When Lady Bridget awoke, it was then near the hour at which they ordinarily breakfasted. Finding, when she had dressed, that all was silent in the next room, she looked in.
It was empty, the bed had not been slept in, but there were signs that McKeith had got into his riding clothes and that he had packed a valise.
Maule was waiting in the dining-room, and Maggie, the serving maid, gave a message from McKeith that he had had his breakfast at the Bachelors' Quarters with Mr Harris and that they were both going to start for Breeza Downs immediately.
Bridget made no pretence of breakfasting. She told Maule to forage for himself, and, after swallowing a cup of coffee, made the excuse of household business—to see if the Chinaman had put up his master's lunch—if the water-bags were filled—what were to be the proceedings of the day. She had a hope that McKeith might say something conciliatory to her before he left. The remembrance of that disregarded appeal—the word 'Mate' to which she had given no response, weighed, a guilty load, upon her heart.
But she was sore and angry—in no mood to make any advance or stoop to self-justification. He was outside the store, where Ninnis was weighing rations for Harris, and McKeith's and the Police Inspector's horses, ready saddled, with valises strapped on, were hitched to the paling.
Harris sulkily touched his helmet to Lady Bridget, but McKeith had his back to her and seemed wholly absorbed in some directions he was giving.
'You'll see to it, Ninnis, that six saddle-horses are kept ready to run up, in case the Pastoralist Executive sends along any message that's got to be carried down the river—there's that lot of colts Zack Duppo broke in, they'll do. And you can get in Alexander and Roxalana from the Bore pasture, in case the buggy should be wanted—and one or two of the old hacks that are spelling out there. Of course, her ladyship's horse mustn't be touched, and you'll see Mr Maule has a proper mount if he wants it—the gentleman who'll be here for a bit—a friend of her ladyship's from England—you understand. You'll keep on those new men for the tailing mob, though I'm not sure they mightn't be Unionists in disguise. Anyway, Moongarr Bill is a match for them.... And you'll just mind—the lot of you—that it's my orders to stockwhip blacks off the place, and that if any Unionist delegates show their faces through the sliprails they're not allowed to stop five minutes inside the paddock fence.'
'Right you are, Boss,' responded Ninnis, and there was a change of grouping, and McKeith strode out to the yard to look into some other matter, all without sending a glance to his wife.
Presently Moongarr Bill came up, chuckling mysteriously, 'Say, Boss, I believe there's one of them dashed organising chaps coming down now from the top sliprails.' And as he spoke, a man rode to the fence, harmless enough looking, of the ordinary bush type.
He was about to get off his horse in the assured manner of a bushman claiming the usual hospitality, but McKeith—big and grimly menacing—advanced and held up his hand.
'No, wait a bit. Don't unsaddle. I'd like first to know your business.'
'I'm an Organiser,' said the man defiantly, 'and I'm not ashamed of my job. Trades Unions are lawful combinations, and I've come to have a talk with your men....' He ran on with professional volubility. 'My object in going round your district is to bring about a peaceful compromise between employers and employed—Do you see....?'
'Stop,' thundered McKeith. 'I'd have you understand that there's an organiser on this station already. I'M the Organiser here, and I'm not taking stock in Trades Unions at present.'
'But you'll let me have a talk with your men?—No harm in that.'
'No, you don't,' said McKeith.
'Well, I can spell my horse an hour or two, can't I?'
'No, you can't. You'll ride off my station straight away.'
'I've been off tucker since yesterday,' said the man, who seemed a poor-spirited creature. 'Anyhow, Boss, you'll give me something to eat.'
'Yes, I'll do that.' The laws of bush hospitality may not be violated. Food must be given even to an enemy—provided he be white. McKeith called to the Chinaman to bring out beef and bread. A lump of salt junk and a hunk of bread were handed to the traveller.
'Now you be off, and eat that outside my paddock,' said McKeith. 'See those gum trees over there?—You can go and organise the gum trees.'
The man scowled, and weakly threatened as he half turned his horse's head.
'Look here, Boss, you'll find yourself the worse for this.'
'Shall I. In what way, can you tell me?'
'You'll find that your grass is burned, I daresay.'
'I'm obliged to you for the hint. I'll take precautions, and I'll begin by shepherding you straight off my run,' said McKeith. 'Harris, if you're ready now, come along here.'
The Police Inspector stepped off the store veranda, where he had been standing, a majestic and interested onlooker. The Organiser—after all, a mere man of straw, crumpled under his baneful stare.
'You can't give me in charge—you've got no warrant—I've done nothing to be given in charge for.'
'Some of your people have, though, and here's a bit of information for any skunk among your cowardly lot,' said McKeith. 'I've offered one hundred pounds reward for the scoundrels who cut my horses' throats and robbed my drays on the road to Tunumburra. There's a chance for you, if you're mean enough to turn informer.'
'I know nothing about that,' said the Organiser.
'Eh? Well, if my grass is burned, I shall know who did it, and so will this Police Inspector. And I am a magistrate, and will have you arrested. Get on your horse, Harris, we'll start at once, and ride alongside this chap till he's over my boundaries.'
Harris unhitched his horse and mounted, but not sooner than McKeith was he in the saddle. Then McKeith looked at last towards the veranda where Bridget stood, white, defiant, with Maule at the French window of the dining-room just behind her.
McKeith took off his hat, made her a sweeping bow, which might have included his guest, turned his horse's head and rode in the direction of the sliprails, Harris and the sulky Organiser slightly at his rear.
Bridget never forgot that impression of him—the dogged slouch of his broad shoulders—the grim set of his head, the square, unyielding look of his figure, as he sat his horse with the easy poise of a bushman who is one with the animal under him—in this case, a powerfully made, nasty tempered roan, one of Colin's best saddle-horses—which seemed as dogged tempered as its master.
Maule showed tact in tacitly assuming the unexpected necessity for McKeith's abrupt departure—also that he had already bidden good-bye to his wife.
Lady Bridget made no comment upon her husband's scant courtesy to his guest when she rejoined Maule after an hour or two spent in housewifely business. They strolled about the garden, smoked cigarettes in the veranda, she played and sang to him, and he brought out his cornet, which he had carried in his valise, being something of a performer on that instrument.
A demon of reckless gaiety seemed to have entered into Lady Bridget. Watching McKeith disappear behind the gum trees, she had said to herself:—'I can be determined, too. I have as strong a will as he has. He did not choose to say one regretful word. He was too stubborn to own himself in the wrong. He left me in what—if he believed his suspicion to be true—must be a dangerous position for a woman—only it shall not be dangerous to ME. I know exactly how far I am going—exactly the amount of excitement I shall get out of it all. Neither Willoughby nor he deserve an iota of consideration. I shall amuse myself. So! No more.... But he can't know that. He has never thought about ME. He has thought of nothing but his own cross-grained pride and selfish egoism. No man of ordinary breeding or SAVOIR-FAIRE would have gone off like that!'
She forgot in her condemnation of Colin to make allowance for the primal nature of the man; for a certain kinship in him with the loftier type of savage, whose woman must be his wholly, or else deliberately relinquished to the successful rival, and into whose calculation the subtleties of social jurisprudence would not naturally enter.
Nor did she remember at the moment that Maule had been described by her own relatives as a person of neither birth nor breeding—a fortune-hunter—not by any means a modern Bayard. He at least was a man of the world, she thought, and would appreciate the situation. He had lost that touch of unaccustomedness—she hardly knew how to describe it—which had often irritated her in their former relation. In their talk that day he seemed much more at home than she was in the world she had once belonged to. He spoke of 'personages' with the ease of familiar acquaintance. Apparently, he had got into quite the right set—a rather political set, she gathered. He told her that he had been pressed to stand for a well-nursed Liberal Constituency, and implied that but for the catastrophe of his wife's death he would now be seated in Parliament, with a fair prospect in the future of place and distinction. Of course, it was the money which had done it, she told herself, though he had undoubted cleverness, she knew, and, as he pointed out, his experience in a particular South American republic—very much to the fore just now in European diplomacy—stood to his advantage. His marriage had given him opportunity. He alluded without bad taste to his dead wife's generosity. She had left him her entire fortune unfettered. He was now a rich man. He explained that she had had none but very distant relations and that, otherwise, charitable institutions would have benefited. She had been a very good woman, he said—a woman with whom nine hundred out of a thousand decent men would have been perfectly happy. He let it be inferred that he was the thousandth man. His eyes, not his lips told her the reason why.
Their talk skimmed the surface of vital things—the new awakening in England; the threatenings of a socialistic upheaval; his individual aims and ideas—she recognised her own inspirations. He spoke of his political ambitions. Suddenly she said:
'I wonder why you made the break of coming out to Australia—why you did not stay in England and follow on your career?'
'There are bonds stronger than cart ropes which may drag a man by force from the path he has marked out for himself. Surely you must understand?'
'Really, Mr Maule.'
'Why will you be so formal!' he interrupted impetuously. 'It is absurd. Women nowadays always call men they know well by a PETIT NOM.'
'Do I know you well! I often think I never knew you at all.'
'That is what Lady Tallant used to say to me, latterly, about you and myself—that we never really knew each other.'
'Oh, poor Rosamond! It makes me miserable to think of her. You became friends, then—latterly?'
'She was very nice to me when she came back from Leichardt's Land. And besides, she was anxious for me to come out to Luke and help him a bit.... She told me about your marriage. She knew I could settle to nothing—of course, the world in general thought it was because of that tragedy—my wife's death—and the child—you understand?'
Bridget nodded slowly.
'Lady Tallant knew the truth—that I was tormented by one ceaseless longing—after the impossible. I fancy she thought that if I could realise the impossibility, I might get over the longing.... But—Bridget, it's no use pretending—I did try to do my duty. I think I succeeded, to a certain extent, in making my wife happy—but there was always the same gnawing regret....'
'You must put all that out of your head,' she interrupted curtly.
'I cannot. A man doesn't love a woman like you, and, because she is married to another man, put her out of his head—in two years or ten—or Eternity, for that matter.'
She laughed joylessly. 'Eternity!' she scoffed.
They were in the veranda after luncheon, she swinging slowly in the hammock, playing with a cigarette, he smoking likewise, scarcely attempting to suppress the stormy feeling in his face and voice. For her, the crude brown-grey landscape rose and fell with the motion of the hammock, and jarred with the exotic memories he evoked. She had been called back to the varied emotional interests of her girlhood, and realised, in a rush, how deadly dull was life in the arid wastes of the Never-Never. Nothing more exciting than to watch the great parched plain, with the dry heat-haze upon it, getting browner every day, and the shrinking lagoon and its ever widening border of mud. Nothing, when she turned her eyes to right and left, but ragged gum trees and black gidia forest. What a dead blank wilderness it was!'
She gave a little gasp as if for breath. He seemed to read her thoughts.
'Do you remember Rome—and the Campagna, that first day we went to Albano?—And our walk through the woods down to Lake Nei?—It was then I first knew that I loved you.'
'Will—if you are going to stay here you mustn't talk like that. It's not playing the game.' She spoke pleadingly.
'Does your husband play the game?' Maule retorted. 'Is it playing the game to leave you here alone with me, when he must know—or at least, guess—how things have been between us?—Do you think I didn't notice yesterday that he suspected me—suspected us both? I should have been a blind mole not to see by his face and manner how he felt. Upon my soul, he would have no defence—if....'
She stopped him with a gesture.
'I must ask you again not to discuss my relations with my husband; they do not concern you.'
'Do they not!' And as she rose abruptly from the hammock, 'I beg your pardon,' he added humbly, 'I will do my best not to offend again.'
He got up too and stood, his back against the veranda railings.
'Lady Bridget, you mustn't be angry with me. I suppose I am a little off my balance, you must remember that this is—for me, a rather staggering experience.'
'Shall we go for a ride?' she asked suddenly. 'I don't suppose you have much idea of what a wild western station is like.'
'Oh, I'm fairly well acquainted with life on big pastures,' he answered lightly, taking her cue. 'You would be surprised, perhaps, at the list of my qualifications as an "out-back squatter."—I'm a bit of a rancher—had one in the Argentine—a bit of a doctor—a bit of a policeman—I was in charge once of a constabulary force out in British Guiana. That's where I got a rise off Harris—a bit of a law breaker, too—in fact a bit of everything. Yes, I should enjoy a ride round here with you immensely.'
'Then do you mind looking for Mr Ninnis, the overseer, you know.'
'Yes, I know Ninnis. Had a yarn—as he'd say—with him last night while your husband was talking to Harris. Ninnis doesn't get on well with Harris—another point of sympathy. We're quite friends already. Ninnis and I—he's been in South America, too.'
'You'll find him somewhere about the Bachelors' Quarters, and I'll go and put on my habit,' she said.
Lady Bridget appeared as Maule and Ninnis were finishing saddling the horses. Ninnis had stayed near the head station, and was keeping a sharp look-out for bush fires, he said. Otherwise, there appeared to be no elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual attitude towards strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South America, and also to Maule's undoubted knack of managing men.
They rounded the lagoon and skirted the gidia scrub. Maule was on a Moongarr horse, Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already had opportunity to admire the famous O'Hara seat. They had hunted together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty, however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost tragic hardships of life on the Leura—how she had been left servantless—until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura—when the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush. She described the chivalrous SUNDOWNER who had on one occasion helped her through a week's washing; and Zack Duppo the horsebreaker, whose Christmas pudding had been a culinary triumph, and the loyalty of faithful Wombo, who had done violence to all his savage instincts in acting as house-servant until the advent of the Malay boy Kuppi. She told of her first experience of a summer out West. The frying of eggs in the sun on a sheet of corrugated zinc, so intense was the heat. The terror of snakes, centipedes, scorpions. The plagues of flies and white ants. Then how, during the servantless period, in utter loneliness and Colin's enforced absence at the furthest out-station she had had an attack of dengue fever, and no woman within forty miles of her.
'And your husband allowed this? But where was that barmaid-looking person who seems to keep house here for stray gentlemen—and, who has the yellow-headed and blue-eyed little boy?'
Bridget's lip curled.
'Mrs Hensor had accepted a temporary situation at an hotel in Fig Tree Mount—the only time I've regretted her absence,' and the musical laugh seemed to Maule to have acquired a note of exceeding bitterness. 'Perhaps you don't know,' she went on, 'that Mrs Hensor is a sort of Helen of the Upper Leura—though unfortunately as yet no Paris has carried her off—I wish there was one bold enough to do it. She had to be asked to take a change of air because there was rivalry about her between the buyer of a Meat Preserving Establishment and the chief butcher at Tunumburra. Fair Helen scorned them both. Result: The two buyers bought beasts elsewhere and, as you would understand, on a cattle station, butchers may not be flouted. Though I daresay,' Lady Bridget added with a shrug, 'if I could have had the butchers in the house—I draw the line only at Harris—and had sung to them and played up generally, I might have scored even off Mrs Hensor. But they wouldn't come until after she had gone and there was no further danger of a duel taking place outside the Bachelors' Quarters.'
Maule took her cue again and laughed as if the matter were one to jest about. But as he looked round, his face did not suggest merriment. Nor for that matter did the landscape. They were riding at the edge of the immense sandy plain, patched with brown jaggled grass and parched brambles and prickly lignum vitae—nothing to break the barren monotony but clumps of stunted brigalow and gidia, a wind-mill marking the site of an empty well with the few hungry-looking cattle near it.
Now they dipped into a scrub of dismal gidia.
'This is the most depressing country I have ever ridden through,' he said.
'You don't know what a difference three inches of rain makes,' she answered. 'Then the grass is green, the creeks are running, and at this time the dead brambles are covered with white flowers. But it doesn't rain. There's the tragedy.'
'The tragedy is that you—you of all women should be wasting your youth and beauty in this wilderness. How long is it going to last?'
She shrugged again, and for an instant turned her face up towards the sky. 'You must ask the heavens?'
'Meaning, I presume, that like most of the Australian squatters, your husband hasn't capital enough at his back to stand up against continued drought?'
'Precisely.' She looked at him, with her puzzling smile.
'But you couldn't have understood his position when you married him?'
'No, I didn't—altogether. But I should really like to remind you that I am not in the witness box.'
'I think you owe me the truth!' he said, passionately.
'What do you call the truth?' she asked, reining in her horse and meeting his eyes straight.
But she had to turn hers away before he answered, and he as well as herself was conscious of the compelling effect his gaze had upon her.
'I could have made you marry me if I had been strong enough to persist,' he said.
'Cannot any man do what he is strong enough to do—if he wishes it enough to persist?'
'I should have put it this way. If I had thought less of you and more of myself. But after what you said that day, when you jeered so contemptuously at the kind of environment in which, THEN, I should have had to place my wife—what could I do—except withdraw? But you suffered, Bridget,' he went on vehemently. 'Not so much as I did—but still you suffered. You thought of me—I felt it, and you must have felt too, how continually I thought of you. I used to try and make you think of me—dream of me. And I succeeded. Isn't that true?'
'Yes, it is true,' she answered in a low voice.
'Only lately, since I have been in the district, it has seemed to me that the invisible wires have been set working afresh. Isn't that true also?'
'Yes, it is true,' she said again, as if forced to the acknowledgment.
'Then, can there be any question of the bond between us? You see, it's independent of time and space! for you WERE sorry—you DID care. That's the truth you owe me. If after—after we parted in that dreadful way, I had gone back, had thrown up everything, had said to you, "Come with me ANYWHERE, let us be all in all to each other—on the slopes of the Andes, on an island in the South Seas—you would have come?"'
'I always told you,' she said with her puzzling smile, 'that the slopes of the Andes appealed to me.'
'Peru would have been more picturesque than this, anyway. Is that all I can get out of you—that grudging admission? Well, never mind, I am satisfied. You have owned up to enough. I won't tease you now for more admissions.'
'I have admitted too much,' she said gloomily. 'The curse of the O'Hara's is upon me. Almost all of them have gambled with their lives, and most of them have lost.'
She gave her horse the rein as she spoke, and they cantered on over the plain. After that, she resolutely forbade sentiment.
Mr Ninnis was gratified by an invitation that evening to dine at the Home, and came down in his best dark suit and his most genial mood.
Bridget sang. She had not been singing much lately. Colin's gloom over the evil prospects of squatting on the Leura re-acted upon her spirits. And besides, the piano had been attacked by white ants, and the tuner had not been so far up the river for a long time. It was inspiring to learn that Maule added to his gifts that of getting a piano into tune. Ninnis promised to rummage among the tools for a key that would serve.
Ninnis had never admired Lady Bridget so much as he did this evening. Certainly he thought her more flighty and incomprehensible than ever, but he could not deny her fascination. It seemed quite natural to him that she should be in high spirits at seeing an old friend from England, who appeared to know all her people. Ninnis had taken immensely to Maule. Beside Maule knew parts of the world where Ninnis had been. It was curious to see the American-isms crop out. Ninnis considered Maule a person of parts and of practical experience. He said to himself that the Boss had done wisely in leaving Maule at the head-station while they were short-handed. Maule showed great interest in Bush matters—said he wanted to learn all he could about the management of cattle—thought it not improbable that he might invest money in Leichardt's Land. Ninnis agreed to show him round, and Maule begged that he might be made useful—even offered to take a turn with the tailing-mob, so that Moongarr Bill and the other stockmen might be free to muster more cattle.
Nothing was heard of the Blacks during the next day or two, but one morning Ninnis discovered that an old gun, which the station hands and the black-boys were allowed to use on Sundays for shooting game in the lagoon, had disappeared in the night. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Wombo as the thief. Cudgee owned to having seen him skulking among the Gully rocks. A deserted gunya was found near a lonely, half-dry waterhole in the scrub, and there were rumours of a tribe of wild blacks having passed towards the outlying country in the Breeza Downs direction.
No news came, however, of either racial or labour warfare. McKeith sent not a word of his doings, and Harry the Blower was not due yet on his postal, fortnightly round.
McKeith had been gone a week, and the time of his absence seemed like that sinister lull which comes after the sudden shock of an earthquake and the tornado that follows upon it. Then, one day, something happened.
All the men except the Chinamen were out. Moongarr Bill, Ninnis, and the stockmen on the run, while Maule—a book and a sandwich in his pocket—had gone herding with Joey Case and one of the extra hands.
A sense of mutual embarrassment had that day driven them apart. He had been afraid of himself, and she too had felt afraid. During these seven days she had rushed recklessly on as though impelled by a fatality, never pausing to consider how near she might be to a precipice. Whenever possible, she had ridden out with Maule and Ninnis, or with Maule alone. She found relief from painful thoughts of Colin in the excitement and emotion with which Maule's society provided her. She went with him on several occasions behind the tailing-mob, though ordinarily, she could not endure being at close quarters with cattle. But it interested her to see Maule ride after and round up the wild ones that escaped; to watch his splendid horsemanship which had the flamboyant South-American touch—the suggestion of lariat and lasso and ornate equipment, the picturesque element lacking in the Bush—all harmonizing with his deep dark eyes and Southern type of good looks.
To-day, she had preferred to remain at home alone. She had been pulled up with a startled sense of shock. Last evening when they were walking together on the veranda he had begun again to make love to her, and in still more passionate earnest—had held her hands—had tried to kiss her. She had found herself giving way to the old romantic intoxication—then had wrenched herself from him only just before the meeting of lips.
At last, she had realized the strength of the glamour. She fought against it; nevertheless, in imagination gave herself up to it, as the opium-smoker or haschisch-eater gives himself up to the insidious FANTASIA of his drug.
Yes, Bridget thought it was like what she had read of the effects of some unholy drug—some uncanny form of hypnotism.
For she knew that she did not really love Maule—that her feeling for him was unwholesome.
There was poison in it acting upon her affection for and trust in her husband. Maule made subtle insinuations to McKeith's detriment, injected doubts that rankled. There were no definite charges, though he would hint sometimes at gossip he had heard in Tunumburra. But he would convey to her in half words, looks, and tones that he had reason to believe Colin unworthy of her—that her husband had led the life of an ordinary bushman, and had fully availed himself of such material pleasures as might have come to his hand. The veiled questions he asked about Mrs Hensor and her boy, brought back a startled remembrance of the scene outside the Fig Tree Mount Hotel and Steadbolt's vague accusation. She had almost forgotten it—had never seriously thought about it. Yet now she knew the midge-bite had festered.
Could it be that there was a chapter in Colin's life of which she knew nothing? Was it not too much to believe that he had always been faithful to his ideal of the camp fire? Ah! Maule would have jeered at that—would have been totally incapable of understanding the romance of that dream-drive—a dream in truth. But how beautiful, how sane, how uplifting it seemed, compared with the feverish haschisch dream in which she was now living. Restless under the obsession, she wandered up the gully and, as she sat among the rocks, wrestled with her black angel—and conquered. Clearly there was but one thing to do. She must send Maule away at once before Colin came back. As for Colin, that trouble must be faced separately. Maule must ride back to Tunumburra—he knew the track. Or, should he wish to explore the district further, Harry the Blower was due with the mail to-morrow, and could guide him to any station on the post-man's route which might appear to Maule desirable.
Bridget knew that Maule would leave the tailing-mob before the other men that afternoon, and would probably come to look for her here. So having arrived at her decision and wishing to put off the inevitable scene as long as possible, she set forth by another route for the head-station.
But she had only gone a few steps, when out of the gidia scrub, came Oola the half-caste, her comely face bruised, her eyes wild with grief and terror, her head tied up in a blood-stained strip torn from Lady Bridget's lacy undergarment, the gaily-flowered kimono hanging in dirty shreds upon her brown bosom.
'White Mary! Lathy-chap!' she cried. 'Plenty poor feller Oola. Plenty quick me run. Me want 'em catch Lathy-chap before pollis-man come. That feller pollis-man take Wombo long-a gaol. Mithsis'—the gin implored. 'BUJERI you!—Mithis tell pollis-man Wombo plenty good blackfellow. No take Wombo long-a gaol.'
'What has Wombo been doing?' asked Lady Bridget. 'Did he steal the gun?'
'YOWI (yes). Wombo plenty frightened long-a ole husband belonging to me.' And Oola dropped and knocked her head upon the ground, wailing the ear-piercing death-wail of the Australian native women.
'Oola, you must stop howling!' said Bridget, alive to the seriousness of the situation. 'Has Wombo shot your husband with our gun?'
'YOWI, Mithis. That feller husband altogether BONG' (dead).
From Oola's broken revelations Bridget pieced the story. It appeared that the tribe had followed in hot pursuit of the fugitives, and, knowing his peril, Wombo had sneaked up to the head-station in the darkness, possessed himself of an effectual weapon, and fled away with the gun. The offended blacks had discovered the guilty pair on the outskirts of Breeza Downs, and Oola's husband, with a company of braves, had attacked their gunya. Then—to quote Oola—'that feller husband throw spear at Wombo—hit Oola long-a COBRA (head) with NULLA NULLA. Him close-up carry off Oola. My word! Wombo catch him PHO PHO. Plenty quick husband belonging to me TUMBLE DOWN.' And Oola wailed anew.
'Where's Wombo now?' Bridget asked.
'Blackfeller YAN (run) along-a pollis-man. Pollis-man close-up black's camp. That feller Harris catch 'im Wombo—fetch um long-a Tunumburra gaol. Mine think it stop to-night Moongarr. Close-up station now.'
Lady Bridget at once saw through the affair. Here was Harris taking a legitimized revenge on Wombo, and doubtless also on herself. Clearly, he had been patrolling the Breeza Downs boundaries in search of Unionist incendiaries, and seizing Wombo instead, had acted promptly without waiting for a warrant or consulting McKeith. Wombo would be charged at the township with theft of the gun and murder of Oola's husband. To a certainty he would be hanged if the matter ran its ordinary course. That it should not do, Bridget declared within herself—if she could by any possibility prevent it.
The half-caste woman and the white lady went swiftly through the gidia scrub towards the head-station. At the gully crossing, Maule, on his way back from the tailing-mob, overtook them, and dismounting, walked with Lady Bridget to the house. She forgot then all the scene of last evening, told him the black's story, begged him to help her in the rescue of Wombo.
He reflected for a minute or two.
'We're up against Harris,' he said, 'and Harris has a grudge against all of us. But Harris feels some respect for my knowledge of constabulary law, which, I take it, is pretty much the same in most countries where there are white settlers and native races.'
She looked up at him, letting him feel that she was relying on his astuteness and his strength. He went on:
'Ninnis is mustering with Moongarr Bill and the others, a good way off, and they're camping out to-night.... That leaves only Joe Casey and the other extra hand. Ninnis put me in authority here. Somebody has got to take command, and it must be either you, Lady Bridget, or myself. Perhaps I'm the best qualified of the two....'
She laughed shakily in assent.
'Anyway, I fancy that I know how to deal with this sort of affair better than you do,' he said. 'Will you let me manage it my own way?'
She nodded.
'I suppose I may assume that your husband left me in a position of some responsibility. And if I seem to be taking too much on myself—or, on the other hand, deferring too much to Harris, you'll trust me and not interfere?'
There was no time for discussion, had she wished to go against him. Oola was shrieking and pointing frantically to the track down from the upper slip rails, along which Harris and his prisoner were to be seen riding.
The Police Inspector, uniformed, burly, triumphant, exhaled the Majesty of the Law as he rode slightly in advance leading the black-boy. Now, as they pulled up at the fence, Wombo presented a sorry spectacle—a spear wound in his left shoulder, a spear graze on his leg, his wrists handcuffed and his feet tied to the stirrup-iron with cords so tight that they cut into his tough, black flesh.
Harris dismounted, tied Wombo's horse securely to the veranda post and then made his statement which coincided with Bridget's idea of what had happened. It was too late to push on to Tunumburra. He proposed to lock up his prisoner at Moongarr for the night. Could he have the hide-house?
Not long before, the Police Inspector had locked up a horse stealer, whom he had in charge, in the hide-house for a few hours while he took a meal.
To Bridget it seemed an irony that Wombo should be imprisoned in the very room he had so lately shared with his stolen gin.
She was quivering with indignant pity at sight of the sores on the black boy's legs made by the raw hide thongs, and Oola, who had crept up the off side of the black-boy's horse, was wailing anew. Maule checked with a look the angry protest on Lady Bridget's lip and answered the Police Sergeant in her stead.
'Why, certainly. I'm sure her Ladyship won't object. You'll let me see to that for you, Lady Bridget,' and, as she bowed her head, he addressed Harris again. 'Mr Ninnis and most of the others are camping out to-night on the run, and I seem to be the only responsible man in the place—of course you know that Mr McKeith asked me to stop and help look after things for Lady Bridget if necessary.' Then he complimented Harris genially upon his zeal. 'You've got your warrant, I suppose,' he asked incidentally.
The Police Sergeant looked a little uncomfortable.
'Well, fact is, I wouldn't waste time going back to Breeza Downs head-station for that. Mr McKeith's there and they had a bit of an alarm. Those Unionist skunks tried to fire the shed one night, but no particular damage was done, and they've dispersed. But Windeatt is in such a fright of their making another attempt on his head-station that he's pushing the imported shearers on with the shearing for all he's worth, and keeps any man he can get hold of on guard night and day round the house and sheds, while I and my lot have been doing a bit of riding after Unionists.... Now, if you please, we'll have the key of the hide-house,' concluded Harris. 'I'd like to get my prisoner stowed away safe before I take an hour's spell myself. I'm pretty well knocked up, I can tell you. No sleep at all last night watching that nigger who was tied up to a gum tree, and I've been in the saddle all day.'
Maule proffered the usual refreshment with a deprecatory reference to Lady Bridget, who stood stonily apart. Then on pretext of getting the key of the hide-house, he had a few words with her in the office.
'I'm going to take care of this,' he said, as she gave him the key of the padlock which secured the hide-house door, and he forthwith fastened it to the ring of his watch-chain. 'Of course you want the black-boy to escape?'
'I shall let him out myself,' she answered.
'That would only make McKeith more angry. I have a better plan, in which you need not be implicated.'
'I would rather do it myself,' she said. 'I'm not afraid. If it had been possible, I would have cut those horrible thongs straight away and let the poor wretch get into the bush. He'll be safe at the head of the gully in the gidia scrub.'
'I promise you that he shall be safe in the gidia scrub before sunrise to-morrow. Trust me.'
She shook her head. 'But I can't take services from you, after....' she began hastily and then stopped.
'You call that a service! Yes—to humanity, if you like. Oh, I know. After yesterday evening. NOW, you blame me for being true to myself.... All that has got to be settled between us, Bridget—for good and all. I thought it out as I rode behind the tailing-mob to-day. But for the moment,' he fingered the key agitatedly, 'Bridget, you MUST let me do this thing for you. Don't refuse me that small privilege, even if you deny me all others.'
She wavered—yielded. 'Very well. You can manage it better than I could. So I will accept this last favour.'
'The first, not the last. What have I done but cause you pain? ... If you knew the torture I have been going through....' He checked himself. She was staring at him, half frightened, half fascinated.
'No, no. There must be an end.'
'Yes. There must be an end. Later on, we'll decide what the end is to be.'
He went out to the veranda carrying the key. Bridget did not follow him. She had no power either to resent or to compel him. She sat waiting. When, after about a quarter of an hour, he came back, she was still in the office as he had left her, seated by the rough table on which were the station log, the store book, and branding tallies.
He came in triumphantly, exhibiting the key.
'Harris wanted to take possession of this. It was lucky I had put it on my chain. However, he's satisfied that Wombo is securely locked up and an extra glass of grog and a hint that, as he hasn't provided himself with a warrant there's no obligation on him to stand over his prisoner with a loaded gun, eased his mind of responsibility. The man is in a beast of a temper though, he evidently expected to be entertained down here. I hope Mrs Hensor will give him a good dinner. He insists on sleeping in the little room off the store veranda where he says he can keep watch on the hide house. I suppose it's all right?'
Bridget nodded. 'I'll tell Maggie.' Maule asked for ointment with which to dress the black-boy's wounds and abrasions, and she gave it and left him.
The afternoon was drawing in. Then came the sound of the herded beasts being driven to the yard at sundown and, by-and-by, of Joe Casey's stockwhip as he got up the milkers. The shorthandedness and disturbance of Harris' arrival made everything late, and the goats which should have been penned by now, were busy nibbling at the passion vines on the garden fence. But all this made little impression on Bridget's preoccupied brain. She had the thought of that coming interview with Maule before her. Oola's continuous wailing was an affliction, and she gave the half-caste a blanket and some food and told her to camp on the further side of the hide house where, with eyes and ears glued by turns against the largest chink between the slabs, she might see and speak to the prisoner.
Maule's and Lady Bridget's TETE-TETE dinner was an embarrassed meal, with Kuppi and Maggie hovering about the table. The man's eyes said more than his lips, and the woman sat, strained and silent, or else uttered forced commonplaces.
They were alone at last on the veranda, with night and the vast distances enfolding them. The air was close and hot, the sky banked with storm clouds, and, occasionally, there were flashes of sheet lightning and low growls of thunder. Before long the head-station was very quiet. Harris had inspected the hide-house and, having assured himself of the safety of his prisoner, had retired to the veranda room, making a great parade of keeping his door open, his gun loaded, and his clothes on, ready for any emergency. Joe Casey had gone to his hut, the Chinaman and the Malay boy to theirs, and Maggie, the woman servant, to her own tiny room wedged in between the new house and the kitchen wing.
But it was all early. At that hour, Maule laughingly reminded Lady Bridget, the dining world of London would scarcely have reached the dessert stage.
She would not waste time on banalities.
'I've been waiting to tell you something. My mind is quite made up. I can't go on like this any longer. You must go away to-morrow.'
'To-morrow!' he echoed in dismay.
'Yes. I've thought it out. You don't know the country, but the mailman will be here to-morrow, and he can show you the road.'
'You are very kind.... Why are you so anxious to get rid of me?'
'Surely you understand. You made me a scene yesterday. You'd go on making me scenes.'
'And you?'
She gave a hard little laugh. 'Oh! I—don't want to play any more.'
'You call it play! To me it's deadly earnest. I let you go once. I do not mean to let you go again.'
'But you are talking wildly. Don't you see that it is impossible we can be friends.'
'Oh! that I grant you. We must be everything to each other—or nothing.'
In spite of her cold peremptoriness he could see that she was deeply agitated. That fact gave him courage. His voice dropped to the tender persuasive note which had always affected her like a spell.
'My dear—my very dearest.... We made a great mistake once. Let us forget that. Death has opened the gate of freedom—for me, at least—and I can only feel remorseful thankfulness. We have again a chance of happiness. We will not throw it away a second time.'
'You seem to forget that if you are free I am married.'
'What a marriage? Call it a mad adventure.'
'That may be,' she said bitterly. 'But it doesn't alter the fact that I did care very much for my husband.' She brought out the last words with difficulty.
'DID care. You put it in the past tense. You don't care for him any longer. It would be astonishing if you did. One has only to see you together.... Oh, Biddy, it was so like you to rush off to the other side of the world, and ruin your life for the sake of some strange impracticable idea! I can follow it all....'
'You are mistaken,' she put in.
'I think not. You married in a fit of revulsion against the conditions in which you were living—the hollow shams of an effete civilisation—that's the correct phrase, isn't it? And—well, perhaps there was another reason for the revulsion.... And you thought you had found the remedy for it all. Oh! I admit that he is very good looking, and, of course, he worshipped you—until he had you secure, and then he reverted to the ways of his kind. "Nature's gentlemen" usually do....'
'Be silent, Will,' she exclaimed vehemently. 'You don't understand.'
'My dear, your very anger tells me that I do understand. Why! naturally your imagination was set on fire. The Bush was painted to you in its most glowing colours. No doubt, as you said, it's a Garden of Eden in good seasons. Wonderful vegetation, glorious liberty—no galling conventions—vast spaces—romance—and the will o' the wisp wealth of the Wild. Confess now ... are not my guesses correct?'
'Yes—partly.' She spoke with reluctance. 'But I remember that YOU used to talk to me about the joys of the Wild,' she added with sharp irony.
'Oh, yes, I know it all. I've been there myself. And it's only when El Dorado proves a delusion that one begins to hanker—I did before I met you—for the advantages of civilised existence.'
'Well, you have secured those. Why not go and enjoy them as I'm asking you to do.'
'They have no value for me, unless I may share them with you. Bridget, I can give you everything now that you once asked for.'
'With your wife's money?'
He drew back sharply. 'Ah! You CAN hit a man!' and there was silence for a few minutes. Then he leaned closer to her, and his fingers touched the gold cigarette case which lay on the arm of the squatter's chair in which she was sitting. He went on in a changed manner.
'Poor Evelyn left her fortune to me, knowing the truth. She was a noble-souled woman. I was not worthy of her. But unworthy as I may have been, Bridget, I deserved better of my wife than your husband deserves of you. At least, I did not deceive her.'
'What do you mean? Colin did not deceive me. That, at all events, is not one of his faults towards me.'
'Has he told you, then, why he keeps on his station that insolent woman and her yellow-haired blue-eyed boy?'
Bridget started visibly. He saw that his shaft had struck the mark. But she answered calmly:
'I don't know what you want to imply. I thought you knew that Mrs Hensor's husband was killed on one of Colin's expeditions, and that he looked after her and her boy on that account.'
'Oh, yes, I've heard that story. But it seemed common gossip at Tunumburra that there was another—less creditable—explanation.'
She turned fiercely upon him. 'You have no right to make such an abominable accusation.'
'I only mention what I heard. I went about a good deal there in bar saloons, and to men's gatherings. Naturally, I was interested in the district where, by the way, McKeith does not appear to be over popular. Of course, I attached no great importance to the gossip then. It only made me wonder. Oddly enough, to-day when I was out with the tailing mob, one of the men repeated it—I need not say that I stopped him. He said he'd had it as a fact from a man who was a long time in your husband's employ—a man called Steadbolt.'
Again the scene in front of Fig Tree Mount Hotel flashed before Lady Bridget, and Demon Doubt rose up clothed now in more material substance. Her voice shook as she answered, though she tried to be loyal:
'Steadbolt was discharged from my husband's employment. He is another of Mrs Hensor's rejected suitors. That speaks for itself.'
'Strange that Mrs Hensor should reject so many suitors without apparent reason,' said Maule.
Bridget did not seem able to bear any more. Her head drooped upon her hands, her shoulders heaved convulsively.
'I don't know what to do—I am alone. It's an insult to talk to me in this way.'
'I want to protect you from insult—I want to take you out of these miserable conditions—and there's only one way to do that,' he pleaded.
He took her hands in his and kissed them passionately. 'Oh, I love you. There's nothing in the world I would not do to make you my wife. Why should you hesitate? It breaks my heart to see you unappreciated, neglected, living the sort of rough life that might suit a labourer's daughter, but which is sacrilege for Lady Bridget O'Hara. A man had no right to condemn a beautiful, refined woman like you to such a fate.... Well there' as she murmured incoherently, 'I'll not say any more about that since it hurts you. You see, I respect your wishes. I'll even go away at once, if you command it, and leave you to form your own judgment. I will stay in Leichardt's Town—in Sydney—anywhere—until you have decided for yourself—as I know you must do—how impossible it is for you to remain here. Then I will meet you wherever you please, and we will go to Europe together—bury ourselves abroad—wait in any part of the world you may choose, until the divorce proceedings are over, and we are free to marry. You need not be afraid of scandal, the thing can be kept out of the English papers. It's so far away that nobody will remember you were married to an Australian. Besides, anything of the sort is so easily got over nowadays. My darling, why do you look at me with those tragic eyes? It is not like the old Biddy to be a slave to Mrs Grundy.'
She had been listening, sitting rigid in her chair, her hands still in his, looking at him in a strange fixed manner, almost like a person in the first stage of hypnotism. Now she snatched her hands away and gave a sobbing cry.
'Oh, I'm not the old Biddy. I never can be again.'
'Dear love—believe me, when I promise you that you shall never have cause for regret.'
He would have taken her into his arms, but she drew herself back.
'Will, you don't understand. And I don't understand myself, I can't see things clearly. It's all been so sudden—Colin going away—you—everything.... I want to be alone. I want to find myself.'
He moved aside with a slight inclination of his head as if to let her pass. 'I told you that I would do anything you wish.'
'You mean that—really? Then I wish you to go away at once. You said you would leave me to decide for myself. I take you at your word, and I shall write to you, by-and-by. Promise me that you will go.'
'I have no choice. Your will is law to me. But understand, dearest—I am only waiting.'
'It's good of you not to want to worry and argue.... Don't you understand?—I couldn't bear you to be here when Colin comes back. You must go to Tunumburra to-morrow.'
'Go to Tunumburra to-morrow?' he repeated blankly.
'It's on the way to Leuraville, and you can take the steamer from there. I will write to you in Leichardt's Town. Oh, it's quite simple. The mailman will be here early. You can leave a letter saying that you are recalled.'
'I understand.' Her definite planning gave him hope that she had already made up her mind, and that she would join him in Leuraville or Leichardt's Town. After all, that might be best. 'But I shall see you again. The mailman is not here yet. I have still a few hours respite.'
She made no answer at first. Then 'Good-night,' she said abruptly, and flitted like a small white ghost along the dim veranda.
'Lady Bridget!' His voice stopped her. It shook a little, but the manner was conventional, and she gained confidence from that and turned irresolutely.
'Lady Bridget. While we've been talking about ourselves, we've forgotten that unfortunate black-boy. I only want to tell you, that you may depend on your wishes being carried out. I shall go to my room and watch my opportunity. Trust me, that's all—in everything.'
'Thank you,' she answered simply. 'I do trust you.'
She came back a few steps, and he met her in the middle of the veranda. In one of her swift transitions of mood a humorous element in the situation seemed to appeal to her, and she said with a laugh:—'It's comical, isn't it? The two tragedies, black and white—we two here—those two out there!'
Just then the black curtain of cloud, that had been rising slowly and obscuring the stars, was torn by a strong flash of chain lightning. It threw up her face in startling clearness and he saw, in strange blend with the conflicting emotions upon it, the wraith of her old whimsical smile.
He did not answer her laugh. In truth, the man's nature was stirred to a more deep-reaching extent perhaps than ever in his life before. It may have been the flash of lightning recalling a momentary flash of illumination that had once shone upon his own soul.
That had been when he was kneeling by the bedside of his dying wife, and her last words revealed to him a magnanimity of devotion for which he had been wholly unprepared. He had thought her merely amiable and stupid—except in her love for him—and his sentiments towards her had been a mixture of boredom, and the tolerant consideration due to the bestower of substantial benefits. Nevertheless, she had awakened, during a spasm of remorseful self-abasement, some nobler quality latent in the man.
And now—as that flash of lightning illuminated Bridget's face and made him keenly sensitive to the charm of her personality—her wayward fascination, her inconsistencies, her weakness, her temperamental craving for dramatic contrast, her reckless toying with emotion—by a curious law of paradox, there came back upon Willoughby Maule that scene with his dying wife, and he had again the flashing perception of something sacred, unexplainable, to which his own nature could not reach.
It sobered him. He had had the impulse to snatch her to his breast, to seal the half-compact with a lover's kiss, so passionate that the memory of it must for ever bind her to him.
But the impulse was past. They stood perfectly silent, stiff, in the interval—it seemed a very long one—between the lightning flash, and the distant reverberation of thunder which followed it.
Then he said mechanically, like one walking out of a dream? 'There's going to be a storm. Are you frightened?'
'No,' she answered. 'I'm never frightened of storms!' and added, 'besides, Colin would be so glad of rain.'
Before he could reply, she had glided away again and he was alone.
He thought it strange that she should be thinking of her husband and his material interests just then.
It must have been a little while after midnight when Bridget was awakened by more thunder and lightning and a confused tornado of sound. She had been dreaming that Harris was throwing her from the gully cliffs on to the boulders in its bed—only it seemed to her bewildered senses that the boulders rose towards her instead of her descending to meet them. Next she discovered that rain was pattering on the zinc roof, and that the violent concussions she felt beneath her must be due to the horns of goats knocking up against the boards of her bedroom. Ah! she thought, the men had forgotten to pen the goats, and they were sheltering from the rain in the open space under the floor of the house. There could be no more sleep for her that night, unless they were dislodged.
She waited through the din until there came a lull in the storm, then got up and put on her shoes and a waterproof coat over her nightdress. It was not the first time by any means that, when sleeping alone, she had been obliged to rise and drive away stray animals that had been inadvertently allowed means of entrance.
She went out to the back veranda, which was connected by steps with the verandas of the other two wings. The moon was full and shed occasional pale gleams through the scudding clouds. The close heat had given place to a chill wind and the rain came down intermittently but in no volume—it could not make much difference to the parched earth. There was not a light visible anywhere. The goats were still making a noise under the house.
Lady Bridget got a stick from a heap of sandal-wood boughs stacked against the veranda, and passing to the front, where the piles supporting the house were higher, proceeded to belabour an elderly nanny, who, with her mate, was now nibbling twigs of the creepers. But she was surprised to see only two or three goats, she had thought there must be many more. The animals were refractory, and her beatings of no avail. Now, suddenly, she was seized with a fit of nervous shivering and realised that she felt physically ill. It was of no use for her to try and drive off the goats. She sank down on the veranda steps of the Old Humpey, and afterwards thought she must have fainted.
The sound of Maule's approaching footsteps and his alarmed ejaculation seemed to bring her to herself. He appeared to have come round the back of the Old Humpey. He was horrified at the sight of her convulsive shivering.
'You mustn't stop here,' he exclaimed. 'I was afraid the goats would disturb you, and I've been getting them out as quietly as I could. Most of them are shut up in their fold.'
She saw that he was almost fully dressed. With an effort she controlled her terror, and asked:
'You've not been asleep.'
'Oh! off and on. I've been keeping my eye on Harris' room,' he pointed across the yard to the kitchen and store-building opposite—at the end of which Harris had installed himself—to the squat outline of the slab and back hide house. 'My ear, too,' he went on, 'for Harris' slumbers are neither silent nor peaceful. When he's not snoring, he groans and stirs, and the worst of it is that he's got his door wide open on to the veranda and his bed right across the window that looks straight at the door of the hide house. I thought I'd take advantage of the thunder, but it was no good. He was awake and looking out. Now he has lain down again, and as soon as I hear him snoring I shall try once more.'
A fresh fit of shivering seized Bridget.
'This won't do,' he said, and went hurriedly into his own room which opened a few doors down on to the veranda, and coming back with an opossum rug on his arm and a glass of brandy and water in his hand, he made her drink the spirits and wrapped the rug round her. Presently the shivering ceased.
A moon-gleam between two clouds closing on each other showed her his eyes glowing with sombre passion. She saw that he was holding himself under stern restraint. Though where they were, the veranda running between the end of the Old Humpey and the new house, made a kind of passage so that they were in shadow, there was a possibility of watchful eyes discovering their whereabouts.
'Will you go back to your room, and I'll get rid of these goats,' he said, trying to speak in a matter-of-fact way. 'I supose there isn't a yard where I could put them, nearer than their own by the lagoon.'
'I don't think so,' she answered dully, and without stirring from where she crouched upon the steps. When he urged her anew to go back to bed, she answered petulantly:
'Oh, do let me be. I like the wind and the rain—they're soothing. And I couldn't sleep now until I know that Wombo is safe in the scrub.'
He made no further protest, but set to work shepherding the goats. She watched him drive them out of the gate till his dark form and the piebald shapes he was driving before him were lost in the night. She knew that it would take some little time to pen them all securely in their fold. But the night was young yet.
From shivering, the fire of the brandy and the warmth of the fur rug had turned her temperature to fever heat. She felt keenly excited; the blood in her veins seemed boiling, and the occasional raindrops and moist wind were pleasant on her face. She had gone to the end of the veranda and stood there with long withes of the native cucumber vine that grew over the Old Humpey swaying around her in the breeze. There was not a light in the place. Even moon and stars were now veiled. Her brain raced round desperate and futile schemes for eluding the vigilance of the Police Inspector. She wished now that she had thought of asking him to dinner and putting opium into his coffee—that was the sort of thing they did in novels. She did not know that a less developed brain than her own was working at this moment to the same end, on an inspiration from the bush DEBIL-DEBIL, or such savage divinity as watches over the loves of the Blacks.
She saw what at first she had thought part of the shadow of a neighbouring gum tree cast on the strip of grass that ran at the back of the Old Humpey. But the lesser shadow moved, halted, and the greater shadow was stationary and grew denser as the moon sailed again across a clear patch of sky.
Then Bridget realised that the moving shadow was the half-caste Oola, shrouded in the dark blue blanket she had given her, and that the gin had halted at the casement window of Maule's bedroom. Now, Oola, with her hands on the sill, curved her lithe body, drew her bare feet to the window ledge and dropped within.
Bridget ran along the grass to the window, and from there watched Oola move about the room and in the almost darkness fumble among the objects on the dressing-table. Then Bridget could hear the little click of the tongue and the guttural note of exultation a black tracker gives when he comes upon a trail. Bridget drew aside against the wall, so that Oola, again springing over the window sill, did not observe her. But Bridget saw the watch and chain with the iron key attached to it which the gin had stolen, and seized Oola's arm as the dark form crouched upon the grass again. The gin uttered a smothered shriek. Bridget took the watch from her hand, detached the key from the chain, and slipped watch and chain into the pocket of her coat, while Oola, clutching Lady Bridget's knees, pleaded chokily:
'Mithsis—you gib me key—no make im noise. No tell pollis-man me let out Wombo. My word! plenty quick he YAN long-a scrub. BA-AL pollis-man catch Wombo. Mithsis—BUJERI White Mary! You gib it key to Oola.'
The key was in Oola's hand. 'BA-AL me tell,' whispered Bridget. 'You go quick.'
She, too, bent her body and followed Oola, who sped like a hunted hare round the comer of the Old Humpey. Now she wriggled in the shadow of the yard railings. Now she crept stealthily past Harris' window—and—oh! DEBIL—DEBIL be praised! the Police sergeant's stertorous snoring was clearly audible.
Blessed, likewise, be the retiring moon and the sweeping clouds! Lady Bridget, every nerve a-quiver and the rushing blood throbbing in her temples, also crept noiselessly beneath the window in the wake of Oola, crawling like Oola, but more to the back of the hide-house into the shelter of its drooping bark eaves.
Bending cautiously round the slabs, she watched, as the gin, with a swift wriggling motion like that of a snake, drew herself along the sunken earth floor beneath the eaves and then, softly raising herself to the level of the padlock, put in the key. There was a muffled grating of iron under the gin's hand, as the padlock unclosed and the hasp dropped, then a creak of the door on its hinges, while it opened and shut behind the undulating shape in the aperture. Then a low throaty ejaculation—the black's call of warning. And now with a quickness incredible, the wriggling movement of two blanket-shrouded serpentine shapes round the hide-house—in and out among the grass tussocks and the low herbage, now hidden for a moment by friendly gum shadows in the dimness, now dark moving blurrs upon the lesser darkness, and now altogether invisible....
Lady Bridget knew that in five minutes, once they could be upright again, the fugitives would have reached the gully, and after that the gidia scrub. Then security from the terrors of a white man's gaol would be almost assured to them.
Lady Bridget waited—waited, it seemed to her an eternity, in reality it was barely over the five minutes she had mentally given the two blacks for their escape. That five minutes had been full of alarms, and she could feel her heart thumping, so tense was the strain. She had to consider the possibility of Harris being awakened; also, of Maule's return and an attempt on his part to free the hide-house prisoner. Also there was the danger of the clouds breaking before she had done her work.
She heard a movement of the sleeper in his bed below the open window opposite. Harris might have been aroused, and perhaps have stirred without awakening.... But the snoring had ceased.... She did not think, however, that he could be fully awake.... Presently the snoring recommenced.
She crept very slowly along the earthen floor, drawing her hands along the slabs as she went. A splinter from one of them ran into her finger—but that did not matter. Now she touched the door, which lay back towards her, for the blacks had not waited to close it. She pushed it very softly, holding her breath at the creak of the hinge and listening intently for the recurrent snore which sounded through the window only three paces from her.
At last the thing was done—the padlock fastened, the key turned in the lock, and now in her pocket. She dropped flat on the earth, her cloak drawn lightly between her knees, and wriggled snake-like, as Oola had done past Harris' windows, then pushed herself on hands and knees along the ground, squeezing her body against the palings of the yard, till she reached the Old Humpey on the opposite side. Once round that corner, she got on to her feet, feeling sick and giddy but intensely relieved. She leaned against the gum tree which had protected Oola, and now realised that it had been raining in a driving gust and that she was wet to the skin.
The bleating of a kid, which had been left under the house and had found its way into the yard, startled her anew. She thought that she heard sounds in the wing near the hide-house—steps on the veranda. Was Harris stirring? Had he discovered the flight of his prisoner?
She waited again till all was quiet. By this time, there was a watery radiance just overhead. She looked towards the lagoon, but there was no sign of Maule. She felt the shivering begin again, though her head seemed burning, and she could hardly think collectedly. Her chief idea was to get back to bed.
But she was able to reason to herself that Maule must somehow be informed of the escape. She did not think he could have got back yet to the spot where he had left her. Or he might come straight to his room and miss the key and his watch. In any case, these must be restored to the place from which Oola had taken them.
She lifted herself to the window-sill as Oola had done, and in a moment was inside the room. It had been an easy enough business, only that in clutching the window frame, the jagged end of the splinter she had run into her hand caught and tore her flesh. The room was of course empty.
She lifted a candle—which, with matches, stood on the dressing table—and put back the watch and chain, and the key now separate from them. That fact would show Maule that it had been tampered with. But she must find some more exact means of conveying what had happened. Premature action on his part might give the alarm. Her brain worked in flashes. She had vivid ideas, which in her fevered state she could not hold properly. She must write to Maule. A notebook that he must have taken from his pocket lay on the table also. She tore out a leaf—paused—She must write so that only he would understand. An accident might happen to the paper.
There must be no definite statement to implicate him or herself. Some words in French occurred to her. She wrote them down and continued the note in that language. At the close she begged him to act so that there should be no ground for suspicion—reminded him of his promise to go away on the morrow—said she would write to him at the Post Office at Leuraville. She did not sign the sheet, but folded it across—addressed it to Maule and laid it under the watch on the table.
A fresh spasm of shivering seized her. Suddenly she remembered the opossum rug she had left. She opened the door leading from Maule's room into the veranda, and went out. She stood bewilderedly, looking across the faint-lit yard to the dim veranda of the kitchen wing opposite, as she fought against the sick faintness that threatened to overcome her. Then she walked along the veranda to the place where she had parted from Maule. The rug was lying there, and she threw it round her, and waited on the steps with chattering teeth and shaking limbs.
In a minute or two, he joined her. She saw by the fitful moonbeams that he was wet and muddy—truly in a worse plight than herself. She could hardly speak for the rigor. Seeing her condition, he took her up in his arms, and carried her along the veranda towards her own room. The clasp of his arms, the warmth of his body, even through his wet clothing helped her to steady herself. She continued to tell him of the great achievement.
'Wombo has escaped—I saw Oola taking the key out of your room. Harris was asleep—snoring. She let Wombo out, and I locked the door of the hide-house again afterwards, and put the key back in your room. It's all right—nothing can be found out till the morning. They're safe in the scrub by now.'
'Well, I'm thankful for that at any rate,' he answered. 'But at this moment I cannot think of anything or anyone but you. My dearest—I'm so afraid of your being ill—what can I do?'
'Nothing. I have sal volatile in my room—stuff to take for a cold. I only want to get off my wet things and go to bed—I can sleep now. Don't be frightened about me.'
She staggered when he put her gently down inside her own door, but recovered herself courageously, lighted her candles, laughed at her own disordered appearance, bade him go at once and look after himself.
He kissed her hand reluctantly.
'Till to-morrow.'
She looked at him alarmedly. 'Will! But you have promised me. You are going away to-morrow.'
He did not reply. His eyes were roving round the chamber, dimly lighted by the two candles. He was observing the feminine details the untidinesses so characteristic of her; the daintinesses, equally characteristic—all in such odd contrast with inevitable bush roughnesses. He noticed the silver and ivory on the dressing-table; the large silver-framed photographs—an autographed one of the Queen of Wartenburg—Molly Gaverick and Rosamond Tallant in Court veil and feathers, Joan Gildea at her type-writer—the confusion of books, the embroidered coverlet on the large bed, the bush-made couch at its foot upholstered in rose-patterned chintz on which she had seated herself.
'You have GOT to go,' she urged. 'WHATEVER happens, you are leaving here with the mailman to-morrow.... Promise—on your word of honour—that NOTHING shall hinder you.'
'Of course, I shall keep my promise, though it breaks my heart to leave you like this. But I know—I feel that the parting will not be for long.... Yes....' as she slowly shook her head and a strange fateful look shadowed the feverish brightness of her eyes. 'I COULDN'T leave you if I didn't feel certain of that.'
'Oh, I'm tired out. I'm tired—dead tired—' Her face was ghastly, her lips like burning coals. 'I can't argue any more. And now it's good-night—good-bye.'
'Not good-bye. At least there will be time to-morrow for that.'
'You MUST go—Good-night.'
He left her, but waited in the veranda, reassuring himself by the sound of movements on the other side of the closed door. When all was silent, and the candles extinguished, he went back to his own room.
He saw on the dressing-table his watch and chain with the key detached beside them—a confirmnation of the truth of what Lady Bridget had told him. But she had forgotten to tell him of the note she had left also, and, naturally, he did not look for it. Had he known and looked he would have discovered that the note was gone.
Lady Bridget always looked back upon the next few days as a confused nightmare. She awoke in the grip of fever—that malarial kind which is common in Australia—tried to get up as usual, but fell back upon her bed, faint and dizzy. Her brows ached. She had alternations of burning heat and icy coldness. There came active periods in the dull lethargy which is often a phase of fever, and from which she only roused herself at the spur of some urgent call on her faculties. One of these was Willoughby Maule's anxious message of enquiry conveyed by Maggie, to which she had the presence of mind to return the answer that she had caught cold, and was staying in bed for the present, but would no doubt be quite well shortly. Also that she was sorry not to bid him good-bye, but begged that he would not think of postponing his departure.
She heard as in a dream the sound of the mailman's arrival, and presently, of the saddling of horses in the yard, and then the CLOP-CLOP of their feet as they were ridden past her end of the house to the Gully crossing. There were two horses. So Maule had left the head-station with Harry the Blower, as she had bidden him do. She was conscious of relief.
She realised in bewildered fashion, that Maule was gone out of her life at Moongarr, and connected the sound of his horses' departing feet with the thud of Sir Luke Tallant's hall door, when he had left her at the first interview which had led to their final quarrel.
From that effort of memory she sank again into mental coma. Maggie took it to be natural sleep, and laid the mailbag just brought by Harry the Blower, on her mistress' bed to await her awakening. Much later in the day, on the return of Mr Ninnis and the other men from their cattle-muster, finding the bag still untouched, Maggie broke the seals at her mistress' dazed order, and having sorted out Lady Bridget's letters, carried away the bag for Ninnis to take his own mail.
But Lady Bridget paid no heed to her letters, and thus it happened that for the time being, she was quite unaware of an event which was of great importance to her.
She had been scarcely even distantly conscious of the hue and cry, and general excitement at the head-station, when it was discovered that the prisoner had escaped. Harris had his own suspicions—it might be said, his certainties, but the man's crafty nature bade him keep his accusations for an opportunity when he ran less risk of being worsted. He meant to wait until McKeith's return. Meanwhile what he had not been prepared for was Willoughby Maule's departure with the mailman before he himself came back from an unsuccessful hunt after the fugitives. That move had lain outside his calculations. He had gleaned enough from Mrs Hensor, as well as from his own observation, to feel sure that Maule and Lady Bridget were in love with each other, and he had never supposed that they would part so abruptly.
The head-station was very shorthanded in the absence of Ninnis and the stockmen, and Harris had been obliged to go out by himself on the man-hunt. He did not know the country at the head of the gully, where he concluded that Wombo was hiding, and lost himself in the gidia scrub. Thus, he was in a very disagreeable temper, when he at last arrived at the Bachelors' Quarters.
To Lady Bridget the day passed, and all the seemingly distant noises of it, like a phantasmagoria of vision, sound, impressions—the echoes of station activity; the Chinamen's pidgin English as they weeded the front garden; Tommy Hensor's voice when he brought the cook a nestful of eggs some vagrant hen had laid in the grass-tussocks, the men going forth with the tailing-mob—and at intervals the scorching recollection of that hinted scandal concerning Colin and Mrs Hensor of which Maule had told her.... Horrible... unbelievable... and yet....
Then, after a long while, with lucid breaks in the dreamy stupor, she heard the roar of Ninnis' incoming mob of wild cattle from the range. She could even wonder whether he had been able to muster that herd of five hundred or so for the sale-yards. She knew that her husband was counting upon the sale of these beasts—probably at 6 pounds a head—to enable him to fight the drought, by a speedy sinking of artesian bores. She felt herself reasoning quite collectedly on this subject, until the roar of beasts turned into the roar of the mighty Atlantic, breaking against the cliffs below Castle Gaverick.... She saw the green waves—real as the heaving backs of the cattle—alive, leaping.... And she herself seemed tossed on their crest... she saw and felt the cool embrace of the wave-fairies she had once tried to paint for Joan Gildea's book.... Oh! she had never fully appreciated the strength of that now inappeasable longing for the Celtic home, the Celtic traditions which had been born in her. She had never known how much she loved Castle Gaverick... how much she loathed the muggy heat, the flies and the mosquitoes now brought by last night's rain, the fierce glare beating upon the veranda, the sun-motes dancing on the boards....
The appearance late that evening of Mrs Hensor, who having heard the mistress was ill, had come down partly from curiosity, partly from genuine humanity to see what might be amiss, was the next thing that roused Lady Bridget from her fever-lethargy.
'Maggie told me you'd been out in the rain last night, and had caught cold, and I thought Mr McKeith would wish me to ask if I could do anything,' Mrs Hensor said.
Lady Bridget sat up in bed, for the moment her most haughty self.
'Thank you; but there's no occasion for you to trouble, Mrs Hensor. I would have sent for you if I had required your services.'
'And I'm not aware that I was engaged to give them,' snorted Mrs Hensor. 'It was out of consideration for Mr McKeith that I came. I've got quite enough to do at the Quarters, and I'm really glad not to have to trouble myself down here—what with Mr Ninnis wanting extra cooking, and Mr Harris in such a rage over Wombo's getting away—I'm wondering if you heard anything last night, of that, Lady Bridget? And Harris is put out, too, over Mr Maule going off with Harry the Blower, while he was hunting for the black-boy. However,' Mrs Hensor concluded, 'the master will be here tomorrow to see into the rights of things.'
'How do you know that the master will be here to-morrow?' asked Bridget sharply.
'Harry the Blower brought me a letter from Mr McKeith,' replied Mrs Hensor with malign triumph. 'I suppose he thought you'd be too busy doing things with Mr Maule to bother over the station affairs, and that Mr Ninnis might be out on the run—and so he wrote to tell me what he wanted done as he often used to before.'
Lady Bridget closed her eyes, and leaned back against the pillows trying hard to control the muscles of her face, and not to betray her mortification. Moreover, she was certain that Mrs Hensor had stated the exact truth.
'I should prefer to be alone,' she said, feeling the woman's eyes upon her.
'Then I'll go, as you don't want me,' returned Mrs Hensor. 'But if I was you, Lady Bridget, I'd take a dose of laudanum, and get myself into a perspiration, for I believe it's a touch of dengue fever you've got the matter with you.'
A touch of dengue in tropical Australia may be serious or the reverse—sharp and short and critical, or tedious and less dangerous. Lady Bridget's case was the sharp, short kind demanding prompt treatment. When McKeith came home the following day, he found her delirious, and incapable of recognizing him.
Worn out as was the strong man's frame—not only with wild jealousy and tortured love, but with sleepless nights of patrol work, days in the shearing-shed, sharp fighting with a second conflagration—fortunately put out before much damage had been done—and a final dispersion of Unionist forces, Colin never for one instant relaxed his watch by Bridget's bedside.
All night he tended her, fighting the fever as he had fought the fire at Breeza Downs, plying her with continued fomentations, dosing her with quinine, laudanum and the various medicines he had found efficacious. For never was a better doctor for malarial fever than Colin McKeith—he had had so much experience of it. When towards morning she fell into a profuse sweating, and he had to change and wring out the blankets in which he had wrapped her, he knew that the fever danger was past.
She awoke at mid-day from a deep, health-restoring sleep, so weak however, that her bones felt like water and her face looked as white as the pillow case. But her brain was clear.
She saw that there was no one else in the room, which was still in great disorder. The blankets, hot and heavy, were almost unbearable, but she had not strength to fling them off. It felt frightfully warm for the time of year and the air that came in through the open French window seemed to be blowing from an oven. The sky, as she glimpsed it from her bed between the veranda eaves and the railings, looked curiously dark and had a lurid tinge.
Lifting herself slightly, she became aware that Colin was in the veranda with his back to her, looking out over the plain. The set of his figure as he bent forward, with his hands on the railings and his eyes apparently strained towards the horizon, reminded her of the determined hunch of his square shoulders and the dogged droop of his head when he had ridden away with Harris and the Organizer.
She called faintly, 'Colin.'
He turned round instantly and came to the bed. She stared up at him, frightened at the look in his face.... Something dreadful must have happened. She was too weak to go over coherently in her mind the sequence of events and feelings. She only sensed a menacing spectre, monstrous, terrifying. She could not realise her own share in the catastrophe she felt was impending. She could not believe that Colin could change so much in less than ten days. Everything had come about with such incredible swiftness. His face looked haggard, ravaged. The cheeks seemed to have fallen in. The features were rigid as if cut out of metal. The whites of his eyes between the reddened lids were very blood-shot and the eyes themselves seemed balls of blue fire. There was not a shade of kindliness in them, only the gleam of a fixed purpose which no entreaties would alter.
She could imagine that he might have looked like that, when, as a boy he had beheld the mutilated bodies of his father, mother, sisters, stretched stark, after the blacks had done their hideous work.
And it was true that he did feel now somewhat as that boy had felt, for again to his tortured imagination that which he held dearest seemed to be lying foully murdered before his eyes. She, his love, had been ravished from him, and he could only regard her as dead to him for evermore.
'Colin,' she gasped. 'What is the matter?'
The muscles of his face relaxed, it seemed automatically, as if there were no soul behind. He laughed a dry ironic laugh. 'Never mind. You mustn't speak.'
He felt her pulse, examined her as a doctor might have done—all without a word, and straightened the blankets and pillows.
'You must have food,' he said, and went out. She heard him calling Maggie. After a few minutes he came back with a tumbler of beaten egg and milk, to which he had added brandy, and told her she must drink it.
Her hand was too weak to hold the tumbler. He put one arm under the pillow, raised her head and held the glass to her lips until she had drunk every drop of the mixture. All this with no show of tenderness or one unnecessary word. She needed the nourishment and stimulant, and after them felt better.
'I remember.... I must have been ill. What was the matter with me?'
'Dengue,' he answered shortly.
'I was out in the rain.... I got a chill I remember.'
'Oh, you were out in the rain!... I should have thought you could have done what you wanted without that.' The bitterness of his tone was gall-like. And again the ironic laugh.
She winced and drew her head aside. He took away his arm instantly from behind the pillow and straightened himself, looking down on her, still with that dreadful light in his eyes. She could not bear it, and turned her head away from him.
'Don't look at me.... I'm going to get up.'
'No, I think you'll stay where you are.' His voice broke slightly but hardened again. 'I won't talk to you. I won't let you speak a word yet... that will come afterwards.'
'But I don't understand.'
'Better not now. I'll tell you this. You're through the fever. It won't come back if you do as I tell you—You understand something about dengue. You'll stop here till you're stronger. You've got to take the brandy, eggs and milk till you feel sick of it. To-day you'll have slops. I've told Maggie about preparing your food, if the fever comes back—it won't if you keep quiet—but if it does—hot bottles—blankets—laudanum—I've mixed the doses—until you get into a sweat. Remember that. And you'll have someone in your room to-night.'
'In my room—YOU? What do you mean?'
'It won't be me—I'm going away.'
'Going away—what is it?'
She noticed that he turned and looked at the sky.
'Why is it so dark—and the heat so stifling?' she asked.
'These damned Unionists have fired the only good pasture left on Moongarr. It's been burning since two o'clock this morning. I sent the men out. Now I'm going myself—to save what I can.'
He left the room abruptly. In a minute or two she heard him outside calling 'Cudgee... Harris'—and then giving the order to saddle up. She got out of bed and tottered to the window. She could see now the wide range of the disaster. The lurid haze was spreading. The horizon shrinking, and the air was hotter than ever. The fire seemed still a long way off, but there was nothing to stop the flames if once they reached the great plain. The course of the river, here at best a mere string of shallow waterholes, was quite dry. The rain of the other night had been too insignificant and local to do any good. The brown mud-strip round the lagoon below, was not perceptibly diminished. She knew that the narrow water channels flowing from their one working artesian bore, must soon be licked up by the flames. And the Bore in process of construction, was at a standstill for want of workmen.
Bridget gazed out despairingly towards the shrinking horizon and upon the parched plain with the rugged clumps of dun coloured gum trees scattered upon it—the near ones looking like trees of painted tin, sun-blistered. The swarms of flies, mosquitoes in the veranda offended her. She disliked the cattle dogs mooching round with hanging jaws and slavering tongues. The ferocious chuckle of a great grey king-fisher—the bird which white people called the laughing jackass—perched on the branch of a gum tree beside the fence, made her shudder, because the bird's soulless cachinnation seemed an echo of Colin's laugh.
Ah! that was the bush, undivested of romance—hard, brutal, vindictive, in spite of the mocking verdure of her honeymoon spring.... And Colin was a part of the Bush. He resembled it. He too could be strong and sweet and tender as the great blossoming white cedar down by the lagoon, as rills of running water making the plain green—when his desires were satisfied. And he could be brutal and vindictive likewise, when anyone dared to thwart his will and defy his prejudices.
She staggered about the room, feminine instinct prompting her to freshen her appearance, to change her soiled, crumpled nightdress, to throw a piece of lace over her dishevelled head, to pull up the linen sheets which had been rolled clumsily to the foot of the bed, so that the blankets could be wrapped round her. But she sank again presently, exhausted, on her pillows.
In a short time McKeith came back, booted and spurred, and stood as before looking at her with forbidding sternness.
'You'd better have stopped quiet. I've told Mrs Hensor to come down and look after you. She knows what to do.'
Bridget cried out passionately: 'I won't have that woman in my room. How dare you tell her to come near me.'
'Dare! That seems a queer way to put it. However, you can order her out if you don't want her. There's Maggie—and I'm sending Ninnis back to-night.'
'When are you coming home?'
'I can't say. I've got things to do—and to think about.'
His words and his manner seemed to convey a sinister meaning.
'I see—you are angry about the black-boy. If you want to know I will tell you exactly what happened.'
He laughed again and his laugh sounded to her insulting.
'Oh, I know what has happened. You needn't tell me. I had some conversation with Harris this morning. I know EVERYTHING; and now I've got to settle in my own mind how things are to go on.'
She went very white and repeated dully: 'How—things—are to go on?'
'Between you and me. You don't imagine, do you, that they can go on the same?'
'No,' she retorted with spirit, 'certainly they can't go on the same.'
Maggie had come along the veranda and was at the French window.
'Mr Harris says he's ready, sir, and the horses....'
'All right.' McKeith went out of the door, but turned and paused as if he were going to speak to his wife. But he thought better of it and walked rapidly away—perhaps because she avoided his look.
She supposed that he was infuriated with her because of her part in Wombo's escape, and she thought his anger unjust. No doubt, too, he suspected Maule's connivance, and she knew that he was furiously jealous of Maule. But surely he would understand that she must have sent Maule away. What more can a wife do in the case of an over-insistent lover? And how should a husband expect an explanation when he had literally thrown her into her lover's arms, or at least had left her defenceless against his solicitations! Had he treated her differently after the Wombo episode in the beginning, she might have told him the truth about her former relations with Willoughby Maule.
As things had been, it was rather for Maule than for Colin that she found excuse.
She was bitterly hurt and offended against her husband. Oh, yes. He was right. They could never again be the same to each other. If he had come back penitent, pleading for forgiveness, overwhelmed with contrition at her dismissal of Maule, she might then perhaps have explained everything and they might have become reconciled. But now, his vile temper, his insupportable manner, his dominant egoism made any attempt of conciliation on her part impossible. She had a temper too—she told herself, and her anger was righteous. And she also had an egoism that wouldn't allow itself to be trampled on. She had rights—of birth, of breeding, to say nothing of her rights of wifehood and womanhood for which she must insist upon respect. If he would not bend to her, even to show her ordinary consideration and courtesy, then she would not lower her pride one iota before him.
Thoughts of this kind went through her mind as she lay smarting under the burning sense of outrage, until the reappearance of Mrs Hensor. Then, the new effort she made in sending away the woman exhausted brain and body and left her with scarcely the power to think—certainly not to reason.
But Lady Bridget did not know what had followed upon her husband's home-coming. She had not been in a condition to realize how all night through he had tended her, putting aside every other consideration, giving no heed to the affairs of the station, refusing to see the Police Inspector who had sent in an urgent message soon after his arrival.
Only when turning for a moment to the veranda and noticing the red glare in the sky, had he been startled out of his absorption in his wife's illness. In ordinary circumstances, he would have been on his horse in a twinkling and riding as for life to fight the worst foe a squatter has to face in times of drought. He knew that if the fire spread, it might mean his ruin. As it was, he rushed up to the Quarters to rouse Ninnis and send him with Moongarr Bill and all available hands to do what he could in arresting the flames. But he himself dared not leave Bridget till the fever was down, and the crisis past. That could not be till she had awakened from the deep sleep into which she had fallen.
With the sight of her in that sleep, however, the pull on his forces slackened, though he was still too strung-up to think of snatching even an hour's sleep for himself. He watched, alternately, the Bush fire and Bridget's face, thinking his own dour thoughts the while. Every now and then, he would creep on tip-toe to the veranda railings and gaze out upon the lurid smoke which it seemed to him was thickening over the horizon. When the sun was risen he washed and dressed and went up to the Bachelors' Quarters where Mrs Hensor was already about and gave him tea and food, which he badly needed. From her he learned a considerable amount of what had been going on at Moongarr. From the Police Inspector, a little later, he learned a good deal more.
Harris' manner was portentous; he asked for a private interview in the office, saying that he had stayed on purpose to see the Boss, because his tale was impossible to write. Then he told his own version of the capture and locking up of Wombo, taking blame on himself for having left the key of the hide-house in Maule's possession.
'But you see, Boss, he twitted me a bit about not having a warrant, and there's no doubt, wherever he's learned it, that the chap has got the whole constabulary lay-out at his finger ends—besides having the ear of the Governor and the Executive down in Leichardt's Town. He's got money too, no end of it. They were saying in Tunumburra that his wife left him a quarter of a million.'
'Go on—that's nothing to do with us,' put in McKeith gruffly.
'He's an old friend of her Ladyship's, I understand,' sniggered Harris.
'What the devil has that got to do with Wombo?' said McKeith furiously.
Harris drew in his feelers.
'I wouldn't swear that it had, Mr McKeith, and I wouldn't swear that it hadn't. All I know is, that Mr Maule had the key of the hide-house in his bedroom that night, and, being a close friend of her Ladyship's, he was no doubt aware that she didn't relish the notion of Wombo's being had up for theft and murder—I'm not saying who it was let out Wombo. It's a mystery I don't take upon myself to fathom—I'll leave that to you.'
'There's one easy solution of the mystery that doesn't seem to have occurred to you,' said McKeith. 'The gin Oola could easily have stolen the key—they're cunning as the devil—half-castes—and as treacherous—I know them—I've had my own good reasons for not letting one of them inside the fence of my head-station.'
'That may be—I can only say what I know, and you can form your own opinion.'
'Say what you know then—I'm waiting to hear. But be quick about it, man, I've no time to waste this morning.'
Harris began his tale—how he had watched at the window of his little room, till after midnight, his gun ready, his eyes glued on the padlocked door opposite; how overcome with drowsiness against which he had vainly struggled—'for a man that's been pretty near two days and nights in the saddle may be excused if his eyes begin blinking,' Harris put it. He had dropped dead asleep—he confessed it—at his post. Then, how on awakening suddenly, for no apparent reason, all seeming quiet around, he had got up as he was, half dressed and in his boots—had stepped across to the hide-house, had found the padlock intact and, hearing no sound, had concluded the black-boy was inside safe asleep. How then, with a relieved mind, he had been going back to his stretcher, when the noise of a goat bleating had set him on the look-out from his veranda. How, presently, looking at the veranda opposite, he had seen the door of Mr Maule's bedroom open, and a woman come out, how she had stood a few moments facing him, with the moonlight straight on her, so that there was no possibility of his making a mistake. Harris paused. McKeith glared at the man, who, had he been quick at psychological interpretations, would have read an awful apprehension underlying the ill-restrained fury in the other's face. The question came in hoarse jerks.
'What—Who—Who was it you saw—?'
'It was the Lady Bridget, Boss.... I—'
Before he could proceed, a strong arm struck out and McKeith's hand clutched at the Police Inspector's neck.
'You hound! You contemptible skunk! Take back that lie, or I'll throttle it in your throat.'
Harris was of powerful build also, and, moreover knew some tricks of defence and assault. He freed himself by a dexterous duck of his head, and a sharp shake of his body, and stepped backward so that the office table was between him and his antagonist.
His face was scarlet, his bull's eyes protruded from their full sockets. But he was wary, and not anxious to provoke the devil in McKeith.
'Wait a bit,' he said thickly. 'If you'll keep your hands off me, and let me finish what I was going to say, I'll show you the proof that I'm not telling you lies—though you're mistaking my meaning in regard to her Ladyship....
'Leave her Ladyship out of it, will you,' McKeith snarled, his teeth showing between his tense lips.
'I would do that willingly, Boss, for there's no disrespect intended I can assure you. Only it means that this Wombo business will have to be reported, and if you can help me to the right evidence—well, so much the pleasanter for all parties,' returned the Police Inspector craftily.
McKeith made a slight assenting movement of his head, but said nothing. His brows puckered, and he stiffened himself as he listened, strung to the quick, while Harris continued.
'Well—I did see—that lady,'—the volcanic gleam from McKeith's eyes stopped him from pronouncing Lady Bridget's name. 'I saw her come out of that room,' he jerked his thumb along the veranda. 'The moon was right on her just then. I saw her give a shiver—she'd been out in the wet. Then she walked up the veranda to where there's the covered bit joining on to the Old Humpey, and I noticed her sit down on the steps—'
'Stop,' broke in McKeith. 'If you were on the veranda over there, you couldn't have seen as far as the steps.'
'Right you are, Boss. But I wasn't waiting on the veranda. When the lady turned her back, I moved into the yard, and I was standing by that flower-bush'—Again he jerked his thumb, this time to the centre bed, and a young bohinia shrub covered with pink blossoms 'If you try yourself from there, you'll find you can look slick through to the front garden. That's where I saw Maule step out of—I guessed he'd come round by the back of the Old Humpey. I guessed too, he thought she oughtn't to be sitting out there in the damp—She was shivering again—she'd put a rug that was lying on the steps round her. He just picked her up in his arms, and carried her right along, and when I stepped across I saw him take her into one of those rooms at the end of the front veranda....'
A muffled growl, something like the sound a hunted beast might make when the dogs had got to touch of him, came from McKeith. Again he stiffened himself; his lips hard pressed; his eyes on Harris' face. The Police Inspector avoided his gaze; but he too was watchful.
'You see I was thinking of my prisoner, and wondering if there could be anything afoot about him. So as I knew there was nobody then—in Mr Maule's room, I went back and looked in. I wanted to make sure, if I could, where the key of the hide-house might be. There was a candle left alight, and I saw the key right enough on the chest of drawers beside Maule's watch and chain. It never came into my mind then, that anybody could have used it. I noticed a bit of folded paper under the watch. That's it, Mr McKeith. There's the proof that I am not lying about what I saw.'
Harris had taken out of his breast pocket, a piece of newspaper in which was wrapped the leaf torn out of Maule's notebook, folded and addressed. He opened it out, and laid it on the office table in front of McKeith, keeping his own stubby finger on one corner of the sheet.
Still McKeith maintained his difficult self-restraint.
'So you stole—a private communication that had been left in another person's room, and was intended for his eyes alone?'
'Come now, Boss. You know well enough that a constabulary officer who's up against tricks to release a prisoner has got to keep his eyes peeled, and mustn't let any clue to mischief escape him. How was I to know that there wasn't some plot to cheat the law? How do I know that there wasn't? That's why I'm showing you the paper. I'm not a French scholar—I suppose that's French—and as I suppose you are, I'll ask you to translate what's written there.'
McKeith pushed aside the man's finger, and taking up the paper carried it to the window, where he stood with his back to Harris, spelling out Lady Bridget's hurriedly written sentences.
He seemed a long time in getting at the sense of what he read. As a matter of fact, he had only a limited acquaintance with any modern languages except his own. He had picked up some colloquial German, and once when laid up in hospital, had set himself to read Balzac's PERE GORIOT with the aid of a dictionary. Thus he had acquired a fairly extensive if somewhat archaic vocabulary. But Lady Bridget's veiled intimation of Wombo's escape couched in up-to-date and highly idiomatic French which would have been perfectly intelligible to Willoughby Maule, conveyed little to him beyond the fact of a secret understanding between his wife and a man whom he knew had once been her lover. That idea drove every other into the background of his thoughts. He did not care in the least how Wombo had escaped. It seemed clear to him that Oola had stolen the key after Harris had gone back to his room, while Maule and his wife were together—together in Lady Bridget's own chamber. The blood surged to his brain, and his temples throbbed as though they would burst. In the madness of his jealousy, the words of the paper, combined with Harris' revelations were damnatory confirmation of his wife's guilt. He felt now that he had foreseen what would happen, from the moment that he had surprised the look on Lady Bridget's face, when Maule had unexpectedly appeared before her. She had given herself away then. And, a little sooner, rather than a little later—as might have been the case had he not left them together—the inevitable had come to pass.
Yes, through the agony of that conviction now brought home to him, a dogged resolve formed itself in his mind—the determination not to betray himself or her. It beat upon him with insistent force. Though his goddess must be dethroned from her shrine in his heart, she should not be cast down for a vulgar brute like Harris to gloat over her shame....
'Well, Boss,' the Police Inspector asked with affected nonchalance that bordered on insolence. 'Can you make anything that's satisfactory to you out of that?'
McKeith turned, Harris thought he was going to leap upon him in a fit of blind fury, and started up from his seat by the office table. McKeith's eyes blazed, his taut sinews quivered; his face was now quite pallid, and the hand in which he held the piece of paper was clenched so tight that the veins stood out like thick cords, and the knuckles were perfectly bloodless.
But suddenly the pitch on his nerves was eased. His eyelids dropped, and when he lifted them, the eyes were quiet and intently observant.
He moved into his usual office chair.
'Sit down again, won't you, Harris?' he said, and Harris resumed his former place.
'What were you asking?' McKeith continued. 'Satisfactory to me is it? Yes, perfectly satisfactory, thank you.... I'm only amused—as you see... to find that I was quite right in my suspicions.' And he laughed in what Harris thought a very odd way.
'Eh? I don't take your meaning.' Harris' manner was distinctly objectionable.
McKeith gave him a sharp look, and his teeth went over his under lip. Then, to the man's evident surprise, he laughed again, throwing his head back so that the muscles of his throat showed under his beard, working, as it were, automatically. It really seemed as if the man's mechanical merriment were no part of himself. He was, in fact, gaining time to propound an explanation which he did not believe in the least, but which happened to be almost the exact truth.
He answered with an air of ironic indifference.
'Well, you know, I wouldn't go in for the detective line, if I were you, Harris. You aren't subtle enough for it. You jump too quickly at conclusions which have nothing to do with the main point. In fact, you're a fool, Harris—a damned fool.'
Harris' puzzled expression turned to one of extreme indignation. 'Seems to me, Mr McKeith, that it's you who are—well, damned queer about this affair. I'm sure I don't know what you've got to laugh at. But if you've found out who let the black-boy out of the hide-house, I'd be glad to know, that's all.'
McKeith ceased from his mirthless laughing and his sarcastic bluff. He leaned forward, facing Harris with his hands on the paper which he had laid on the table before him. He picked up the other's last words.
'Yes, that IS all. It's the only part of this note which concerns you. Well, I can tell you that it was the half-caste woman, as I thought, who let Wombo out of the hide-house. She stole the key from Mr Maule's room when HE was asleep, and let Wombo out when YOU were asleep—a longer time perhaps than you imagined, Harris. The black-boy made for the scrub, and I suppose they were in too great a hurry to think of shutting the door. Oola sneaked back—they've got the cunning of whites and blacks put together, those half-castes—and no doubt she guessed there'd be a hue and cry directly the door was found open. So she locked it again—and brought the key to her ladyship.'
McKeith seemed to force the last words from between his teeth.
'Well, that's quite simple, isn't it?'
'Now, I shouldn't call it as simple as you make out, Boss. It appears mighty odd to me that the gin should have worried round after her ladyship when she might have sneaked back with the key to the place she took it from. And then there's all the rest—the putting the key back and fitting in times and all that.... Seems to me a bit too much of the Box and Cox trick—a sort of jig-saw puzzle, d'you see.'
Manifestly, Harris was endeavouring to square probabilities. McKeith still held himself in.
'I've given you the facts. You can figure out your details for yourself. I've my own business to attend to, and I must be off on it.'
He got up, and folding Lady Bridget's note, deliberately put it in his breast pocket. Harris stretched forth a restraining hand.
'Boss, I say—that's important—for my report, you know.'
McKeith's temper burst out.
'Damn your report. I'm a magistrate, and I've taken your report, and the blacks are in the scrub and you can go and find them for yourself if you choose. You have no warrant, remember. No, I'm not going to be bothered any more about that black-boy. What.... Not I—with a fire raging on my run, and not enough hands to put it out.'
'But her ladyship....' spluttered Harris.
'Listen here you....' McKeith's face and attitude were menacing. 'I came back to find her ladyship down with dengue as bad as could be. It was on her that night, and if she had to be carried to her room in a fit of shaking, what business is that of yours? Understand me, Harris. Don't you go mixing up my wife's name with this beastly black-boy affair, or you'll have to reckon with me—and I can tell you, you won't relish that reckoning.'
'There was no offence meant. I only wanted to do my duty,' protested the Police Inspector, cringing after the way of bullies.
'You'll find opportunity enough for doing that if you ride back to Breeza Downs and lend the Specials your valuable assistance in protecting the sheep-owners against the Unionists. And I might remind you, as I reminded that damned Organiser who's fired my run, that there's a hundred pounds reward still waiting for anybody who catches the men that robbed my drays and killed my horses.'
McKeith paused a moment before going out by the further door of the office which looked out on the plain.
'I'll leave you now to run up your horse and make your own arrangements. As soon as I can, I shall start to help in getting the bush fire under. You can arrest that Organiser if you are keen on arresting somebody. Send in when you're saddled up, and if I'm ready we'll ride to the turn-off track together.'
McKeith went back to his wife's room. She was still sleeping. Then it was that spasms of mortal agony began literally to rend the man. He left her side and seated himself on the bed in his dressing-room. He sat with his arms folded across his chest. His shoulders heaved. Deep dry sobs shook his huge frame. He would not let a groan escape from between his clenched teeth, but there was blood on his lower lip where he had bitten it in the effort to control himself. Presently, he heard a sound in the next room—a half moan—a name spoken. No, it would not be his name that she would utter first on her return to consciousness.
The man got up; stretched his long, lean frame, shuddering as if it had been on the rack. He drew two deep breaths, braced himself, wiped the blood from his lip, put on the stony mask which Bridget saw when she opened her eyes and found him looking down at her.
Next morning, Lady Bridget was better and her mind clearer. There had been no return of fever, and, though the physical weakness was great and her temperature—had she taken it—would have been found a good deal below normal, her fierce determination not to remain helpless any longer gave her strength to get up and dress. She was not able, however, to do anything but lie in a half-alive condition in the hammock at the end of the veranda. All night the fire had blazed, but more fitfully, and this morning the lurid glare had died down. Only a murky haze, faintly red here and there, spread over the north-eastern sky. Small, isolated smoke-clouds rose above the stretches of forest, and an irregular-shaped tract of charred grass at the edge of the plain showed how far the flames had encroached upon it before they had been got under. One might well conceive with what almost superhuman exertions the beaters had at length accomplished their task. A large number of cattle had been driven by the fire on to the pasture beyond the home paddock—a pasture that had so far been carefully nursed in view of possible later necessity.
Bridget was bushwoman enough to comprehend the crippling effect upon McKeith's resources of the calamity, had she allowed her mind to dwell upon that aspect of affairs. But her mind was incapable just now of dealing with practical issues. She felt utterly weak, utterly lonely. Although she was glad Maule had gone, she missed his sympathetic companionship to an extent that she could hardly have thought possible.
As the hammock swayed gently at the slight touch of her fingers on its rope edge, her imagination drifted dangerously and her senses yielded to the old drugging fascination. He seemed as close to her as had been his bodily shape a few days previously. She was conscious of the pull of his will upon the invisible cords by which he held her. If it were an unholy spell, it was, now, at least, in her desolation, a consoling one. He loved her; he wanted her. She knew that he was passionately eager to devote his life to her. He would wait expectantly until she wrote. With a few strokes of her pen she might end her irksome captivity in this wall-less prison of desert plain—this wilderness of gum and gidia.
As she lay there in the hammock, a child's clumpy boots pattered along the garden path and Tommy Hensor came up the steps with a big cabbage leaf gathered in his hand. He opened it out when he reached the veranda and displayed three Brazilian cherries, the first fruits of a plant growing in the Chinaman's garden.
'La-ship ... La-ship! I got these myself. I made Fo Wung give 'em me for you.'
At any other time the child's offering would have been received, at any rate, graciously. Now Tommy shrank away, startled by the look on Lady Bridget's face and the forbidding gesture with which she warned him off.
'Go away! ... Go away! ...' she cried. 'I don't want you.'
Tommy's common, freckled little face crumpled up and his blue eyes filled with tears. He dropped the cabbage leaf and the cherished Brazilian cherries and ran down the steps again, blubbering piteously.
Lady Bridget got up as soon as the child had clicked the garden gate behind him. She was ashamed of the spasm of revulsion that had seized her. She wanted to cast away from her the dreadful thought his appearance had suddenly evoked. She picked up the cabbage leaf with the fruit and flung them over the railings into a flower bed, where the butcher-birds and the bower-birds quarrelled over them, and the big, grey bird in the gum tree on the other side of the fence cachinnated in derisive chorus to Bridget's burst of hysterical laughter.
A little later Maggie came out from the bedroom with some letters in her hand.
'I've laid holt on your mail, Ladyship, turning out your room. I expect you forgot all about it.'
Yes, she had forgotten, absolutely; it seemed years since Harry the Blower had passed by and Willoughby Maule had departed. She languidly inspected the envelopes. Nothing among them of any importance—except one.
It was a blue telegraph-service envelope, and had been forwarded on by the postman from Crocodile Creek, the nearest telegraph station. In the last fifteen months they had brought the bush railway a good deal further up the river, and Crocodile Creek was the present terminus. Thus the road journey was now considerable shorter than when Colin McKeith had brought his bride home.
Lady Bridget read the several lines of the cabled message over two or three times before the real bearings of it became clear to her fever-weakened intelligence.
At last she grasped the startling fact that the cablegram was from her cousin, Lord Gaverick, and that it had been despatched from London about seven days previously. This was what it said.
'ELIZA GAVERICK DIED TWENTIETH LEAVES YOU CASTLE AND FIFTY THOUSAND DIFFICULTIES EXECUTORS YOUR PRESENCE URGENTLY DESIRED WIRE IF CAN COME, GAVERICK'
Lady Bridget let the blue form drop on her lap. She stared out over the brown plain and the herds of lean beasts all shadowy in the smoky mist over the horizon, then round, along the wilderness of gidia scrub, with its charred patches afar off, from which there still rose thin spirals of smoke.
Destiny had spoken. Here was the order of release. There was no gaoler to keep the prison doors locked any longer—except—except—No, if she wished to break her bonds, Colin would never gainsay her.
Late that night the men came back from fighting the fire which they had now practically put out. Even in the moonlight they looked deplorable objects, grimed, covered with dust and ashes, their skins and clothes scorched by the fierce heat.
They seemed drunk with fatigue, and could scarcely sit their horses. When they dismounted they could hardly stand.
Their feeble COO-EES at the sliprails brought out Ninnis, who had been sent home in the afternoon and had been taking some well-earned repose so as to be ready for the next shift—happily not required. He and the few hands left to look after the head-station and the tailing-mob held the men's horses when their riders literally tumbled off them. Ninnis made McKeith take a strong pull of whiskey and supported him along to the Old Humpey. For Colin had had strength to say that Lady Bridget must on no account be disturbed. Ninnis led him to the room lately occupied by Willoughby Maule, and was surprised at his employer's vehement refusal to remain in it.
'I'll not stop here.... No, I won't go to my dressing-room. In God's name, just let me stretch myself on the bunk in the Office and go to sleep.'
He threw himself on a bush-carpentered settle, with mattress and pillows covered in Turkey-red, which was used sometimes at mustering times when there was an overplus of visitors. There he lay like a log for close on twelve hours.
By and by, Lady Bridget, at once longing and reluctant, came softly in to see how he fared.
A storm of pity, anger, tenderness, repulsion—the whole range of feeling, it seemed, between love and hate—swept over her as she looked at the great gaunt form stretched there. Colin was still in riding clothes and booted and spurred. His moleskins were black with smoke and charcoal; his flannel shirt, open at the neck, showed red scratches and scorch-marks on the exposed chest and was torn over the arms, where were more excoriations of the flesh. And the ravaged face! How hard it was. How relentless, even in the utter abandonment of bodily exhaustion! The skin was caked with black dust and sweat. The darkened thatch of yellow hair was dank and wet. The fair beard, usually so trim, was singed in places, matted, and had bits of cinder and burnt leaves sticking to it.
A revolting spectacle, offending Lady Bridget's fine, physical sensibilities, but a MAN—THE Man. She could not understand that tornado of emotion which now made her being seem a very battle-ground, for all the primal passions. She turned away with a sense of nausea, and then turned to him again with a kind of passionate longing to take him in her arms—brutal as she thought him, and unworthy of the affection she had once felt for him—felt still alas!—and all the romance she had once woven about him.... She saw that a fly was hovering over the excoriated arm and drew the ragged sleeve over its bareness. Then she noticed the mosquito net reefed up on a hoop above the bunk, and managed to get the curtain down so that he should be protected from the assaults of insects. But as she touched him in doing this, he stirred and muttered wrathfully in his sleep, as though he were conscious of her tenderness and would have none of it; she fled away and came to him no more.
She had been racking her brain since receiving the cablegram as to what answer she should return to it.
After that pitiable sight of her husband, Bridget moved restlessly about the house, with intervals of lassitude in the hammock, for she still felt weak and ill. But quinine was keeping the fever down, and she resolved that her husband should not again be required to nurse her. She did not go into the Office any more, but busied herself in a defiant fashion upon little cares for his comfort when he awoke. He should see that she did not neglect her house-wifely duties—at least while she remained there to perform them. The qualification was significant of her mood.
Thus, she gave orders that the veranda of the Old Humpey should be kept free from disturbing footsteps, and saw that the bathroom was in order, and a change of clothing set ready for him when he should awake. Also that there should be a meal prepared.
He did not wake till the afternoon. She heard him go straight in to take his bath, and hastened to have the dining room table spread. But she saw him go out of the bathroom—all fresh and more like himself—and cross the yard on his way to the Bachelors' Quarters, making it clear to her that he wished to avoid the part of the house she occupied. Bridget went back to the front veranda in a cold fury, pierced by stabs of mental pain. She watched him from the end of the veranda go into the living room of the Quarters, and thought bitterly that he would ask Mrs Hensor for the food he required. No doubt too, he would obtain from Mrs Hensor, information as to how she herself had been getting on during his absence, and Mrs Hensor would give him a garbled report of her own dismissal from the sick room.... How dared he—oh! how DARED he treat her, Lady Bridget, his wife, with such cruel negligence, such marked insult!
It did not occur to her that he might wish to see Ninnis, who, when at the station, was usually about this time, in his office at the back of the Bachelors' Quarters.
After a time, she heard Colin's voice again in the yard, and his step on the Old Humpey veranda. He came now by the covered passage on to that of the New House, and advanced towards her.
He only came, she told herself, because it would have seemed too strange had he continued to ignore her existence.
And he was conscious of her resentment. By a curious affinity, his own spirit thrilled to the unquenchable spirit in her. Qualities in himself responded to like qualities in her. He admired her pride and pluck. Yet the two egoisms reared against each other, seemed to him—could he have put the thought into shape—like combatants with lances drawn ready to strike.
He believed that it was love which gave her strength—love, not for him, but for that other man whose influence he was now convinced had always been paramount, and who with renewed propinquity had resumed his domination.
Certain phrases in that letter he had read long ago on Joan Gildea's veranda, and which had been haunting him ever since Willoughby Maule's re-appearance, struck his heart with the searing effect of lightning. He felt, at the first sight of her there on the veranda, before she turned full to him, a passionate yearning to take her in his arms, and cover her poor little wasted face with kisses—to call her 'Mate'; to remind her of that wonderful marriage night under the stars. But when he saw the proud aloofness of her look, his longing changed to a dull fury, which he could only keep in check by rigorous steeling of his will against any softening impulse.
So his face was hard as a rock, his voice rasping in its restraint, when he came near and spoke to her. 'You have not had any more fever?'
'No.'
He put two or three questions to her about her health—whether she had taken the medicine he had left for her, and so on, to which she returned almost monosyllabic replies, sufficiently satisfactory in the information they gave him.
'That's all right then,' he said coldly. 'I thought it would be, though I didn't at all like leaving you in such a condition.'
'Really! But it doesn't seem as if you had felt any violent anxiety about me since you came back. I heard you go to the bathroom a long time ago, and I saw you going up to the Quarters.'
He did not appear to notice the latter implication.
'I had to sleep,' he said curtly. 'I was dead beat.'
'Yes, I saw that,' she answered.
'A-ah!' The deep intake of breath made a hissing sound, and he flushed a brick red. 'You came and looked at me?'
'I went into the Office.'
'I didn't want you to see me. You must have loathed the sight of me. I was a disgusting object.'
She said nothing.
If he had glanced at her he would have seen a piteous flicker of tenderness pass over her face—a sudden wet gleam in her eyes. And had he yielded then to his first impulse, things might have gone very differently between them. But he kept himself stiffened. He would not lift his eyes, when she gave him a furtive glance. The expression of his half averted face was positively sinister as he added with a sneering little laugh.
'One can't look as if one had come out of a bandbox after fighting a bush fire.'
She exclaimed, 'Oh! what does it matter?'
He utterly mistook the meaning of her exclamation.
'You are quite right,' he retorted. 'When it comes to the end of everything, what does ANYTHING matter!'
For several moments there was dead silence. She felt as if he had wilfully stabbed her. He on his side had again the confused sense of two antagonists, feinting with their weapons to gain time before the critical encounter.
'Well?' He swung himself savagely round upon her. 'That's true, isn't it? The end HAS come.... You're sick of the whole show—dead sick—of the Bush—of everything?—Aren't you? Answer me straight, Bridget.'
'Yes, I am,' she replied recklessly. 'I hate the Bush—I—I hate everything.'
'Everything! Well, that settles it!' he said slowly.
Again there was silence, and then he said:
'You know I wouldn't want to keep you—especially now,'—he did not add the words that were on his lips 'now that bad times are coming on me,'—and she read a different application in the 'now.' 'I—I'd be glad for you to quit. It's as you please—maybe the sooner the better. I'll make everything as easy as I can for you.'
'You are very—considerate....' The sarcasm broke in her throat.
She moved abruptly, and stood gazing out over the plain till the hysterical, choking sensation left her. Her back was to him. He could not see her face; nor could she see the dumb agony in his.
Presently she walked to a shelf-table on the veranda set against the wall; and from the litter of papers and work upon it, took up the cablegram she had lately received.
'I wanted to show you this,' she said stonily, and handed him the blue paper.
There was something significant in the way he steadied it upon the veranda railing, and stooped with his head down to pore over it.
The blow was at first almost staggering. It was as though the high gods had shot down a bolt from heaven, shattering his world, and leaving him alone in Chaos. They had taken him at his word—had registered on the instant his impious declaration. It WAS the end of everything. She was to quit.... He had said, the sooner the better.... Well—he wasn't going to let even the high gods get a rise out of him.
He laughed. By one of those strange links of association, which at moments of unexpected crisis bring back things impersonal, unconnected, the sound of his own laugh recalled the rattle of earth, upon the dry outside of a sheet of bark in which, during one of their boundary rides at Breeza Downs lately, they had wrapped for burial the body of a shepherd found dead in the bush. Both sounds seemed to him as of something dead—something outside humanity.
He handed her back the telegram, speaking still as if he were far-off—on the other side of a grave, but quite collectedly and as though in the long silence he had been weighing the question.
'It seems to me that this has come to you in the nick of time, to solve difficulties.'
'Yes,' she assented dully.
'You've got no choice but to go as your cousin says. There's money depending on it.'
'Money! ... Oh, money!' she cried wildly.
'Money is apt to stick on to lawyers' fingers when they're left to the handling of it .... This is a matter of business, and business can't be put on one side—especially, when there's as large a sum as fifty thousand pounds in the proposition. I guess from this that you're wanted.'
'Yes,' she said again. She was thinking to herself, 'That's his Scotch carefulness about money; he wouldn't consider anything in comparison with that.'
'You had better take the northern route,' he went on. 'There ought to be an E. and A. boat due at Leuraville pretty soon—I'll look it out. ... Perhaps you'd like to make the start to-morrow?'
'To-morrow—oh yes, to-morrow—just whenever suits you.'
'I couldn't take you down myself. There are things—serious matters I've got to see to on the station. And besides, you'll allow it's best for me not to go with you. Ninnis could drive you to Crocodile Creek, and put you into the train; and Halliwell will look after you at Leuraville, and see you on board the steamer.'
'Oh, I wonder that you can spare Ninnis,' she returned bitterly. 'I suppose you'd want Moongarr Bill still more on the run. But there's Joe Casey—I daresay somebody else can milk the cows, and get up wood and water. Or there's Cudgee—I don't mind who goes with me.... I can drive myself.'
'My God! do you imagine I'd put a black-boy—or anyone but my own trusted overseer in charge of you! What are you thinking of to talk like that?'
He took a few steps along the veranda, moving with uncertain gait; then stopped and leaned heavily against the wall. In a few seconds he had recovered himself, and came back to her, speaking quietly.
'I will think out things and arrange it all. You'll be perfectly safe with Ninnis, I think it would be better for you to sleep one night at old Duppo's place. There's fresh horses for the buggy there—I've got Alexander and Roxalana in the paddock now—they're the best....'
Oh, how could he bear that those horses, of the dream-drive, should take her away from him! He went on in the same matter-of-fact manner. 'I expect the answer to the cablegram will get as quickly as if Harry the Blower took it, if you send it from Crocodile Creek yourself. And there's your packing—there's not much time, but you won't want to take a lot of things. Anything you cared about could go afterwards.'
'Go afterwards—What do you mean? I want to take nothing—nothing except a few clothes.'
'Ah well—it doesn't matter—As you said—nothing matters now.... Well, I'll go and see Ninnis, and settle about to-morrow.... Then there's money....' he stopped at the edge of the steps leading down to the Old Humpey, looking back at her—'what you'll need for the passage—and afterwards—I know what you'll be thinking; but I can arrange for it with the Bank manager at Leuraville.'
A mocking demon rose in her.
'Please don't let yourself be inconvenienced. I only want the bare passage money. And directly I get to England I will pay you back.'
His hands dropped to his sides as if she had shot him. His face was terrible. At that moment, she could have bitten her tongue out.
'I don't think—you need have said that, Bridget,' and he went slowly down the steps, and out of her sight like a man who has received a mortal hurt.
If purgatory could hold worse torture than life held on that last evening Lady Bridget spent at Moongarr, then neither she nor her husband would have been required to do any long expiation there. It would be difficult to say which of the two suffered the most. Probably McKeith, because he was the strongest. Equally, he showed it the least when the breaking moment had passed. Yet both husband and wife seemed to have covered their faces, hearts and souls with unrevealing masks. No, it was worse than that. Each was entirely aware of the mental and spiritual barrier, which made it absolutely impossible for them to approach each other in the sense of reality. A barrier infinitely more forbidding than any material one of stone or iron. Because it was living, poisoned, venomous as the fang of some monstrous deadly serpent. To come within its influence meant the death of love.
There was not much more of the day to get through. Husband and wife both got through it in a fever of activity over details that seemed scarcely to matter. He busied himself with Ninnis—first explaining to the overseer as briefly as he could, the necessity for Lady Bridget's voyage to England—a necessity that appealed to Ninnis' practical mind, particularly in the present financial emergency. It surprised him a little that McKeith should not himself see his wife off; but he also recognised practical reasons—against that natural concession to sentiment. On the whole, it rather pleased him to find his employer ignoring sentiment, and he fully appreciated the confidence reposed in himself.
The two men went over questions connected with the journey, overhauling the buggy so that springs, bars and bolts might be in order, seeing that the horses were in good condition, sending on Cudgee that very hour, with a second pair in relay for the long stage of the morrow, when over fifty miles must be covered. There would be another pair at old Duppo's, and, after a day and night of comparative rest, Alexander and Roxalana would be fresh for the last long stage of the journey. They calculated that under these provisions the railway terminus at Crocodile Creek, might be reached on the eve of the third day. And there were many instructions, and much careful arranging for Lady Bridget's comfort during the journey.
Then there were letters to write, business calculations, a further overdraft to be applied for to the Bank, pending the cattle sales.... Would there be saleable cattle enough to meet demands and expenses of sinking fresh artesian bores—now that the fire had destroyed all the best grass on the run?
McKeith found no consolation in the prospect of his wife's riches. That only added gall to his bitterness, new fuel to his stubborn pride, new strength to the wall between them.
He sat brooding in his office, when the business letters were written—to the Bank-manager; to Captain Halliwell, the Police-magistrate at Leuraville; to the Manager of the Eastern and Australian Steam Navigation Depot, Leuraville, enclosing a draft to pay the passage; to the Captain of the boat advertised for that trip, who happened to be an acquaintance of his—all recommending Lady Bridget to the different people's care—all anticipating and arranging against every possible drawback to her comfort on the voyage—all carefully stating the object of her trip to England—business connected with the death of a near relative. Then, after the ghastly pretence of dinner—during which appearances were kept up unnecessarily before Maggie and the Malay boy, by a forced discussion of matter-of-fact details—looking out the exact time of the putting in of the next E. and A. boat at Leuraville—all of which he had already done, and pointing out to Bridget that she could catch it, with a day to spare.
There was food for the journey too, to be thought of, and other things to talk about. As soon as the meal was ended, McKeith went back to the office, and Bridget saw or heard no more of him that night. He did not come even to his dressing-room. She concluded that he was 'camping' on the bunk in the office, and when her own packing was done, she lay in wakeful misery till dawn brought a troubled doze.
Her packing was no great business—clothes for the voyage, and a big furred cloak for warmth, when she should arrive in England in the depth of winter—that was all.
Everything else—her papers, knicknacks, personal belongings—she left just as they were. Colin might do as he liked about them. She felt reckless and quite hard.
Only one among those personal possessions moved her to despairing tears. It was a shrivelled section of bark chopped from a gum tree, warped almost into a tube.
She placed this carefully in the deepest drawer of her wardrobe. Would Colin ever find it there—and would he understand? All the time, through these preparations, strangely enough she did not think of any possible future in connection with Willoughby Maule. The events of the past few days seemed to have driven him outside her immediate horizon.
When she came out in the morning dressed for her journey, she found her husband in the veranda waiting to strap up and carry out her baggage. Scarcely a word passed between them; they did not even breakfast together. He said he had been up early, and had had his breakfast already, but he watched her trying to eat while he moved about collecting things for her journey, and he poured out the coffee, and begged her to drink it. While he was there, Chen Sing brought in the basket of food he must have ordered for the buggy, and there was Fo Wung too, the gardener, with fresh lettuce and water-cress, and a supply of cool, green cabbage leaves in which he had packed a few early flat-stone peaches, and some Brazilian cherries.
Lady Bridget thanked them with the ghost of her old sweetness, and they promised to have the garden 'velly good—TAI YAT number one' and to 'make plenty nice dishes,' for the Boss during her absence.
While they stood at the French window, McKeith filled flasks with wine and spirits, and packed quinine and different medicines he had prepared in case of her needing them. Then after shewing her the different bottles, he took the supply out to Ninnis to be put in the buggy.
Everything was ready now—the buggy packed, the hood unslung so that it could be put up and down in protection against sun or rain—this last alas! an improbable eventuality. Alexander and Roxalana were champing their bits. Ninnis in a new cabbage-tree hat and clean puggaree, wearing the light coat he only put on when in the society of ladies he wished to honour, was standing by the front wheels examining the lash of his driving-whip. McKeith had given him his last directions. There was nothing now to wait for. McKeith went slowly up the steps of the back veranda, and in at the French window of the sitting room, where Bridget had been watching, waiting. At his appearance, she went back into the room. She stood quite still, small, shadowy, the little bit of her face which showed between the folds of her motor veil, where it was tied down under her chin—very pale, and the eyes within their red, narrowed lids, dry and bright.
'Are you ready, Bridget?' he asked.
'Yes.'
He came close, and took a little bag she was holding out of her hands, carried it to the back veranda, and told one of the Chinamen to give it to Mr Ninnis—all, it seemed to her, to evade farewells. She called him back in a hard voice.
'Colin—I've left my keys,'—pointing to a sealed and addressed envelope on her own writing-table. 'There are a few things of value—some you have given me—in the drawers.'
'I will take care of them,' he answered hoarsely.
They stood fronting each other, and their eyes both smarting, agonised, stared at each other out of the pale drawn faces.
'Colin,' she said; and held out her hands. 'Aren't you going to say good-bye?'
He took her hands; his burning look met hers for an instant and dropped. There was always the poisonous wall which their soul's vision might not pierce—through which their yearning lips might not touch. For an instant too, the hardness of his face was broken by a spasm of emotion. The grip of his hands on hers was like that of a steel vice; she winced at the pain of it. He dropped her hands suddenly, and moved back a step.
'Good-bye—Bridget.'
'Is that all you have to say? All?'
He stuttered, helplessly. 'I—I—can't.... There's nothing to say.'
'Nothing! You let me go—like this—without one word of apology—of regret. I think that, at least, you owe me—courtesy.'
Her tone lashed him. He seemed to be struggling with his tongue-tied speech. When words came they rushed out in fierce jerks. 'I'll say this—though where's the good of talking.... What does it amount to anyway, when you're down on the bedrock, and there's nothing left but to give up the whole show and start fresh as best you can? I'll say this—I've never pretended to fine manners—I leave them—to others. I'm just a rough bushman, no better and no worse. Apology!—that's my apology—As for regret. My God! isn't it all one huge regret? No, I won't say that.... Because there are some things I CAN'T regret—for myself. For you, I do regret them. I was an insane ass ever to imagine that I and my way of living could ever fit in with a woman brought up like you. The incompatibilities were bound to come out—incompatibilities of temper, education, breeding—outlook on things—they were bound to separate us sooner or later, I'm glad that it's sooner, because that gives you a chance of getting back into your old conditions before you've grown different in yourself—dried up—soured—maybe lost your health, roughing it through bad times in the bush.... As it is, you'll get out all right—Never fear that I won't see you get out all right.'
'And you?' she put in.
'Me! I don't count—I don't care.... A man's not like a woman. I've always been a fighter. And I've never been DOWNED in my life. I'm not going to be DOWNED this time. I shall make good—some time—somehow. I'm not the sort of small potato that drops to the bottom of the bag in the big shake-up.'
She winced visibly. He read distaste in her slight gesture, in the expression of her eyes. It was true that the man's pugnacious egoism—a lower side of him asserting itself just then—had always jarred upon her finer taste. He recognised this subconsciously, and his self-esteem revolted at it.
'You needn't be afraid,' he exclaimed harshly. 'If I wanted to hold to my rights, and keep you here with me—what has happened would prevent me—I've got too much pride to hang on to the skirts of a rich wife. But you won't be harmed.... I don't know yet, but I believe there's a way by which you can win through straight and square—no smirch that you need mind—And if there is—whatever the way of it is, I'll do my best to bring you out all right.'
'You are generous.' Her eyes flashed but her voice was coldly bitter. 'May I ask what you propose to do?'
'There's no use....' he said heavily. 'I told you talking was no good—now. I've got my own ideas....'
'Then, if that's how you feel, the sooner I go the better pleased you will be,' she returned hysterically. 'Oh, I'm ready to go.'
He moved to the steps, not answering at once. Then he said:
'The buggy is waiting, will you come?'
He went down the steps in front of her, but stopped at the bottom to help her, for her foot had stumbled on the edge of the veranda. His strong arm upheld her until she was on the gravel. The touch of his fingers on her arm, brought home the incredible horror of it all—the suddenness, the brutality. She pulled her veil hastily over her face to hide the gush of tears. She could not speak for the choking lump in her throat. He released her at once and strode on. Not another word passed between them. Ninnis greeted her with gruff cordiality—began a sort of speech about the cause of her departure—condolence and congratulations stupidly mixed. McKeith impatiently cut him short.
'All right, Ninnis. Get up. And mind, the horses are fresh. They'll want a bit of driving at the start.'
He helped Bridget to her seat, tucked the brown linen coverlet round her knees. In doing so, he bent his head—she thought he had dropped something. Then through the thin linen of the covering, and her light summer garments, she felt the pressure of his burning lips as though they were touching her flesh.
She bent forward. Their eyes met in a wild look, just for a second. The horses plunged under Ninnis' hands on the reins. McKeith sprang back.
'Wo-oh! Gee on then!' Ninnis called out. 'Good-bye, Boss. You can trust me to look well after her ladyship.... Be back again as soon as I can.'
And if Colin spoke, the sound did not carry to his wife's ears. Her last impression of him as the buggy swayed and rattled down the hill was again the dogged droop of his great shoulders.
It was too late now. She felt that the Furies were pursuing her. Ah, but the end had come—come with such hideous misconception—every word spoken—and there had been so few in comparison with the immensity of the occasion—a hopeless blunder. It had been the tussle of two opposing temperaments, it was like the rasping steel of a cross-cut saw against the hard, heavy grain of an iron-bark gum log. Then the extraordinary involvements of circumstance. Each incident, big and little, dovetailing and hastening the onward sweep of catastrophe. It seemed as though Fate had cunningly engineered the forces on every plane so that there should be no escape for her victims. Like almost all the tragedies of ordinary human life, this one had been too swift in its action to allow of suitable dialogue or setting.
From Joan Gildea to Colin McKeith.
Written about a year later.
MY DEAR COLIN,
I find it impossible to recognise my old friend in the hard, businesslike communication you sent me from Leichardt's Town. I almost wish that you had allowed the lawyer you consulted to put the case before me instead; it would have seemed less unfitting, and I could have answered it better. But I quite appreciate your objection to taking the lawyer into your confidence as regards the personal matters you mention to me. It would be cruelly unjust—I think quite unpardonable in you to bring forward the name of Mr Willoughby Maule in connection with Bridget. Not that HE would mind that. I honestly believe that he would snatch gladly at any means for inducing Bridget to marry him. Whether she would do so, if you were to carry through this amazing scheme of yours, it's impossible for me to say. At present she certainly prefers to keep him at a distance. He has never been to Castle Gaverick. And except for a few visits on business to London that is where she has lived since she came over here.
Your letter followed me to Jamaica where I've been reporting on the usual lines for THE IMPERIALIST, but, of course I couldn't answer it until I had talked it over with Bridget and, as you desired, had obtained her views on the matter. It was a shock to her to realise that your reason for never writing to her and for refusing to let her write to you, was lest that might affect the legality of these proceedings, which I understand you have contemplated from the beginning of your quarrel. Bridget is too proud to show you how deeply she is wounded by your letter. All she has to say is, that if you really wish to take this action, she will not oppose it.
But Colin, do you really wish, it? I refuse to believe that you seriously contemplate divorcing your wife. You must know that you have not the accepted grounds for doing so. As for the law you quote which allows divorce in cases of two years' so-called desertion, I can only say that I consider it a blot on Leichardt's Land legislation. Divorce should be for one cause only—the cause to which Our Lord gave a qualified approval; and Bridget has never been unfaithful—in act or desire, to her husband. I would maintain this in spite of the most damning testimony, and you must in your heart believe it also. Besides, your testimony is ridiculously inadequate.
I am glad, however, that you have at last made your accusations in detail—in order, as you say—that I—and Bridget, incidentally, I suppose—should fully understand why you are adopting this attitude towards her. I'm glad too, that you do not mean to make any use of the evidence against her and are prepared to take all the blame for the unhappy state of affairs between you! I write sarcastically. Why, it would be monstrous if you had any other intention! Oh, how I hate this pedantic roundabout way of writing! I feel inclined to tear up these sheets—I've torn up two already. Really, you've made it so difficult for me to treat you naturally. If I could talk to you, I'd make you understand in five minutes—but I can't—so there!
Naturally, I had heard of your bringing Mr Willoughby Maule to the station, and when I learned what followed, naturally also, I concluded that you had discovered his identity with that of the man Bridget had once cared for. I blame myself horribly. But for my carelessness you would never have read that letter of Biddy's—she knows all about it now—and your insane jealousy would not have jumped to conclusions—at any rate so quickly. And perhaps if I had not bound you to secrecy you'd have had the matter out with her, which would probably have saved all this trouble. Anyhow, I can't imagine that you would have left her alone with him as you did—and with bad feeling between you—at the mercy of her own reckless impulses and that of Willoughby Maule's ardent love-making. She doesn't pretend that it wasn't ardent, or that he did not do his best to get her to run away with him—or that the old infatuation did not come back to a slight extent—Is it surprising after your conduct? No wonder she compared his devotion favourably, with yours. Colin, your leaving her in such conditions wasn't the act of a MAN, of a gentleman. I speak strongly, but I can't help it. I know your stubborn pride and obstinacy, but you were wrong, you have disappointed me—oh! how bitterly you have disappointed me!
Then there was that business about the blacks. What a fool you were—and how brutally self-opinionated! I don't wonder Bridget thought you an inhuman monster.
Now I have said my worst, and you must take it as it is meant and forgive me.
As for the true story of that night's adventures, out of which your Police Inspector seems to have made such abominable capital—I used to think Police Inspectors were generally gentlemen—but they don't seem to be, out on the Leura—I've got all the details from Biddy. A tragi-comic business—so truly of the Bush, Bushy! I could laugh over it, if it weren't for its serious consequences. Of course, Biddy got up to turn out the goats which were butting with their horns under the floor of her bedroom. I've often got up myself in the old days at Bungroopim, when stray calves got into the garden, or the cockatoo disturbed our slumbers. Do you remember Polly? and how she would keep shouting out on a moonlight night 'The top of the mornin' to ye'—because we'd forgotten to put her blanket over the cage—I believe there were several occasions when you and I met in midnight dishabille and helped each other to restore tranquillity. If anyone was to blame for Biddy's adventure, it was your wood-and-water joey—or your Chinamen—or whoever's business it may have been to see that the goats were properly penned.
Naturally, Mr Maule, when he was disturbed too, came and did the turning out for Bridget and shepherded the creatures to the fold.
Then meanwhile, she saw the black-gin sneaking in at Mr Maule's back window to steal the key; and WOULD it have been philanthropic, impulsive Biddy, if she hadn't helped in the work of rescue, and sent the two sinners, with a 'Bless you, my children!' off into the scrub? It was like Biddy too, to go and put the key back in Mr Maule's bedroom and to scribble that ridiculous note in French so that he shouldn't go blundering to the hide-house and hurry up the pursuit. I told Bridget how the Inspector had watched her go out of Mr Maule's room, and had grabbed the note afterwards, and shown it to you. She had forgotten altogether about that note—supposed that, of course, it had reached its proper destination. She couldn't remember either exactly what she had written—except that she wanted to word it so that if there should be any accident, nobody—except Mr Maule, for of course, they'd determined on the release before that—should understand to what it referred. So she didn't mention any name—she believes she dashed off some words he had quoted to her about Love triumphant, and securing happiness and freedom by flight. And then she put in something referring to a scene they'd had that day in which he had begged her to fly with him, and she had made him promise to leave next morning, pacifying him by a counter promise to write.
She told me about her fever and ague—you don't need proof of that after the state in which you found her—and how Mr Maule carried her to her room and left her there after a few minutes. She doesn't remember anything after that, until she came out of the fever and saw you—with the face and manner I can well imagine—standing by her bedside.
I am sure that Bridget began to 'find herself' then, and that the way in which she left Moongarr was one of those shocks which make a woman touch reality. It may be only for that once in her life, but she can never be the same again. You have put your brand on your wife, Colin—that is quite plain to me. She has changed inwardly more than outwardly.
But she is extremely reticent about her feelings towards you. That in itself is so unlike the old Bridget, and I have no right to put forward my own ideas and opinions—they may be quite wrong. Really, the news of Eliza Lady Gaverick's death, and of Bridget's change of fortune, coming just at that moment, is the sort of dramatic happening, which I—as a dabbler in fiction—maintain, is more common in real life than in novels. I am certain that if I had set out to build up the tangled third act of a problem play on those lines, I couldn't have done it better. All the same, I'm very sorry that this change of fortune didn't come off earlier or later, for I am well aware of how you will jib at it.
Well, I can tell you, on her own authority, that Bridget never wrote to Mr Maule as she had promised. She had no communication with him from the time he left the station until they met on the E. and A. boat. He joined her, as you know, at the next port above Leuraville. It was rather canny of him to go there—yet I don't see how, in the circumstances, he could have loafed round Leuraville without making talk—though I think it was a great pity he didn't. Of course he had his own means of communication with the township, and knew she was on board. No one was more surprised than she at his appearance on deck next morning. I don't think, however, that she saw much of him on the voyage. She said that she got a recurrence of the malarial fever off the northern coast and had to keep her cabin pretty well till they reached Colombo. Then she asked him to leave the steamer and take a P. and O. boat that happened to be in harbour—and this he did do.
I am bound to say that Willoughby Maule must have improved greatly since the time when young Lady Gaverick decided he was a 'bounder.' I daresay marriage did him good. I believe that his wife was a very charming woman. Or, it may be that the possession of a quarter of a million works a radical change in people's characters. Or, again, it may be that he is more deeply devoted to Biddy than I, for one, ever suspected. There is no doubt that given the regrettable position, his behaviour in regard to her now is commendable.
But Bridget, doesn't love him—never has loved him. I state that fact on no authority whatsoever except my own intuition. Also I am honestly of opinion she has cared for you more than she has cared for any man. You don't deserve it, and I may be wrong. But, nevertheless, it is my conviction. Make of it what you please. I have been, I candidly own it, surprised to see what discretion and good feeling she has shown through all this Gaverick will business. There has been a good deal of disagreeable friction in the matter. Lord Gaverick has not come off so well as he expected. He has got the house in Upper Brook Street, which suits young Lady Gaverick, and about fifteen hundred a year—considerably less than Bridget. The trouble is that Eliza Gaverick left a large legacy to her doctor—the latest one—and there was a talk about bringing forward the plea of undue influence. That, however, has fallen to the ground—mainly through Biddy's persuasion. I believe it is Bridget's intention to make over Castle Gaverick to her cousin, but this is not given out and of course she may change her mind.
And now, Colin, I think I have said everything I have to say. The main point to you is, no doubt, the answer to your question. As I said at the beginning of this letter, Bridget will not oppose any course you choose to take in order to secure your release from her—that is the exact way she worded it. But I cannot believe that, in face of all the rest I have told you, you will go on with this desertion—divorce business—at least without making yourself absolutely certain that you both desire to be free of each other. Remember, there has been no explanation between you and Biddy—no chance of touch between the true selves of both of you. Can you not come to England to see her? Or should she go out to you. I think it possible she might consent to do so, but have never broached the idea and cannot say. Yes, of course I understand that this might invalidate the legal position. But as only two years are necessary to prove the desertion—even if you should decide together that it is best to part—isn't it worth while to wait two years more in order to make quite sure? No doubt, you will say that I am shewing the proverbial ignorance of women in legal questions. But I can't help feeling that there must be some way in which it could be arranged. I do beseech you, Colin, not to act hastily.
You say that if this divorce took place, Bridget's reputation would not suffer, and that she could marry again without a stain upon her character as they say of wrongfully accused prisoners who are discharged. But again—is that the question?
I know nothing of your present circumstances—health, outlook on life—anything. Bridget once hinted to me that you might have your own reasons for desiring your freedom. She would give no grounds for the suspicion that there is any other woman in your life. I do not think anything would make me credit such a thing and I put that notion entirely out of court. I do not know—as your letter was dated from Leichardt's Town—whether you still live at Moongarr. It is possible you may have sold the place. I hear of severe droughts in parts of Leichardt's Land, but have no information about the Leura district. Now that Sir Luke Tallant has exchanged to Hong Kong, Bridget hasn't any touch with Leichardt's Land, and I have very few correspondents there.
Write to me—not a stilted, legal kind of letter like the last. Tell me about yourself—your feelings, your conditions. We are old friends—friends long before Bridget came either into my life or yours. You can trust me. If you do not want me to repeat to Bridget anything you may tell me, I will faithfully observe your wishes. But I can't bear that you, whom I should have thought so well of—have felt so much about—should be making a mess of your life, and that I should not put out a hand to prevent it.
Always your friend,
JOAN GILDEA.
It was a long time before Mrs Gildea received an answer to her letter. She had begun to despair of ever getting another line from Colin McKeith, when at last he wrote from Moongarr, six months later.
MY DEAR JOAN,
Your letter has made me think. I could not write before for reasons that you'll gather as you go along. I shall do as you ask and tell you everything as straightly and plainly as I can. I feel it is best that you should know exactly the sort of conditions I'm under and what a woman would have had to put up with if she had been with me—what she would have to put up with if she were going to be with me. Then you can judge whether or not I'm right in the decision I have come to as the result of my thinkings. You can tell my wife as much as you please—of the details, I mean. Perhaps, you had better soften them to her, for you know as well as I do—or better—that her impulsive, quixotic disposition might lead her into worse mistakes than it has done already. Of course, she'll have to know my decision. I am sure that if she allows her reason play, she will agree it is the only possible one.
I'm not going to talk about what happened before she went away, or about that evidence—or anything else in that immediate connection. I was mad, and I expect I believed a lot more than was true. I don't believe—I don't think I ever did really believe—what I suppose you would call 'the worst.' But that doesn't seem to me of such great matter. It's the spirit, not the letter that counts. The foundation must have been rotten, or there never would have been a question of believing one way or the other—because we should have UNDERSTOOD. Explanations would not have been needed between true mates. Only we were not true mates—that's the whole point. There was too great a radical difference between us. It might have been a deal better if she HAD gone off with that man.
But to come now to the practical part of the situation. You know enough about Australian ups and downs to realise that a cattle or sheep owner out West, may be potentially wealthy one season and on the fair road to beggary the next. It will be different when times change and we take to sinking artesian bores on the same principle as when Joseph stored up grain in the fat years in Egypt against the lean ones that were coming. That's what I meant to do and ought to have done at any cost. But—well I just didn't.
The thing is that if I could have looked ahead, perhaps even six months, I might not have thought it acting on the square to a woman to get her to marry me. If I could have looked a year ahead, I wouldn't have had any doubt on the subject.
But you see I justified it to myself. One thousand square miles of country—fine grazing land most of it, so long as the creeks kept running—and no more than eleven thousand head of stock upon it, seemed, with decent luck, a safe enough proposition, though you'll remember I was a bit doubtful that day on your veranda at Emu Point, when we talked about my marrying. The truth was that directly I saw Bridget, she carried me clean off my head—and that's the long and short of it.
Besides, I'd been down south a good while, then, figuring about in the Legislative Assembly and swaggering on my prospects. I'd left Ninnis to oversee up here, and Ninnis didn't know the Leura like some of the old hands, who told me afterwards they'd seen the big drought coming as long back as that.
I remember one old chap on the river, when he was sold up by the Bank in the last bad times, and his wife had died of it all, saying to me, 'The Leura isn't the place for a woman.' And he was right. Well, I saw that I was straight up against it that spring when we had had a poor summer and a dry winter, and the Unionists started trouble cutting my horses' throats, and burning woodsheds and firing the only good grass on my run that I could rely upon. I didn't say much about it, but I have no doubt that it made me bad-tempered and less pleasant to live with.... That was just before the time Biddy went away. Afterwards, the sales I'd counted on turned out badly—cattle too poor for want of grass to stand the droving and the worst luck in the sale-yards I'd ever known.
First thing I did was to reduce the staff and bar everything but bare necessaries—I sent off the Chinamen and every spare hand. Ninnis and I and the stockman—a first-rate chap, Moongarr Bill—worked the run—just the three of us. You can guess how we managed it. A Malay boy did cooky for the head-station.
After Christmas I left Ninnis and Bill to look after the place. I had to go to Leichardt's Town. I had been thinking things out about Biddy all that time—you know I'm too much of the Scotchy to make hasty determinations. Well, I had that Parliament Bill, allowing divorce after two years desertion in my head, from the day Biddy left me. It seemed the best way out—for her. I had heard about that fellow going Home in the same boat with her, and never guessed but that it was a concerted plan between them. That note Harris showed me made me think it was so. I don't think this now—after what you told me.
But what did rub itself into me then was that I ought to let her marry him as soon as she decently could. I couldn't see the matter any other way—I don't now. He has lots of money—though a man who would buy happiness with another woman out of the money his wife had left him—well, that's a matter of opinion. Besides, she has got the fortune the old lady left her and can be independent of him if she chooses. There's nothing to prevent her living any kind of life that pleases her—except me, and I'm ready and willing to clear out of the show. One thing I'm sorry for now, and that is having torn up the draft she sent to pay me back her passage money, and putting the bits in an envelope and posting them to her without a word. I suppose it should have been done through a lawyer, with all the proper palaver. Perhaps she didn't tell you about that. I somehow fancy she didn't. But I know that it would have hurt her—I knew that when I did it. And perhaps that is why I did it. You are right. I haven't acted the part of a gentleman all through this miserable business. But what could you expect?
For you see, my father worked his own way up, and my grandfather was a crofter—and I haven't got the blood of Irish kings, on the other side, behind me.
Now I'm being nasty, as you used to say in the old Bungroopim days when I wouldn't play. YOU were my Ideal, in those days, Joan—before you went and got married. I've been an unlucky devil all round.
Well there! I had to try and arrange things for an overdraft with the Bank in Leichardt's Town, but I went down chiefly to consult lawyers about the divorce question, so that it should be done with as little publicity and unpleasantness as possible. It appeared that it could be done all right—as I wrote you. What would have been the good of my havering in that letter over my own feelings and the bad times I had struck? It never was my habit to whine over what couldn't be helped.
Luck was up against me down there too. I got pitched off a buckjumper at a horse-dealers', Bungroopim way. I had been 'blowing,' Australian fashion, that I could handle that colt if nobody else was able to. The end of it was that the buckjumper got home, not me. I was laid up in hospital for close on two months, with a broken leg and complications. The complications were that old spear wound, which inflamed, and they found that a splinter from the jagged tip had been left in. Blood-poisoning was the next thing; and when I came out of that hospital I was more like the used up bit of soap you'll see by the COOLIBAH* outside a shepherd's hut on ration-bringing day, than anything else I can think of.
[*Coolibah—a basin made from the scooped out excrescence of a tree.]
As soon as I could sit a horse again I went to work at Moongarr. I had found things there at a pretty pass. Not a drop of rain had fallen up to now on the station for nearly nine months. YOU know what that means on the top of two dry seasons. As soon as I was fit, we rode over the run inspecting—I and Ninnis and Moongarr Bill. There's a lot of riding over one thousand square miles, and we didn't get our inspection done quickly. Day after day we travelled through desolation—grass withered to chips, creeks and waterholes all but empty, cattle staggering like drunken men, only it was for WANT of drink. The trees were dying in the wooded country; and in the plains the earth was crumbling and shrinking, and great cracks like crevasses were gaping in the black soil where there used to be beautiful green grass and flowers in spring.
The lagoon was practically dried up, and the little drain of water left was undrinkable because of the dead beasts that had got bogged and dropped dead in it. They were short of water at the head-station, and we had to fetch it in from a waterhole several miles off that we fenced round and used for drinking—so long as it lasted. When we were mustering the other side of the run, it came to our camping at a sandy creek where we could dig in the sand and get just enough for horses and men. The water of the Bore I'd made, was a bit brackish, but it kept the grass alive round about and was all the cattle had to depend on. You can think of the job it was shifting the beasts over there from other parts of the run which was what we tried to do, so long as they were fit for it.
We were selling what we could while there was still life left in the herd, but the cattle were too far gone for droving. We managed to collect a hundred or so—sent them in trucks from Crocodile Creek Terminus, for boiling down and netted about thirty shillings a head on them. That was all. I guess that—by this time, out of my eleven thousand head with No. 666 brand on them I'd muster from four to five hundred. The mistake I made was in not selling out for what I could get at the beginning of the Drought. But it was the long time in Leichardt's Town that had me there.
It was bad luck all through from first to last. Mustering those beasts for boiling down started that old spear wound afresh. Until it got well again, there was nothing for it but to sit tight and wait.
Moongarr Bill left to make a prospecting trip on my old tracks up the Bight—took Cudgee and the black-boy with him. He had an idea that he'd strike a place where we'd seen the colour of gold on our last expedition, but weren't able then to investigate it. I've never been bitten by the gold fever like some fellows, and I daresay that I've missed chances. But I thought cattle were a safer investment, and I've seen too much misery and destruction come from following that gold will o' the wisp, for me to have been tempted to run after it.
Old Ninnis was the next to leave, I made him take the offer of a job that he had. When it came to drawing water five miles for the head-station, and keeping it in an iron tank sunk in the ground, with a manhole and padlocked cover for fear of its being got at, the fewer there were of us the better. Now the station is being run by the Boss and the Malay boy, who is a sharp little chap, and more use in the circumstances than any white man. We've killed the calves we were trying to PODDY*. And the dogs—except one cattle dog—Veno—Biddy would remember her; how she used to lollop about the front veranda outside her room. Now, what the deuce made me write that!—Well, the dog goes with me in the cart when I fetch water, and takes her drink with the horses at the hole.
[*Poddy—to bring up by hand.]
I'm getting used to the life—making jobs in the daytime to keep myself from feeling the place a worse hell than it really is. There's always the water to be fetched and the two horses and the dog to be taken for their big drink. If you could see me hoarding the precious stuff—washing my face in the morning in a soup plate, and what's left kept for night for the dog. When I want a bath I ride ten miles to the bore. Then there's saddlery to mend, and dry-cleaning the place and pipes between whiles—more of them than is good for me. Stores are low, but I've still got enough of tobacco. I daresay it's a mercy there's no whiskey—nothing but a bottle or two of brandy in case of snake-bites—or I might have taken to it.
Thank God I've got a pretty strong will, and I've never done as I see so many chaps do, find forgetfulness in drink—but there's no saying what a man may come to. It's the nights that are the worst. I'm glad to get up at dawn and see to the beasts. And there's that infernal watching of the sky—looking out all the time for clouds that don't come—or if they do, end in nothing. You know that brassy glare of the sun rising that means always scorching dry heat? Think of it a hundred times worse than you've ever seen it! The country as far as you can look is like the floor of an enormous oven, with the sky, red and white-hot for a roof, and all the life there is, being slowly baked inside. The birds are getting scarce, and it seems too much trouble for those that are about to lift their voices. Except for a fiend of a laughing-jackass in a gum tree close by the veranda that drives me mad with his devilish chuckling.
Well, how do you think now, that her ladyship would have stood up against these sort of conditions? Many a time, walking up and down the veranda when I couldn't sleep, I've thanked my stars that there was no woman hanging on to me any more. Most of the men on the river have sent away their women—stockmen's wives and all. There was one here at the Bachelors' Quarters, but I packed her off before I went to Leichardt's Town.
I'm just waiting on to get Moongarr Bill's report of the country up north—how it stands the drought, and what the chances are for pushing out. As for the gold find—well, I'm not banking on that. As soon as I hear—or if I don't hear in the course of the next two or three weeks—I shall pull up stakes, and burn all my personal belongings, except what a pair of saddle bags will carry.
Before long, I'm going to begin packing Biddy's things. They'll be shipped off to her all right.
When the divorce business is over, I shall make new tracks, and you won't hear of me unless I come out on top. I've got a queer feeling inside me that I shall win through yet.
Well, I'm finished; and it's about time. I've run my pen over a good many sheets, and it has been a kind of relief—I began writing this about three weeks ago. Harry the Blower—that's the mailman—comes only once a month now, and not on time at that.
I suppose the drought will break sooner or later, and when it breaks, the Bank is certain to send up and take possession of what's left. So I'm a ruined man, any way.
Good-bye, Joan, old friend. I've written to the lawyer, and Biddy will be served with the papers soon after this reaches you. I'm not sending her any message. If she doesn't understand, there's no use in words—but YOU know this. She's been the one woman in the universe for me—and there will never be another.
He signed his name at the end of the letter; and that was all.
Harry the Blower came up with his mails a day or two later. Among the letters he brought, there were three at least of special importance to Colin McKeith.
One was from the late Attorney General of Leichardt's Land, in whose following he had been while sitting in the Legislative Assembly, and whom he had consulted in reference to the Divorce petition. This gentleman informed Colin that proceedings were already begun in the case of McKeith versus McKeith, and that notification of the pending suit had been sent to Lady Bridget at Castle Gaverick, in the province of Connaught, Ireland.
The second letter was from the Manager of the Bank of Leichardt's Land, regretfully conveying the decision of the Board that, failing immediate repayment of the loan, the mortgage on Moongarr station must be foreclosed and that in due course a representative of the Bank would arrive to take over the property.
The third letter was from Moongarr Bill, dated from the furthest Bush township at the foot of the Great Bight, which had formed the base of Colin's last exploring expedition. A mere outpost of civilisation it was—that very one which he had described at the dinner party at Government House where he had first met Lady Bridget O'Hara. Apparently, in Moongarr Bill's estimation, its only reason for existence lay in the fact that it had an office under the jurisdiction of the Warden of Goldfields, for the proclamation of new goldfields, and the obtaining of Miner's Rights.
Moongarr Bill's epistolary style was bald in its directness.
Dear Sir— he began:—
The biggest mistake we ever made in our lives was not following up the streak of colour you spotted in that gully running down from Bardo Range to Pelican River. If we had stopped, and done a bit of stripping for alluvial, for certain, we should have found heavy, shotty gold, with only a few feet of stripping. But I've done better than that—got on the lead—dead on the gutter. To my belief, that gully is the top dressing of a dried up underground watercourse. It's a pocket chock full of gold.
You see, it's like this:
Here followed technical details given in local gold-digger's phraseology which would only be intelligible to a backwoods prospector or a Leichardt's Land mining expert. McKeith read all the details carefully, turning the page over and back again in order to read it once more. There was no doubt—making due allowance for Moongarr Bill's exaggerative optimism—that the find was a genuine one.
The writer resumed:
'I've pegged off a twenty men's ground, this—being outside the area of a proclaimed goldfield—our reward as joint discoverers. The ground joins on to your old pegs; and the wonder to me is that nobody has ever struck the place. However, that's not so queer as you might think, for there has been very little talk of gold up here—in fact the P.M. does Warden's work. Besides, the drought has kept squatters from pushing out, and it's too far off for the casual prospector. Luckily, the drought has driven the Blacks away too, further into the ranges; and I haven't seen any Myalls this trip like the ones that went for us last time. It's a pity Hensor pegged out then. He'd have come in for a slice of luck now—we three being the only persons in the world—until I lodged my information at the Warden's office this morning—who had ever raised the colour in this district or had any suspicion of a show. I reckon though that if the find turns out as I think, you'll be making things up to little Tommy.
I'm to have my Miners' Right all properly filled up to-morrow, and shall make tracks back to the gully at once, so as to leave no chance of the claim being jumped. I've named it "McKeith's Find" so your name won't be forgotten. I don't count on a big rush at first—all the better for you—but I shall be surprised if we are not entitled at the end of four months to our Government reward of 500 pounds, as there are pretty sure to be two hundred miners at work by that time.
I'm writing to Ninnis—though I don't know if he has done his job yet—telling him to lose no time in getting here; and you won't want telling to do the same. I reckon that whether the drought has broken by this time or not, it will pay you better to start for here than to wait at the station until there are calves coming on to brand and muster. Ninnis will be in with us all right, and it would be a fine thing if you came up together. He's a first-rate man, and has had a lot of experience in the Californian goldfields. Poor luck, however, or he wouldn't have come over to free-select on the Leura.
It took me a good three weeks to get as far as the Pelican Creek, and I couldn't have done it in the time if there had been Blacks about. Knowing the lay of the country too, made it easier than it was before for us. Cudgee has turned out a smarter boy than Wombo was. No fear of Myalls with their infernal jagged spears being round without his sniffing them. One of the horses died from eating poison-bush. Don't go in for camping at a bend in Pelican Creek, between it and a brigalow scrub, first day you sight Bardo Range going up the Creek, where there's a pocket full of good grass one side of a broken slate ridge—IT'S NO GOOD. But I wouldn't swop the other horses for any of Windeatt's famous breed. There's some things it would be well for you and Ninnis to bring, and a box of surveyor's compasses would come in handy.
Here followed half a page on practical matters, and then the letter ended.
McKeith pondered long over Moongarr Bill's letter, as he sat in the veranda smoking and watching a little cloud on the horizon, and wondering whether rain was coming at last.... If Moongarr Bill was right, the gold-find would mean a fresh start for him in his baulked career. At any rate, it behoved him to take advantage of the chance and to go forth on the new adventure without unnecessary delay. But the savour was gone for him from adventure—the salt out of life. The stroke of luck—if it were one—had come too late.
And now the Great Drought had broken at last.
Next evening there came up a terrific thunderstorm, and a hurricane such as had not visited the district for years. It broke in the direction of the gidia scrub, and razed many trees. It passed over the head-station and travelled at a furious rate along the plain. Hailstones fell, as large as a pigeon's egg, and stripped off such leafage as the drought had left. Thunder volleyed and lightning blazed. Part of the roof of the Old Humpey was torn off. The hide-house was practically blown away. The great white cedar by the lagoon was struck by lightning, and lay, a chaos of dry branches and splintered limbs, one side of the trunk standing up jagged and charred where it had been riven in two.
Upon the hurricane followed a steady deluge. For a night and a day, the heavens were opened, and poured waterspouts as though the pent rain of nine months were being discharged. The river 'came down' from the heads and filled the gully with a roaring flood. The lagoon was again almost level with its banks. The dry water-course on the plain sparkled in the distance, like a mirage—only that it was no mirage. No one who has not seen the extraordinary rapidity with which a dry river out West can be changed into a flooded one, could credit the swiftness of the transformation.
Then the heavens closed once more. The sun shone out pitilessly bright, and the surface earth looked, after a few hours, almost as dry as before. But the life-giving fluid had penetrated deep into the soil; the rivers and creeks were running; green grass was already springing up for the beasts to feed upon. The land was saved. Alas too late to save the ruined squatters. There were so few of their beasts left.
Nevertheless, the rain brought new life and energy to the humans. Kuppi, the Malay boy fetched buckets of water from the replenished lagoon, and scoured and scrubbed with great alacrity. He came timidly to his master, and asked if he might not wash out with boiling water the closed parlour and Lady Bridget's unused bedroom. He was afraid that the white ants might have got into them.
McKeith's face frightened Kuppi. So did the imprecation which his innocent request evoked. He was bidden to go and keep himself in his own quarters, and not show his face again that day at the New House.
Since Lady Bridget's departure, McKeith had slept, eaten and worked in the Old Humpey, his original dwelling.
But Kuppi did not know that the white ants had not been given a chance to work destruction upon 'the Ladyship's' properties. Regularly every day, McKeith himself tended those sacred chambers. Bridget's rooms were just as she had left them.
He had done nothing yet towards dismantling that part of the New House in which she had chiefly lived. He had put off the task day after day. But since receiving Moongarr Bill's letter, and now that the drought had broken, and the Man in Possession a prospect as certain as that there would come another thunderstorm, he knew that he must begin his preparations to quit Moongarr.
To do this meant depriving himself of the miserable comfort he found during wakeful nights and the first hour of dawn—the time he usually chose for sweeping and cleaning his wife's rooms—of roaming, ghost-like, through the New House where every object spoke to him of her. In the day time, he shrank from mounting the steps which connected the verandas, but in the evenings, he would often come and stroll along the veranda, and sit in the squatter's chair she had liked, or in the hammock where she had swung, and smoke his pipe and brood upon the irrevocable past. And then he would suddenly rush off in frantic haste to do some hard, physical work, feeling that he must go mad if he sat still any longer.
To-day however, after Kuppi had fled to the kitchen, he went into his old dressing room and stood looking at the camp bed, and thought of the day of Bridget's fever when Harris had given him her note to Maule, and he had sat here huddled on the edge of the bed wrestling dumbly with his agony. The association had been too painful, and in his daily tendance he had somewhat neglected this room and had usually entered the other by the French window from the veranda. Thus, he saw now that a bloated tarantula had established itself in one corner, between wall and ceiling, and an uncanny looking white lizard scuttered across the boards, and disappeared under a piece of furniture, leaving its tail behind. A phenomenon of natural history at which, he remembered now, Bridget had often wondered.
He opened the door of communication—where on that memorable night, he had knocked and received no answer—and passed through it treading softly as though he were visiting a death chamber. And indeed, to him, it was truly a death chamber in which the bed, all covered over with a white sheet, might have been a bier, and the pillows put lengthwise down it, the shrouded form of one dearly loved and lost. He gazed about, staring at the familiar pieces of furniture, out of wide red eyes, smarting with unshed tears. In her looking glass, he seemed to see the ghost-reflection of her small pale face with its old whimsical charm. The shadowy eyes under the untidy mass of red-brown hair, in which the curls and tendrils stood out as if endowed with a magnetic life of their own; the sensitive lips; the little pointed chin; and, in the eyes and on the lips, that gently mocking, alluring smile.
There were a few poems that Colin had taught himself to say by heart, and which he would recite to himself often when he was alone in the Bush. THE ANCIENT MARINER was one, and there were some of Rudyard Kipling's and he loved THE IDYLLS OF THE KING—in especial GUINIVERE. Three lines of that poem leaped to his memory at this moment.
'THY SHADOW STILL WOULD GLIDE FROM ROOM TO ROOM
AND I SHOULD EVERMORE BE VEXT WITH THEE
IN HANGING ROBE AND VACANT ORNAMENT.'
He went to the wardrobe where her dresses hung as she had left them, only that daily, he had shaken them, cared for them so that no hot climate pest should injure them. And in so doing, he had been overwhelmingly conscious of the peculiar, personal fragrance, her garments had always exhaled—an experience in which rapture and anguish blended.
How he had loved her! ... God! how he had loved her! ... And yet, latterly, how he had got to take his supreme possession of her as a matter of course; had allowed the joy of it to be blunted by depression and irritability over sordid station worries. He remembered with piercing remorse how often he had neglected the trivial courtesies to which he knew she attached importance. How he had been prone to sullen fits of moodiness; had been rough, even brutal, as in that episode of the Blacks.... Brutal to her—this dainty lady, his fairy princess! ... And now he had lost her. She was gone back to her own world and to her own kin.
If only he had yielded to her then about the Blacks! If he had curbed his anger, shown sympathy with the two wild children of Nature who were better than himself, in this at least that they had known how to love and cling to each other in spite of the blows of fate! He had horse-whipped Wombo for loving Oola, and swift retribution had come upon himself.... That he should have lost Bridget because of the loves of Wombo and Oola! It was an irony—as if God were laughing at him. He set his teeth and laughed—the mirthless laugh which had startled Harris.... Well, whether it were automatic or planned retribution on the part of the High Powers, the trouble could be evened up and done with. 'I was a damned fool,' he said to himself; 'and I've been taught my lesson too late for me to benefit by it. Except this way—I'm not going to be DOWNED for ever. I'll go through my particular piece of hell, on this darned old earth if I must, and then I'll wipe the slate and come out on top of something else that isn't love. There's possibilities enough along the Big Bight to satisfy most men's ambition. And it's not much odds any way, so long as SHE isn't seriously hurt.'
With that summing up of the matter, he seemed to gain stoic energy. Now he went back to his dressing room, and pulled out to the veranda a couple of worn portmanteaux. Into these he put a variety of personal belongings. Among them, pictures from the walls, and old photographs in frames that had been on the dressing table. It was significant that none of these were portraits of his wife. The portmanteaux he dragged along the veranda to the side of the steps leading down to the front garden. Then, instead of returning to Lady Bridget's room, he attacked an escritoire in the parlour in which he had kept family and private papers, and which flanked her Chippendale bureau. He brought out another collection—notebooks, papers, bundles of letters dating much further back than his occupation of Moongarr—salvage from the wreck of his old home. His mother's workbox; his father's SHAKESPEARE; the family Bible—a piteous catalogue. He looked long at the book and the photographs. These last were portraits of his father, his mother and his sisters, who had all been massacred by the Blacks, when he was a boy. He separated all such relics from the general lot, placing them, and also two or three packets of papers upon a shelf-table in the veranda—it was that table where Lady Bridget had laid the cablegram from Lord Gaverick, which she had shown him the day before she had left Moongarr. Now it seemed to him an altar of sacred memories. He brought various other small things out of the parlour—things he had not the heart to destroy—all belonging to his youth—and placed them there. As he looked at them, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and a wave of emotion passed over his face, softening its hardness for an instant. But the grimness came back. He made a quick movement back to Lady Bridget's room; and when, after a minute or two, he came out again, he was carrying a curious object which he had taken out of the deep drawer beneath her hanging wardrobe. It was a dry piece of gum-tree bark, shrivelled and curled up at the sides, so that the two edges almost met. At first he put it on the heap that he had turned out of the portmanteaux for destruction. His grim thought had been to top with this strange memorial of his marriage-night, the funeral pyre he had intended to build. But again the spasm of emotion contorted his features. His shoulders shook, and a dry choking sound came from his lips. He took up the piece of bark too, and laid it with the daguerreotypes on the table. He seemed afraid to give himself time to think, but went from room to room here and in the Old Humpey, dragging one thing after another out on to the veranda. Some of the heavier articles he had to hoist over the steps connecting the two verandas, and then to drag them down the other steps into the front garden, where they strewed the gravel round the centre bed.
In spring and summer, when the Chinamen had been there to water and Lady Bridget to superintend the planting and pruning, this bed had always been gay with flowers, banking a tall shrub of scented verbena the perfume of which she had been particularly fond of. Now there were weeds—most of them withered—instead of flowers. The verbena bush had long been dead, and the dry leaves and branches, beaten down by the late storm, made a bed of kindling.
Never was there garden so desolate—the young ornamental trees and shrubs all dead; the creepers dead also; even the hardy passion vines upon the fence, mere leafless, fruitless withes of withered stems.
McKeith paused after lugging down two squatters' chairs—the first house carpentering he had done for his wife after their arrival at the head-station, and in which, he had resolved, no future owner of Moongarr should ever sit. That was the thought fiercely possessing him. Rough chairs and tables and such-like that had been there always, might remain. But no sacrilegious hands should touch things made for her, or with which she had been closely associated. They should be burned out here in the deserted front garden, where not even Kuppi—the only other occupant of the head-station—would witness his preparations. He himself would lay and kindle the funeral pyre, and to-night, when there would be only the stars to see him, he would light the first holocaust.
He stood considering. Sweat dropped from his forehead. His gaunt frame was trembling after his effort, which had been heavy, and he leaned against one of the tarred piles supporting the veranda to rest. But only for a few minutes. Then, his feverish activity recommenced. He piled up the wooden furniture on the bed of withered verbena branches, filled the interstices with dead leaves that he collected from the garden, laid the smaller things—books, papers, pictures—where they would assist the conflagration, and did not stop until the pyre had reached to the level of the veranda railing. He reflected grimly that there was a chance of sparks setting fire to the house itself, and calculated the extent of the gravel between, deciding that if he was there to watch there would be no danger.
All the time, the old kangaroo dog, Veno had been nosing round him, sniffing at the objects lying round, then looking up at him with bleared, wistful eyes, and evidently unable to understand these strange proceedings. Once or twice, he had roughly pushed the dog away, but, when he had finished the work and seated himself from sheer fatigue on the veranda steps, Veno came and squatted beside him, the dog's head upon his knee. He filled his pipe and smoked ruminatively; the exertion had had one good effect; it had dulled the fierceness of his pain.
As he sat there—a faint breeze that had risen with the approach of sunset, cooling his heated body—he thought again about Moongarr Bill's letter. He looked at the great pyre in front, and caught the gleam of the lagoon below through the bare branches of the trees the little ripple on its surface, the freshening green at its marge. Then he gazed out over the vast plain towards the horizon. From his low position on the steps, the middle distance was hidden from him. Through the reddish tinge cast by the lowering sun, he could discern, far off likewise, the unmistakable signs of new-springing grass and the course of the river, for so long non-existent. From the gully he heard the sound of rushing water. It had been a roaring torrent just after the storm, and he knew that a flood must have come down from the heads.
Yes, the Drought had broken. The plain would soon be green again. Flowers would spring up as they had done for Bridget's bridal home-coming. If the rain had fallen a few months sooner the station might have been saved.
And even now, with the remnant of three or four hundred cattle, provided there were no crippling debt, no spectre of the Man in Possession, he might still hang on, and in time retrieve his losses, lie low, sink artesian wells, make the station secure for the future.
He had been so fond of the place. He had taken up the run with such high hopes; had so slaved to increase his herd, to make improvements on the head-station. He had looked upon this as the nucleus of his fortune; the pivot on which his career as one of the Empire-builders would revolve.... And now....
Well, some clever speculator no doubt would buy it at a low price during the Slump, stock it with more cattle, work it up during a good season or two, and, when cattle stations boomed once more, sell it at an immense profit. That was what he himself would have done had he been a speculator in similar conditions. Even still, he could do it with a small amount of capital to supply a sop for the Bank.... Now that the Drought had broken they would be more likely to let him go on.... He thought of the 3,000 pounds Sir Luke Tallant had made him put into settlement on his marriage. He had not wanted to do that at the time; his Scotch caution had revolted against the tying up of his resources, and his instinct was justified. If only he had command of that money now! It was his own; his wife was rich; that was the one benefit he could have taken from her.... But it was impossible to broach the question.
Suddenly the dog stirred uneasily, sniffed the air and leaped to the gravel walk where it stood giving short, uncertain barks, as though aware of something happening outside for which it could not account.
McKeith lifted his head, bent in the absorption of his thought, and looked about for the disturber of Veno's placidity. But Kuppi was nowhere in sight, nor was there sign of other intruder. Where he sat, the garden fence, overgrown with withered passion vines, bounded his vision, and had anybody ridden or driven up the hill through the lower sliprails, he would not have seen them, probably would not have heard them. For there were no longer dogs, black boys, Chinamen or station hands to voice intimation of a new arrival. All the old sounds of evening activity were hushed. No mustering-mob being driven to the stockyard; no running up of milkers or horses for the morrow; no goats to be penned—they had been killed off long ago; no beasts grazing or calling—no audible life at all except that of the birds, who, since the rain, had found their notes again and were telling each other vociferously that it was time to go to bed. Indeed, the silence and solitariness of the once busy head-station had enticed many of the shyer kinds of birds from the lagoon and the forest. Listening, as he now was, intently, McKeith could hear the gurgling COO-ROO-ROO of the swamp pheasant, which is always found near water—and likewise rare sound—the silvery ring of the bell-bird rejoicing in the fresh-filled lagoon.
But Veno was still uneasy, and Colin got up on to the veranda. He stood there, listening all the while, strained expectancy in his eyes as if he too were vaguely conscious of something outside happening....
And now he did hear something that made him go white as with uncanny dread. It was a footstep that he heard on the veranda of the Old Humpey—very light, a soft tapping of high heels and the accompanying swish of drapery—a ghostly rustle—'a ghostly footfall echoing.'... For surely in this place it could have no human reality.
It approached along the passage between the two buildings, halted for a few seconds, and then mounted to the front veranda.
The man was standing with his back to the Old Humpey. He would not turn. A superstitious fear fell upon him and made his knees shake and his tall, lean frame tremble.... He DARED not turn his head and look lest he should see that which would tell him Bridget was dead.
But the dead do not speak in syllables that an ordinary human ear can hear. And Colin heard his own name spoken in accents piercingly clear and sweet.
'Colin.'
To him, though, it was as a ghost-voice. He stood transfixed. And just then the dog bounded past him. It had flown up the steps barking loudly. That could be no immaterial form upon which the creature flung itself, pawing, nosing, licking with the wildest demonstrations of joy.
He heard the well-remembered tones:
'Quiet Veno.... Good dog.... Lie down Veno—Lie down.'
The dog seemed to understand that this was not a moment for effusiveness. Without another sound, it crouched upon its haunches gazing up at the new-comer.
Then Colin turned. Bridget was standing not a yard from him. A slender figure in a grey silk cloak, with bare head—she had flung back her grey sun-bonnet and shrouding gauze veil.... He saw the face he knew—the small, pale face; the shadowy eyes, wide and bright with an ecstatic determination, yet in them a certain feminine timorousness; the little pointed chin poked slightly forward; the red-brown hair—all untidy curls and tendrils, each hair seeming to have a life and magnetism of its own. It was just as he had so often pictured her in dreams of sleep and waking.
He gazed at her like one who beholds a vision from another world. And then a great sob burst from him—the pitiful sob of a strong man who is beaten, broken with emotion. The whole being of the man seemed to collapse. He staggered forward, and such a change came over the gaunt, hard face, that Bridget saw it through a rain of tears which fell down her cheeks.
'Oh, Colin—Won't you speak to me?'
'Biddy!' He went close to her and gripped her two wrists, holding her before him while his hungry eyes seemed to be devouring her.
'It's you—it's really you. You're not dead, are you?'
'Dead! Oh no—no.... I've come home.'
'Home!' He laughed.
'Oh don't—don't,' she cried. 'Don't laugh like that.'
'Home!' he repeated, grimly. 'Look round you. A nice sort of home. Eh?'
'I don't care. It's the only real home I've ever had.'
'But look—look!'
She followed his eyes to the great pyre in the garden, with the dead leaves, and the pieces of furniture, the squatters' chairs, the little tables he and she had covered together, the hammock that he had cut down leaving the ropes dangling—many other things that she recognised also. Then her gaze came back to the veranda. To the open portmanteaux; the different objects still strewing the ground; and then to the shelf-table against the wall near the hammock, and, there, to his most cherished possessions. She knew at once his mother's work-box, the shabby SHAKESPEARE—the portraits, and, on top of all, the piece of gum-tree bark.
She snatched her wrists from his grasp, darted to the shelf, seized the shrivelled pice of bark, and pressed it against her bosom as though it had been a living thing.
'Oh, you COULDN'T burn this! ... You were going to burn it with the rest—but you COULDN'T—any more than you could have burned your mother's things.... I thought of it all the way—I knew that if you could burn this, too, there would be no hope for me any more. I PRAYED that you might not burn it.'
'But how—how did you know I was going to burn the things?' he stammered bewilderedly.
'I saw it all—I saw you—just like this, on the veranda—so thin and hard and miserable—and so proud, yet—and stubborn—I saw it all—saw the bonfire ready—And I saw this piece of bark—And then something made you stop and you put it with your mother's things instead. You remembered—Oh! Mate, you DID understand? You DID remember—that first night by the camp fire—and we two—just we two'—she broke off sobbing.
'You saw—you saw—' he kept saying. 'But how—how did you know? Tell me, Mate.'
'I saw it all in a dream—at Castle Gaverick. Three times I dreamed the same dream; and I felt, inside me, that it was a prophetic warning. We're like that, you know, we Irish Celts. And you—though you're a Scotchman—you used to laugh at such things! But they're true; they're true—I've had glints of second sight before. Joan Gildea understood. When I told her, she believed it was a warning God had sent me, and she said I must go to you—go at once lest it should be too late. She wanted to come with me, but it would have been difficult for her to leave her work, and I didn't want her—I wanted to come to you all on my own.'
'And then?—then?' he asked breathlessly.
'Oh, then I left Castle Gaverick at once, and, in London, I took my passage—there was an E. and A. boat just going to start. Of course I knew the route. I got out of the steamer at Leuraville, and came straight on by train—I didn't wait anywhere. I thought I'd get out at Crocodile Creek and pay somebody to drive me up here. But you've got the railway brought nearer, and when I got out at Kangaroo Flat there was a most extraordinary thing—Then, I knew why the voice inside had been urging me on so quickly.'
'An extraordinary thing—? What was it?' he said in the same breathless, broken way.
'It was Mr Ninnis. He was there, standing on the platform just off his droving trip—he was going to take the next train to Leuraville. If I had stayed there as Captain Halliwell wanted me to, I should have missed him. He'd got a letter from Moongarr Bill—Oh, I know all about that. But it doesn't matter—it doesn't matter in the least. You can go if you like and find the gold—I'll stop at Joan Gildea's cottage in Leichardt's Town and wait for you—I don't care about ANYTHING if you'll only let me be your Mate again. But Colin—' she rushed on, for he could not speak, and the sight of a great man struggling with his tears is one that a woman who loves him can scarcely bear to see. And yet the sight made Bridget happy for all its pain—'Colin, when I first saw Ninnis, do you know what I thought—? That you had sent him to meet me. That you, too, had been warned in a dream?'
'No, I wish I had been—My God, I wish I had been.'
'What would you have done, Colin?'
'I'd have been there myself,' he said simply. 'It would have been me, not Ninnis, that you saw at Kangaroo Flat Station.'
She held out her arms. The roll of bark dropped on the boards of the veranda. In a moment he was pressing her fiercely to his breast, and his lips were on hers.
And in that kiss, by the divine alchemy of true wedded love, all the past pride and bitterness were transmuted into a great abiding Peace.
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