Hara temperament awake and clamouring. Try as she would—and she did try in a futile fashion—she could not shut off the impression of Willoughby Maule—the sombre ardour in his eyes, the note of suppressed passion in his voice. There was no doubt that this unexpected meeting had restarted vibrations, and that his influence was a force to be reckoned with still.
If Colin had acted differently—if he had not behaved so brutally to those poor blacks—if his manner to her had not been so hard and overbearing. And then his leaving her alone like that with Willoughby Maule! Of course, he was jealous. He had jumped at conclusions. What right had he to do so? What could he know? He must suspect her of horrible things. His questions had been insultingly dictatorial. Now, he wanted to shew her that he flung her off. He would not put out a finger to hold her to him. Had he not said something like that before their marriage! ... It was abominable.
The whiffs of tobacco smoke came no more. He was moving about again. She heard him in the bathroom. After a minute or two he came to the door and tried to open it.
'Biddy,' he said. Then in a deep-toned eager whisper, 'Mate!'
She sat up in bed; she had the impulse to go and open the door, but some demon held her back. She lay down again on her pillow.... The bed had creaked.... He must have known that she was awake.... He waited a minute or two without speaking ... knocked very softly.... She was silent.... Again she heard him moving about in his dressing-room, and, after a little while, she heard him go out, passing along the back veranda. He did not return. It was dawn before Bridget dropped into the heavy morning slumber, which follows a night of weeping.
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