The Wonder-Child: An Australian Story
by Ethel Turner · English · Gutenberg #45683 · 352,707 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Wonder-Child: An Australian Story
Author: Ethel Turner
Illustrator: Gordon Browne
Release date: May 25, 2014 [eBook #45683]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45683
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WONDER-CHILD: AN AUSTRALIAN STORY ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: 'HERMIE.' (See page 134.)]
THE WONDER-CHILD
An Australian Story
BY
ETHEL TURNER
(MRS. H. R. CURLEWIS)
Author of 'Seven Little Australians,' 'The Camp
at Wandinong,' 'The Story of a Baby,' 'Three
Little Maids,' etc.
'The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Is, not to fancy what were fair in life,
Provided it could be,--but finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means,'--ROBERT BROWNING.
With Illustrations by Gordon Browne
_FIFTH IMPRESSION_
LONDON
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Paul's Churchyard E.C.
1901
*CONTENTS*
CHAP.
I. TWO WORLDS
II. THE WONDER-CHILD
III. THE SECOND LADY-HELP
IV. THE PAINTING OF THE SHIP
V. DUNKS' SELECTION
VI. THIRTY THOUSAND A YEAR
VII. COME HOME! COME HOME
VIII. AN ATHEIST
IX. MORTIMER STEVENSON
X. 'I LOVE YOU'
XI. A SQUATTER PATRIOT
XII. R.M.S. UTOPIA
XIII. THE BUSH CONTINGENT
XIV. HOME TO THE HARBOUR
XV. HEART TO HEART
XVI. THE ROSERY
XVII. CROSSING THE VELDT
XVIII. A SKIRMISH BY THE WAY
XIX. THE MOOD OF A MAID
XX. MISS BROWNE
XXI. THE MORNING CABLES
XXII. CONCLUSION
*THE WONDER-CHILD*
*CHAPTER I*
*Two Worlds*
'Ah me! while thee the seas and sounding shores
Hold far away.'
They were walking from the school to the paddock where the children's
horses, thirty or forty nondescript animals, grazed all day long.
'Sh' think,' said Peter Small, son of the butcher who fed
Wilgandra,--'Sh' think you could have afforded one sprat at least for
teacher's present!'
'Afforded!' quoth Bartie Cameron. 'I could have afforded a thousand
pounds!'
'Then why d'ye 'ave 'oles in your stockings, and bursted boots?' asked
Peter.
''Cause it's much nicer than having darns and patches,' returned Bartie,
looking disparagingly upon his companion's neater garments.
'My old man's got a mortgage on your sheep,' said Peter, baffled on the
patches.
'We like mortgages,' said Bartie airily; 'they make the sheep grow.'
'We've got a new red carpet comin' for our livin'-room,' shouted Peter.
Bartie looked him over contemptuously.
'I've got a sister in London, and she makes fifty pounds a night by her
playing.'
'You're a lie!' said Peter, who was new to the school, and did not know
the Camerons.
'Take this, then!' said Bartie, and put his strong young fist in the
face of his friend.
A big girl, saddling her horse, came and pulled them apart, after they
had had a round or two.
'Haven't I got a sister who makes fifty pounds a concert?' demanded
Bartie breathlessly.
'Ain't he a lie?' demanded the son of the slaughterer.
The big girl arbitrated instantly. Certainly Bartie had a sister who
made hundreds and hundreds--more shame to her. Peter had better go home
and read the papers, if he did not believe it.
Peter said he did read the papers; he had never seen anything in them
about no sisters.
'What papers?' said the girl.
'_P'lice Budget and War Cry_, of course,' answered the boy.
'That's the sort of paper _your_ sister would be in,' Bartie said; 'mine
is always in the cables.' He turned off from both girl and boy, and
made his way to where a half-clipped horse nibbled at the exhausted
pasturage.
A small girl of eight had, with incredible exertion, put the huge saddle
on its back; Bartie had nothing to do but fasten the girths in place and
put on the bridle. He flung himself up, and moved the animal close to a
stump; Floss, the small girl, climbed to a place behind him, and a
nine-year-old boy, playing marbles near, rose up at the sight of the
moving horse, pocketed his marbles, swung his bag of books round his
neck, and clambered up to the third place on the steed's broad neck.
All the paddock was a-move. There was a general race down to the
sliprails, a gentle thunder of horses' hoofs and boys' shouts, broken by
the shriller cries and 'Good-byes' of the girls.
Then up and down, left and right, away along the branching roads rode
the country school children, tea and home before them, behind, one more
day of the quarter's tedium dropped away for ever.
The Cameron horse jogged along; as a rule she had only Roly and Floss to
carry, Bartie having a rough pony to journey on; but to-day the pony had
wandered too far to be caught before school-time, so Tramby had an extra
burden, and walked sedately.
Floss had a tiny red palm to show.
'Why, that's three times this week you've had the cane! You must be
going it, Floss,' said Roly.
'It was sewing,' sighed Floss; 'how would you like to sew? I know you'd
go and hide behind the shed.'
The front horseman turned his head. 'It's time you did learn, Floss,'
he said; 'look at my stockings, I'm sick of having holes in them. Look
at my trousers.'
'I heard Miss Browne telling you to leave them for her to mend,' said
Floss.
'No, thanks,' said Bart; 'I know her mending too jolly well. She'd
patch it with stuff that 'ud show a mile off.'
'Yes, look at my elbows,' Roly said; and though the positions forbade
this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new
rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.
Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes
and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and
her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock
was exquisite--a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully
embroidered.
'I wish some more of Challis's frocks would come,' she sighed; 'this
one's so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.'
'Why, she'd be shivering,' said Roly.
'Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!'
'Think how hot it is here!' sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming
little face with her disengaged hand.
'I got the mail,' Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his
pocket--a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue
with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the
postmark of Windsor.
'Suppose they're stopping with the Queen again,' he added laconically.
'Wonder what they have for tea at her house?' sighed Flossie, and her
system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in
prospect for her own meal.
Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and
stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out
the sliprail--nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then
she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the
passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.
Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of
miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock
coppery sky, summer and drought time.
[Illustration: HOME FROM SCHOOL.]
Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a
stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not
saying very much, for Wilgandra's vegetation as a rule copied the
neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant
to the eye in country wilds.
There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen
orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow
grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty
things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have
carried, but still in good condition--it seemed as if the mortgage was
fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered
off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.
Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was
rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her
arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about
in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River
Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves
lapped idly.
There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and
a table.
Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah,
and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.
There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely
pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that
Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it
was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the
room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in
her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.
'Have you got the mail?' she asked.
Bartie nodded.
'Go and fetch father,' he said; 'he's down with the roses, I saw his hat
moving.'
He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged
off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her
little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table,
on which was no cloth as yet.
'Miss Browne,' he called, the very tears in his voice, 'Miss Browne,
isn't tea ready?'
A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying
into the room.
'Poor Roly!' she said. 'Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending
your best jacket, and didn't notice the time. But I'll soon have it
ready now.' She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and
at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the
dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged,
and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.
Then she noticed the rent of extraordinary dimensions in Bartie's coat,
the same jagged place that had made even Peter Small exclaim.
'Dear, dear,' she said, 'this will never do. This really must not go a
moment longer. Where is my thimble? Where can I have put my thimble?
Give me that coat, Bartie, this minute, if you please.
Bartie took it off, but sat with jealous eye upon it all the time it was
in her hands. He would have it mended his way.
'Now, look here,' he said, 'please don't go putting any fresh stuff in
it. Just sew it over and over, so the places come together. I'll take
to mending my own clothes. It's just the way you go letting new pieces
in that spoils your mending, Miss Browne.'
'But, Bartie dear,' the gentle lady said, 'see, my love, when a place is
torn right away like this, we have to put fresh stuff underneath. I'll
just get a tiny bit from my work-basket.'
'You just won't,' said Bartie stubbornly. 'You give it to me, and I'll
mend it myself'--and he actually took the needle and cotton and cobbled
it over till there certainly was no hole left.
'Now, my love,' he said, and held it up triumphantly.
'But it will break away again to-morrow,' said Miss Browne, in deep
distress. 'If you would just let me put a little patch, Bartie.'
But Bartie clung to his coat.
Roly had strayed out to look at his kangaroo-rats, but now came back.
The tears came to his voice again at the sight of Miss Browne, sitting
with her thimble on, looking helplessly at Bartie.
'Oh dear,' he said, 'isn't there never going to be any tea?'
'You poor little fellow!' she said. 'Just one minute more, Roly dear.
You can be sitting down.'
Hermie had gone flying across the ground to a place in the eighty acres
where the ground dipped into a little valley. It was all fenced round
with wire, to keep off the fowls and sheep. Within there grew roses in
such beauty and profusion as to astonish one. She saw a very old
cabbage-tree hat bending over a bush, and darted towards it.
'Dad,' she said, 'dad darling, come along in; the mail has come.'
There rose up a man, grey as his own selection, a man not more than
five-and-forty. Eyes blue as Hermie's own looked from under his grey
eyebrows, a grey beard covered his mouth.
'The mail, did you say, little woman?' he said, and stopped to prune
just one more shoot here, and snip off just one more drooping blossom.
'And tea, too, darling; at least I suppose it will be ready some day.
Come along, you are very tired, daddie. Why did you start ploughing a
day like this?'
The man sighed.
'It had to be done, girlie; but see, I gave myself a reward. I have
been down here an hour. Now let us go and read our letters.'
As they reached the living-room they found Miss Browne dusting the piano
and tidying the music; the setting of the table was advanced one stage
further, that is, the knives and forks were now on.
Roly came up again from another visit to his rats.
'Miss Browne,' he said, 'oh dear, oh dear!'--and stalked off to the
kitchen, to demand of Lizzie, the young State girl who scrubbed and
washed for them, where was the corned beef for tea, and wasn't there any
butter?
But the father was tearing open the letters. Hermie and Bartie hung over
his shoulder, reading just as eagerly as he. Floss crouched between his
knees to catch the crumbs. Roly, munching while he waited at a hunch of
ill-coloured bread, kept an eye and an ear for any spoken news, and Miss
Browne moved continually about the room, straightening chairs, altering
the position of the table vases, rearranging the knives and forks.
Mr. Cameron looked up, and drew forward a chair next to his own.
'Do sit down, Miss Browne,' he said; 'I am sure you are very tired. Sit
down, and let us enjoy this all together.'
So Miss Browne, too, joined the circle, Roly watching her with a
brooding eye.
'WINDSOR CASTLE.
'OH, MY DEAR ONES, MY DEAR ONES' ran the white letter,--'Is the earth
shaking beneath me, have my hands ague, that my pen trembles like this?
We are coming home, home, home. No false reports this time, no
heart-sickening disappointment; the papers are actually signed for a
long season, and we leave by the Utopia in six weeks. The news came an
hour ago. I saw an equerry coming in with the letters, saw the letter
that meant so much carried up to my room by a house steward, and had to
pass along the corridor and leave it. Challis was going down to play to
the Queen in her private sitting-room. But after it all was over how we
went to our rooms again! There was only a chambermaid in sight, and for
the last twenty yards of corridor we ran. Home, home, home, to your
arms, my husband, my dear one, my patient old sweetheart! Home to my
little girls, my boys, my little boys! Darlings, my eyes are streaming.
Oh, to hold you all again, to feel you, to touch my Hermie's hair--is it
all sunlight yet?--to be crushed with Bartie's hug, to hold again the
poor little babies I left, my Roly, my little Floss. Ah, dear ones,
dear ones, now it is all over, now we are coming, coming to you, I can
let you know. Oh, these weary, weary years, these great cities where we
have no home, no corner of a home. I have broken my heart for you all
every night since I came away. Six years, my dear ones, six years of
nights to break my heart. Be sorry for mother, and love her, darlings.
Have you forgotten her, Hermie? Bart, Bart, have you kept a little love
warm for her? Ah, dear God, my babies will not know me, little Floss
will turn away her head. My sweetheart, my sweetheart, if the time has
been as long for you, and pleasures as tasteless, and all things as
void, then my heart sickens afresh, for I know what your life has been.
'What has kept me up all this weary time I cannot even think. Whatever
it was, it has snapped now, and I am limp, useless, broken up into
little bits, like nothing so much as a little child stretching out its
arms and crying to its mother. Can you not see my arms stretching,
stretching to you? Does not my cry come to your little town? It is
Challis who is the woman now; she sees my work is done. She had begun
to show me the bracelet the Queen gave her, and to tell me what every
one had said, but I had torn open Warner's letter, and found the home
orders had come. She is packing various little things now, and has
rung, and given orders with the dearest little air of self-possession.
"Sit down and write, and tell daddie," she said; "I will see to
everything now."
'The carriage is to come for us in an hour. We have been here three
days, and every one has been as kind and as enthusiastic as they are
always. We go to Sandringham on Friday; the Princess asked for Challis
to play for her guests that night; the Dowager Empress is to be there,
and others.
'Then at Manchester an immense farewell concert on Monday; Mr. Warner
says two thousand seats are already booked to hear the "Wonder-Child";
another at Plymouth on Friday; a rush up to Edinburgh, just for her to
appear at the Philharmonic. They are only giving her forty pounds for
the night, but Mr. Warner is unwilling for her to lose the Scotch
connection.
'Then peace, perfect peace, and home. I sit and try to fancy the
changes the six years have made in the home. I am glad you have had two
new bedrooms built; that will allow you to have a study again,
sweetheart, and Hermie a drawing-room--sixteen is sure to be hankering
for one. The furniture is looking a little shabby, I know; but of
course that can be easily remedied, and I have always had my boxes
stuffed with art vases and bits of brass and bronze, ready for when the
good time came. You have probably laid down new carpets long ere this
in all the rooms, but I shall bring some rugs and Eastern squares, for I
doubt if your back-block towns have supplied what would satisfy my now
cultured taste.
'I suppose people wonder at you still being stuck to the Civil Service
at a wretched two hundred and fifty pounds a year. Isn't the prevailing
idea that we are rolling in money? There is surprisingly little for all
the enthusiasm there has been--I think Mr. Warner said he had banked
three thousand pounds for her--all the rest goes in expenses, which are
enormous. We are obliged to be at the best hotels, and to be dressed
up-to-date; that runs away with big sums. And the advertising that Mr.
Warner says is so necessary swallows gigantic amounts. This has been
the first year with much profit. Sometimes when I dress my little
girlie in her Paris frocks I think of Hermie, making last season's do
again, perhaps. Did the last box of Challis's frocks do for Flossie?
The lady-help, I am sure, will have been able to cut them down.
'Do not let us think of the future, sweetheart, I cannot bear it yet. I
cannot leave you any more, you must not be left; Challis has had her
meed of her mother now, and it is the turn for the others. Yet Mr.
Warner says it must be kept up, this life of hers, this Wandering Jew
life. It is the price great artists pay. But the child is brave.
'"You shall not have it any more, mamma," she said when I read this out;
"you shall go home to daddie for always now."
'But when I looked at her face it was pale, and there was that wan look
in it that comes sometimes. To think of the little tender thing bearing
all this alone!
'But we must not think of the future, sweetheart; we must not think of
it for an instant. You will come to Sydney to meet us? Perhaps only you.
And we will come straight home to Wilgandra with you. If she ruins her
chances for ever, she shall have one month's quiet home before the
Sydney season begins. Mr. Warner will try to prevent this, but I shall
be very firm. Then you must get leave, and children and all, we will go
to Sydney together, and you shall hear the darling play. To think you
have none of you ever seen great audiences carried away by her little
fingers!
'Ask the lady-help not to do up my bedroom for me. I want to see the
faded pink and white hangings, and the sofa with the green roses on it,
and the knitted counterpane that grandma made--just as they were when I
left them.
'Oh, my little home, not beautiful, not even very comfortable, stuck
away in that hot little town hundreds of miles from Sydney--my heart is
breaking for you!'
Nobody spoke when the letter was finished--nobody, indeed, had spoken
all the way through. Tired little Floss, finding no news forthcoming,
had fallen asleep.
Roly had sat down to the table, and was sawing an end off the corned
beef. Miss Browne, since nothing was read aloud, had gently risen up
and was dusting the piano, to be less in the way. But from time to time
she glanced at the letter, alarm in her eyes. Could it be the little
golden girl was ill?
The father put down the letter, and his hand shook.
'Coming home,' he said, and rose up, looking dazed; 'we--we must stop
her at once, of course. Children, how can we stop her?'
Bart's chest was heaving. For a second he had heard the crying come to
the little town, and seen the stretching of the arms.
But out of the window lay the grey selection that she had never seen;
closer at hand were the rents in his clothes, the broken places on his
boots. He pulled himself together.
'I'll go down to the post and cable to her not to come,' he said; 'you
be writing it down, dad.'
And Hermie's girl-heart was breaking. The letter had shaken the very
centre of her being, and wakened in her a passion of love and longing
for this tender woman. Oh, to be held by her, kissed, caressed--to feel
that hand on the hair she could not help but know was pretty!
But looking up she saw her father's anguished gaze around him--Bart's
manly mastery of himself. She brushed her tears aside.
'I'll get the pen and ink,' she said; 'it--it's late--the cable ought to
go to-night.'
Miss Browne sat down, quivering with the suspense.
'Which,' she whispered, 'which of them is dead, your mother or little
Challis?'
Bartie it was who laughed--a hoarse apology for a laugh.
'Dead!' he said; 'they're coming home, Miss Browne!'
It was Miss Browne's turn to look anguished. She rose up and moved
uncertainly about the room, she began to tidy the music in feverish
haste, she dusted the piano yet again.
Then she turned to Mr. Cameron with one hand fluttering out.
'I--I--must ask you to let me have a s--shilling,' she quavered;
'the--the boys really must have their hair cut before she sees them.'
*CHAPTER II*
*The Wonder-Child*
'Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with His dew
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and
blue,
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings.'
Up to the last eight years Mr. Cameron's friends and relatives had
always had their hands full with finding positions for him that would
enable him to support his wife and family.
Once or twice he was in receipt of five hundred a year, but much more
frequently he would be in a bank or an insurance company, starting with
a modest salary of a hundred and twenty.
Every one liked him cordially--they could not help it. But every one
was unfeignedly glad when one of the relatives made a great effort, and,
by dint of interviewing Members of Parliament and getting a little
influence to bear here and a little there, worked him into the Civil
Service, the appointment being that of Crown Land Agent at Wilgandra,
the salary two hundred and forty pounds, less ten pounds for the
Superannuation Fund.
Wilgandra was so far away--three hundred and seventy-three miles back,
back, away in the heart of the country--the very farthest town to which
the Government sent its Land Agents. Surely the bad penny could never
turn up again to vex their peace!
Even Mrs. Cameron's anxious soul was set at rest.
The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no
society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable. But
the work seemed smooth and easy, and after so many ups and downs the
quiet security of the small hot township seemed delicious to her.
It was not that Mr. Cameron drank or gambled, or possessed indeed any
highly coloured sin. He was simply one of the impracticables, the
dreamers, that the century has no room for.
He had written verses that the weekly papers had accepted; indeed, a few
daintily delicate things had found their way into the best English
magazines.
He had painted pictures--a score of them, perhaps; the art societies had
accepted three of them, refused nine, and never been even offered the
remainder; no one had ever bought one of them.
He had composed some melodies that a musical light passing through
Sydney professed to be captivated with, had promised to have published
in London, and had forgotten entirely.
When they were unpacking their much-ravelled chattels the first night in
Wilgandra, James Cameron came to his great paint-box that the late
family vicissitudes had prevented him touching for so long.
'Ah,' he said, and a light of great pleasure came into his grey eyes as
he lifted it from the packing-case and rubbed the dust off it with his
good cuff--'mine old familiar friend. Why, Molly darling, I shan't know
myself with a brush in my hand again. With all the spare time there
will be here, I ought to do some good work at last.'
Then his wife laid down the stack of little torn pinafores and patched
jackets and frocks she was lifting from another box, and crossed the
room and knelt down by her husband's side, just where he was kneeling
beside the rough packing-case that had held his treasure.
'Dear one,' she said, 'dear one, Jim, Jim,'--one hand went round his
neck, her head, with its warm brown hair that the grey was threading
years too soon, pressed against his shoulder, her face, old, young, sad,
smiling, looked into his, her brave brown eyes held tears.
'Why, little woman,' he said, 'what is it--what is troubling you?
Smiling time has come again, Molly, the worries are all left behind with
Sydney.'
'Jim,' she said, and her hand tightened on the paint-box he held, 'Jim,
do you know we have five children, five of them, five?'
'Well, girlie,' he said, and got up and sat down on the edge of the box
and drew her beside him, 'haven't we an income of two hundred and thirty
pounds for them, a princely sum, when we are in a place where there is
nothing to tempt us to buy? And we hardly left any debts behind us this
time.'
'But, dearest, dearest,' she urged, 'if you get hold of this, we shall
not have it a year; you will get up in cloudland and forget to furnish
your returns or some such thing, and then you will be dismissed again.'
'Ah, Molly,' he said, his face falling, 'always the gloomy side.
Couldn't you have given me a night of happiness?'
A stinging tear fell from the woman's eyes.
'I couldn't, I couldn't,' she said; 'the danger made my heart grow sick
again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. _I_ love
your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses
but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what _have_ they
done?'
The man's eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a
circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see
their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were
disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just
at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to
crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn,
anxious-eyed creature.
His face whitened. 'It is worse than drink!' he said.
She acquiesced sadly.
'Nothing else would make me take it from you,' she said, her wet eyes
falling again to the paint-box; 'and if it were you and I only against
the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get
ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!'
He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of
genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into
his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his
life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the
policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the
whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.
He gave his wife a passionate kiss.
'You are right,' he said, 'take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin
from now to be a man.'
Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother's brow were
fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a
home around her where before had only been a house; the children were
taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to
Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.
The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate
themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome
yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.
Then the name began to crop up in the country news of the daily papers.
Another wonder-child for Australia had been discovered, it seemed--a
certain Challis Cameron, a mite of eight years who was creating much
excitement in the township of Wilgandra.
Presently from the larger towns near the paragraphs also were sent. A
concert had been given in aid of the Church Fund, and a pleasing
programme had been submitted. Among the contributors was a tiny child,
Challis Cameron, whose wonderful playing fairly astonished the big
audience.
Before Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had quite waked up to the situation, an
enthusiastic committee had been formed, a subscription list started and
filled, and a sum of sixty pounds thrust into their astonished hands,
for the child to be taken to Sydney for lessons.
Nowhere on the earth's surface is there a a land where the people are so
eager to recognise musical talent, so generous to help it, as in
Australia.
Mr. and Mrs. Cameron looked at each other when they were left alone, a
little dismay mingled with their natural pride. And from each other
they looked to the paddock beside their house where all the children
were playing. This especial child was unconcernedly filling up her
doll's tea-cups with a particularly delightful kind of red mud, and then
turning out the little shapes and calling Bartie to come and look at her
'jellies.'
Talent they had always known she had, but hardly thought it was anything
much above that of any child very fond of music. As a baby she had
cried at discords; at three years old she used to stand at the end of
the piano and make quite pretty little tunes with one hand in the
treble, while Bartie thumped sticky discords in the bass. At four she
used to stand beside Hermie, whom her mother was teaching regularly, and
in five minutes understood what it took her sister an hour to learn
imperfectly. At four, too, her head hidden in the sofa-cushion, she
could call out the names of not only single notes but chords also, as
Hermie struck them. So her mother undertook her tuition too, and in two
years these paragraphs were appearing in the papers.
But to go away with her and stay in Sydney while masters there heard her
and taught her! What was to become of the other four, and the husband
who needed his wife so much?
'I am afraid we must send her to a boarding-school there,' she faltered.
'How can I leave the home?'
But later the child came and stood at her knee; a tall, thin, little
child she was, with fair fine hair that fell curlless down her back, and
in her eyes that touch of grey that makes hazel eyes wonderful.
The face was delicately cut, the skin clear and pale; only when the pink
ran into it was she pretty.
'I made another song, mamma,' she whispered.
The dying light of the long still day was in the room, very far away in
some one's fig-trees the locusts hummed, a sprinkle of sweet rain had
fallen, the first for months, and the delicate scent of it came through
the window.
'What is it, darling?' whispered the mother.
The child's eyes grew larger, she swayed her tiny body to and fro.
'Oh, the roses, the roses and the shivery grass! Oh, the sea! Oh, the
little waves running on the sand! Oh, the wind, blowing the little
roses till they die! Oh, the pink roses crying, crying! Oh, the sea!
Oh, the waves of the crying sea!'
The mother's arm went round the little body, down into the depths of
those eyes she looked, those eyes with their serious brown and grey
lights mingling, and for one clear moment there looked back at her the
strange little child-soul that dwelt there.
Out at the door there was a clamour, Roly demanding bread-and-jam. From
the paddock came a sudden gust of quarrelling, the next-door children,
with Hermie, shrill-voiced, arbitrating. Probably down in the street
Bartie was fighting any or all of the boys who passed.
'Dear heart!' ran the woman's thoughts. 'My days are too crowded to tend
this little soul. Better that she too asked bread-and-jam of me.'
'Play it for me, mother,' said the child, and plucked at her hand. 'I
can't; I have tried and tried, and the sea won't cry, only the roses.'
'Nonsense, nonsense!' said the troubled mother; 'run and play till
bedtime. Play chasings with Roly and Floss, or be Bartie's horse. Have
you forgotten the reins I made him?'
The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.
'I will get the reins,' she said nervously, obediently.
Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could
say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or
strangers.
Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every
moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid
coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the
shilly-shallying in using it.
So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk
beside her in a second-class carriage.
'We shall be back in a month at most,' she called out for the twentieth
time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.
But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said,
the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her
concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat
high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off
the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to
bury her excited little face on her mother's breast.
Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of
its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it
insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its
hands recklessly into its pockets.
Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the
anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her
pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose
of sending the child to Germany.
And now what to do?
The small house at Wilgandra seemed going along very steadily; Mr.
Cameron had not once failed to furnish the reports due from him to the
Government. The lady-help selected by the mother had the house and the
children and the father in a state of immaculate order. She was a
magnificently capable, managing woman; every one, Mr. Cameron
especially, stood much in awe of her, and unquestioningly obeyed her
smallest mandate; even Roly, unbidden, performed magnificent ablutions
before he presented himself for a meal, and Hermie was often to be seen
surreptitiously trying to mend her own pinafores in the paddock.
Mrs. Cameron could not but confess her place was not crying out for her
to the extent she had imagined; indeed, the wonderful lady-help, Miss
Macintosh, seemed to have brought the home into a far better state of
order and discipline than even she, the mother, had been able to do.
Little Floss was a healthy and most independent babe of two; Roly, three
years old, was a sturdy mannikin who stared at her stolidly when, her
heart full of tears, she stooped over him and asked, did he want her to
go away again?
'Mamma mustn't go away in a big ship, must she, sweetheart? You can't
do without her again, can you?' she said.
But Roly was a sea-serpent swimming on the dining-room floor, and the
interruption irritated him.
'Yes,' he assented, with swift cheerfulness, 'mamma go in big ship.
Good-bye, good-bye!'--and he waved an impatient hand to get rid of her.
Hermie and Bartie had just started to a good private school near at
hand, and the teaching--all honour to the mistress!--was of so skilful
and delightful a nature that the two could hardly summon patience to
wait for breakfast ere they set out for the happy place. So Challis's
claims tugged hard.
'But you--what of you, my husband?' she said. 'You cannot spare me; it
is absurd for you to even think of it!'
But he was excited and greatly moved at the thought of his child's
genius. Deep down, in his heart was the knowledge that had he himself
been given a chance he could have made a name for himself in this world.
But there was always uncongenial work for him, always something else to
be done, 'never the time and the place and the loved one all together.'
'Let us give her her chance,' he said. 'It is early morning with her.
Don't let ours be the hands to block her, so that when evening comes she
can only stand wistful.'
So they sailed away, the mother and the wonder-child; behind them the
plain little home, before, the Palaces of Music.
*CHAPTER III*
*The Second Lady-Help*
'The droop, the low cares of the mouth,
The trouble uncouth
'Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain
To put out of its pain.'
And for actually six months that home survived! After that the
crumbling was to be expected, for some discerning man came along, and
married the marvellous lady-help out of hand.
Mr. Cameron spent five pounds in the purchase of a pair of _entree_
dishes for a wedding-present, and was unhappy that he could so very
inadequately reward her great services. But there was a curious air of
buoyancy and relaxation observable in him the first day the house was
free of her.
At tea he got _The Master of Ballantrae_ out, and read boldly all
through the meal, a thing he had not ventured to do for eighteen months.
And out in the frozen shrubbery at midnight, with the Master and Mr.
Henry thrusting at each other, he spilled the tea that Hermie passed
him. When he saw the wide brown stain he had made on the table's
whiteness--although the ridiculous fancy pursued him that it was the
Master's life-blood smirching the snow--he looked up startled, full of
apologies. But there was only Hermie's childish face in front of him;
and though she said, 'Oh, papa!' as became a president of the tea-tray,
she looked away the next second to laugh at Roly, who had spread his
bread with jam on both sides, and did not know how best to hold it. And
Cameron felt so much a man and master of his fate once more, that he
stretched right across the table to help himself to butter, instead of
politely requesting the passing of it. For three months the household
ran a merry course. Hermie, a bright little woman of eleven, begged her
father to let her 'keep house' and give the orders to Lizzie, the very
young general servant.
The father bent his thoughts five minutes to the problem; Miss Macintosh
had been away now a fortnight, and everything seemed going along really
delightfully. What need to break the sweet harmony of the days by
getting in some person whose principles counted reading at table and
spilling tea among the cardinal vices?
And Lizzie, the State girl, was at his elbow with a shining face. She
was fifteen, she said--fifteen was real old! Now why should the master
go getting in any more of them lady-helps, who did nothing but scold
from morning to night? She, Lizzie, would undertake all there was to do
in this place 'on her head.'
Cameron smiled at the eager girls, and, while hardly daring to consent,
put off for a further day the engagement of a successor to Miss
Macintosh. And the three months ran gaily along, and still Hermie sat
importantly at the head of the table, and still her father read, and
still Roly spread his bread upon both sides.
There was always a good table--far better than either the mother or
lady-help had kept.
For the family grocer had an alluring way of suggesting delicacies, when
he came for his orders that certainly no mistress of eleven or handmaid
of fifteen could withstand.
'Almonds?' he would say. 'Very fine almonds this week, Miss
Cameron--three pounds did you say--yes? And what about jam? I have it
as low as fivepence a tin, but there is no knowing what cheap fruit
these makers use.'
'Oh,' Hermie would say, 'I must have very good jam, of course, or it
might make my little sister ill! How much is good jam?'
'There's strawberry conserve, a shilling a tin,' the man would
say--'pure fruit and pure sugar, boiled in silver saucepans.'
'Silver saucepans! That couldn't hurt Flossie! We will have six tins
of that, please,' the small house-woman would answer. Then there were
biscuits; Miss Macintosh, frugal soul, only gave Wilgandra, when it came
calling, coffee-biscuits at sevenpence a pound with its afternoon tea.
Hermie regaled it upon macaroons at half a crown. Then Lizzie would
have her say. What was the use of cooking meat and vegetables on
washing-day, ironing-day, and Saturdays, she would say, when you could
get them tinned from a grocer? So tins of tongue, and whitebait, and
pressed meats, French peas, asparagus, and such, were added weekly to
the order, the grocer sending to Sydney for the unusual things. 'We are
saving a lady-help's wages,' Hermie would say, 'and it saves the
butcher's bills, so it is not extravagant a bit.'
It was not until the third month that the day of reckoning came. Then
the grocer, grown a trifle anxious over his unusual bill, which no one
was settling, ventured to accost Mr. Cameron one day on his verandah and
present it.
'No haste, of course,' he said politely, 'only as your good lady and
Miss Macintosh always paid monthly, I thought you might not like it
going on much longer.'
When he had bowed himself out, Mr. Cameron rubbed his suddenly troubled
brow a moment. Money, bills! The thought had actually never crossed
his mind all these three months! His wife first and then Miss Macintosh
had always managed the finances of the family. Indeed, one of Mrs.
Cameron's injunctions to the lady-help had been, 'When Mr. Cameron's
cheque for his quarter's salary comes, please be sure to remind him to
pay it into the bank.' And Miss Macintosh had never failed to do so,
nor to apply for the twelve pounds monthly for payment of the household
bills.
He went into the dining-room and began to rummage helplessly about his
writing-table. To save his life he could not recollect what had become
of his last cheque, for there was a conviction on his mind that he had
never paid it into his account.
Hermie was at the table, Mrs. Beeton's cookery-book spread open before
her; over her shoulders peeped the heads of Bartie and Roly, absorbed in
the contemplation of the coloured plate picturing glorified blancmanges
and jellies. For was not to-morrow Roly's fifth birthday, for which
great preparation must be made by the young mother of the house?
'Children,' said the father at last entreatingly, 'come and help me; I
have lost a very important envelope.'
For over an hour did that family search from one end of the house to the
other. It was Lizzie's happy thought that discovered it.
'A long blue envelope, with no stamp on it and just printing
instead--why, there was one like that in the kitchen drawer with the
dinners on it,' she said.
She rushed for it, and met her anxious master with it held triumphantly
out.
The back of the envelope bore dinners for the week in Hermie's round
careful hand.
_Mon._--Roast fowl, mashed potatoes, collyflower, pink jellie
and gem cakes.
_Tues._--Tong, blommange and strawberry jam, rainbow cake.
_Wed._--Sardenes, current buns, yelow jelly and merangs.
Mr. Cameron thrust a trembling hand into the depths of it, and, to his
exquisite relief, was able to draw out the cheque for his quarterly
sixty pounds.
In danger of the kitchen fire, in danger of the dust-box, in danger of
Roly's passion for paper-tearing, in danger of all the wind-storms that
had sprung up and torn raging through the place, in danger of all these
for three months, and still safe!
The relief took the man back into the dining-room, responsibility for
his family to the front for the third time in his life.
He ran through the bills with a sinking heart. Instead of twelve pounds
a month that Miss Macintosh's carefulness had made suffice, little
Hermie had brought up the totals to twenty-eight--eighty-four pounds for
the quarter, to be deducted from the sixty pounds that must also pay
rent and clothes and many other things.
The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had
been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with
the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the
changed meals as much as the boys--Cameron had quite a boyish appetite
for good things, and Hermie's brilliant menus had been delightful to him
after a long course of Miss Macintosh's boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle
roly-polies, and milk sagos.
'A first-rate little manager,' he always called her, when he passed up
his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he
recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more
expensive than rhubarb or rice.
'Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!' she said, awake at last to
the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear
commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such
an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction,
and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.
'But I am eleven,' she kept repeating sadly, 'eleven, papa. I ought to
have known.'
There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys'
school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother's
conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each
day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights
that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.
But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and
found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one
to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake
himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of
the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied
three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he
took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over
heavy.
But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning
home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.
The father's blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.
'Is my son a thief,' he said, 'that he should treat me so? Or is it he
despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?'
With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his
conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat
on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never
resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.
No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas,
when the boy marched in with the year's prize for punctuality under his
arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.
'I like a man of honour,' he said. But the two events together, the
grocer's bill and the master's call, decided the father he must enter
into submission and have another lady-help, for the children's sake.
How to obtain one? He made inquiries about Wilgandra, but the class of
people from whom he sought to take one were of the mind that prevails in
many of the country towns and bush settlements. They would rather
starve than serve--at all events where they were known. Now and again a
self-respecting intelligent girl broke away from her life and went off
with her trunk to find service in Sydney.
But, for the most part, the daughters of a house up to the number of
seven, or even ten, stayed under the cramped roof-tree of their fathers,
and led an unoccupied, sheepish existence, till marriage or death bore
them off to other homes.
So in despair Cameron wrote off to a Sydney registry office, and asked
the manageress to send him a lady. Just before he closed the letter the
happy freedom of the last three months led him to add a postscript, 'I
should like the lady you select to be of not too managing a
disposition--gentle and pleasant.'
The registry office keeper rubbed her hands; here surely at last was a
chance to dispose of Miss Browne--Miss Browne, who was ever on the
books, who was sent off to a situation one week, and came back with red
eyes and a hopeless expression the next, dismissed incontinently as
incapable.
The registry office keeper turned up the town Wilgandra in her railway
time-table.
Three hundred and seventy-three miles away! Surely at such a distance,
especially as the employer was paying the expensive fare, Miss Browne
might be regarded as settled for a space of three months!
Mr. Cameron had no complaint to make of his new lady-help on the score
of being of a managing disposition. She was gentleness itself--that
kind of deprecating gentleness that makes the world feel uncomfortable.
She tried pitifully hard to be pleasant--pleasant and cheerful. She
worked from earliest morning to late at night, and accomplished about as
much as Hermie could in two hours. It took her nerveless fingers nearly
a quarter of an hour to sew on a waistcoat button, and in little more
than a quarter of an hour the button would have tumbled off again.
Lizzie seldom trusted her to cook anything; when she did so the poor
lady invariably emerged from the kitchen with her hands burnt in several
places, sparks in her eyes, the front width of her dress scorched, her
hair singed, and her poor frail body so utterly exhausted, the family
would insist upon her instant retirement to bed.
Nobody knew what the woman's life had been, where had gone the vigour,
the energy, the graces that should still have been hers, for her years
were barely thirty-five.
A crushing sorrow, disappointment on the heel of disappointment,
loneliness, or perhaps only a grey life full of petty cares passed in a
scorching, withering climate--one or all of these things had dried the
sap out of her, and left of what might have been a gracious creature,
radiating pleasure and comfort, only the rags and bones of womanhood.
The Camerons suffered her patiently for three long months; then the
father gathered his courage up in both hands, closed his ears to the
pity that clamoured at his heart, and told her gently enough that she
must go.
She threw up her fluttering hands and sank on the sofa--in her eyes the
piteous look of amaze and grief that your fireside dog would wear if you
took a sudden knife to him. So kind had the family been, so patient,
the poor creature had told herself exultingly that they were satisfied,
even pleased with her, and had hugged the novel, delicious thought to
sleep with her for the last two months.
She asked shakingly what she had done.
'Nothing, nothing at all,' Cameron reassured her eagerly; 'it is merely,
merely I can see you are not strong enough for such a hard place as
mine.'
'A hard place!' she cried, and looked at him dazed. 'Why, there are
only five of you, and Lizzie to do all the rough work! I've been where
there were ten, and done the washing and everything. I've been where
there were nine, and had to chop the wood and draw the water myself.
I've been mother's help and had to carry twin babies miles in the sun.
I've been where the children pinched and scratched me. I've been at
places where I rose at half-past four, and found my way to bed at
eleven. And in none have I ever given notice myself. A hard place!
Dear heart!'
'My dear Miss Browne,' Cameron said, and such was the fluent nature of
the man that his eyes were filled, and he had no idea that he lied, 'it
was solely for the sake of your health I spoke. You look so delicate.
If you think the duties are not too heavy, why, I shall be most heartily
obliged to you if you will stay with us indefinitely.'
Then he went away to seek his children, to tell them her story, and beg
their tenderest patience.
*CHAPTER IV*
*The Painting of The Ship*
'Never a bird within my sad heart sings,
But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings.'
Yet his coward pen never plucked courage to itself to write across seas
of this family incubus.
The earlier letters had spoken variously of 'Miss Macintosh,' or 'the
lady-help'; now there was never a name given, the references being
merely to 'the lady-help.' Even the children scrupulously followed this
up.
When the Marvellous One had gone off with her _entree_ dishes to her new
home, the father had said, 'Children, we will not tell mother just yet
that Miss Macintosh has left, it would only worry her. We will wait
till we can write and say we have another one as good.'
So the tale of Hermie's housekeeping and the mislaid cheque never
crossed the sea, and the mother in her far German boarding-house
continued to comfort herself with the thought of Miss Macintosh's
perfections.
When Miss Browne's shortcomings made themselves glaringly patent, the
pens again shallied in telling the story.
'It is so close to Challis's concert, we mustn't worry them with our
little troubles, children,' the father said.
So Bartie and Hermie continued to write guarded letters; and if the
boy's hand at times ran on to tell how Miss Browne had put ugly patches
on his clothes, or the girl's heart began to pour itself out on the thin
paper and speak of the discomfort of the new reign, recollection would
come flooding, the letters would be cast aside and new ones written,
short, studied, and never saying more in reference to the vexed question
than 'the lady-help had taken Floss out for a walk.'
'I hope Miss Macintosh sees you have your little pleasures,' the mother
would write. 'You do not tell me about birthday parties or picnics.
Don't forget mother loves to hear of it all.'
And Hermie would write back sadly:
'The lady-help is very busy just now, but when she has more time she is
going to let us have a party.'
'I tremble each mail,' the mother wrote once, 'lest your letter should
bring me news that Miss Macintosh is engaged and about to be married.
It is strange such a woman has not been snapped up long before this.'
And Cameron answered:
'I do not think you need worry, my darling, about the lady-help
marrying. She has given me to understand she has had a disappointment,
and will never marry.'
But the very guarding of the letters, the reading of them over, to be
sure nothing had been let slip, made them seem poor and lifeless to the
anxiously devouring eyes the other side of the world.
She wrote at last:
'Sweetheart, from what you don't say, more than from what you do, I
learn of your loneliness. You are so dull, my poor boy, and the days
rise up and sink to rest all grey like one another. Yet a little more
patience, and surely there will be plenty of money to make life all
sunshine for you. But just for a little brightness, darling, reach down
that box of paints we put away on the cupboard top, get out your
brushes, and let them help the hours to fly. While the Conservatorium
has been closed for vacation Challis and I have been four days in Rome.
And she found me crying one morning in a picture gallery, in front of
some great picture, a Raphael, or an Andrea del Sarto--some one, at all
events, who painted with hands of fire. And yet it was not the subject
of the picture that moved me, unless it was that the magic canvas
wrought me to the mood that is yours so often. All I thought of was the
cold harsh woman, the Martha with blind eyes, who, that first day in
Wilgandra, took away by force and at the same time the paint-box and the
glow from your life. My boy, my sweetheart, let me give it back. Ah,
would that I could stand on the chair and reach it down from the
cupboard and put it into your hands myself! But do it now, my darling,
this moment. I know you will be careful and not risk your position by
forgetfulness. And when you are loneliest, when you miss me most, let
the brushes take my place.'
Cameron had been reading his letter at the tea-table.
'Children,' he said, and rose up, his face working, his eyes shining
strangely, 'children, mother wants me to paint pictures again. I--she
says I am to get the box down.'
The table had no comprehension of the greatness of the matter, but rose
up at once, at seeing the father so moved. Roly brought his mug of
sweetened milk along with him, Floss continued to bite at her crust of
bread-and-jam, Miss Browne fluttered about, Hermie and Bart pressed at
their father's elbow.
'Bring a chair, Bartie,' Cameron said, 'here at the cupboard in the
hall.'
'Mine cubbub,' interjected Floss; 'me's hat in dere. Go 'way, daddie.'
'I'll climb up,' said eager Bart. 'What is it up there, dad?'
'Give me the chair--let me reach it down myself,' Cameron said, and
stepped up and stretched his long arm to the top.
A dusty mustard-box! The children's eyes brightened with swift thoughts
of treasure, then dulled when the lid was flung back and displayed
nothing but a chaos of dirty oil-tubes and brushes.
But when they saw their father's glistening eyes, saw him fingering the
same tubes with a tender, lingering touch, looking at the brushes'
points, they did not tell him they were disappointed in the treasure.
Instead, Bart led off with a cheer.
'Hurrah for daddie the artist!' he shouted.
'Hurrah!' cried Hermie.
''Rah!' shrilled Roly.
Floss claimed a kiss.
'Me dive daddie dat,' she said in her kindest way, 'out mine cubbub.'
And thus was the painting of the ship begun.
'Can you see what I mean, Bart?' Cameron said two months later, when the
picture was almost finished, so desperately had he worked at it.
'You mean it for a ship, don't you?' Bart said. 'If I'd been you,
though, dad, I'd have painted a steamship with two funnels. People
don't think much of sailing-boats now.'
'Can you see what I mean, Hermie?' Cameron said, and wistfulness had
crept into his eyes.
Hermie's blue-flower eyes were regarding the great canvas dubiously.
'Couldn't you have made the water blue, papa?' she said; 'the sea is
blue, you know. P'raps, though, you hadn't enough blue paint. But I like
it to be a sailing-boat; steamships aren't so clean.'
The man's heart clamoured for his wife, who had never been at a loss to
find what he meant. For a moment it seemed intolerable to him that she
was not there at his elbow, to share the exaltation of the moment with
him.
'Run away, run away,' he said irritably to Hermie and Bart; 'you shake
my elbow, you worry me; run away.'
Miss Browne made a hysterical noise in her throat.
'It is so sad,' she said; 'what is it you have done to it? It is only a
ship and a man, and yet--do you know I can hardly keep the sobs back
when I look at it.'
To her amaze her employer turned eagerly round, shook her hand again and
again in warmest gratitude, and fell to painting once more with feverish
haste.
The canvas showed a livid stretch of coast and ocean, and a spectre ship
with a spectre captain at the helm.
The ship had an indescribably sad effect. You saw her straining through
the strong, repellent waves, you heard her cordage creaking, you saw her
battling stem struggling to push a way. She was a living thing,
breaking her heart over the black hopelessness of her task. The
captain's face burnt flame-white out from the canvas; his desperate eyes
stared straight ahead; his long hand held the helm in a frightful grip.
You knew he was aware he would never round his cape; you knew he would
fight to do so through all eternity.
The Camerons celebrated the day of the finishing of the picture as a
high holiday. The children had ten shillings tossed to them to spend as
they liked. They bought a marvellous motley of edible things, and
dragged their father and Miss Browne up the Jib to partake of them. It
were sheer madness to suppose a whole half-crown's worth of Brazil nuts;
to say nothing of chocolates, tarts and other extreme dainties, could be
discussed within the cramped walls of a house in a street. The whole
width of the heavens was needed, and a thousand gum-trees, and the smell
of earth and grass.
Cameron walked about on the heights as if on air. He had not painted
that canvas that stood, still wet, down below in the straggling town.
He had entertained a spirit, something stronger, fiercer, more
triumphantly capable than himself. He could have flung up his arms and
run shouting up and down, shouting thanks to the winds, the trees, the
sailing skies, that the spirit had taken its dwelling in him.
Magnificent fancies came bursting upon him; now and again he held his
head, so rich were the conceptions, so strong felt his hand to bring
them into instant being.
An urgent craving for his wife took hold of him--he strode away from the
children's shouts, away from Miss Browne, who sat wretched because she
had forgotten the tin-opener, and the tea, and the sugar.
He found himself down near the creek, with the gums waving eighty feet
above his head, gums with snow patches of blossoms on them, stern gums,
smiling gums, red, silver, blue. And he called, 'Molly,' and the trees
encouraged him.
And again, 'Molly,' 'Molly,' and there burst up to his lips from his
heart all the words he had had to stifle away since the sailing of her
ship. All that he would have poured out to her these last two years,
all that had lain quiet and kept his being stagnant since that last
agonised clinging of her arms.
'I thought I could bear it,' the man said to the trees, 'but I can't--it
is too much! Are you listening to me, Molly? I must have you again to
talk to. She has had you long enough--Challis has had her share of you;
now I must have you again. These children take us from each other,
Molly. We are very fond of them, but we should have more time to love
each other without them, to love like we did twelve years ago. I want
you, to tell you about the picture, Molly, Molly. Can you hear, darling,
can you hear?'
And sometimes she seemed near to him, seemed a part of the air, the
trees, the earth, and he raved to her and talked joyously.
And sometimes he lost her, the delicate spirit webs broken by the
world's machinery, and he dropped his head on his arms and wept.
But when the thread snapped finally, and nothing could bring her to him
again, he groped his way upwards, for now the loneliness, after the
speaking, was a thing he dared not bear. The children welcomed him
eagerly. They had wanted him so badly, they said, for dinner, and here
he came only just in time for tea. Would he please open that tin of
jam--there was no opener, but perhaps he could do it with a bit of
broken bottle? And there were no matches; would he please use his and
light the fire? The tea was forgotten, but hot milk and water would be
nice, perhaps, but there was only a little milk remaining, and the sugar
had been left behind. He fell to laughing, and was thereby restored to
more normal mind. He lighted the fire, and water and milk circulated
round the little party, and refreshed it. He attended to the
wounded--Bart had gashed his hand attempting the opening of that tin of
jam, Hermie had a tick in her arm, Roly had stirred up a nest of
bull-dog ants, and had met with his due reward, Floss had eaten too many
chocolates, and Miss Browne had been stuck in the mud, attempting to get
water from a pot-hole; her large shabby shoes looked pathetically
ridiculous.
So by the time he had helped all his lame dogs over their stiles, and
got them ready for marching home, his mood was quite a happy one again.
He went down the mountain-side, Floss in his arms, Bart and Hermie on
either side, Miss Browne and Roly close at hand.
And with a flushed face and happy eyes and a fluent tongue he told them
all manner of wonderful things; in very truth he could keep them to
himself no longer. How the world was going to be very pleased indeed
with his picture, and hang it in so famous a place that Challis would
not be the only one making the name of Cameron celebrated. And how a
whole mint of gold was going to be given to him for it--Hermie and Miss
Browne would be able to order all they liked and more from the family
grocer. And how he was going to send for mamma to come at once to stay
with them again, so that they could all live happily to the end of their
days.
Through the little town they wound with eyes shining at the thought.
Hermie's order-loving soul was soothed at the vision of domestic peace
once more. Bart resolved to keep his best knickerbockers for the
mother-fingers to mend.
'Can she make puddings?' said Roly, who despised the culinary skill of
Miss Browne. And 'Mam-mam,' murmured little sleepy Floss, not because
her mind held recollection of using the name, but because a baby
next-door spoke it incessantly, and it seemed pleasant. Only Miss Browne
looked wistful-eyed; a mother such as this seemed would never deem her
capable enough; Christmas would see her back in Sydney, weariedly
waiting occupation in the registry office.
They turned the key of the door--Lizzie had had holiday also. And on
the threshold, pushed beneath the door by the post-boy, lay another long
blue envelope with no stamp upon it, and only printed letters instead.
Cameron picked it up, quite without suspicion--his cheque for the
quarter, he supposed.
But the reading told him he was dismissed the service for his
carelessness and the culpable neglect of his duties during the past four
months.
*CHAPTER V*
*Dunks' Selection*
'Well, it is earth with me; Silence resumes her reign,
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.'
'I shouldn't think it can be very much farther, dad,' said Bart.
'I believe we have passed it,' Hermie sighed; 'I am sure we have come
much more than nine miles,' and she mopped her hot cheeks that the sun,
burn as he would, had never freckled.
Cameron, the reins slack in his hand, looked doubtfully from side to
side.
'It ought to be somewhere here,' he said; 'isn't that a fence at the top
of the hill? Yes, I'm sure it is.' He touched the horse lightly with
the switch that Floss held, and on they went again. They were in a
borrowed broken-springed buggy, the five of them and Miss Browne, come
out to see the home their father was buying--none of them, not even the
father, had seen it yet.
For a couple of months after his dismissal Cameron had lingered on in
the house in Wilgandra, too bewildered and helpless to know what to do.
It was not the first time a similar crisis had happened, but before his
wife had always taken matters in hand, looked up situations for him in
the papers, interviewed influential people, brushed his clothes and sent
him out with little to do but present himself to his employer.
But now he was completely at sea.
He wrote a few letters to Sydney friends, vaguely asking if they knew of
'a billet.' But seven years' silence makes strangers of ones best
friends; some were scattered, and dead letters were the only reply;
others wrote to say Sydney had never been in such a state of hopeless
depression, and strongly advised him not to come to add to the frightful
army of the unemployed.
'Why not go on the land?' said one or two of them. 'A man like you with
a growing family should do well there, and you would at least be your
own master and free from "a month's notice."'
Cameron first asked the children what they thought of 'going on the
land.'
When they heard this meant moving to a new place, and having sheep and
growing all their own things, and each one helping, they were enchanted.
Cameron was too shy and reserved to have made many friends in the
township, but he put on a clean cool coat and filled his pipe and
wandered forth, with the vague idea of asking some one's advice on the
matter. But there was a race-meeting in a neighbouring township, and
the streets were almost deserted, the tradespeople and the
land-and-estate agent being the only men at their posts. The latter,
however, struck Cameron as the very man to ask. And Cameron struck the
agent as the very man for whom he had been waiting. There was a
selection, he said, a few miles away--eighty acres of fine land that its
drunken owner, Dunks, had hardly stirred since he had taken it up.
There was a five-roomed cottage on it, there were fifty head of sheep,
poultry, a couple of horses, a cart, and all tools. Dunks, anxious to
get to Sydney, was willing to let all go for two hundred and fifty
pounds.
But Cameron went home hopeless, he could as easily raise two thousand
pounds as two hundred and fifty.
Hermie met him with a registered letter from which a cheque for a
hundred fluttered. Challis's professors, it seemed, had allowed her to
give a few concerts in the midst of her course of lessons, and five
hundred pounds had been the result.
'The child insists that I shall send a hundred,' ran the letter, 'for
you all to buy presents with, and though I don't know what you can
buy--but sheep--in Wilgandra, I send it. More I do not enclose, my dear
one, for well do I know how shockingly you would lose and give it away.
But all have some fun with this hundred, and now every penny that comes
I shall jealously bank for the future and for the child's own use, as is
but fair and right.'
Cameron and Bartie and Hermie went eagerly off to the agent's again.
Cameron held up his cheque, and asked if it would do if they paid that
amount down and the rest on terms. And the agent, after a little demur,
was agreeable--had he not that morning been visited by Dunks, who said
he would take as low as a hundred and fifty to be rid of the place?
Cameron almost handed the cheque over there and then, but then some of
the prudence learned from his wife came to him, and he pocketed it
instead, and said they would go and look at the place.
Thereupon, the following Saturday, the agent lent his buggy, gave
directions for finding, and this was the journeying.
'Yes,' Cameron said, 'this must be it, but there doesn't seem to be a
gate. I suppose we had better go through these sliprails. Get down and
lift them out, Bart.'
The early summer, in her eagerness and passion for growth and beauty,
had been tender even to Dunks' selection. The appearance of the place
appalled none of the buggy-load.
Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums
were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their
soberness.
Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for
lambs, and a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the
cottage and gambolled with the children. There was a bleating calf with
a child's pink sash tied round its neck, fluff balls of chickens ran
under the feet, downy ducklings were picking everywhere.
And all this young life was so beautiful a sight that the children were
wild with rapture, and Cameron's dreamy beauty-loving soul told him here
was the home for him.
The cottage shocked him somewhat, it was so very tumbledown, the roof
was so low, the windows so broken.
He began to consider whether he had not better take up a selection for
himself near at hand and run up his own cottage, these walls were hardly
worth the pulling down.
But Mrs. Dunks began to talk to him, and her apron was at her eyes
nearly all the time. He learned that Dunks was the best of men, and only
weak. If once they could get from this neighbourhood and his bad
companions to Forbes, where her own people were, he would surely reform.
He learned that Mrs. Dunks had nine children, all under fourteen; that
she was in a consumption, and only the air of Forbes could cure her. It
seemed to him that he could not turn round to this fragile, heavily
burdened creature, look into her fever-bright, anxious eyes, and tell
her he would not give her this chance to end her days among her own
people.
So he looked at all the young life again, and the sheer sun, bursting
out of the wattles, and was glad to be persuaded that a little paint and
a bit of timber would make the house quite new again.
'Do you think,' he said, and turned round to the woman, 'that you could
give me possession of the place in a month?'
And the woman burst into thankful tears, and told him they would be gone
to-morrow.
'I've packed up for going eighteen times this year,' she said through
her tears. 'I've got my hand well in.'
Dunks was away in the township, the youngest baby was lying in her arms
looking up at her with pure eyes, and the pale wraith death, whom she
ever felt beside her, had kept her conscience tender.
'Did--did you say the agent told you two hundred and fifty?' she
faltered.
Cameron thought of his children and braced himself up.
'He did,' he said firmly, 'and I cannot possibly give you a penny-piece
more. I consider it is a very fair price.'
'But--but----' the woman began again.
'It is no use, I can go no further,' Cameron said, 'so please do not
waste your breath'--and he unhobbled his horse and prepared for the
journey home, his face set away from her, lest he should be softened.
How could he dream she wanted to tell him that a hundred and fifty was
all they had asked, and more than the place was worth, so ill in repair
was everything? Then the thought of this man's famous child came to
her--Challis, with fingers of gold. What were a hundred pounds to the
father of such a child?
She looked away from the eyes of her babe, she forgot that she and death
were met, and replied:
'Very well, we will take two hundred and fifty, Mr. Cameron.'
Going homewards in the jolting buggy the talk was of the happiest.
'Miss Browne and I will look after the fowls, daddie,' Hermie said.
'An' me,' said Floss.
'You and I must get the crops in,' Bart and his father told each other.
But how this would be done, and what the crops should be, they had but
the remotest notion; still, it was a phrase heard often in Wilgandra,
and sounded well.
'Will it take you long to learn to shear the sheep?' asked Miss Browne
timidly.
Cameron looked a trifle disturbed. Sheep seemed very right and proper
things to own when one was 'going on the land,' but it had not yet
occurred to him to think to what use he was going to put them.
Bart's observation of his neighbours had been a little keener than this,
however.
'We sha'n't get any wool to mention from that handful,' he said. 'I
suppose they are for killing. Mrs. Dunks says they use a sheep a week.
Her husband kills one every Saturday.'
'Who--who--oh, surely you will not have to kill them, Mr. Cameron!' said
Miss Browne, shuddering with horror. 'Surely you will not be expected
to kill them for yourself.'
The thought of it turned Cameron sick; it seemed to him he had never
quite got over chopping off a fowl's head once for his wife, though it
was nine years ago.
Roly gloated over the thought.
'I'll shoot them with my bow and arrow,' he said.
Cameron wiped his brow.
'I suppose one could use a gun to them, eh, Bart?' he said.
But Bart looked doubtful.
Nearing home Cameron gave the reins to Bartie, and leaped out and walked
the last mile or two, wrestling with the problem how he might turn
himself from a dreamer of dreams into a practicable, hard-working man of
business. It had to be done, some way, somehow, or what to do with
these children, and how to face his wife?
Then suddenly he found his thoughts had wandered to the sunset fire that
blazed before him in the sky; he was putting it in a picture, massing up
the purple banks, touching the edges with a streak of scarlet.
When he convicted himself of the wandering he groaned aloud.
'There is only one way,' he said, and walked into his house with lifted
head.
The children were stretching their limbs after their cramping drive,
Roly and Bart panting on the floor, a cup of water beside them so warm
and flat and tasteless that even thirst would not bring them to it.
Bart was talking of Nansen, picturing stupendous icebergs, revelling in
the exquisite frigidity of the water in which Nansen had washed
luxuriously every day. The exercise actually cooled the little party
down one degree. Then in to them came their father.
'I want a bonfire made in the yard,' he said; 'a very big one, I have
something to burn.'
The boys were upright in a moment and on their way; even Floss tossed
down the newspaper with which she was fanning herself (the _Wilgandra
Times_, with which was incorporated the _Moondi Mercury_), and rushed to
partake of the fun, and Hermie and Miss Browne found themselves impelled
to go and see what was happening.
Such a blaze! Bart raked up a lot of garden rubbish and added tree
branches. Roly, feeling quite authorised since the bonfire had been
commanded by his father and was no illicit one of his own, made journeys
to and from the wood-heap and piled on the better part of a quarter of a
ton of wood just paid for.
Then down came the father, his blue eyes a little wild, his mouth not
quite under his own control. He had his mustard-box under his arm.
'Oh, daddie!' Hermie cried and sprang at him. 'Oh no, no, no!'
But he pushed her aside.
'Don't speak to me--none of you speak one word,' he said, and he stooped
and dropped the box where the flames leapt.
'No, no, no!' Hermie screamed, and rushed at it, and put a hand right
through the flame and touched the box, then drew back, helpless, crying.
'Get away!' Bart said, and pushed her back from danger and took the work
himself, a rake for aid.
He dragged the charred box out, Miss Browne fluttered round him and
caught at the lid and burnt her hands, and fell over the rake and singed
her hair and eyebrows. Roly and Floss, carried off their feet by the
excitement, rushed to help, and the box lay safely on the grass again,
two minutes from the time it had been in the flames.
'Let it alone, no one dare to touch it!' commanded the father, and the
voice was one the children had never heard before.
He picked the box up, hot and blackened as it was, and flung it on the
fire again; the lid fell off, there came a rain of tubes and
paint-brushes, a splutter or two from the turpentine, the smell of burnt
paint, then the fire burnt steadily again, and there was silence that
only Hermie's bitter crying broke.
The father had gone back to the house; he came down to them once again
and this time The Ship was in his arms.
Surely an ill-starred ship! There had been no money to send it to
Sydney for the artists there to appraise; Cameron, absolutely frightened
when he found how the debts were growing, exhibited it in Wilgandra and
a neighbouring town or two, and marked it ten pounds.
But who in the back-blocks was going to give that sum for a picture
without a frame? The coloured supplements, with elaborate plush
surrounds, satisfied the artistic yearnings of most of the community,
and The Ship came back to sad anchorage in the Cameron dining-room.
But to burn it!
Hermie gave a fresh despairing cry. Floss, Bart, and Roly stood
absolutely still, the instinct of obedience strong at such a crisis.
Cameron's arm was again raised, but Miss Browne flung herself right upon
him and clung to the canvas, her weak hands suddenly filled with
strength and tenacity.
[Illustration: 'NOT THIS, NOT THIS,' SHE CRIED, 'ANYTHING BUT THIS.']
'Not this, not this!' she cried. 'Anything but this! Give it to me--I
will keep it from your sight--I will hide it away--it shall never meet
your eyes. My ship, my ship, you shall not burn it.'
She held it in her arms, actually torn from his grasp.
Cameron glanced around--the leaping flames, the startled children,
Hermie's hysterical sobbing, Miss Browne's wild attitude of daring and
defiance--he told himself he had taken a theatrical vengeance on
himself.
'Oh, do as you like,' he said irritably, and turned back to the house.
'Bart, put a bucket of water on that fire.'
One month from the night of the sacrifice the Camerons were in
possession of the selection, and Mrs. Dunks was lying in peace among
those of her own people who rested from the sun's heat in the Forbes
graveyard.
*CHAPTER VI*
*Thirty Thousand a Year*
'Ah, for a man to arise in me,
That the man I am may cease to be.'
'I should think we might get the bag of corn now, eh, Bart?' Cameron
wiped his brow, and stopped to survey the patch of ground that looked so
smooth.
Bart looked at it critically.
'I think we'd better give it another turn, dad,' he said, and hitched
the string-mended harness a little more securely to the jaded horse.
'It's such a lunatic plough, it misses twice for every time it hits.'
Cameron looked at the wide space of ground to be gone over yet again.
'I'm very anxious to get the corn in,' he said. 'You see, we're a month
late as it is, and it will be a big saving in feed when we have it to
cut.'
'Yes; but it is no good unless the ground is ready,' Bart said. 'We
have no manure or anything like the _Journal_ says. We'd better give it
an extra turn.'
'You're quite right, quite right, my boy,' Cameron said, and led his
horse on again, up and down, up and down the furrows.
'I don't like such a lot of stumps being left in,' Bart said, the
seventh time in an hour that the plough had gnashed on one. 'In the
_Journal_ there's a picture of a stump eradicator--a grand little
machine. We'll have to save up and get it, dad.'
'Ay, ay,' said the father; 'still, I don't think the stumps will
interfere very much. The corn can easily come up between them.'
'It would be easier ploughing,' sighed Bart, following the horse about
in a waved line.
'You're tired out, lad; knock off for a spell,' Cameron said. 'I keep
forgetting how young you are. We have been working here since
eight--five hours.'
But Bart would work till he dropped rather than leave off a minute
before his father. He took a long drink at the oatmeal water Miss
Browne had made, and went on stooping, picking out the stones, digging
spots the unfaithful plough had left untouched, following the horse
while his father dug.
Cameron was thin as a rail. Ever since they had come here he had worked
like a man possessed, for the spectacle that came to haunt his nights
was of his children in actual need of bread. He had left debts behind
him in the township--a hundred pounds' worth of them; there was a
hundred and fifty yet to pay on the selection; and the patching-up of
the house, rough as it had been, had taken money. There was seed to
buy, there were tools to mend or replace, interest to pay on the money
he had borrowed on the place--a thousand other things.
And not one word of all the changes did the letters carry across the
secret seas.
'There is no need to worry mamma unnecessarily,' Cameron said to the
children. 'When we have made a great success of the place and paid
everything off, then we will tell her.'
Across the acres came the insistent sound of the dinner-bell.
'I don't think I'll stop,' Cameron said, 'I'm not hungry. Off you go,
Bart, and don't come back for an hour.'
But Bart was learning the art of managing his father.
'The poor old nag wants a rest,' he said. 'We must take her up and give
her a drink and some oats. And I'd come in to dinner, dad, if I were
you. Hermie will be disappointed if you don't.'
So they went up to the little patchwork house together.
It was not to a very tempting repast the bell had summoned them.
Hermie, no longer able to order macaroons and whitebait and tinned
oysters to make delicacies with, had, childlike, lost interest in the
culinary department of the house. And Miss Browne was no artist; to her
a leg of mutton represented nothing but a leg of mutton, and fricassees
and such tempting departures seemed but tales in the cookery book never
to be put to practical use.
To-day there were chops--fried. Years back, when Lizzie came fresh from
the State to Mrs. Cameron's tutelage, she had been instantly instructed
in the fine art of grilling. But now that there was no one to insist
upon these delicate distinctions, and the frying-pan was so much easier
labour, Cameron was slowly forgetting the taste of grilled meat.
There were potatoes too; the family took it for granted that these were
necessarily nasty things, either watery or burnt.
Bread and jam--no longer silver-pan conserve, but cheap raspberry, in
which the chief element was tomato--finishing the pleasing repast.
Miss Browne sat at the head of the table, exhausted and dishevelled, for
she had swept the room, had sewn on four buttons, and dressed Floss, and
set the table.
Cameron, before removing to the selection, had dismissed her again,
gently enough; he knew it would be impossible to continue to pay her ten
shillings a week for being a nuisance to them.
And again she had wept and wrung her hands and entreated to remain. The
tears streaming down her cheeks, she told him the time she had been in
his family was the happiest in her life. She would not dream of taking
money now, she said; but she implored him to let her work for her home.
So here she was, still at the head of the table, faithfully apportioning
the dish of chops and keeping the smallest and worst-cooked one quietly
for herself, and pouring out tea, which all the family drank with each
and every meal, so slowly and confusedly that her own was always cold
before she touched it.
'Not a chop?' she said to Cameron. 'Oh, but you really must. Think of
the severe physical labour you are continually doing. Just a small one!
You touched no meat yesterday, nor the day before.' She looked on the
verge of tears.
'Don't trouble, I don't care for any,' Cameron said. 'I'll have
some--some,'--his eyes wandered round the table in search of something
nicer than the potatoes--'some bread and butter.'
But Lizzie's prentice hand at bread! And store butter three weeks old!
He reached himself _Pendennis_, and, helped by the pleasant gossiping of
the mayor, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls.
All through the meal Miss Browne lamented over his appetite, but he
heeded her voice just as much as he did the flies that buzzed round his
tea-cup--both were integral parts of life, and to be endured.
'May I put you a chop aside, and warm it up for your tea?' she persisted
anxiously.
He put his finger on the place in the book and looked up for one second.
'I am going to try vegetarianism,' he said. 'I have come to the
conclusion that meat does not agree with me.'
And it did not. Every second Saturday now with his own hands he was
obliged to kill a sheep for the sake of his family; he found a man would
charge ten shillings each time to come the distance. The physical
nausea for the task was such that from the time he first took the knife
into his shuddering hand to the day they buried him, no morsel of animal
food passed his lips.
The children were still--a month after they had come--full of
magnificent enthusiasms. Hermie and Miss Browne were going to restore
the fallen fortunes of the family by raising poultry. Hermie worked
intoxicating sums on paper, and even Miss Browne, distrustful of the
child's arithmetic, on checking the figures could find so little wrong
that she began to be a-tremble with delight at the prospect herself.
Bart himself, the only one of the family touched with caution, found
they had left sufficient margin for losses, and assented that a fortune
might assuredly be made.
For who could dispute the fact that the grocer charged from one to two
shillings a dozen for his eggs, according to season? Let them reckon on
the basis of one shilling. And Small, the butcher, charged three and
sixpence to four and sixpence a pair for table fowls. Let them be very
safe, and say two and sixpence.
They were starting with the twelve fowls the Dunks had left on the
estate. Now if one hen in one year brought up three clutches of
chickens, how many would that make? Hermie, with shining eyes, cried
thirty-nine; but Bart, who had seen mortality among chickens, refused to
put down more than twenty.
'Very well,' said Hermie, 'count twenty, if you like, only I know it
will be thirty-nine, I shall be so careful of them. Twelve hens with
twenty chickens each--that will be--that will be--what are twelve
twenties, Miss Browne?'
'Two hundred and forty,' replied the lady, amazed herself that it could
be so much, 'two hundred and forty! Why, I have never seen so many
together in my life.'
Bart wrote down the figures two hundred and forty.
'Fowls grow up in six months,' Hermie said. 'Lizzie says so, and her
mother used to keep fowls. The _Journal_ says--I read it this
morning--that fowls generally lay two hundred eggs a year.'
'Say one hundred and fifty,' Bart said.
'Very well,' said Hermie. 'Please, Miss Browne, what are two hundred
and forty times one hundred and fifty?'
'My dear,' gasped Miss Browne, 'I--I really need a pencil for that.'
Bart offered his stump, and Miss Browne was five minutes working the
sum, so sure was she she must have made an astounding mistake somewhere.
'It--it certainly comes to thirty-six thousand,' she said at last.
'Would you please multiply it by a shilling a dozen, and say what it
comes to,' was Hermie's further request.
Miss Browne again took a surprising time to do the simple sum.
'A hundred and fifty pounds,' she said.
'That is for the first year,' Hermie said; 'but now would you please
work it out on this big piece of paper, and see what we should get the
second year. Two hundred and forty fowls----'
'And the twelve you began with, too,' said Roly.
Hermie was quite willing to be cautious.
'We won't count them, we'll allow for them dying, too,' she said. 'Two
hundred and forty fowls with, say, twenty chickens each in the year.
What's that?'
Miss Browne's pencil worked.
'Four thousand eight hundred,' she said.
'And they lay one hundred and fifty eggs a year.'
Miss Browne looked quite shaken at the result her arithmetic
produced--seven hundred and twenty thousand eggs! Three thousand
pounds!
The excitement made her work out the results of the third year, and she
was weeping when the sun came out--sixty thousand pounds. She was
weeping for her grey spoiled life. Exquisite dresses, travel, health,
even marriage, and little children of her own, would have been all
possible, had she worked these sums years and years ago, and set to work
with twelve fowls.
Bart still had misgivings.
'More might die than that,' he said.
Hermie was quite pale with excitement.
'We have counted that half that come out die,' she said, 'and Lizzie
says her mother always reared ten out of every thirteen. We have only
counted six. But count three, if you like; still, that is thirty
thousand pounds. And we have not counted selling any.'
Even Bart saw the moderation that only counted three chickens to each
hatching, and his doubts died away.
Visions of all this wealth intoxicated the children; they tore their
father from his book; Hermie told him, with eyes ashine with tears and
little heaving breast, that he was never to do any more of that dreadful
ploughing, that in three years they would be making thirty thousand a
year, at least, by no harder work than just feeding the fowls and
packing up eggs.
He smiled at them very gently; he could not bear to damp their ardour.
In very truth he could not exactly find out why these figures should not
be as they seemed.
'Of course you would have a huge feed-bill and want a big run of land,'
he said.
Bart gave a comprehensive sweep of his young arm towards the scrubby
bush-land that lay around them.
'As much as we like for a shilling an acre a year,' he said.
'But the feed-bill?'
'Five thousand a year would buy enough at all events, and still we'd
have twenty-five thousand left,' Hermie said jubilantly. 'You will give
up the ploughing, won't you, daddie?'
Cameron temporised, and said he would just do a little while the
chickens grew.
That night a violent wind came up with drenching rain. Cameron lay
listening to it, wondering what skies were over the head of his beloved
whom the seas held from him.
Then he heard doors opening and shutting, whispered words, and finally a
series of very angry cackles. He threw on some clothes, and went to
find out the meaning. In the living-room an oil lamp was flaring in the
draught, a Plymouth rock was roosting on the piano top, a white Leghorn
was regarding the sofa suspiciously. On the floor sat Hermie, rubbing a
wrathful fowl dry with a Turkish bath-towel, and presently in staggered
Bartie and Miss Browne, the former with five fowls by the legs, the
latter nervously holding one at arm's length.
Cameron fell into a convulsion of silent laughter, so earnest were the
children, so absorbed. And Miss Browne, poor Miss Browne, how ludicrous
she looked with her scanty hair flying ragged round her shoulders, her
figure clad in an ancient mackintosh, her mouth frightened, her eyes
heroic with the endeavour not to let go the fowl, which twisted itself
madly to peck at her trembling hand!
'I don't know what you are laughing for, papa,' Hermie said, a trifle
offended. 'The fowl-house leaks dreadfully.'
'But it has rained half a dozen nights since we came; you never brought
the things in here before, my child,' he urged.
Hermie received Miss Browne's contribution on her knee, and fell to
drying its dejected feathers.
'We didn't know before that each of them was worth two thousand five
hundred pounds,' she said. 'Please, papa, will you hold Bartie's fowls,
so that he can light the fire. We are going to give them something hot
to drink.'
*CHAPTER VII*
*Come Home! Come Home*
.
'Oh, that 'twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Around me once again!'
Five years dragged on. Sometimes word came that the travellers were at
last coming home, and Cameron's heart grew warm, only to grow cold
again, as he realised he dare not let them come to this. Then, while
the agony of dread still was crushing him, the next mail would bring the
bitter relief that the time was not yet--the agent or the music masters
or some one else had found another year was necessary, or the great
career would be spoiled. Not one word all this time of the selection,
else had the 'career' been in instant danger of the ruin predicted, the
mother would have journeyed at the greatest possible number of knots an
hour back to them. Her dreamer of dreams depending on a selection, her
children depending on her dreamer, become his own master!
Yet surely the man had had his lesson, and toiled now marvellously,
piteously.
Five years, and not one idle day.
Five years of bewildered struggling with unknown enemies--drought,
hurricanes of wind, bush fires, devastating rains, a soil that the
farmer born and bred could hardly have made pay. Never a complaining
word. Hermie, growing to womanhood, broke her heart over his life at
times.
There was even a day when she fell down on her knees at a chair, and
covered paper wildly with a pen that commanded her mother to come home.
Cameron working obstinately on one frightful day, the thermometer one
hundred and seventeen degrees, had a 'touch of the sun,' and even after
the doctor had left him quieted, his head in cool cloths, his
temperature falling, he still moaned for his wife, cried to her like a
child, stretched out his arms, raved, besought her to hold his hand. It
was then that Hermie broke her promise, down on her knees, just hidden
by the bed-curtain, writing wildly with the pen she had brought for the
doctor to write his prescription.
'By the next boat,' she wrote; 'if you wait for the one after, it will
be wicked of you. How can you stay like this? Challis, Challis--all our
lives spoiled for her to have a chance! We have no chance; father's life
is worse than any dog's. Challis--I think I hate Challis! Going along
quietly and happily, are we? Miss Macintosh taking your place? We are
starving, worse than starving; the food we have to eat is worse than
none at all. He needs delicate things, ice and invalid dishes, properly
cooked. I have just been to the safe to look what I could get, and the
mutton has gone bad--it goes bad nearly every day in summer here; there
is no milk, for the cows have no feed, there is some nasty mouldy bread
and bad butter, and golden syrup with flies in it, and sugar alive with
ants. You! You and Challis are eating the best things that can be
bought with money. I hate Challis! The doctor says we are to keep his
head cool with water, and to stand vessels full of water about the room
to cool the air. The well is nearly dry, the sun has turned the tank
water bad, or else a wombat or a bird has fallen in, and it is
poisonous. Bartie has gone a mile with the cart to beg some from the
Dalys.
'Miss Macintosh taking care of us all so nicely! We have no one in the
world but Miss Browne. Oh yes, we have told you lies and lies, but you
ought not to have believed them. You should have come to see for
yourself that he was happy and well. Oh, if you could hear him crying,
just to hold your hand, he says, and to hear you talk! Ah, mother,
mother, mother, how cruel you are!'
But the spirit of the man, just learning to be indomitable, kept him
back from long illness. In four days he was up again, easily turned
sick and faint, but able to lie on the sofa, and even take an interest
in the delicacies that Hermie set before him. She had ridden Tramby
into Wilgandra herself, gone to the grocer, and implored him for nice
things--calf's foot jellies, and whitebait, and Canadian tinned fruit.
'My sister, Challis Cameron, the pianist will be back soon. I have
written for them to come, so you will be sure to be paid.'
And the grocer, a kindly spot in his heart still for the youngest
housekeeper he had ever taken orders from, made up a big basket of
tinned goods, and said he would wait for Challis to pay him.
'Hermie,' Cameron said from the sofa on the fifth day, 'my head is still
confused, but I seem to remember when I was very bad that you kept
telling me mamma was coming. There has been no letter, has there?'
Hermie grew a little pale.
'No, there has been no letter, papa,' she said.
'Hermie,' he cried, after spending a minute trying to find the reason
for her curiously averted head, 'you did not write for mamma, Hermie?'
She turned to him then, her blue young eyes on fire.
'I did,' she said; 'it is time, more than time she came. If she does
not come soon, you--we--we shall all be dead!'
'Child, child!' he said.
He had risen from his sofa and gone to the window, to look once more
with aching eyes at his wretched lands. If this had been the green isle
in the sea he had dreamed of making it, he would have sent long ago
himself. But these desolate acres!
'Child,' he groaned, 'I couldn't let her come to this. I am only half a
man--half a man. God left the manliness out of me when He made me, and
gave me womanish ways instead. And I have never fought them down, as it
must have been meant I should do. But I will begin again, I will work
harder--things must take a turn, and then I can meet her, and she will
not despise me. Child, God has no more awful punishment than when He
lets those we love despise us. Send another letter, tell her not to
come yet--not just yet. Let me have one more chance.'
Hermie was sobbing at his side, pulling at his arm, trying to urge him
back to the sofa. She knew he was not talking to her, knew he was hardly
aware she was there, but her sensitive spirit, leaping at his troubles
with him, was bowed down with the knowledge and weight of them. How she
loved this man--this grey-haired, blue-eyed man at her side! Hardly the
love of daughter for father; her feelings for him had in them something
of the passionate, protecting tenderness of a mother for a crippled
child.
'Lie down,' she said, 'there--let me move these pillows; that is better.
She must come--she should have come long ago. And I told her to be sure
to come by the next boat. Now lie still; I am going to get your lunch.'
The exertion and emotion had tried him exceedingly. He lay still,
still, his face to the wall; and now his mood brought a tear from under
his eyelid. It was too late! She would have started! Ah, well, praise
God for that! God who took these things out of our hands. She was
coming--he might give up for a little time, and lie with his head on her
breast; she who had always forgiven him would forgive him still and
clasp him to her, and call him, 'Dear One.' Then all he would ask would
be the happiness of dying before the world began again.
The happy tears rolled down his cheeks. Hermie, tip-toeing back with her
tray, saw them, and was filled with dismay. What had she done by this
interference?
'Darling,' she said, dropping beside him, 'don't mind, don't mind. The
letter is not posted yet--Bartie was going to take it in this afternoon.
It is not mail day till to-morrow. We will not send it.'
Not posted! Not posted! She was not coming--she might not know of his
extremity, his need for her! The chill wind passed over him and dried
his tears, dried his heart.
'Here is the letter,' the poor child cried; 'don't look like that,
darling. I would not vex you for the world. Shall I tear it up?'
He looked at it piteously. Oh, that Bartie had it, riding with it
through the bush, summoning her, summoning her!
'Shall I burn it?' said the poor little girl.
'Yes,' he said, 'burn it.' His voice was lifeless, his eyes stared
dully at the wall.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*An Atheist*
'Thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat
of the day.'
Hermie put her letter and all hopes of rescue together into the kitchen
fire.
Life was an endless drab again.
She went listlessly out, and stood on the doorstep to look at it.
Her father did not want her, he had pushed his lunch aside, and bidden
her, irritably--he who was so gentle--to leave him to himself.
Bart, poor grave little Bart, a man at fourteen, was working about the
place. Neither he nor the young ones had gone to school while the
father had been ill. He and Roly had been all the morning beating
monotonously at a bush fire just across the road. There was no
excitement about it, there seemed little danger; the fire burned
quietly, steadily--it had been burning for two days--but this morning it
had crept to the fences; the boys had been obliged to cut boughs and
beat at it.
Roly sat on the fence most of the time, and sleepily kept back the
cunning yellow tongues from the patch Bart had entrusted to him. Bart
walked up and down, mechanically threshing out the little licking flames
that longed to curl round the fence.
Sometimes he left Roly on guard, and went to do necessary work, feed the
two calves, shed a burning tear over the dying sheep, give Tramby a few
drops of water.
Hermie went down to him wearily, a sun-bonnet on her head.
'There's no danger about the fire?' She looked at it a little
apathetically.
'Oh no; if there were three of us, we could put it all out. Roly's not
much use, of course.'
'Bart, what are we going to do?'
'For water? Oh, Daly's going to let me have a big cask to-night.
You've got half a bucketful still, haven't you? I didn't want to take
Tramby out till it was cooler. Reminds me, I must mend the cart--that
old shaft's smashed again.'
'And when that cask's gone?'
'Oh, I'll go and get some from old Perry. His well's not half dry, and
there's only himself. But don't you go and be wasteful, Herm--no
washing clothes and that sort of waste.'
'I want a bath--I want to turn on a tap, and not have to use just a
dipper or two. All Challis has to do is turn on a tap.' Hermie spoke
with a strange bitterness.
Bart smiled good-humouredly. 'Yes, she's a lucky little beggar,' he
said. 'My word, if I could have the bath-water she wastes, I'd make
this poor old place look up a bit.'
He looked round on the desolate acres, looked at them with yearning
affection. He was a quiet-natured boy; he did not call himself unhappy;
he would have felt he had nothing left to ask for, had he but a
plentiful water supply for the stock and crops, and better tools to work
with, and a little more strength in that young arm of his. Like his
mother, he had the knack of doing the thing at hand with all his power,
and already he was a far more proficient farmer than his father would
ever be.
'What are you going to do now?' the girl asked, as he hurried away.
'I'll come with you if you like.' Such a hot, patient young face his
was, it smote her that she seldom heeded him. He looked pleased at her
faint show of interest.
He showed her the corn, coming up bravely, the wheat patch, not drooping
quite as much as it might have done. He pointed to the trees in the
little orchard. 'In another month or two those apricots and peaches
will be about ripe,' he said; 'make a nice change, won't they?' His
eyes dwelt lovingly on the green small fruit. 'When the drought
breaks----'
'Pshaw!' said the girl.
'Oh,' the lad said cheerfully, 'it will, one of these days; then we'll
go along grand.'
He had caught the spirit of patience, of acceptance of ills, from the
settlers about.
'But the sheep, nothing will give them life again!' The girl's eyes
burned.
The boy had no fortitude against this; he gave a sudden wet glance
towards the far end of the selection.
'Let's go and see how they're getting on,' he said in a low tone.
The girl rebelled.
'No--why?' she said. 'It only makes us miserable, and we can't help.'
'All right, you go back,' Bart said. 'I'll have to go. I might have to
light another fire.'
Hermie followed him.
The sheep crept away from the house to die, once they found no water was
to be had there. They chose to lie down and cease to be at the spot
where once had been a dam. Patches of ashes showed where Bart had piled
wood over the poor carcases and burnt them up, in his wise young
knowledge that the air must be kept pure.
None were dead to-day, though fifty seemed dying. Half a dozen brown
ragged little lambs filled the air with piteous outcry.
Hermie's heart swelled.
'Can't you do anything?' she said.
'No,' he said, 'they'll have to go. I've had to give them up, dear. If
I can get water for the house for the next week, I'll be glad. Daly is
running very short himself.'
There were footsteps in the bush just near, a panting of breath, a
curious dragging sound.
'Floss,' said Hermie, and remembered for the first time she had not seen
her little sister for hours. 'Where can she have been?'
The child was dragging a bucket. Her face was almost purple with the
heat; she had kept her eyes half closed, to shut out the almost
unendurable glare, and did not know she was so close to home till she
stumbled almost into Bart's arms.
When she saw Hermie there too, she clung to the handle jealously.
'It's not for the house,' she said, 'so don't you think it. Let it
alone, Bart! Bart, if you take it, I'll scratch.'
Such a fierce little face it was!
'I'm only going to carry it for you, Chucks,' Bart said. 'You shall do
what you like with it.'
'True'n honour?'
'True and honour.'
The little girl relinquished her hold, but kept a guarding eye on the
precious fluid.
'Where did you get it, old girl?' Bart said.
'Don't tell father?'
'Why ever not?' said Hermie.
Floss turned on her vehemently.
'I took it,' she said. 'Don't care, I'm glad. They've got a whole cask,
the greedies, and lots of money, so they can get as much as they like.
They get casks from the Bore, and they're sent down in the train, and
they've got a cart to fetch it. They drink it all themselves--pigs!
They don't care about the sheep.'
'Not the Scotts, Floss--you've not been stealing the poor Scotts'
water?' cried Hermie, aghast. The Scotts lived in a miserable hut on
the adjoining selection, and were the nearest neighbours.
Flossie's eyes blazed indignantly.
'Them!' she said. 'They've got less than us! I got it from those mean
measuring men.'
Hermie looked puzzled.
'She must mean that camp of surveyors down the road,' Bart said. 'It's
a mile away at least. Why, you poor old Flossie, have you been right
down to that camp for this little drop of water?' He put his disengaged
arm over her bony little shoulders.
Floss caught her breath, and looked unhappily into the half-full bucket.
'The first one was fuller,' she said, 'but the s-sheep nearly knocked me
down to g-get it, and they s-s-spilled it on the g-ground.' Her voice
shook with sorrow for the waste.
'Twice,' muttered Bart, 'she's been twice, Hermie.'
They were back among the sheep now, and Bart hardly knew what to do with
such a drop among so many.
'This one,' said Floss; 'look at its poor eyes--and that one lying down,
and the little lambs, Bartie.'
Bart put the bucket to the noses of the ones she touched, but had to
drag it away before the poor things had half what they wanted.
A piteous bleat went up from the others.
'I--I think I'll just get one more,' Floss said, and almost staggered to
the bucket. 'It's quite easy to steal it now; the camp's left all by
itself. Oh, I must get one more--look at that one's eyes.'
But Bart picked her up in his arms, and started back to the house with
her.
'You'll just come and lie down quietly,' he said. 'I never saw anything
like your face. You'll be ill like father. Poor little Floss! poor
little old Floss!'
'There--there would have been half a bucket more,' said Floss, 'only I
nearly fell once, and it s-s-spilled.' She was sobbing on his shoulder,
sobbing heart-brokenly, hard little Floss who never cried.
Hermie took the child from her brother at the door.
'I'll undress her and sponge her,' she said; 'that will cool her a
little, but I quite expect she will be ill like father. Well, it is all
Challis's fault.'
In an hour Floss lay asleep, the fierce heat of her cheeks a little
faded, and Hermie's hands were idle again.
Miss Browne was helping Lizzie to fold the poor rags of clothes from the
wash; the father still begged to be left alone; outside Bart and Roly
still threshed monotonously at the fire.
Hermie went into the tiny bedroom that had been run up for her because
the house was too small--the bedroom that the mother had been so pleased
to hear was built. She found herself looking in the glass at herself,
looking sadly, listlessly.
She saw a girl, thin, undeveloped, with a delicately cut face, and
shadows lying like ink-smears beneath her eyes. Her womanhood was
coming, and she had no strength to meet it; at her age she should have
had rounded limbs and pleasing curves. She seemed to recognise this, as
she gazed unhappily at her angles. Her hair pleased her, for the sun
was making a glory of it; there was a nameless beauty about her face
that she recognised vaguely.
'I shall never marry,' she sobbed. 'No one ever comes here but that
heavy, stupid Morty. I shall be like Miss Browne in a few more years.
I'm getting untidy now--no one can be tidy in clothes like these; I
never care how I do my hair--what is the use, when there is no one to
see it? I've not been to a party or a proper picnic, like the girls in
the book, in all my life. I shouldn't know what to do, if I did go to
one. No; I shall grow just like Miss Browne, and it is all Challis's
fault.'
A portrait of the sweet-faced girl-player hung on the wall. Hermie tore
it down from its place and broke it into fragments.
'I'm just tired to death of seeing you smile!' she muttered.
Miss Browne came in--Miss Browne, with perspiration on her face and a
strand or two of her colourless hair loose. She carried an armful of
Hermie's clothes from the wash. 'They are a very bad colour,' she said,
'but we cannot blame Lizzie, when there was next to no water. My dear,
what is the matter?'
Hermie did not even wipe the tears from her face; she was sitting still,
her hands on her knees, and letting the salt drops trickle drearily down
her cheeks.
Miss Browne took a step towards her, then paused timidly. There had
never been much intimacy or confidence between them. Hermie, with her
innate love of daintiness and beauty and the hardness of youth, despised
while she pitied the poor woman.
'Is it--anything I can help--your father--Floss--you are
anxious--worried?'
'Oh no,' said Hermie, 'I wasn't thinking of any one but myself.' She
leaned her head back, and had a sense of pleasure in her rolling tears.
'I suppose I'm not much more miserable than usual; but then I expect you
are miserable--every one is, I think.'
'But not in the middle of the day, love,' the lady-help said.
'Why not?'
'Oh'--vaguely--'there isn't time, as a rule. One is so busy. It is a
different thing when you go to bed.'
'What do you do then,' said Hermie, 'when you are miserable in bed?'
Miss Browne thought a second. 'I think I say my prayers,' she said.
'And if that does not cure you?'
'I say them again.'
'And if you are still miserable?'
'I--I think I go to sleep then; one is generally tired.' She spoke
apologetically.
Hermie leaned her head still farther back. 'Saying prayers would not
help me much,' she said. 'I am an atheist.'
'What?' screamed Miss Browne.
'An atheist,' said Hermie. 'It is very comfortable to be one. You have
only to think about eating and sleeping. Oh dear!'
She arose languidly and administered water to Miss Browne, who was
gasping alarmingly. 'This room is hot,' she said. 'Go and lie down in
your own. You shouldn't have made me talk, if you didn't want to hear
things. Mind that bit of loose wood at the door.'
Miss Browne, thus dismissed, went away like a chidden child, but her
eyes were full of terror, and her very knees trembled. She groped her
way to the sitting-room and poured out the frightful story into Mr.
Cameron's ears.
He made his own way presently to the hot, cramped bedroom. Hermie had
let her hair down, and was sitting on the edge of the bed surveying her
poor little prettinesses tragically in the looking-glass.
Her father sat down on the bed beside her, and disclaimed fatigue and
headache and everything else she urged upon him.
'What is this Miss Browne tells me, little one?' he said, and almost
indulgently, so young, slight, and absurd she looked, to be questioning
eternity.
Hermie twisted her wavy hair up into a hard plain knot.
'I only said I was an atheist,' she said, and her young lips quivered
and her eyes grew wild.
He put his arm round her.
'How long have you been feeling like this, childie?'
She burst into a passion of frightened tears.
'Since yesterday morning,' she said.
'Tell me about it,' he whispered.
She swallowed a few sobs. 'I'm tired of saying prayers, nothing gets
better--nothing comes. It--it's easy enough to believe in God, if you
live in Sydney and have water laid on--and cool days and money and a
mother. But out here--oh, He can't expect us to believe in Him!'
'I think a few of us do,' he said.
'Us!' she repeated. 'You don't believe anything, do you, father? I've
never heard you say a word. I have thought for long enough you were an
atheist too.'
He took his arm away and moved to the little window; it was almost ten
minutes before he turned round and came back to her.
'Child,' he said, 'sometimes I think my mistakes are too many for me. I
have nothing to say to you. I dare not even say, Forgive me. Poor
little child, to have come to such rocks! I should have helped you long
ago. Only, you see, I had got in the habit of leaving these things to
mother.'
'Mother did not often go to church,' said Hermie discontentedly. 'I
don't remember her talking religion much.'
'She breathed it instead,' he said; 'she is the best woman in the world,
never forget that, Hermie. When we were first married I was full of the
young university man's talk--brain at war with established doctrines.
She never came over weakly to me, as some women might have done, she
never kept spotlessly aloof, indeed, she conceded me freely many of my
points. But she managed to make it plain to me that all these questions
mattered very little--Christ, and prayer, and love, and doing our
best--those were her rocks, and waves of dogma washing for ever on them
could not move them.'
'Did she ever read any of those books of yours--those on the top shelf?'
whispered Hermie.
'Ah,' said Cameron, 'you have been reading those, have you? Oh yes, she
was never afraid to read anything that was written, but she
distinguished between faith and creed. She said she did not try to
explain or understand God, only to believe in Him. She is quite right.
It is the hard names, the popular orthodoxies, the iron creeds, that
take the soul and heart and warmth out of religion. When you were
little, she did nothing more than show you God as your Father, and
Christ as your Saviour, to be tenderly loved and obeyed, and gone to for
refuge and comfort.'
'No,' said Hermie.
'No; it was her way. She wanted the love of God to be a living thing to
you all--a glad, warm, spontaneous thing, like the love you bore us,
only deeper. She would have no lines and rules and analyses of it while
you were small. It was not a thing she actually spoke about very often,
but white hours, find room for themselves at times--on plain Mondays and
Saturdays as often as on quiet Sundays, and she had a way of making the
influence of them run, clear, fresh, pleasant streams through the
mud-flats of life. Can you realise in any degree what it is to me to
find her daughter with such thoughts, Hermie?' His voice was very low.
Hermie pulled the pin from the plain tight knob, and let all her hair
hide her flushed face again.
'If--if only I had known you thought like this!' she muttered.
'Yes,' he said; 'it is a thing I shall never be able to put away from my
mind again, that I did not let you know. A man gets in the way of
keeping quiet things like these to himself, but I should not have
forgotten I had children. I knew Miss Browne was a good woman, whatever
her faults, and I felt that I might leave you to her. Don't think I am
excusing myself.'
'It was not your fault, darling, darling,' Hermie said, and clung to
him; 'but think how miserable we are--all of us, even poor little Floss!
How can He forget us like this?'
Cameron's blue eyes looked out at the blue sky.
'Not to understand, only to believe. He does not lead us always through
green pastures. The severe and daily discipline makes us shrink, no
doubt. But we have to go on.'
'Oh, darling, I do love you, I do love you!' wept the girl.
'Tie up your hair, childie, and we will go down and sit among the roses,
if any are still alive. I am quite strong enough to walk.'
He opened the door, and they went out together, and neither looked at
the sky. But here had gathered a brave cloud host, and there another
contingent came, determined, black-browed, strenuously fighting the
long-victorious sun, desperately clinging together. And over the
fainting earth flashed its lights, and through the heavens tore the
sudden thunder of its guns.
And the battle was to it.
Down came the sweet torrents of the rain, and the cracked, piteous earth
lay breathlessly glad and still beneath it. You heard the calves call
to their mothers, the surprised whinny of the horses seeking shelter.
You saw the sheep struggling to their feet and lapping the wet grass
with swollen tongues.
You heard the birds making all sorts of new little cries and noises, as
they flew wildly for shelter--birds many of them that had been born and
grown to make nests for themselves, and never known the strange
phenomenon of rain.
You heard the hisses and splutters of the bush fires, as the evil spirit
went out of them.
You saw a lad come up from them, his beating bough still in his hand,
the lines of his young grave face all broken up, and the glad tears
bursting out, to meet the deluge of rain that beat in his face.
You saw a small girl rushing out half dressed and heedless of the
torrent, for the exquisite pleasure of seeing the sheep drink.
You saw a woman with thin, blown hair and a drab complexion saying her
prayers in her bedroom.
Down where the roses were just recalled to life, Hermie was clinging to
her father, both wet through with the sweet blinding rain.
'Oh, you didn't believe me, did you?' she cried. 'As if I could--as if
I could! It was just that the dust had got into my heart and choked me.
Oh, darling, I never really meant that dreadful thing! Dearest, you
don't think I meant it, do you?' Her tears were gushing out in streams.
'I never believed it for one moment,' he said, and kissed her, and led
her back to the house.
*CHAPTER IX*
*Mortimer Stevenson*
He was a man, take him for all and all.'
Morty came up to the selection the next Sunday--Mortimer Stevenson.
'Glad to see you, Morty,' Cameron said. 'What's the news of the war? It
is a week since we have seen the paper.
Mortimer fastened his horses' reins to the verandah-post, then drew half
a dozen papers out of his saddle-bag--a daily or two, a couple of
weeklies, one or two English special war numbers.
'I'd rather you read for yourself,' he said, handing them to the older
man; 'it's not pretty enough to talk about much. Those Boers take a lot
of beating. Of course, it will be all right as soon as Lord Roberts
takes charge.'
The crisp papers were in Cameron's hands; a few yards away an old canvas
chair stretched itself out invitingly.
'Hermie, my dear--Miss Browne--here is Mr. Stevenson,' he called down
the passage of the little house.
'Don't mind me, I'll just sit down here and have a smoke while you
read,' Stevenson said; 'don't disturb any one, perhaps they are busy.'
He sat down on the verandah step, and began to fill his pipe, and
Cameron, relieved, opened his papers, and was in the Transvaal for the
rest of the afternoon.
To look at, Stevenson was a typical young bushman. He had added inches
to his stature so rapidly, and breadth to his shoulders, that he was ill
at ease anywhere but in the saddle. His complexion was burnt to a deep
copper. Grey, good eyes looked squarely at you.
Used to cities, you would not like his dress. A serviceable tweed suit,
country-cut, one of the brilliant ties, which, so the storekeepers
persuade the bush, are worn in Sydney, a soft brown hat with its
dangling, string-coloured fly-veil.
His father was a vigorous old man of seventy; his type occurs again and
again on the out back stations.
He had gathered great wealth during all those laborious years, and he
spent it, if not frugally, at least with full respect for its difficult
garnering. He had been a member of the Upper House, and his wife,
during her lifetime, had much enjoyed the dignity of seeing his letters
addressed, 'The Hon. Matthew Stevenson, M.L.C.'
He had had but a rudimentary education, yet his plain common-sense and
clear intellect had made the loss only a slight one to him. To his
sons--six of them he had--he offered education, or at all events its
equivalent--the money for it--liberally, and three of them had taken
advantage of it, and gone finally into various professions in Sydney.
The others--the duller three--had assimilated just as much of the tonic
waters as does the ordinary youth of eighteen; then they shook the dust
of Sydney off their feet, and returned thankfully to the station where
their hearts had always been. Mortimer was youngest of this latter
three, and the only one now unmarried.
Bart came down the passage, and his eyes brightened at the sight of the
figure smoking on the verandah step.
'Hallo!' he said, 'just the fellow I wanted. Look here, Daly gave me a
whole lot of new seed--Sheep Burnett I think he called it. Will it hurt
to sow it on that place where the sorghum was?'
'Oh, any place will do, old chap; but you needn't waste your best
ground; it's great stuff, you know--it would grow in the Sahara. Just
sow it along with your grass or clover seeds.'
'It comes up quickly, doesn't it?' Bart said anxiously. 'Do you think
it would make all down there look smooth and green and nice in a month?'
Mortimer laughed. 'Are you taking to landscape gardening, Bart?' he
said. 'I never knew before you had an eye for effect.'
Bart sat down on the step. 'It's no joking matter, Morty,' he said.
'My mother and Challis will be home in a month; we've got to make the
place look up a bit before they come. The governor's been making
bonfires of all the rubbish since breakfast--it does look tidier,
doesn't it?'
Mortimer looked round. 'It's not the same place,' he said heartily, and
added for encouragement, 'And after all, perhaps they won't come, old
fellow; you know you've had a lot of false alarms.'
'Oh, but this time it's certain,' Bart said, and not without
unhappiness; 'they've actually started by this.'
Floss came clattering out in her rough boots. She sat down on the other
side of the family friend.
'I knewed it was you when I heard Pup bark,' she said; 'you came last
Sunday, too, and the Sunday before that.'
'Did I, Flossie?' he said. 'That sounds as if it were a Sunday too
many.'
'Oh no, no one minds you,' she answered; 'if it were your father, now,
or the Revering Mr. Smith, it might be a nuisance; we'd have to put a
clean tablecloth on for them.'
'And that sounds as if I am going to be asked to stay to tea, Floss?'
Mortimer said.
'Of course you are,' was Flossie's reply. 'Miss Browne says it's the
least we can do, considering all the papers and things you give us.
Only she says she doesn't know how she's going to make the butter spin
out. We don't get it from the store again till Thursday.'
'There, hold your tongue, Floss,' said Bart, 'you'll make Morty afraid
to take any.'
'Oh no, he needn't be,' Floss said. 'Me and Roly's going to say we
don't like it under our jam.'
Roly came stealthily from behind some trees.
'Where is she?' he whispered.
'It's all right,' Floss said; 'she's got to change her dress, and her
hair was pretty awful, so she'll have to do it again.'
Thus reassured, Roly ventured to the step, and took up a position at
Mortimer's shoulder. He was attired in an orange and blue-striped
football jersey, and the most respectable pair of knickerbockers he
possessed. Mortimer had given him the jersey on his last birthday, and
it was the boy's dearest possession.
'Why,' said Mortimer, 'what have you been after? Is Miss Browne laying
wait for you for stealing her jam?'
'Oh no,' said Roly. 'It's only this,' and he pointed to his jersey;
'she doesn't think it's religious to wear football things on Sunday.'
'Well,' said Floss, in the virtuous tone a clean pinafore made
justifiable, 'I don't think it is, either. Look at me. I learnt a
collect this morning.'
'A what?' said Roly.
'A collect,' said Floss. 'Collect for the thirteenth Sunday after
Trinity. Hermie wasn't sure if this was the right Sunday, only it was a
nice short one to begin with.'
'Does Miss Hermie teach you your collects?' asked Mortimer, his head
turned away a little.
'She wants to,' said Floss, 'but I don't know if she'll always be able
to find me. She was looking for Roly, too, this morning, only he was
playing Boers somewhere, so he got off.'
'Wasn't playing Boers,' said Roly. 'I was putting a new name on our
gate.'
'What a story you are!' cried Floss. 'I saw you creeping along with
father's guns.'
'Wasn't!' said Roly. 'Hadn't I got this jersey on?'
'That's nothing; you sleep in it--truly he does, Morty. As soon as
Hermie or Miss Browne go out of the room, he puts on the jersey over his
pyjamas. Why he hates school is 'cause he can't go in it.'
'What name were you writing on the gate, old fellow?' asked Mortimer, to
save the situation.
'Transvaal Vale,' said Roly; 'come on down and see--it looks great. I
rubbed Hermie's silly name off.'
But Mortimer did not move. Dunks' Selection the place had always been,
and always would be called; but Hermie in piteous rebellion had written
years ago in violet ink on the sliprails, The Rosery. Mortimer would
not go and look at the poor little name defaced.
Miss Browne came out, Miss Browne with her face shiny with recent
washing, her hair almost tidy, the better of her two colourless gowns on
her back.
'Very glad indeed to see you--very sorry to keep you waiting so
long--hope you, your father is quite well--Bart, my dear, a chair--what
are you thinking of, to let Mr. Stevenson sit on the step?--very sad
about the war--Flossie, don't tease Mr. Stevenson, my dear--quite a cool
day--providential thing the drought has broken--hope you will stay to
tea.'
These and sundry other remarks she delivered breathlessly, and at the
end put her hand to her side and gasped gently.
'I shall be most pleased to stay, Miss Browne, if it will be putting you
to no inconvenience,' Mortimer said.
'Most pleased--most happy--an honour--who is so kind, so
thoughtful--those English magazines--and she had never thanked him yet,
and those delicious chocolates--too good of him; most glad if he would
stay--uncomfortable house--unavoidable--bush, no comfort--he would
understand----'
'He knows he's not to take more than two helpings of butter,' said Bart,
with a twinkle in his eye.
'Bart, my dear--oh, my love--your mother--what would she say?--Mr.
Stevenson--what can he think?--my dear--oh, my love,' and the poor lady
withdrew in hot haste, to hide the embarrassment Bart had plunged her
into, and to laboriously prepare tea.
'I see your father's come down generously,' said Mr. Cameron, glancing
up a moment from his papers. 'Matthew Stevenson--that is your father,
of course--five thousand pounds, and more if wanted, to the fund for the
Bushmen's Contingent.'
'Yes, that's the governor,' Mortimer said. 'He's red-hot on the war. I
believe if he were five years younger, wild horses wouldn't keep him
back from volunteering himself. You must come up to Coolooli and have a
chat with him over it, Mr. Cameron.'
But Cameron was deep again in the war correspondent's letter.
Bart went off to feed the calves--Roly had vanished at the sound of Miss
Browne's footstep.
'Did you know our mother and Challis was coming home, Morty?' said
Floss.
'Bart just told me--yes, that will be very nice for you, Flossie. All
will be well, now, won't it?' said Mortimer.
'Oh, you're like the rest, are you?' Floss said. 'Every one going to
live happy ever after, eh? No, thank you, not me; I'm always going to
hate them. They don't get over me. No, thank you. I know them--bring
me a doll, won't they? and "There you are, Flossie darling, sweetest,
come and kiss us." Not me. See my finger wet, see it dry, cut my
throat sure's ever I die, if I have anything to do with them.
Stuck-ups, that's what they are!'
Mortimer gazed on the child, a little uncomfortable horror mixed with
his amusement; his bringing-up had been orthodox, and reverence for
parents was entwined with all his life.
'Why, girlie,' he said, 'this is shocking! Your own mother!'
'Challis's mother,' corrected Floss. 'Didn't she go off and leave me?
Lot she cared! I was only two, Lizzie says, and I might have picked up
anything, and eaten it and died. Even Mrs. Bickle minds her baby,
although she does get drunk at times. S'pose I'd had measles? or Roly?
We'd have died, or at least got dropsy, Lizzie says, having no mother to
nurse us. No, thank you--no getting round me with a doll. As for that
Challis, I'll give her a time of it--just you see.'
'But--but--but,' cried Mortimer, greatly at a loss, 'your mother is as
fond of you as anything, of course. I expect it is very hard for her to
go so long without seeing you. She doesn't do it on purpose, old woman.
You see, Challis was so clever they had to give her a chance.'
'How do they know I'm not clever?' demanded Floss. 'I believe I am.
You should have seen the man I drew on my slate this morning. Or how do
they know I couldn't play before the Queen? I'm up to "What are the
Wild Waves Saying?" and it's got two flats.'
Mortimer had no answer for this; he could only gaze at her.
There was another step in the doorway, and Hermie came out, a very
slender-looking Hermie in the let-down white frock that had made a woman
of her in a day. Floss leaned back and giggled as her sister shook
hands with the visitor.
'He! he! he! She's put her long dress on,' she said. 'Morty, look!
it's as long as Miss Browne's. You'd think she never had short ones,
wouldn't you? She's 'tending she's growed up.'
'Flossie,' said Mortimer, 'wouldn't you like to look at my watch? you
haven't seen the works for a long time.'
'Me holding it then,' stipulated Flossie.
'All right,' said Mortimer, and gave up his valuable timekeeper into the
bony little outstretched hand.
'You spoil that child shockingly,' Hermie said.
Floss looked up from the entrancing little wheels.
'He spoils you worser,' she said. 'Look at the books and flowers and
chocolates he brings over and gives you, no matter how bad-tempered you
may be.'
Hermie looked vaguely disturbed.
'Spoil me--do you spoil me? Surely I'm too big,' she said.
The man's heart leapt to his eyes.
'Wish I'd the chance,' he muttered.
'What did you say?' said Hermie.
'Nothing,' said Mortimer, and began to smoke furiously again.
'Morty,' said Floss, 'Morty, how many times does the littlest wheel turn
while the big wheel turns once?'
'Thirteen,' Mortimer said recklessly.--'I hear your mother is coming
home, Miss Cameron?'
'Yes,' sighed Hermie.
'This is surely very good news?'
Hermie gave a troubled glance around.
'Y-yes,' she said.
'Why, what a story you are, Morty!' said Floss. 'It doesn't turn
thirteen times.'
'I mean thirty,' said Morty. 'Miss Cameron, I have three men loafing
around at the sheds, and can't find work for them to do. It would be
doing me a real kindness if you'd let them put in their time
straightening up this place.'
'Thank you,' Hermie said, 'but we should not like to employ men we were
not paying.'
'Not when they're eating their heads off in idleness?' implored Morty.
'No, thank you,' Hermie said stiffly.
'I beg your pardon,' Mortimer said dejectedly.
'I should think you do,' cried Floss; 'it doesn't turn anything like
thirty times. I wouldn't have a watch I didn't understand. Here, take
it.'
He pocketed it humbly.
'I'd like to see the ground Bart spoke of sowing Burnett on,' he said,
plunging away from his mistake. 'Will you walk down with me, Miss
Cameron? It is quite cool and pleasant now.'
Hermie rose to her feet, then remembered her shabby little shoes that
she had all this time been successfully hiding beneath her long dress.
'Oh,' she said, 'it's too far. Floss will go with you, won't you,
Floss? I will go in and help Miss Browne with tea.'
*CHAPTER X*
*'I Love You'*
'The bird of life is singing on the bough
His two eternal notes of "I and Thou."'
It was after tea, and the long shadows of the dusk had fallen so gently,
so tenderly, that even Dunks' selection had a beauty of its own.
Mortimer sat on the verandah and talked war to Mr. Cameron till his very
soul loathed the Transvaal. Then he was captured by Bart, and forced
into the dining-room to explain something in the _Town and Country
Journal_, and give his opinion on the merits of Johnson's Grass.
And when he went outside again, Roly and Floss hung upon his arms and
begged and begged him to 'come with us a bit.'
At eight o'clock he broke away from them, and stumbled through the dark
passage to the kitchen regions to seek Miss Browne.
But here only an oil-lamp flickered in the breeze; even Lizzie was away
from her post, having gone before tea to walk to Wilgandra, in the
urgent need of a little pleasant human intercourse, ere she began
another grey week.
There was a door open near by, and glancing in Morty saw Miss Browne,
seated at her cleared dressing-table so busily writing and so surrounded
by little papers and letters he came to a vague conclusion that she was
'literary.'
'Miss Browne,' he called imploringly.
She laid down her pen and hastened to the door to him.
He seized both her hands, he pressed them, he wrung them as he stood,
labouring with his excitement.
'Miss Browne,' he said, 'will you help me? You must help--oh, do not
refuse--she has gone down the garden alone--I think she is leaning on
the gate. I must go to her. I must go to her. Will you keep them
back--all the others--could you get them in a room and turn the key--how
can I tell her if they follow me like this?'
'Tell her--who--what--why?' said the astonished Miss Browne.
'I love her,' said the man; 'I love her with all my soul--I must tell
her; you will help me?'
His face looked quite white; there was a moisture on his forehead, his
eager voice shook.
Miss Browne was crying; she had taken one of his big hands and was
stroking it.
'Oh, my dear, my dear!' she said. 'How beautiful, how very beautiful!
Oh, my love, how sweet--oh, how sweet, my love!'
'You will help?' he said. 'You will keep those little beggars away?'
'Leave it to me,' she said; 'you go to her, down in the garden, and the
dusk is here, and the moon beginning to rise! How sweet, how beautiful!
And she has on a white dress! Don't trouble about anything, my
love--just go out to her.' The happy tears were gushing from her eyes.
'What a good sort you are!' he said, and wrung her hand, and patted her
shoulder, then went plunging out into the sweet darkness to tell his
love.
He found her where the wattles grew thickest, leaning on the fence, her
flower-face turned to the young rising moon.
'How did you know I was here?' she said.
'I knew,' he answered, and a long silence fell. 'What are you thinking
of?' he whispered.
'I don't--know,' she said, and a strange little sob shook in her throat.
His arm sprang round her.
'Oh,' he said, 'I love you--I do love you! Dearest, dearest, I love you!
Do love me, darling--I love you, I love you so!'
Hermie was trembling like the little leaves around them--too surprised,
too stricken with the newness of the situation even to slip out of his
arms. The pleased young moon smiled down at them, the leaves whispered
the news all along the bush, an exquisite perfume of flowers and trees
and freshening grass rose up to them. How sweet something was--the
clasp about her waist, the kisses that had rained upon her cheeks, the
eager, beautiful words that still were beating in her ears!
'Oh, I don't understand, I don't understand,' said the excited girl, and
burst into strange tears, and tried to move from his arms, and put a
startled hand to her cheeks, to feel what difference those kisses had
made.
'Did I frighten you--did I frighten you, my darling, my little girl?' he
said. 'See there, don't tremble, I will take my arm away. It is too big
and rough, isn't it? There, there, I won't even kiss you; let me hold
your hand, there. You have only to understand that I love you, that I
have always loved you--ever since you were a tiny thing of twelve, and I
used to ride this way just for the pleasure of watching you. You were
like no other child here, so slender and sweet and white and pink, and
all that shining hair hanging round you. I think I wanted you always.
I wanted to pick you up and put you on the saddle in front of me and
ride away with you--away and away right out of the world. You will let
me, darling? You will try to love me a little? You will be my own
little wife?'
Wife! One of the Daly girls had just been married to a boundary rider
near. Hermie had seen the lonely place where they were to live together
with no one else to break the monotony.
Wife! All those dull, uninteresting women who came to call in Wilgandra
were wives, all those dull, horrid men in Wilgandra were their husbands.
Be married; she, Hermie Cameron, like the girls in Miss Browne's books!
Perhaps it might not be so very bad--they all seemed to look forward to
it.
But to Mortimer Stevenson! Oh no, none of them ever married any one
like that, the men there were all officers, penniless young artists and
authors, or at least earls. Most of them had proud black eyes and
cynical smiles, and spoke darkly of their youth. Or else they were
debonair young men with laughing blue eyes and Saxon curly hair.
Mortimer! She had actually forgotten it was only Mortimer speaking all
this time, Mortimer Stevenson, who wore red and blue painful ties, and
grew red if she spoke to him, and knocked chairs over in his clumsiness,
and had never been anywhere farther than Sydney, and thought Wilgandra
and his father's station the nicest places in the world.
A cloud came over the happy moon, the leaves hung sad and still; from
somewhere far away came the piteous wail of the curlew.
Hermie freed her hand and found her voice.
'This is really ridiculous,' she said petulantly. 'I suppose you are in
fun.'
'In fun!' he echoed dully.
'Yes, you can't really be serious. Think what a fearfully long time we
have known each other! I'd as soon think of being married to Bart, or
Bill Daly.'
He winced at Daly--big, coarse, uneducated bushman.
'If I waited a long time, couldn't you grow to love me?' he said. 'I
could stop doing anything you don't like; I--I would go through the
University like James and Walter did, if you liked.'
The exceeding pain in his voice touched the girl's awakening heart.
'Forgive me, Morty,' she said, 'it must seem very horrid of me. I
didn't understand myself at first----'
'Perhaps--perhaps----' he began hopefully.
'No, I am sure, quite, quite sure I could never love you,' she said
decidedly. 'I shall never marry, I have quite made up my mind. There is
no one I could ever care for enough.'
'Have you anything particularly against me?' persisted Mortimer. 'I'd
alter anything; you don't know how I would try.' His voice choked.
She could not instance his ties, his clumsy length of limb, his habit of
furious blushing.
'You make it very hard for me,' she said. 'I--I wish you would go home;
I want to go to bed.'
'Forgive me,' he said humbly. 'Forgive me; you have been very good and
patient with me. I will go at once.'
Hermie looked for him to move. He took a step away from her--a step
back--a step away. The sad moon came out and showed her his blurred
miserable eyes, his working mouth.
'Oh, I am sorry--sorry!' she cried.
'May I kiss you--just once?' he whispered.
She stood still, her head drooped down, till he lifted it, very gently,
very tenderly, and bent his head and put his quivering lips on hers.
Her hand went gently round his neck a minute.
'Poor Morty, dear Morty!' she said. Her breath came warm on his cheek
one second, and a feather kiss, a sweet little sorry kiss that made his
heart like bursting, was laid there.
The next second she had slipped away into the darkness, and he was
stumbling to find his horse and carry his misery as far as he might.
Hermie went a circuitous route round the back of the cottage, so anxious
was she to reach her bedroom without having her hot cheeks challenged by
the sharp eyes of Floss or Roly. And there on the back verandah, where
they never went, the two little figures were sitting, one at either end
with their backs against a post.
'It's time you were in bed,' were the natural words that sprang to her
lips, when she found she might not elude them.
Two laughs bubbled up. 'We're not going to bed for hours,' they said;
'we're having a 'speriment.'
'A what?' said Hermie.
'See this,' said Floss, standing up, 'we're both tied to the posts with
the clothes-line. Such larks! Brownie said she wanted to try a
'speriment on us, and see if we could sit still for two hours. If we
do, she's going to give me her little gold brooch, and Roly the green
heart out of her work-box.'
'We can swop them at school for usefuller things,' interpolated Roly.
'The best is,' giggled Floss, 'we like sitting still, we'd been running
about all day. And she forgot to tell us not to speak to each other,
and she didn't put us too far to play knuckle-bones. I've wonned Roly
three times.'
But Hermie had gone in, an impatient doubt as to Miss Browne's sanity
crossing her mind.
She found Bart climbing out of the dining-room window.
'Did you go doing that?' he demanded.
'What?' said Hermie.
'Lock the door while I was reading.'
'Of course I didn't,' Hermie said impatiently.
'It's that young beggar Roly,' Bart said; 'I'll have to take it out of
him for this. He'd even jammed the window, and I'd no end or work to
get it open. I want to go and help father.'
'Where is he?' Hermie said.
'He's washing the paint-brushes in the cowshed,' said Bart. 'Isn't it
lucky? Morty says there are about three dozen tins of red paint at his
place, no earthly good to any one, and he's going to send them down in
the morning, and dad and I are going to give all the place a coat of
paint before mother comes.'
Hermie went to her bedroom, shut the door, and sat down by the window,
glad of the sheltering darkness.
But two or three feet away, at the next window, sat Miss Browne, also in
the dark, Miss Browne, now crying happily into her wet handkerchief, now
looking at the moon and whispering, 'Love, love, how beautiful, how
beautiful!'
The sound of footsteps, however, in the adjoining room brought her
swiftly outside Hermie's window.
'Hermie!' she cried in a breathless tone at the sight of the girl
sitting there in her white dress. 'That cannot be you?'
'Yes, it is,' said Hermie; 'why shouldn't it be?'
'Oh, my love, my love! It is hardly half an hour. I thought two hours,
at the least. My dear, my love, no one disturbed you? Oh, my love, don't
tell me Roly and Floss got loose?'
'I don't know what you mean,' Hermie said shortly, 'but I can't help
thinking it is rather ridiculous to keep those children sitting there.
They ought to be in bed. I am going to bed.'
'To bed--my love--my dear!' gasped Miss Browne. 'Where is he?'
'Where is who?' asked Hermie impatiently.
'M-M-Mr. M-Mortimer Stevenson,' said Miss Browne in a whisper.
Hermie had her secret to hide.
'What should I know about Mr. Stevenson?' she said coldly. 'I presume
he has gone home.'
Gone home! All could not have gone well and happily in half an hour!
Miss Browne grew quite pale.
Such a sweet half-hour it had been for her! For twenty minutes of it she
had thought of nothing but the white light of love that was going to
flood Hermie's life. But during the last ten minutes there had come to
her a thought of the material advantages that would accrue to the
girl--Stevenson would have four or five thousand a year at his father's
death. It had been very sweet to sit and think of dear little
flower-faced Hermie lifted for ever above the sordid cares of wretched
housekeeping.
'My love--my dear,' she faltered, 'I--I am old enough to be your mother.
Could you trust me--won't you----'
But Hermie, with the blind young eyes of a girl, saw nothing outside her
window but tiresome Miss Browne, crying a little into her handkerchief
(she often cried), stammering out sentences that seemed to have no
beginning or end (her sentences seldom had), twisting her fingers about
(she never kept them still).
This, when the girl's excited heart wanted to be away from all voices,
all eyes, and go over the strange sensations, with the moon alone for
witness.
'Miss Browne,' she said, making a strong effort not to speak unkindly,
'I have a headache to-night, and want to be alone. Would you be so kind
as to keep what you have to say till morning, and tell me then?'
Nothing could have been swifter than the way Miss Browne melted away
into the darkness.
*CHAPTER XI*
*A Squatter Patriot*
It was eleven o'clock before Mortimer reached home, not that Coolooli
lay two hours and a half distant from the selection, but that he was
trying to ride and ride till the raw edges of his wound had closed
together somewhat.
Finally he remembered his father would be waiting up for him--one of the
old man's fixed customs was to be the last one up in his house--and he
turned his mare's head in the direction of the sleeping station. He
rode up through the moonlit paddocks and the belts of bush, and wondered
a little, as he looked at his home, that the sadness of the place had
never struck him before.
The house rose on the crest of a hill, convict-built, most of it, in the
very early days of the colony, and with a wing or two added here and
there. Large, thoroughly comfortable, yet it stood there with a certain
air of sternness, as if it knew what unhappy hands had laid its strong
foundations, what human misery built up its plain thick walls.
No creepers clung to it and wooed it with their grace; no fluttering
muslins, fashioned by women's hands, blew about its plain windows. In
the wide garden that encircled it trees grew, and handsome shrubs, but
the flowers seemed to know themselves for strangers there, and came not.
Mortimer's eyes went to the twin hill, half a mile away.
How often had he raised a house on that! Not a grim, plain one, like
this his home, but a large sunny cottage, with wide verandahs and large
bright windows, and a garden where all the sweet flowers in the world
ran mad.
Near enough the big house for the old man, left to himself, not to feel
lonely; far enough away for Hermie to be unquestioned queen, and free as
the winds that blew.
Oh, the happy hours he had wandered on that farther hill, raising that
happy home to receive his love! There had even been a moonlight night
or two when he had furnished it--furnished it with deep chairs and wide
sofas and delicious hammocks, all for the little light-haired girl who
worked so hard on that wretched selection to nestle into and rest. He
had begun to work harder and give deeper thought than was his wont to
the management of the station; there would be plenty of money for an
income, he knew, but he wanted even more than plenty; he wanted the
little hands that had always been so afraid to spend sixpence, to revel
in the joy of flinging sovereigns broadcast. He had been
waiting--waiting to tell her, it seemed for years--waiting till she was
just a little older and a little older.
But the long frock to-day had told him she was a woman, and he had
rushed to know his fate; and now all was over.
He put his saddle in the harness-room, and turned the horse out into the
moonlit paddock. He went in through the side door, down the wide hall
where the lamps still burned for him, and into the dining-room.
His father was sitting at the big table drinking very temperately at
whiskey and water, and reading a paper.
'I'm sorry to have kept you up, dad,' Mortimer said.
'That's all right,' said his father, 'it's not often you do it.'
'No,' said Mortimer.
The old man pushed the spirit-casket across the table.
'You look as if you've got a chill,' he said; 'take a nip.'
The son poured himself a finger's depth, and drank it off, his father
watching him from under his shaggy eyebrows.
'Did Luke or Jack come up this afternoon?' asked Mortimer.
'Jack and his wife,' said the old man. 'Luke went to Sydney yesterday,
Jack says, to watch the sales himself.'
'Take Bertha with him?'
'I rather think the young woman took him. Don't believe she's the wife
for any squatter; Macquarie Street's the only run she'll ever settle on,
with the theatres and dancing halls within cooey.'
'Oh, well,' sighed Mortimer, 'Luke can afford it, and he seems happy
enough. Anything fresh about the war? You seem to have all the papers
there.'
The old man's eyes gleamed, his hand trembled as he reached for an
evening paper, and opened it.
'See here,' he said, 'Buller's made a fatal mistake, a fatal mistake.
He's advancing on Ladysmith by this route, wheeling here and doubling
there, and having a brush or two on the way. Now, what he ought to have
done is plainly to have gone along by night marches up here, and taken
up a strong position here. See, I've marked the way he ought to have
gone with those red dots. You don't look as if you agree.'
'Oh,' said Mortimer, 'I don't know anything about it. But I should say
those Johnnies at the head of things know what they're about better than
we can out here.'
'Not a bit, not a bit,' said the old man excitedly; 'it's always the
looker-on who sees the most. He's just rushing on to his doom, and
those brave chaps shut up in that death-trap'll never get as much relief
from this attempt as they would if I sent old Rover out. You mark my
words and see. This range of hills is the key of the position, and
until those thick-headed generals can be brought to see it, there'll be
defeat after defeat. Did I tell you Blake and Lewis and Walsh and
Simons came to me, and asked to volunteer?'
'Whew!' said Mortimer. 'I don't see how we'll get along without Blake.
Did you give your consent?'
'Consent!' cried the old man. 'If the place went to ruin, d'ye think
I'd keep the fellow back? I gave him a cheque, and I promised to look
after his wife and brats if he fell; that's what I did.'
'But it's unlucky Walsh wants to go too,' said Mortimer; 'he'd have been
the very fellow to take Blake's place. We could have better spared
Doherty.'
'That mean-spirited dog! A lot of volunteering there is in him. He'll
take good care to keep his cowardly carcase out of bullet range.'
Mortimer looked thoughtful, and poured a little more whiskey into his
tumbler.
'I suppose we must get fresh men on in their places straight away,' he
said; 'we don't want the place to suffer.'
'Hang the place!' shouted the old man; 'let it go to ruin if it likes.
Every man that has the pluck to come and tell me he'll go and shoot at
them scoundrels out there, hang me, it's a cheque I'll give 'im, and be
a father to his brats if he's got any, and keep his place open till he
comes back. And a horse to each--the best I've got on the place--hang
me, two horses.'
'It's very generous of you, father,' Mortimer said, a little unsteadily.
'I see, too, by yesterday's paper, you are giving five thousand pounds
to the fund. I--hardly knew you felt as strongly about it as this.'
The old man sprang up, and began to thunder about the room.
'Feel strongly about it--strongly! If I was only ten years younger, I'd
do more than feel strongly! Me very bed's like stones the nights the
cables show no victories; the food in me mouth turns to dust. Feel
strongly!'
Mortimer left the table, and stood at the window looking out at the
moonlight that made snow of the twin hill. He did not know he drummed
on the window pane until his excited father roared to him to stop. Then
he turned and went across the room to where his father was sitting again
at the table, gazing with furious eyes at the cables that told of
Buller's line of march.
'Father,' he said, and put his hand on the old man's shoulder, 'will you
give me a couple of horses? I don't know that I want the cheque.'
Old Stevenson trembled. 'You're fooling me,' he said.
'I wouldn't fool when you're so much in earnest,' Mortimer said. 'I'm
afraid I'm a slow-witted chap. It never occurred to me before to-night
to volunteer. Now it seems the one thing I'd care to do in all the
world.'
The old man breathed hard.
'I'm not as young as I was, Morty,' he said quaveringly; 'I--can't take
disappointments easy. You're not just saying this lightly? You'll
abide by it?'
'The only thing that could stand in my way,' said Mortimer, 'would be
your objection. That is removed, since it never existed; so it only
remains to find out the date of the sailing of the Bush contingent.
Thanks to your subscription, there'll be no difficulty in getting me in,
for I know my riding and shooting will pass muster.'
'Morty,' the old man was clinging to the young one's arm, 'Morty, I'd
given up the hope of ever seeing this day. Six sons I had--six, and not
a puny, poor one among them. That's what held me up when the war got
into me veins first, and I had to face it that seventy was too old to
fight. It took some facing, lad. After that I just waited and waited.
And none of you spoke. I kep' reading the Sydney news, to find that my
sons there was going. None of their names was in. Dick, I could ha'
forgave him--p'r'aps--as he's six childers and a wife; but James, a
doctor, no end of chances to get in. And Walter, the best shot and best
horseman ever come from out back. Never a word that Walter had blood in
his veins. I thought it might be funds stoppin' 'em--they might be
feared to leave their businesses, thinking they'd suffer. No need of
that, I thinks, and sends them a cheque a-piece--a solid thousand each.
Does that fetch 'em? Not it. They writes back, very useful, come in
nicely. Jack here, married to a wife, wouldn't mind going--see some
life; but wife cries and clings, and he gives in. Luke! No son of
mine. Oh, I'll not cut him out my will, or do anything dirty by him,
but don't never let him give me his hand no more. Cries down his own
people, upholds the dirty scoundrelly Boers, and hopes they'll win their
fight; dead against the Britain that his own father comed from. My only
lad left at home----'
'Well, that laggard at least is off to shoot his best,' said Mortimer
lightly.
'Morty,' said the old man, and pressed his hand, 'you'll ha' to forgive
me. I've had hard thoughts of you, Morty.' His faded eyes were
suffused.
'Don't let's think of that, dad,' said Mortimer. 'What horses do you
think I'd better take?'
'In the morning, in the morning,' said Stevenson. 'I only want to sit
still to-night, and thank God I've got one son that's a man.'
Mortimer looked at the creased, illumined face, the wet eyes, the old,
working mouth. His heart swelled towards him.
'Dad, old fellow,' he said, 'I'm hard hit. I love a girl, and she won't
have me.'
His father gripped his hand.
'Poor chap, poor chap!' he said. 'I know, I've been through it. I
loved a girl before I married your mother, and I met her daughter the
other day, and it was the same as if it had been yesterday.' He looked
at his big son with new eyes. 'The girl's got hanged bad taste,' he
said.
'You'd have liked her, dad,' Morty said. 'Not like the girls round here,
big, strapping women; very slender and sweet-looking, her skin's as pink
and soft as that baby of Jack's.'
'Happen I know her?' said his father.
'Her name is Hermie Cameron,' Mortimer said.
'That thriftless beggar's daughter!' was on the old man's lips, but the
look on his son's face checked him.
'Yes--a pretty child,' was what he said instead, and thanked Heaven that
her taste had been so bad.
'See here, dad,' Mortimer said awkwardly, 'of course it's not in the
least likely I shall get hit---but of course war's war, and there's a
chance that one may get knocked over.'
'I don't need telling that,' said the old man quickly.
Mortimer pressed his shoulder. 'It's this, dad,' he said. 'I want to
ask you a favour The Camerons--they're so hard up, it--it makes me
fairly miserable.'
'A cheque, lad,' said the father eagerly, 'of course, of course. Would
a thousand pounds do? You shall have it to-night--this minute.'
He was moving to get his cheque-book, but Morty detained him.
'No, no, dad,' he said, 'you don't know poor Cameron; he's the most
unfortunate fellow in the world, but he's the last man who would take a
present of money.'
'I could offer it as a loan,' suggested the old man.
'No, he wouldn't have even that, I'm positive,' Mortimer said. 'I've
tried a time or two myself, but he's choked me off jolly quickly.'
'Then what can I do, boy?' the father said helplessly. 'Believe me, I'm
willing enough.'
'I know, I know, dad. All I want to ask you is to keep an eye on them,
and if you can do them a turn, do it. The mother's coming from England
in a month or so, and I'd give my head to be able to make the place look
up a bit. Cameron and his boy are fairly killing themselves to do their
best, but you can guess what their best is when there's only labour and
not a sixpence to spend.'
'You leave it to me, leave it to me,' said Stevenson.
'And one other thing,' said Morty. 'Of course I won't, dad, but if I
should come a cropper, will you let some of my share go to the little
girl I wanted?'
'She shall have every penny of it,' cried the old man; 'hang me, it's
the least I can do.'
They gripped hands.
'Good-night, boy!'
'Good-night, dad!'
*CHAPTER XII*
*R.M.S. Utopia*
'There,' said Challis, 'that is exactly the middle of the sheet, mother.
Just as many again, and we're all kissing each other and going mad.'
She held a piece of note-paper in her hand, and had just carefully
marked out with a red pencil one more of the thirty-three days of their
voyaging.
'That leaves just sixteen,' said Mrs. Cameron.
'And a half,' said Challis, 'and Mr. Brooks told me the captain says we
may be two whole days late, so we'll count seventeen, darling, and not
disappoint ourselves.'
'There is the captain now, talking to Mrs. Macgregor and Lady
Millbourne,' said Mrs. Cameron. 'Run and ask him, dear, if it is true.
I can't bear the thought.'
'Oh, mother,' said the little girl, and hung back, looking with nervous
eyes at the group.
'Girlie, you must get over this silly shyness,' said Mrs. Cameron. 'I
think you get worse every day, instead of better. Run along at once.'
The girl rose and walked slowly down the long deck. Some children
rushed to her.
'Come and play, come and play,' they said. 'It's rounders, and we want
another on our side.'
'Don't ask her,' said a boy, 'she's a stuck-up--never plays with any
one.' The voice reached Challis, and coloured her cheeks.
'You will be on our side, won't you?' a little girl said. 'We don't
know what to do for another.'
'I--I don't know how to play. I'm very sorry--if I could I would,'
Challis said.
'Oh, but you can't help knowing,' urged the small girl. 'All you've to
do is hit the ball and run. Mamma's deck-chair there is one rounder,
and the barometer thing's another, and that life-buoy's the third, and
here's home. Of course you mustn't hit the ball overboard.'
'Oh, please,' said Challis, 'won't you get some one else? I should
spoil the game. Oh, I couldn't play--please,' and she broke away from
the hand, and heard 'stuck-up' again from the boy as she moved away.
Used to the fire of a thousand eyes, the girl shrank nervously from
disporting herself before half a dozen idle watchers. She liked the
quiet corners on the deck where no one could see her; she had a habit of
lying on some cushions by her mother's side, and pretending to be
asleep, just to escape being talked to.
A group of ladies drew her amongst themselves before she could pass.
'The sweet little thing!' said one.
'Have you been dreaming a Wave Nocturne up in your corner?' said
another.
'Don't tease the child,' said a third. 'Darling, we're getting up a
concert for to-morrow evening, and we're going to give the money to the
Patriotic Fund when we get to Sydney. You will play some of your lovely
pieces for us, won't you? You know we couldn't have a concert without
the aid of the famous Miss Cameron.'
'I am afraid mother will not allow me to again,' Challis said. 'She
said yesterday was to be the last time.'
'The last time! Oh, why--why?' chorused the ladies.
'She said something about wanting me to rest now,' said poor Challis,
flushing.
'Oh, but just two or three little pieces,' persisted the promoter of the
concert, 'for the wives of the brave boys going to the war! Oh, I know
you won't refuse us, will you? That pretty little thing you played for
the funds of the Sailors' Home on Monday--what was that?'
'The Funeral March from Chopin's Second Sonata,' said Challis shyly. 'I
will ask mother. I am sure, as it is for the soldiers, she will allow
me,' and she edged out of the group.
A lady lying on a lounge beckoned to her.
'How are you, my dear, to-day?' she said.
'Quite well, thank you,' was Challis's answer.
'You are looking pale, I think. Your mother should give you quinine.
Don't you ever take anything before you play to your big audiences?'
'No,' said Challis.
'Your mother should see you have a quinine powder before you begin, and
just before going home a dessert-spoonful of malt extract. It would
fortify the system immensely.'
'Would it?' said Challis, a little wearily.
'Is that little Miss Cameron?' said another lady, coming up. 'Now I
think Mrs. Goodenough might really introduce us. Ah, now we know each
other, and I am very proud--very proud indeed to shake hands with
Australia's celebrated player. I heard you in the Albert Hall two
nights before we left London, my dear. You play
magnificently--magnificently.'
Challis stood with gravely downcast eyes, and never said a word.
'I wonder could you spare me a photograph, my dear,' continued the lady,
'one of those in a white frock that are all over London? And I should
like you to write your name across it. Will you?'
'We have not any left--we gave the last away,' said Challis, and with a
little good-bye bending her head--something like the grave quiet bend
she gave her audiences--she moved along on her errand.
'So that's your player,' the flouted lady said. 'Well, I don't think
much of her. Not a word to say for herself. I suppose she is greatly
overrated; it is mostly advertisements, you know--wonderful nowadays
what can be done by advertisements.'
Challis reached the captain at last. Lady Melbourne had a pleasant word
for her, and asked nothing but how she was enjoying _Treasure Island_,
which was in her hand. Mrs. Macgregor merely inquired after her mother's
headache.
'Captain,' Challis said, 'are we really going to be two days late?
Mother is very anxious.'
'Why, we are all hoping it will be more than that,' said Lady
Millbourne. 'A perfect voyage like this should last for ever. I want
to persuade the captain to break the shaft of his propeller, like the
Perthshire did, and let us drift for forty days.'
'Then mother and I would steal the captain's gig and row home by
ourselves,' Challis said with a little shy roguery that dimpled her
mouth, and made you think she was pretty after all.
'I never loved a dear gazelle,' said the captain, 'but I had to land it
days before I should have had to, if it had only been a tiresome
elephant. My dear little fairy-fingers, I have to give you up two days
before the time. This will be the quickest run I've made this year.'
The glad colour leapt all over the girl's face. 'Oh-h-h!' she cried, and
broke away from them, and went bounding back along the deck to her
mother, just as any of the children might have gone.
The delightful news necessitated giving all the rest of the morning up
to happy chat. They drew their chairs close up together, sheltered from
over-much observation by the angle of the deck-house. Mrs. Cameron had
no more headache, _Treasure Island_ fell flat and forgotten on the
deck.'
[Illustration: 'NOW LET'S JUST GO OVER IT ALL AGAIN,' SAID CHALLIS.]
'Now let's just go over it all again,' said Challis. 'Father'll come
first. I don't want to kiss any one till I have kissed him. Well,
what's he like? No, don't you say, I'll say. He'll have a
moustache--no, I think he'll have a beard--yes, a beard. Not a long
one, just a short one, and rather curly. And his eyes have a nice
laughing look in them, just the nice look like M'sieu de Briot's, who
said there was nothing in the world worth worrying about. You said,
didn't you? that daddy hated worrying over things. I can't help
thinking he'll have a brown velveteen jacket when he comes to meet us,
like Mr. Menel's, at Fontainebleau, and paint all over it. But of
course he won't. Let's see, he'll have a grey suit and a shiny hat, like
Mr. Warner. No, he mustn't have that--that's not like daddie at all.
No, I'll tell you; it's very hot at Wilgandra, so he'll have a nice
white linen suit and a white helmet, and he might--he might be holding
up a big white umbrella lined with green--you know, mamma, like that
nice man who came on board at Malta.'
Mrs. Cameron was leaning back, her eyes shining, a fond smile on her
lips as she listened to the girl's prattle.
'Then there'll be Hermie, and I know she's lovely. Don't you think she
will be? You said you always thought she would grow up very beautiful.
Oh, isn't it dreadful that we've never had a photo of them? Such lots
of mine sent to them, and never any of theirs! It's like drawing their
faces with your eyes shut. I think Hermie will have her hair in a thick
plait. I suppose she goes to picnics and dances and everything, and
always knows what to say to people. Mother, I don't think I shall ever
get to know what to say. I'm fourteen, and nothing will come into my
head to answer people. A lady said to me this morning, "You play
magnificently." Now what can you answer to that? I really felt I'd
like to say, "Yes, don't I?" just to see how she would look. Only I was
afraid it would be rude. If I'd said, "Oh no, I don't, you're
mistaken," she would have thought I was mock modest, wouldn't she? But
Hermie, yes, she'll always know what to say. I can sleep in her room,
can't I? You said there wouldn't be any other. It will be like Ellen
and Edie Fowler we met on the trip to Dover; they always had their arms
round each other, and used to tell each other everything and everything.
Hermie and I will; we'll whisper and whisper all night, just like they
did.'
The steward came up with eleven-o'clock tea and the glass of milk that
Challis always drank. Mrs. Cameron left her cup to grow cold, Challis
set her tumbler in an insecure place, and a lurch of the ship sent it
flying.
'Never mind, I couldn't have drunk it,' she said, then as the man came
back, 'I am so sorry to give you that trouble, steward. If you like to
bring a cloth, I'll wipe it up myself.'
'Well, about Bart,' said the mother, 'what will Bart be like?'
'Oh, Bart,' said Challis, 'I just feel as if we'll rush straight
together, and never come undone again. That's the sort of feeling you
have when you're twins. I feel I'd like to give him everything and sew
his buttons on and let him bully me. You notice the Griffithses here.
They're twins, and she does everything he tells her, and he gets
everything for her. It's lovely. I hope Bart hasn't forgotten we're
twins.'
'And Roly?'
'Roly? I'm not sure of Roly. I can hardly see him at all. I think,
p'r'aps, he's like that little boy at our table who wears Eton suits and
tries to walk like the boatswain. All I can remember about Roly is one
day we were eating water-melon in the paddock, and Roly ate his slice
away and away, till there was just a green circle round his head.'
'And Flossie--my little baby Floss?'
'Darling little Flossie, I almost love her best of all. She's got very
goldy hair and a teeny little face, and she's as little as Lady
Millbourne's little girl. And she likes being carried about, and she
can't dress herself, and I shall dress her, and fasten all the dear
little buttons, and tie her sashes. And I shall put her to bed myself,
nobody else must, and I'll tell her stories and stories. And every day
there'll be something new for her out of my box. There are fifteen
things for her, mother, not counting what she's to go halves with Roly
in. Isn't it a darling little tea-set? I never saw such sweet little
cups. And won't she like the little dolls from the Crystal Palace? I'd
really like to play with them myself. And the big doll we got in the
Rue de Crenelle. I must get on with its frock to-morrow, mother, or it
never will be done.'
On, on went the ship through the secret waters. New stars came out on
the great night skies, new breezes played in the rigging. On, on, and
the long days dropped away, somewhere, somewhere, beyond the edge of the
sea. On, on, and the happy eyes saw at last the dear frown of the
Australian coast-line.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*The Bush Contingent*
'Armed year--year of the struggle!
No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible
year.
Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipped
cannon--
I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.'
Cameron was in Sydney again--the first time for seven long years. He had
come down almost a month before the date upon which the Utopia was
advertised as due, with the desperate hope of getting something to do
that might yield him enough money to buy a new suit.
Up on the selection he wore soft shirts and old tweed trousers almost
all the time.
When it came to a question of finding him starched shirts and a decent
suit and hat in which to face his wife, Hermie and Miss Browne were
nonplussed.
Finally they discovered one suit that had not been taken, piecemeal, to
work in; but the moths had also discovered it. Sponge and press and
darn as Hermie might, it still looked disreputable; the shirts were
ragged, there was no hat that was not hopelessly spoiled with the sun
and dust and rain.
It forced itself upon Cameron that there was but one thing to do--he
must borrow a few pounds from some one.
And there was but one man he knew who would lend it to him--Mortimer
Stevenson. Hermie had never told her secret. He groomed Tramby up a
little, and put on a linen coat and hat, and set out in the direction of
Coolooli. He hoped he might not meet the father; he was quite conscious
of the fact that the business-like, successful old man looked upon him
as a shiftless beggar. They knew each other slightly; Stevenson had
ridden in two or three times when passing the selection, and stayed for
an hour or two talking stock and crops and the war. Once or twice
Cameron had been for dinner to Coolooli while shearing was on, and there
were chances to learn successful methods. But he shrank with all his
soul from encountering the old man this morning.
Two or three aboriginal women were coming back from a journey to the
house, cloths full of stores and broken food slung over their shoulder.
Stevenson forty years ago had had to break up a big camp of them on the
land he had just taken up, and drive them farther west. Ever since he
had not felt justified in refusing food to any of their colour.
Cameron stopped the women, to ask if they had seen Mortimer riding away
that morning.
'I say, Mary,' he said, 'you been see that one Mr. Mortimer?'
'Ba' al mine see 'im that one young pfeller Stevenson walk about,' said
the most ancient of the women. 'Old pfeller Stevenson 'im up there.
You gib it tik-a-pen, you gib it plenty pfeller 'bacca.'
Cameron threw her a bit of precious tobacco, which she proceeded at once
to cut up and cram into her unsavoury-looking pipe. Then he rode on;
Mortimer might by chance have gone out somewhere on the run before the
women had reached the station. Half a mile nearer to the house a
sundowner had been put on to mending a fence. At present he was smoking
and looking at it occasionally.
'Going up to volunteer, mate?' he said, as Cameron rode through a gate.
Cameron disclaimed the honour.
'Take a tip and do it,' the fellow said. 'The old chap is off his nut
just now, and is jolly well flinging his money round--him as was too
close to give a fellow tucker without turning him on to axe-sharpening
first. You'll get your fare to Sydney and a moke and pocket of tin
handed over to you afore you've finished of telling him you want to
join.'
Cameron inquired good-humouredly why under such exceptional
circumstances he himself did not volunteer.
He grinned. 'Guv'nor's knowed me on and off for twenty year,' he said,
and fell to looking at the work before him again. 'Seems to think I've
had too much bush experience. Had a try on, of course, but Mister
Mortimer he put the stopper on me. I'm cursing my luck for not waiting
till he'd gone.'
'Gone!' said Cameron; 'why, where's he going?'
'He went larst Monday--you must be a just-come not to know,' the man
said; 'he's goin' off to glory along o' the Swaggies Army.'
Cameron turned his horse's head and rode slowly back to the selection.
He took a picture or two, and tried to sell them in Wilgandra, but they
were still frameless, and he only raised a pound by the sale of both.
It was his neighbour Daly who helped him most; he saved him his fifty
shilling railway ticket by sending him to Sydney in charge of a dozen
trucks of sheep.
Landed there after the almost intolerable journey, he tried desperately
for work--even beat up an old friend or two, who looked askance at his
shabby appearance. One offered him a pound which he could ill spare,
having fallen on hard times himself, the other wrote him half a dozen
useless recommendations to various business men.
Cameron hung around the quay in a sort of fascination; no pilot boat
went out but he did not tremble, no great ship came round Bradley's Head
but he felt it bore his wife on board. The transports sent from the
Cape for the Bush Contingent--The Atlantian and the Maplemore--were
already anchored out in the stream, the great numbers painted on their
sides adding an unusual note to the shipping on the smiling harbour.
Launches and heavily weighed boats bearing timber for the horse-boxes
were continually putting off from the quay to cross the intermediate
stretch of water to where they lay.
The bustle and movement woke Cameron to life again, and the knowledge
that he must do something, if it were only to take a header into the
plentiful water; not here at the quay where a thousand eyes would see,
but from one of the quiet bays or headlands the harbour has so many of.
Then he pulled himself together again, recognised it was want of food
that had begot such cowardice in him, and spent his last shilling on a
good meal. After that he tramped out to Randwick to the camp, and asked
for Private Mortimer Stevenson.
The sentry jerked his head in a certain direction, and Cameron made his
way to where some ten thousand perhaps of Sydney's citizens, women and
children, had crowded, as they crowded almost every afternoon, for the
novelty of seeing the bushmen drill.
It was an odd, unmilitary spectacle. Uniforms were not yet served out,
and there seemed no regularity as to height. Here a sunburnt fellow
from 'out back' drilled in a tattered flannel shirt and a pair of
ancient moleskins that had seen several hard shearing seasons. Next to
him was some wealthy squatter's son in a well-cut light grey suit, then
a rough fellow with a beard half a foot long, moleskins again, and an
old red handkerchief tied round his throat, then a lad, a fine
well-grown fellow in the white flannels he played tennis in on his
far-off station. None of the pomp, the _eclat_ of militarism was
there--not even the discipline; the men gossiped cheerfully with each
other even while they stood in their ranks, they laughed at the girls in
the crowd--even threw kisses to them. They were a fine,
independent-looking lot, and you knew at a glance at them that they
would think no more of carrying their lives in their hands than most
people think of carrying umbrellas. But you marvelled how they were to
assume in so few weeks' time the well-groomed, spick-and-span, automatic
appearance you had hitherto associated with the word soldiers.
Cameron watched the different squads for a little time, and felt proud
of Mortimer when he found girls and men were pointing him out and
saying. 'That one, look! the fourth from the end; he's a
splendid-looking fellow, isn't he?' 'See that fourth chap, that's the
sort of man we want to represent us.'
But the drilling and the hoarse cries of the hardworked sergeants seemed
endless, and Cameron wandered on and watched the riding and shooting
tests which separated the genuine bushmen from the counterfeits, who
swarmed here, as easily as the winnow separates the grain from the
chaff. At last the squads broke up, and the men mixed with the crowd or
went off, mopping their steaming faces, to their tents or the canteen.
Mortimer broke loose from the men around him, and went instantly to
Cameron, whom he had quickly seen while drilling. He carried him off
direct to his tent.
'I'm awfully sorry to have kept you waiting so long,' he said. 'Here,
try this deck-chair, it's more comfortable than that bench. And what
will you have to drink? Oh, I know, you like lemon squash.' He turned
to a rough-looking fellow at the door. 'Go down to the canteen, Brady,
like a good fellow, and get a jug of lemon squash. Here's the money.'
He turned back to Cameron. 'I'd have given anything to get away when I
saw you, but you can guess what it is out there.'
'Yes, yes,' said Cameron, 'it doesn't matter; it was all interesting. I
have been looking about.'
Mortimer gave him a sharp look.
'Is all well up there?' he said. 'It isn't often you come down.'
'Nothing's wrong,' said Cameron, 'I came down to meet my wife, that's
all.'
'Of course, of course,' said Mortimer; 'stupid of me. I was reading
about it only this morning in the paper--about the big welcome the
citizens intend to give your little girl. There is to be a launch--the
Government launch, isn't it?--and the mayor and no end of people are
going up the harbour to meet her.'
'Are they?' said Cameron.
'You've been consulted about it, surely?' said Mortimer warmly.
'They're not doing all this without referring to you?'
Cameron straightened himself a little.
'I've had no fixed address since I came down,' he said. 'They've
overlooked me, I suppose, because they don't know I exist; I hardly do,
you know.'
'Are any of the others down with you?' asked Mortimer--'Bart or Roly or
any of them?'
'Oh no,' said Cameron. 'Some one has to mind the landed property
against my return.'
'And are they all well?' pursued Mortimer. 'Roly--wasn't Roly looking a
little thin before I left?'
'Oh no,' Cameron said, 'he's right enough. The girls feel the life more
than he and Bart. My eldest girl seemed very off colour when I left?'
'Not typhoid?' burst out Mortimer. 'I saw in the paper it had broken
out in Wilgandra----'
'Oh no, we're too far for that. Nothing but the heat. Was that Timon I
saw among the horses?'
'Yes, I brought him and the governor's favourite roan down--he made me
have him.'
'Mortimer--I'm compelled to ask--I cannot do without--my
wife--Challis--suit--make them ashamed----' Cameron's voice choked.
'Confound that Brady!' said Mortimer, springing up and upsetting his
chair; 'takes as long to get a lemon squash as if I'd sent him to town
for it. If it had been a bottle of whiskey, now, no delay then; might
come in for a spare glass himself. You r'mber Brady, rouseabout up at
Coolooli, gives a home-touch to see him about. He volunteered the same
time as I. I say, I'm off duty now for the rest of the day--may as well
come back to town and have a bit of spree. Brooks, I say Brooks, go and
see if there's a spare cab, there's a good fellow.' Another coin went
into another rough fellow's hand.
Cameron found himself driving back to town by Stevenson's side before he
had collected his thoughts--or even had his lemon squash.
Half the way Mortimer rattled on about the day's work in camp, the
transports, provisions for the comfort of the horses, the prospect of
the contingent's success.
'By the way,' he said all at once, 'I want you to do me a favour. The
governor's been too free with his cash for me--not safe to have too much
about, you know--tempt some poor devil. D'ye mind taking some of it and
looking after it for me--just for a year or two till I get back? Use
it, you know; you might use it now instead of drawing any out of your
own account, then when I come home you can pay me back. Awfully obliged
it you will; had a couple of pounds stolen out of my tent yesterday, and
have been going about with fifty pounds on me since. I'll get you to
look after thirty of it; the governor's cabled no end of money to a bank
in Durban for me, for fear I'll run short.'
Half a dozen crisp notes were thrust into Cameron's hands, and Mortimer,
hot and red in the face, was rattling on again about the horse-boxes for
the voyage, and how they should have been made this way, and not that
way, and about the wisdom of telling the men to bring their own saddles,
and about that egregious ass the public, who seemed to think the Bushmen
were so thin-skinned that they could not bear a word of command, unless
it was put in the form of a polite request.
'Isn't it tommy-rot?' said Mortimer. 'We're not a pack of sensitive
girls. We enjoy the discipline, and recognise we have to be licked into
some sort of order, unless we want to remain a mob.'
Cameron was very quiet, but he gripped Mortimer's hand on parting, and
cleared his throat to try to say something.
But the young volunteer found he must be off in violent haste.
'By George,' he said, 'haven't another minute; promised the colonel I'd
go out and kick up a row about the horse-boxes,' and his big loose
figure plunged back to the waiting cab. 'You'll come and see me off,
all right, so long'; and the cab woke to life and moved smartly off, to
lose itself in the stream of vehicles going towards the quay.
Cameron, a lump in his throat, turned towards the General Post Office,
to see if there were further news from the little contingent at home.
The last letters from Bart had been disquieting; Small, the butcher, it
seemed, had transferred the mortgage he held on the selection to old Mr.
Stevenson. 'And Daly says,' Bart had written, 'it's about the worst
thing that could have happened, Stevenson's so close-handed. Small often
used to give you time, but he says Stevenson never will.' A second
letter followed. Stevenson had foreclosed, but was willing for a year
or two, until a tenant he had in view was ready to occupy, that Cameron
should remain on the place. In the meantime, however, he, Stevenson,
must be at liberty to make any alteration or improvement he saw fit to
the property.
The present letter was excited in tone. 'After all, dad,' the boy wrote,
'I believe it's the best thing that could have happened. The place is
looking up no end, there are quite ten men at work on it, so the chances
are the mater and Challis won't quite die of the shock of seeing it.
And what do you think? You know that calf we gave Hermie two years ago?
Well, I never knew there was good blood in it, did you? It's the last
thing you'd think to look at it. But that Stevenson knows a thing or
two. He comes down here and pokes about pretty often, and he saw it,
and what did you think? Offered me ten pounds down for it! I couldn't
believe my ears. Don't you remember I tried to sell it when you were
ill, and Small offered two for it? But I wasn't going to let on I was
so green as not to know it was a good sort, and I said straight that we
could not let it go under fifteen. He looked at me in that queer, sharp
way of his, and he poked at the calf a bit, and then said, "Say twelve
ten." But I'd got my mettle up by that. I knew if a close-handed, hard
chap like that offered twelve ten, it must be worth quite twenty-five.
I just turned round and went on digging up the potatoes for dinner and
said, "Fifteen pounds," for all the world like Small does at the sales.
He went round to Dimple and began poking at her again, and examining her
like anything, and then he said, "Fourteen pounds, sonny." I'd got
enough potatoes out for Miss Browne by then, so I put them in the basket
and just said, "Good morning, sir," and pretended to be going.
'Then he began laughing fit to kill himself, and in between the laughs
he said, "Fifteen," and I said, just like Small, "She's yours, and
you've got a bargain." And he laughed again, and said, "I have." I
hope you're not vexed, dad, at me doing this on my own. I've been
feeling very anxious ever since, for she must have been a really
valuable little thing--he's not the man to be deceived; they say he's
the best judge of stock in the country. I told Daly about it, and he
wanted to know if Stevenson was drunk at the time. He doesn't drink at
all, does he? But I thought you'd agree that the fifteen would be more
use to us now than twenty-five later, and that's why I closed with him.
I'm sending five down in this, thinking it will come in usefully for
you. And Hermie and Miss Browne have gone off to Wilgandra to get new
dresses and cups and sheets and whips of other things with the rest. You
should have seen their list. The mater and Challis'll think we're no
end of swells after all.'
*CHAPTER XIV*
*Home to the Harbour*
'City of ships!
City of the world! (for all races are here,
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
Proud and passionate city--mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up, O city--not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself,
warlike!
War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!'
Down through the excited waters of the harbour came the great ship
Utopia, the fussy little tug running on ahead.
Away near the Heads the stretching blue had danced almost as unfurrowed
by the lines of boats as outside, where the ocean's ways lay wild.
But as the ship came down, down closer to the city, a stately untroubled
belle on the arm of her hot, nervous, fidgety little partner, many of
the passengers felt with astonishment they had never seen so many
watercraft in all their lives before. Rowing boats--scores and scores
of them! They looked like flies on an agitated surface of translucent
honey. Sailing boats! Surely not one stitch of canvas owned by the city
was out of use. Poised, waiting, up and down, everywhere, you felt
there was going to be a storm and these were the white gulls come in
flocks to flutter and dip and rise till it began. The ferry-boats! They
went their hurried journeys to and from--across to North Shore, to
Mosman's, and Neutral Bay, to Manly, and you could fancy they were
looking over their shoulders all the way and longing to come back. The
ocean-going boats, leaning at the Woolloomooloo wharves or anchored out
in the stream, they were black with eager people, and waved from every
point long strings of brilliant flags--the flags of half the world.
America was there, shaking out her Stars and Stripes from a mail
steamer, a San Francisco timber-boat passing along to a berth in Darling
Harbour, and a transport come to take stores for the army in the
Philippines.
From one of the men-of-war in Farm Cove floated Japan's white flag with
its red chrysanthemum; France had her war-ship, with its red, white, and
blue ensign, also in the cove. All the others, half a dozen of them,
floated the white ensign of England.
Up at the quay lay the mammoth Friedrich der Grosse, Germany's black,
red, and white ensign flying in the wind amid her gay strings of
bunting, and round the corner, in Darling Harbour, among the boats that
had come down heavily laden from the rivers, the boats from all the
other colonies and Fiji and Noumea. Russia and Norway both were
represented.
And the city--had the City of Blue Waves gone mad?
As the Utopia made her slow progress up the harbour, those on board were
able to catch a breath of the excitement from the land.
The wharves at Woolloomooloo seemed a black mass of humanity; the
windows of the warehouses were lined with faces, men and small boys had
taken up vantage-points on scaffolding, cranes, the very roofs of the
wharf buildings. On the green park-like slopes of the Domain thousands
were patiently waiting, white and gay coloured parasols and dresses
enlivening the sombre garments of the men.
Challis stood at the side of the boat with trembling knees and rounded
eyes. Mrs. Cameron was beside her, very pale, struggling hard for
composure, putting her hand to her throat secretly now and again, to
smooth the lumps that seemed to be rising there. A warm reception she
had had no doubt her child would have; indeed, the Melbourne papers she
had seen had said big preparations were to be made for her reception,
for was not this the city of her birth, the eager, open-handed city that
had made it possible for the world to judge of her genius? But the
mother's wildest thoughts had never dreamed of anything like this;
royalty itself had never on any of its journeyings been welcomed in more
magnificent fashion.
She paled and paled--she slid down her hand, and caught and held tightly
in it one of the small thin hands of her gifted child.
Yet, great as the honour undoubtedly seemed, had the power to change
things been hers, she would have swept the wharves clear of all that
strange-faced crowd, and have had, standing there alone, looking up at
her, the husband her heart was throbbing for, the children she yearned
for, and yet would hardly know.
The lady who had begged the photograph pressed her way up.
'What does it all mean? Did ever you see such excitement? Is it really
as Mrs. Graham says--the welcome for Miss Cameron? I never saw anything
to equal it in my life. My dear, my dear, you are the most fortunate
girl in the world. I am proud to have shaken hands with you, honoured
to have sat at the same table. See, here is my travelling ink-pot and a
pen, write me your autograph, darling.'
Mrs. Goodenough bustled up and caught at the mother's arm.
'Such excitement is enough to kill her; give her two of these quinine
tablets, and keep these in your pocket, to give if you notice a sign of
flagging. It will be a most exhausting day for her. And you are
pale--here, I have my flask of tonic--you must, you must indeed take
some. You will never bear up through all the congratulations, if you do
not. Well, well, I must say I have never seen anything like this in my
life.'
Challis stood as white as if carved in marble; sometimes her little soft
underlip quivered, sometimes she gave an almost piteous glance round, as
if seeking an impossible escape. She had had warm welcomes and even
cheers and a little bunting in many towns, but what was this she had
fallen upon?
The gangways were hardly down before there hurried on board from the
wharf a gentleman in a tall hat, and two others with the ungroomed,
long-haired appearance of the musician the world over. One of them bore
a moderate-sized bouquet of white flowers, and another a small harp of
roses that looked a little dashed with the sun and dust.
'Miss Cameron, Miss Cameron!' was the call echoed all along the deck.
The captain himself came up and took the little girl and her mother down
to the men. They were warmly shaken hands with, their healths and the
voyage asked after, and the flowers presented. Then one of the
musicians began to read an address couched in the most flattering terms,
but half-way through the tall-hatted gentleman tapped his arm and
whispered and looked at his watch. And the musician nodded and turned
over the leaves of the address, and shook his head doubtfully and looked
hastily also at his watch.
'My dear Miss Cameron,' he said, and rolled the big paper up, 'I shall
really have to keep this for a more opportune time. We had thought the
Utopia would not have been here until four this afternoon, when all our
arrangements would have gone well. But now the mayor and the Euterpe
Society, and all the musical bodies in the town are of course engaged in
seeing the Bush Contingent off. We expect the procession any
minute--indeed, it must be nearly in Pitt Street by this.'
Mrs. Cameron said a few graceful words, in which she begged them not to
waste time now; she was assured by all their kind speeches of the
welcome her daughter had in this her native city, and she expressed her
sense of the good fortune that had awaited them, inasmuch as the Utopia
had arrived in time to see an event of such national importance as the
departure of the Bush Contingent. No one could have guessed at the dear
fatuous notion she had been nursing in that sensible head of hers until
a moment back.
As for Challis--Challis put her head over her fast-fading harp and
laughed, laughed uncontrollably a minute or two. Then she stretched out
her hand and touched one of the musician's sleeves. 'Couldn't we get
off and see the procession?' she said.
The musician looked at her eagerly, admiringly. 'Just what I was going
to suggest,' he cried. 'Come on, come on--we've got a carriage out here
for you, and if we've any luck we'll just get up into Macquarie Street
in time.'
He and his friends swept the two voyagers off their feet, and carried
them with the pushing throng to the gangway. None of the passengers had
any time to look at them; all were a little off balance at the time,
rushing about with faces broken up into tears and laughter, kissing and
throwing arms round those they had been long parted from, wildly
imploring stewards for gladstones and handbags from their cabins.
In the crush Challis whispered to her mother, 'Oh, aren't I glad it's
not for me!' in a tone of fervent thankfulness.
When they were down on the wharf, the rapturous meetings on all sides
sent their eyes hungrily searching the crowd again for their own home
welcomers. But there seemed no one, no one, look as they would, and
they went slowly down the company's wharf with the welcomers the city
had sent to the hired open carriage outside.
Challis and her mother sat facing the horses, the tall-hatted gentleman
and one musician sat opposite to them, the other went on the box. It
had been the committee's intention to bid the coachman wear white
favours, in honour of the visitor'
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