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An Australian Girl

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Title: An Australian Girl

Creator: Catherine Martin


        
Release date: January 2, 2016 [eBook #50832]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50832

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN AUSTRALIAN GIRL ***




Produced by Al Haines.





                                   AN

                           *AUSTRALIAN GIRL*


                                   BY

                           MRS. ALICK MACLEOD

                    AUTHOR OF 'THE SILENT SEA', ETC.



                           AUSTRALIAN EDITION



                                 LONDON
                        RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON
            Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
                                  1894

                        [_All rights reserved_]




                                _NOTE._

       _This edition is especially issued for circulation in the
                       Australian Colonies only._




                          *AN AUSTRALIAN GIRL*



                              *CHAPTER I.*


It was one Sunday afternoon in the middle of December and in the
province of South Australia.  The grass was withered almost to the
roots, fast turning gray and brown. Indeed, along the barer ridges of
the beautiful hills that rise in serried ranks to the east of Adelaide,
the herbage was already as dry and bleached as carded flax.  In the
gullies, thickly timbered and lying in perpetual shade, the ground still
retained the faint graying green distinctive of Australian herbage in a
state of transition from spring verdure to summer drought.

But soon even the shadiest recesses would bear witness to the scorching
dryness of the season.  For even before the middle of this first month
of summer, two or three of those phenomenal days had come which furnish
anecdotes for many successive months alike to the weather statist and
the numerous class who cultivate community of soul by comparing
experiences of those dreadful days on which 'the hall thermometer stood
at 104 deg. before noon.'  This Sunday had not quite been one of the
days that make the oldest residents turn over heat averages extending to
the early dawn of the country's history.  But, nevertheless, it was a
very hot, still day, without a breath of wind stirring, and in the
distance that faint shimmering bluish haze which, to the experienced
eye, tells its own tale of days to come.

The masses of white, silver and messmate gum-trees that clothe these
same Adelaide hills so thickly, formed a grateful resting-place for the
eye, wearied with the steadfast glare of sunshine.  So did the vineyards
that dot their declining slopes, and the gardens and orchards that are
scattered broadcast to the east of the town.  But even Adelaide itself
is interwoven with the foliage of trees, which do so much to mitigate,
both for eye and body, the severities of a semi-tropical climate.  This
fascinating embroidery of trees is more especially observable in
glancing over North Adelaide.  This extensive and important suburb,
which is divided from Adelaide proper by the Torrens Lake and Park
Lands, lies considerably above the city and adjacent suburbs.  So large
a proportion of the houses are surrounded by gardens, that from some
points of view North Adelaide looks like a well-trimmed wood, thickly
studded with houses.

And these gardens are, as a rule, neither suburban slips, with
precocious trees selected for their speedy power of growth, nor the
painfully pretentious enclosures which auctioneers delight to term
'grounds.'  No, they are genuine gardens--roomy, shadowy, well planted,
well watered; rich in flowers and many fruit-trees, bending in due
season under their fertile loads; haunted with the hum of rifling bees,
fragrant with the perfume of old-world blossoms.  In such a garden on
this Sunday afternoon a young man and woman were slowly pacing up and
down a broad central walk, thickly trellised with vines.  The gadding
tendrils, the wealth of wide emerald leaves, the countless oval clusters
of ripening grapes--Crystal, Black Prince, and delicate Ladies'
Fingers--which clothed the trellis on the sides and overhead, made a
delightful picture.  So did the great rose-trees hard by, garlanded
after their kind with pale pink, yellow, white and blood-red roses.
Parallel with this vine arcade there were loquat trees loaded with thick
clusters of clear-skinned creamy fruit, and orange-trees, with
dark-green globes nestling among glossy boughs, sheeted in waxen
blossoms, whose penetrating odour loaded the atmosphere. But as so often
happens when a young man and woman are engaged in a _tete-a-tete_,
neither the objects round them nor any topic of wide social importance
engrossed their attention.

'Do you know why I asked you to come out into the garden, Stella?' said
the young man, breaking a pause that had followed some previous talk.

'Oh, to admire the roses, and flick the poor vine-leaves with your
riding-whip now and then.'

'I wouldn't mind betting a thousand to one you know as well as I do; but
that's the way with you.  You'll never help a fellow out of a hole.  Why
didn't you come to Melbourne last month?'

'Ted, that reminds me.  Shouldn't I congratulate you on your horse
winning the Melbourne Cup?  Or is it an old stupid story by this time?'

'It's the things that don't come off which make the stupid stories.'

'Well, I congratulate you, then.  How long have you been on the turf?'

'I haven't been on the turf at all, in one way.  I've bred racehorses,
and bought and sold them, ever since my uncle died, leaving me
Strathhaye; that's now six years ago, come Easter.'

'Well, for six years you have been more deeply interested in young
horses than in anything else in the world----'

'You know a jolly sight better than that.'

'You have talked of them, dreamt of them, been with them; several times
you have nearly died for them; always you have lived for them, and now
at last you have won the blue ribbon of the Australian racing world.
How did you feel when you saw your horse pass the winning-post?'

'I didn't see him at all.  He was a dark horse, and sold the bookmakers
right and left.  There was a packed mob of them yelling like devils,
calling out this horse and the other. When the number was put up, and
people kept shouting "Konrad!" I saw blue stars for a bit.'

'It must be delightful for something to happen that makes you see blue
stars.  I almost wish I had been there.'

'I wish you had.  I would have had a new drag in your honour, and a team
that would have made most of those there look silly.  Why didn't you
come when Laurette wrote to ask you?'

'Oh, let me see!  I know there were very good reasons, but I forget
them.'

'Now, Stella, don't sham.  You wouldn't forget them if they were very
good reasons.'

'What nonsense! the better they are the more completely they go under
sometimes.  Think what good reasons there are for being good, and things
of that sort.'

'Now, I'm not going to be put off.  You've often served me that trick.
I ask you a question and you start a new quarry, and the night after I
wake up thinking, "Stella never told me whether she still writes to
Billy Stein," or whatever it may be.  Why didn't you come?'

'Must you know?'

'Yes, certainly.'

'Well, as I was walking by the Torrens, I found a little palm-basket
sewn up in the most cunning manner with a red worsted thread.  I
unpicked it, and out flew a little milk-white dove, crying: "Don't go to
the Melbourne Cup, don't go to the Melbourne Cup!"'

'Well; I'll be hanged if ever I saw a girl that can make up a fib patter
than you can when you like!'

'Now I know why you wanted to come into the garden--so that my mother
shouldn't overhear you talking like a jockey.'

'Oh, that's all you know about the way jockeys talk! You never heard
them.  Besides, you know, you shouldn't tell a crammer.'

'It's not a crammer--it's a parable.'

'That's blasphemy, isn't it, calling yarns you make up as you go along
after things in the Bible?'

'Do you think there are no parables except those in the New Testament?'

'I know a parable is when a fellow asks for a long drink in everlasting
fire, and the other chap in Isaac's bosom won't even wet his lips.  By
Jove, I've often thought there wasn't much to choose between them for
goodness!  One had his good time here and turned his back on the beggar;
but the beggar was more spiteful--he had all eternity to behave better,
but didn't.'

'Oh, Ted! you are too delightfully literal.'

'I wish to the Lord you really believed I was too delightfully anything.
Surely you might have dropped a fellow a line when Konrad won, seeing
you had the naming of him.'

'Did I?  When?'

'Why, a month after he was foaled.  Don't you remember that frightfully
stupid ball at Government House, where a fellow couldn't put a hoof down
without treading on some old tabby's train?  There was Mrs. Bartholomew
Gay with one from here to the Polar regions--white satin embroidered
with Chinese dragons, or something.  I had to stand with one foot in the
air, like a circus-tumbler, so often, for fear of stamping on her tail;
at last I firmly planted my foot on it, and tore it out of the gathers.
By Jove, didn't she look daggers at me!  But she trundled it off the
floor after that.'

'What a memory you have!' said the girl, laughing.  'I remember now--we
sat out a dance, and you told me about some signally talented yearlings,
and this foal, who had such a brilliant pedigree--I am proud of him; I
shall kiss the star on his forehead when I see him.'

'You remember he has a star?  You had much better let me take it to
him--not that I would give it to him, though.'

'Now, Ted, if you are too bold I shall return to my book.'

'No, no, you wouldn't have the heart to do that.  You can always go to
your books while I am mostly three hundred and fifty miles away.  How
many months is it since I saw you last?'

'Oh, two or three, I suppose.'

'It was in July, nearly six months ago; and you then said you would most
likely come to Laurette's in November. But you didn't.  You wouldn't
come to the Cup, and you wouldn't drop me a line to say you were glad
about Konrad--all to avoid giving me a chance.  Now, don't make your
eyes big, as if you didn't take in what I say.  Why don't you ask me
what chance?'

'Well, then, what chance?' returned the young lady, laughing, but with a
heightened colour.

'To once more ask you to marry me.'

'Only once more?  Then after that we may be fast friends.'

'Not at all--we shall be man and wife.'

'Oh, Ted!  Well, I suppose we could hardly be both.'

They smiled in each other's faces, but the young man soon became grave.

'Stella, how often have I asked you to marry me?'

'Do you mean counting from the very beginning, or since we have grown
up?'

'I don't think it's fair for you always to poke borax at me.  Why don't
you be serious?'

'I don't like being serious.  I have been to church once already.  The
proper way to spend a hot Sunday is to be like chaff that the storm
carrieth away----'

'What do you mean by that?  Is it another parable?'

'I mean to lie in a hammock in the west veranda, and think whatever idle
thoughts choose to come into your head, or read your favourite poets, or
listen to a bird on a branch hard by.  Do you hear that white-breasted
swallow in the top of the Moreton Bay fig-tree?'

They were silent for a few minutes, and the liquid, melodious carols of
the little minstrel filled the air.

'But I would much sooner listen to you than to that little rubbish,'
said the young man in an emphatic tone.

'Oh, what bad taste!  Wouldn't you like to know what it really feels
like to float in the air like a sunbeam?' asked the girl mischievously.

'He only flies and sings for his tucker--I can get mine without that.
Besides, I would sooner be on the earth near you than anywhere you could
mention.  Stella, it was close to this very spot I first asked you to be
my wife, when we were both of an age to marry.  Do you remember it?'

The girl looked at her companion with undisguised amusement.

'I should think I did!  You were barely nineteen.'

'And you were nearly eighteen--a very good age for both, considering I
had been left my own master twelve months before, with twelve thousand a
year.  What more did we want?'

'A little wisdom, a little love, a little sympathy, and power of
companionship--everything that we ought to have mutually.'

'Do you mean that I didn't love you enough, or didn't know my own mind?'

'But surely marriage is the sort of bargain which needs two to make it?'

'Well, at any rate you refused me out and out then, and you were as
solemn as if you were going into a convent. Larry always declares you
were thinking of doing it then. I know you had a picture of the Virgin,
and said she was our advocate, and talked about the soul and all sorts
of Papist things--enough to make a Protestant's hair creep.'

'Did your hair creep?  And how did you know you were a Protestant?
Because you never go to church, I suppose?'

'That's neither here nor there.  But now, do you remember the second
time I asked you?'

A quick wave of colour swept over the girl's face.

'Ted, what is the use of going over all this?'

'Well, I'll go over it--and you check me if I make a mistake.  It was
eighteen months later.  We hadn't seen each other for nearly a year.
You were in the garden when I came.  Is that right?'

'Yes.'

'I saw your mother and told her I was going to try my luck again, and
she said I had her consent and good wishes. The moment you saw me you
asked if any gifted year-old colt had hit his leg, I looked so serious;
and then you said: "Oh, you are going to be foolish again"----'

'And you were, and I was still more foolish--for you knew your own mind,
and I didn't know mine.'

'Foolish!  By George! when I think about you, and feel rather savage, I
remember that once in your life, anyhow, you were good and sensible; and
that's the day you promised to be my wife, and sat beside me in the
arbour of Spanish reeds, with the scarlet japonica hanging on it in
bundles.'

'You certainly have rather a dreadful memory.'

'Yes--you wore a cream-coloured dress like the one you have on now.  I
could tell you every word you said--and, by heaven!  I could tell you,
too, how I felt a week afterwards when I got your letter at Strathhaye
breaking it all off, and saying it was a frightful mistake on your
part.'

'Well, Ted, do you want me to say again how sorry I am?  Do you want me
to grovel in the dust all my life because of that blunder?  After all,
you brought it on yourself by being so persistent when I was in rather a
weak-minded mood.'

'Weak-minded?  You never were half so good before or since.  And you had
quite got rid of all that stuff about convents and Papists.'

'You must not speak so disrespectfully of these things.'

'Well, you know very well you may have any notions you like--as long as
you have me.'

'That is rather a strong bribe.'

'I'll make it much stronger if you'll tell me how.  You don't suppose it
does a fellow any good to come a cropper like that, do you?'

'Why, three months afterwards I heard you were going to be married to
Miss Julia Morton.  Why weren't you?'

'I did try to like Julia--if it were only to vex you; but, by Jove! when
she began to be in earnest, I found the shoe was on the wrong foot.  You
might be vexed for a day, but I should be vexed for all the rest of my
life.'

'What makes you think I would be vexed for a day?'

'Oh, just because I've come to belong to you--in a sort of way--like
that goggle-eyed owl and the little gold pistol hanging at your
watch-chain.'

'I use the little gold pistol to wind up my watch with, and the owl has
sparkling ruby eyes into which I look in church when I am very tired.
The one is useful and the other beautiful, you see, Ted.'

'And I am both,' said the young man imperturbably. 'Besides, I can give
you whatever money will buy--take you anywhere.'

'But then, you see, you would be always there.'

'Yes; and when I wouldn't be about you would nearly cry your eyes out.
You may laugh, but women always get fonder of their husbands.  Look
here, Stella, you said "yes" once before; you'll have to say it again
and stick to it.  The last time I spoke to you you said you would think
over it.  You've had plenty of time.  You're close on twenty-three.  A
girl should be married by that time.'

'Or not at all.  You seem to forget that many women never marry.'

'But you're not one of them.  Now, Stella, look me in the face and tell
me, do you intend to be an old maid?'

'Oh, one doesn't intend it; but sometimes circumstances are more
merciful than one's intentions.'

'Has any fellow come along that you care for more than me?'

'N--no.'

'Thank the Lord for that!  All you know have been in love with you
already--Willy Stein, Wigram, Lindsay, Andrew----'

'Ted, you really are too absurd!  Don't you think it is wrong to trifle
away the precious moments that never come back again?'

'Ah, yes, they do.  When I've been with you the time comes back over and
over again.  Besides, Stella, how can you call it trifling when I ask
you to marry me?  Will you?'

'No, thank you.'

'You speak just as if I offered you a mouldy bit of bread.'

'No; as if you offered me some rich cake for which I have no appetite.'

'What if you did not get another chance of refusal?'

'Do you suppose I expect you to turn up periodically all my life, asking
me if I am "game" to come out with you into the garden?'

'Well, it's what I'll do, unless you get married to someone else.'

'Or unless you get married yourself.'

'I shall never marry any woman but Stella Courtland, and that's as sure
as my name is Edward Ritchie.'

The two had paused in their pacings to and fro, and stood facing each
other at the end of the vine arcade furthest from the house, close to a
great white Fortuniana rose-tree, thickly covered over with roses and
buds in all stages of unclosing.

The girl was tall and very finely formed.  Her face in repose was apt to
be rather cold and pale.  The eyes were extremely beautiful--starry,
large, deep and liquid.  When we try to describe eyes or flowers, we
find that language is extremely destitute in precise colour terms.  They
were dark gray-blue--sea-blue is, perhaps, the term that most nearly
approximates to the hue of this girl's eyes, and as that tint in the
waves is subject to rapid changes, to deepening intensity and gleaming
flashes of paler light, so did those bewitching orbs reflect each
passing emotion.  They were as sensitive to her moods as the surface of
water is to the sky's influence.  Thus it will be seen that their range
of expression was infinite.  The same might be said of the whole
countenance.  When moved or animated, it glowed and sparkled as if a
light shone through it.  The brow was singularly noble, and gave promise
of unusual mental power. The complexion was very fair and clear, and
when she talked it was often tinged with swift delicate rose-pink, that
died away very slowly, leaving a soft warm glow in the cheeks like that
often seen in a moist sea-shell.  It was a face whose every line and
feature indicated that Stella was endowed with rare qualities of
intellect and imagination, quick to feel, to see, to think.  And yet a
very woman, far from indifferent to admiration and the sense of power
that the homage of men gives a girl.  Yet, withal, liable to that quick
disdain of the more frivolous aspects of life, which to those who
understood but one side of her complex nature appeared in the light of
wilful caprice. She made a captivating picture as she stood under the
thick woof of clustering grapes and vine-leaves that threw flickering
shadows over her well-poised head, with its abundant coils of silky
hair, which had a slight wave and was of that deep golden-brown colour
that is seldom retained after childhood.

The young man was good-looking in a not uncommon and distinctly
unintellectual way.  He was close on six feet in height, with a
well-knit, athletic figure, a sun-bronzed face, inclining to be florid.
The forehead was low and square; the eyes dark-brown; the hair lighter
in tone, cut close, but crisply curling to the roots.  The nose was
thick, but straight and well defined.  The jaws were too heavy, and the
lips, partly concealed under a heavy drooping moustache, were over-full.
Altogether, it was the face of a man who could be firm and determined in
action, yet morally lacking in force of will.

The contrast between the two faces in form, development, and expression
was so striking that a casual onlooker might conclude there was that
essential difference of nature and temperament which might somehow form
a basis for marriage. This impression would be strengthened by a lurking
air of indecision in the young woman's face as her companion delivered
his resolve in a voice that well carried out the robust air of knowing
what he wanted, and a determination to compass it, which was conveyed by
his general demeanour.

'I don't know whether I should say that I am sorry or glad you are going
to be a bachelor,' she said reflectively. 'Will you grow very thin and
cross, or stout and good-natured?  The worst of it is, if you get stout
you will hobble and have a bad toe.  It will be really gout, you know,
but you'll call it a sprain or something.  And then, when you come to
see me, you will tread on dear Dustiefoot's paws.  I suppose I may be a
little deaf by that time. Ah, I can never bear to think of growing old
or dying!' and Stella stopped abruptly with a little shrug of the
shoulders.

'Why didn't you finish your fancy sketch?  If you were a little deaf I
would bawl at you: "Do you remember that Sunday in December when the
garden was full of roses, and that little beggar of a bird was singing?"
And then you'd say: "Ah, Ted, why didn't we get married when we were
young?" ... You know, Stella, you'll have to give way in the end.  Twice
you've named a horse for me, and twice it's turned out most lucky.  Now,
tell me--suppose we had been married this morning at church, what would
you think the very worst part of the concern?'

'That you wouldn't drive to the railway-station and set off for
Strathhaye--alone.'

'Well, that's flat.  I often wonder what makes me so ridiculously soft
about you, Stella.  You say such horrid things to me, while every other
girl I come across----'

'Now, Ted, if you boast, your very last fragment of a chance is gone.'

'Oh, I have got a fragment of a chance, then?  Come, that's the best
thing you've said yet.  Look here, Stella, have you ever been in love?
Now, honour bright?'

'Well, hardly--except with people in books.'

'But how the deuce could you be in love with people in books?'

'Oh, I assure you they are far the nicest people to fall in love with.'

'Because you can put them on a shelf and leave them there.'

'Yes, that is one great charm.  It is partly what ruins life, the way
people see so much of each other, till they know each other by heart, up
and down--all their stories that once were funny, their pet theories,
their stupid idiosyncrasies----'

'What are idiosyncrasies?

'Let me see.  It is your idiosyncrasy to wish to marry; it is mine to
think it too dangerous an experiment.'

'Fancy calling it an idiosyncrasy when a fellow is spoony. But I expect
that is not the dictionary meaning.  Well, you are all but twenty-three,
and you have not been in love. You may depend, if you are not heels over
head before you are twenty, you never will be.  So you may as well save
waiting any longer.'

The girl laughed out loud.

'Well, Ted, you are the first I have heard use inability to love as an
argument for getting married.  You are really very humble.'

'Oh! a fellow is always very humble when he's up to the hilt in love.'

'It is afterwards, when the fair is over, that he isn't quite so meek
and beseeching.'

'Well, you wouldn't have him be a humble jackass at a distance all
through?  It's too much like making your dinner off peaches.  Besides, a
girl like you always has her own way, hand over fist, single or married;
and when to that you add ever so many thousands a year----'

'Always when you have been to Melbourne you harp more and more on your
money.'

'Maybe.  You see, the more you see of the world the more you find how
much people think of money, and how much it gets for you.'

'And yet to be poor in the midst of riches is the worst kind of
poverty.'

'But you see,' said the young man eagerly, misinterpreting the drift of
this remark, 'Strathhaye is none of your big leasehold affairs.  It's
nearly all freehold--a good deal of it fit to carry three or four sheep
to the acre--where never a cockatoo nor a free selector dare show his
nose.'

'Oh, I feel as if I knew every inch of Strathhaye!'

'Well, a good tale is none the worse for being twice told. Besides, I am
coming to the point.  You might marry for love to-morrow, and in a few
months find you were quite insolvent in the article--have to pay a bob
in the pound, or even less.'

'True--become an utter bankrupt; such things happen.'

'Yes; there was your friend Cicely Mowbray----'

'Oh, please don't!' said Stella, in a tone of quick pain.

'Well, not speaking of things doesn't make them different.  You know how
completely gone she was on the man she married; and in less than three
years she ran off with another fellow!'

'And that was less immoral than staying with the man she married,' said
Stella, a hard expression coming into her face.

'Still, it isn't what people mean to do when they marry for love.  You
see, the point is that you may fall as completely out of love as you may
fall into it.  But you can't wake up one morning to find eighty thousand
acres first-class arable land, freehold, all gone to kingdom come like a
rainbow.  May I smoke a cigarette?'

'Yes.  What a pretty case, and what elegant little cigarettes!'

'They ought to be.  Do you know what they cost each?'

'Oh heavens! You are going to be just like Cr[oe]sus Henway, always
telling the price of things.'

'Or you might say like my father.  He likes to mention the figure that
things cost.  Still, I might easily take after a worse old boy than the
governor.  Though, mind you, I don't mean to go into Parliament ever,
and give ninety Affghanistan camels for an exploring expedition, and get
a handle tacked to my name because they came on a desert a hundred miles
by ninety.'

'You're like a good many more Australians.  You'll never do as much for
your native land as your fathers did for their adopted one.'

'Oh, I don't know!   I've half a dozen gold medals for my wool; and my
horses are far-away the best in the district.  But there--I'll put my
foot in it again if I say much more.  Would you like me to be Sir Edward
Ritchie, Stella, like the old man?'

'Surely that is a very foolish question to ask me, of all people.'

'I am not so sure about that--Sir Edward and Lady Ritchie.  If you
really have any fancy for the title, I might give another big dose of
camels to the Government.  There's plenty more desert to be opened up
for selectors to perish in.'

'Your speaking of the desert reminds me that I am getting parched with
thirst.  There must be some afternoon tea going on by this time.
Haven't we been here a good while?'

'About five minutes.  I don't care for tea.  But I'll go and get a split
soda for myself and bring you a cup.  Oh, if we go inside you won't come
out again--and we haven't settled anything yet.  But here comes Kirsty
with a tray.'

Kirsty was a tall spare woman, who was getting to be more than
middle-aged, but whose active, vigorous ways forbade the imputation of
old age.  She was invariably attired in black, a snowy cap, apron,
collars and cuffs, and a face in which all the cardinal virtues ran
riot.  But it was withal tempered by a certain severity of expression
that would seem to be seldom absent from the bearing of trusted Scotch
servants who have lived nearly all their lives in one family.

'I hae brought your pet Chiny teapot, Miss Stella,' said Kirsty, putting
the tray down on a little wicker table that was fixed beside a rustic
bench in the arcade.  'And Mr. Tom bade me ask ye, sir, whether ye wadna
rather hae a glass o' soda water?'

'Yes, if you please, Kirsty; but tell Mr. Tom to draw it mild.'

'Where is Maisie, or Sarah, Kirsty?' asked Stella, as she poured herself
out a cup of tea.  'You shouldn't be attending on us here, when we
really ought to go inside.'

'Weel, Miss Stella, ye see there's whiles when people disna want ither
folk aboot,' answered Kirsty, with a demure smile; 'Sarah's gone to Mile
End to see her aunt; as for Maisie, I've set her to learn a page o' the
Shorter Catechism.  She used to ken every question in it; but ye suld
hear her when I pit a few till her to-day.  It's just awfu' hoo this
climate seems to be against proper grounding in the fundamentals.'

'Poor Maisie!' said Stella with a smile; 'fancy learning a page of the
Shorter Catechism on a day like this!'  She fanned herself softly with a
wide pink satin fan, tipped with marabout feathers, and slowly sipped
her tea.

'What is the Shorter Catechism when it is at home?' asked the young man,
who was sitting near the girl and watching her every movement.

'Oh, it's just a little Scotch book, full of questions and answers about
things people are supposed to believe--but don't.'

'What sort of questions?'

'The first is, What is the chief end of man?  Now what answer would you
give to that?'

'Being in a garden with the girl who won't have you--but will some
day----'

'No; but in a general way, what do you think is the chief end of man?
what he should most live for?'

Ritchie knitted his brows for a moment.  'Well, I should say it is to
sell on the rise and have a good time.'

'Sell on the rise?'

'Yes, if you sell on the rise you make a pot of money.  If you don't,
the other fellow collars the tin.  Now, what is the answer in the
Catechism?'

'The answer is that the chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy
Him for ever.'

'But, of course, that means when people get to heaven.'

'But why should they get to heaven if they do nothing to deserve it?'

'Well, there you ask me a question!  Ah! here comes Kirsty with my
seltzer.  Here's to you, Stella--and many of them,' said Ritchie,
clinking Stella's cup with his tall tumbler, and tossing off half its
contents at a draught.

'What a pretty pale amber colour!  Is that ordinary soda water?' asked
Stella.

'Yes, ordinary soda water--but not ordinary old Irish whisky.  I'd back
your brother Tom's judgment in that article against any man's.  Have a
little nip.  It's ever so much better than tea.  I say, Stella, why does
the old woman--Kirsty, I mean--set her daughter to learn such stuff?'

'Ted, I am afraid you are almost a heathen.  Do you ever read the
Bible?'

'Well, I sometimes begin to read it on Sunday evening after a game or
two at billiards.  But I generally drop off to sleep.  I seem as if I
always knew what was coming.'

'I wonder how much you really know of it?'

'Oh, lots!  You try.  Ask me about Noah or any of those old buffers.'

'Then what can you tell me about Noah?'

'Ah, Noah!  Well, he was the one that put all the insects into an ark
and drank too much wine, and was going to put a knife into his son Esau,
till the ram called out, "Here am I."  If he had been a proper prize
animal he'd never have given himself away like that.  Well, what are you
laughing at?'

'Oh, Ted, Ted!  Then what about Abraham?'

'Abraham was one of those fellows that was always getting into a fix
because he didn't leave his wife at home.  It shows how wrong it is for
a man to take his wife everywhere.'

'And Isaac, what about him?'

'Well, he was about as sly as a Jew pawnbroker.  He put on a kangaroo
skin, or something, so as to get a mess of porridge.  But he didn't make
much out of it, for he got put into a fiery furnace afterwards--but no,
it was a pit.'

'And how many sons had he?'

'Well, there was Jacob and a thundering lot more; but ten of them got
lost, you know--the ten tribes--so you can't expect me to know _their_
names.  One of them--Joseph--had an awful swell coat.  He went down into
Egypt.  But I never could swallow all the yarn about him. Do you think
you ought to laugh so much at things out of the Bible?'

'Ted, do you really think all that is in the Scriptures?'

'I bet you it is; and a lot far more unlikely.  Yes; I'd lay you all I
hope to make when next I sell on the rise you couldn't ask me much in
the Old Testament I wouldn't give you an answer to,' said Ritchie, with
the elation of a man who has passed a creditable examination.

'But what things do you sell?  I thought you sent your wool to London
and sold your surplus stock to station-brokers, as my brothers do at
Lullaboolagana.'

'Oh, I don't mean station stuff.  I mean shares of all kinds.  Gold in
Victoria; silver in New South Wales; rubies, copper, and tin in South
Australia; opals in Queensland; pearls in Western Australia.  I have had
a share in a pearling boat at Shark's Bay for two seasons.  I mean to
show you a specimen of the pearls before long.  But, after all, no
speculation comes up to betting on thoroughbreds that go flashing by
with a feather-weight on them.  But, you know, it strikes me that no one
with a lot of money gets such a curly half-hour out of betting or
plunging as those that put their last copper on something they know
nothing about, and then hold their breath till they see whether they go
to gaol or make a haul.'

'Well, this is very edifying.  It seems the great thing in selling on
the rise is to rob your neighbour and have some excitement.  I had no
idea you were such a financier.'

'Oh, a fellow must do something.  As for wool and sheep, you shear your
flocks and ship the wool off.  The sheep are turned into the paddocks
and begin to grow their next clip, and the London market goes up or down
a few farthings in the pound.  It's all as slow as a christening.'

'Were you ever at a christening?'

'Yes, I was, worse luck! and stood godfather, too!'

'You a godfather?  Oh, Ted, this is too ridiculous!'

'Well, I thought it meant just to give the little beggar a silver pot
and a five-pound-note now and then.  But it appears you tell the most
barefaced crammers about renouncing the devil and all his work.  It
seems to me the moment you have anything to do with the Church you have
to tell lies till you're black in the face.'

'And who is the happy babe that may be left to your spiritual guidance?'

'Why, Henrietta's last baby.  She's John Morton's wife, you know.
Aren't we somehow related through the Mortons? You see, my sister is
married to John Morton, and your brother Claude is married to Helen
Morton, John's sister. Now, what relation am I to you?'

'Oh, the relation that should sit a little further away. We always come
back to talking of ourselves.'

'Well, there's nothing else half so interesting.  By the way, I was
coming part of the way from Melbourne with Dick Emberly, and he said
your brother Cuthbert was going to take charge of a congregation in one
of the Melbourne suburbs.  I didn't know he was a full-fledged parson.'

'Yes, he was ordained three months ago.  He is going to take a
congregation at Hawthorne for some months for a clergyman who has fallen
ill.'

'Oh, now you'll come to Melbourne.  Larry said she would make you come
for part of the season.  Have you seen her yet since she came to my
father's?'

'No; she called the other day, but I was out.  She left word that she
wanted to see me particularly, and I meant to call one day this week.
How does her husband go on now?'

'Oh, much as usual.  It's always head you lose, tail I win, with a man
like the Hon. Talbot Tareling.  No member of the "British nobility," as
Larry was so fond of calling it, that I've known in the Colonies has
much idea about money, but to grab as much as possible without doing a
stroke of work.'

'Well, I cannot help liking Mr. Tareling.  He has such very good
manners, and he is very amusing.'

'You see, it's all he's got to show for himself and for being descended
from goodness knows how many lords, and for having an uncle a K.G. and
his elder brother married to the daughter of a duke.  Lord, how Larry
used to cram them all down our throats, till we found out to our cost
what an expensive trick it is to have a sister marry into the "British
nobility."  Look here, Stella, shall you be in to-morrow afternoon?
Because, if so, Larry will drive across and settle when you'll come,
then.  You see, you can't get out of it now that Cuthbert is to be in
Melbourne.'

'Oh, let me see.  I'll have to consult my mother and decide about all
sorts of things.  You see, I've promised to go to Lullaboolagana in May
or June.'

'Very well; take Melbourne on the way.  I am going to see the old people
this evening, and I shall tell Larry.'

'Didn't you come from Godolphin House?'

'No; you see, when I got in by the inter-colonial last night, I went
with one or two other fellows straight to the club.  Then I didn't get
up very early, and so I came direct here to see you.'

'When did you see your parents last?'

'Oh! about six months ago--the same time as I saw you before.'

'Well! and the way your poor mother dotes on you--her only boy!  Why do
people think it is a blessing to have children?  Very often it seems one
of the bitter pleasures of life.'

'Well, you see, if people didn't think things were a little better than
they are, the world wouldn't gee up at all.  And doesn't it say even in
the Bible that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his
wife?  Then how much more will he do it for the girl who doesn't want to
be his wife!'

'Ted, your logic is irresistible.'

'You may call it logic if you like--but it's true.'

'Which logic seldom is; but then it's correct, and you can so seldom
combine the two,' said Stella in the light, mocking tone which came to
her so readily; 'I declare I've nearly emptied my teapot!  It is fatal
to begin to drink on a day like this.'

'Yes; the more you drink, the more you want to--that's the mischief of
it,' said the young man, with a gloomier expression than the occasion
seemed to call for.

'By Jove!  I nearly forgot I had this for you, Stella,' he said
presently, taking a small parcel out of his breast coat-pocket, sealed
and addressed as it had come by post.  'You're always interested about
the niggers.  Myers, my book-keeper, is a great dab at finding things
out about them.  By the way, he corresponds with your old friend, Dr.
Stein.  Well, some time ago Myers fossicked out about a very rum sort of
shoe that the blacks use on particular occasions.  I told him to get me
one if he could, and when I got to the club last night I found this
waiting for me.  Oh, it's over three weeks since I left Strathhaye; I've
been in Melbourne and other places.'

'Let me open it!' cried Stella.  'I love unfastening an unknown parcel;
it is one of the simple pleasures of life that never palls.  Oh, Ted,
what a cunning, gruesome-looking sort of thing!' she said, as the shoe
was revealed to view.

It was light, and compressible into a very small compass. The sole was
composed of emu feathers, matted together with a dull red coagulated
substance.  The upper part was a sort of network of small plaited
strands crossed and recrossed.  This curious shoe was extremely crude in
shape, being exactly alike at both ends.

'Why, Ted, this is hair!' cried Stella, after examining the net closely,
and touching the plaited strands, which had still a dull gloss.

'Yes--a woman's hair.'

'Ah! only a woman's hair.  How strangely wicked this shoe begins to
look!  Not a scrap of difference between the heel and the toes--and yet
one could tell it is meant for a shoe; and it looks as if it would keep
well on the foot. Let me see how it would look.'

Stella quickly slipped off her own shoe and put on the aboriginal one.

'Put it off! put it off!  I can't bear to see it on you,' cried the
young man vehemently.

But the girl merely laughed, and walked a few steps, and found that this
curious covering for the foot, though much too large, yet clung to it
with strange tenacity.

'Do you know that it is the most unlucky thing you could do?' said the
young man quite gravely.

'Really!' said Stella, smiling at the sombre tone of conviction in which
he spoke.  'Well, give me my own shoe, Ted.  No--I can put it on.'

Ritchie half reluctantly returned the pretty little bronze shoe with its
silver buckle and dainty bow, and then took up the aboriginal one.

'Now, do you know what this is called, and what it is used for?' he
said, holding it at full length on his outspread palm.

'No; but I am dying to know, for I never before heard that any of our
blacks made any attempt at shoeing themselves.  Could they walk far in a
thing of that kind?'

'Far enough for their purposes, I dare say,' returned Ritchie grimly.
'That is a Kooditcha shoe, and a black fellow never puts a pair of them
on except when he steals at night upon an enemy to kill him.'

'Oh, Ted, are you making that up to give me what you call a "curly
half-hour"?'

'Oh, but you've not heard all yet.  Do you see that reddish stuff
holding the feathers together?  Well, that is human blood.'

'How horrible!  I wish I had not put it on,' said the girl, with a
little shiver.  'It really has an assassin-like look, and such strange
sombre tints.'

'You see, it would make no more track than a butterfly, and nothing to
show it was on a foot.  The blacks say they can track anything that
walks or crawls, from a horse to a young snake; but not a ghost or an
enemy in Kooditcha shoes.'

'Well, of all the myths I have gathered about the blacks, none are so
dramatic as this relic.  Thank you so much for getting it for me.'

'Well, I'm glad you like it.  I wouldn't touch the thing with a pair of
tongs, for my own part.'

'Human blood and a woman's hair!  I wonder if anyone ever wore this to
creep up to a tribal foe at midnight? But why did you say it was unlucky
to put it on?'

'Well, the blacks say if you put one on and don't kill anybody, you'll
live to wish someone had killed you.'

'Clearly the only thing for me to do is to kill someone. Who shall it
be?' asked Stella, with mock gravity.

'Well, I'd offer myself, but you did for me long ago.'

'Why, Ted, you are getting quite epigrammatic.'

'Oh, I can't make a stew of my heart and put it into a letter, like some
fellows.  But look here, Stella.  Ah, here comes Cuthbert.  By Jove! he
looks almost like a Bishop already.'

The newcomer, Cuthbert Lionel Courtland, was three years older than his
sister.  He was a young clergyman, with perhaps something of the
ultra-gravity of demeanour that may sometimes be observable in those
that have recently entered on the sacred calling.  He had the
finely-developed brow that was a characteristic of the Courtland family,
dark gray eyes, something like Stella's in expression, and a
beautifully-chiselled mouth, that helped largely to convey the calm,
sunny expression which marked his face.

The two young men greeted each other as old acquaintances.

'You're a full-blown parson, Courtland, since I last saw you; I suppose
I ought to congratulate you, but----'

'But you're not quite sure, Ritchie?  Well, I'll take the half-will for
the deed.'

'The fact is, I never know what to say before a parson; and though we've
been kiddies together, I don't believe I can forget after this you
belong to the cloth.  The white choker and that makes you look, somehow,
as if you had belonged to the clergy all your life.'

'Well, shall I put a spotted necktie on, Ted--for old acquaintance'
sake?' laughed the young clergyman.

'Oh, I'm just going, thank you.  Stella has been blowing me up for not
being with my parents.  There's a little filly I've had sent to my
father's for you to ride, Stella.  May I come and take you out on
Tuesday morning?'

Stella hesitated, and then consented to the arrangement. The brother and
sister accompanied their guest to the house, where he made his adieus to
the rest of the family. He then mounted his horse and rode away.




                             *CHAPTER II.*


The brother and sister returned to the arcade.  Cuthbert was the first
to speak.

'Stella, there is a question I want to ask, and I'm almost afraid to put
it.'

The girl looked up quickly, and then a smile slowly crept over her face.

'Dear darling boy, don't be afraid to ask me questions--as if they were
lighted matches that might fall into gunpowder.'

'Has anything special passed between you and Ritchie?'

'Yes.'

'Have you accepted him?'

'No.'

'Then why do you go out riding with him on Tuesday?'

'Because I haven't accepted him.'

'Stella dear, don't trifle about this.  Is it fair to him?'

'I think it's not only fair, but generous.  He asks me to marry him.  I
cannot make up my mind to do so at present. In the meantime, I bind up
his wounded spirit with the balm of friendship.'

'Yes, that's it.  You refuse him time after time----'

'Not invariably.  Do not blame me too severely.  You see, I have tried
all the recognised modes of treating a lover.  I have refused him and
accepted him, and sometimes done neither.  When he has asked me for a
stone I give him bread--the nourishment of occasional social intercourse
instead of the terrible disillusion of marriage.'

'All this may be very well from a comedy point of view. But remember, it
is not for the amusement of a passing hour that a man persists in asking
a woman to be his wife year after year.'

'No.  But still, dear, remember how much more amusing it is than if she
had married him the first time of asking.'

'But now let me ask you seriously, what is to be the end of it all?  I
cannot understand you in the least, Stella, in this matter.  To begin
with, it is a mystery to me that you should find pleasure in Ted's
society, and yet I believe you do.'

'Ah, Cuth, you haven't heard Ted give an account of the Bible
Patriarchs'--and the girl burst into a peal of laughter so infectiously
merry that her brother was forced to smile. 'As for asking what is to be
the end of it all, why, that is a question we keep on asking as long as
people live, and, most of all, when they die.'

'Yet people must decide something in a rough and ready fashion.  You
have allowed yourself to drift into a very undesirable position.  You
refuse to marry Ritchie--and there I, at least, feel you are right.  But
I think you are wrong to go out riding with him, for it gives him hope
that in the end you may change your mind.'

'And so I may.  If I could only be sure that he would be always as
amusing as he was to-day----'

'Well, I suppose sex must count for something when a certain friendship
has subsisted since childhood between a young man and woman.  I must say
that to me the chief quality of Ritchie's conversation is a
careless--well, perhaps graphic--commonness of speech.'

'There is more than that.  There is a direct appeal to life as it
presents itself to him; and when we have all tacitly agreed to blink so
much, the trait has a certain fascination--at least to me.'

'I could understand that so much better if Ted's point of view were not
essentially that of the average sensual man.  Pardon me, dear, if I say
anything that vexes you.'

'You must not forget that I have never been in love with Ted.'

'Well, that troubles me sometimes more than if you were.'

'Isn't that just slightly contradictory?'

'Perhaps it may be; but what I mean is, that if you could really be in
love with him, and married him, you might transform him.  But if you
marry him without being in love--well, I fear that one or both may fall
over a precipice.'

'Why, Cuthbert, you must have been reading tragedy lately.'

'What makes you think so?'

'Because it is only tragedy which is so merciful in finishing us up in a
speedy, impressive manner when things go wrong, till at last the ghosts
have to come on the stage to explain how people fell over a precipice.'

'Every word you say there makes me feel afresh how disastrous it would
be for you to risk a _mariage de convenance_, or marriage with anyone to
whom you could not look up in some measure, with whom you would not have
that deeper mental bond without which marriage, in some cases, is not
justifiable.'

'Well, it seems to me that marriage of all subjects is the one that most
eludes dogmatizing about to any successful issue.'

'I admit that; but the more difficult a position is, the more one must
avoid an obvious danger.'

'"To save the soul," says one of the old Spanish saints, "it is
necessary to have as little intercourse with people as possible."'

'Please don't say that in order to be happy in marriage the same axiom
applies; for you are quite capable of proving it,' said the young man
laughingly.

'Did you ever notice a funny old book in tarnished gold that was given
to Grandmother Loudon on her wedding-day, called "Letters to a
Granddaughter"?'

'Yes; I never read it, but I always understood it was published for
private circulation only by an ancestress of our own.'

'Oh, very likely.  It is full of the acute platitudes I find crowding to
my pen when I try to write, so I suppose it is an hereditary strain.
Well, the thinglet is divided into "School Life," "Coming Out,"
"Betrothal," "Marriage," "Maternity."  Each section except marriage has
about a hundred pages devoted to it.  But under marriage there are only
five or six pages, beginning: "It must be evident to my dear intelligent
young female friends that this is a subject on which every woman who
enters the holy estate must be left to make her own special reflections.
They cannot be anticipated."'

'Really, Stella,' said her brother, laughing, 'you never seem to look
into an old, unknown book without finding a joke in it.'

'Do you call that a joke?  You wouldn't if you had turned the
grandmother's letters over as I did, when I was seriously trying to make
up my mind about entering the holy estate.  But the old woman was right
to a certain extent; for there you have to do with all the uncertainty
of untried depths in two natures, brought into a previously unknown
relationship.  Who can tell how the venture is to turn out?'

'Therefore, I say, let there be the sympathy of two responsive natures
or the differences that arise from two minds consciously alive.'

'Yes; and after building on all these hopeful auguries, you find the
result a failure more elaborate than the ordinary type.'

'I cannot quite make out why you are so radically sceptical on the
subject of marriage.  I am sure a great many of those we know most
intimately have made harmonious unions.  Ah!  I can see by your face you
are thinking of poor dear Esther.  Certainly, that marriage turned out a
failure, though at first it promised to be an exceptionally happy one.
But, at any rate, the more mistrustful you are the more careful you
should be not to run risks.  Even when people start with a good stock of
affection, what terrible ruin often overtakes them!  There was your poor
friend Cicely----'

'It is curious to have the poor woman quoted from two such opposite
points of view in one afternoon.  Well, at this moment she is living in
a four-roomed weather-board cottage in a township in New South Wales,
where her husband plays the harmonium in a little Baptist Chapel on
Sundays.  I do not say that there is not an element of terrible ruin in
this, but not in the sense you mean.'

'Her husband?'

'Yes; as soon as she was divorced they were married.  I found out where
they are living, and sent some help at a time when she badly needed it.
We have corresponded from time to time since then.'

'Does mother know this, Stella?'

'Well, no.  There are some things one's mother should be spared.  The
first letter I had was too pitiful.'

'Of course, I know you used to be very fond of each other, but----'

'The friendships of women should always have a limit. I admit it is very
dangerous to find out how things have really happened.  You then find
there are cases in which, if you knew all, you would connive at
"terrible ruin" rather than avert it.'

'But, Stella, we must not let our sympathy with people blind us.  There
are some actions that cut away the roots of friendship.  I would rather
you had found a way of helping the poor woman without corresponding.'

'I wrote to her regularly after I knew she was living with a horrible
man, who used to lock himself up and drink till he was in delirium
tremens--one who was a dipsomaniac before she married him, and yet
managed to conceal it from her till after they were married.  I know she
is living a purer life now than she could then.  The only child that was
born to her was paralytic and imbecile. Fortunately it died.  What sort
of a crime would it have been against herself, and still more against
society, if she had gone on adding to the probable criminals of the
world--to its certain weaklings?'

'I know how frightfully hard life may become; but at the worst, no
matter how we may be sinned against, we may at least refrain from
joining the ranks of those who have wronged us.'

'Meaning the criminals?'

'Yes.'

'Do you consider suicide a crime?'

'Need you ask, dear?'

'Because there were two courses open to Cicely--to kill herself, or go
away with the man who had for over two years protected her at intervals
from the maniacal conduct of her husband.'

'Who was this man?'

'An overseer on their station--a gentleman by birth.  I suppose every
country evolves its own special tragedies. You see, Mowbray's run is
four hundred miles north. When he came to town now and then before he
was married, he managed to keep sober.  At any rate, Cicely, during the
five months' engagement, never heard a breath or had the least
suspicion; and if her aunt did, she took good care not to mention it.'

'Surely she would never be guilty of such atrocity!'

'Oh, but she would.  After the death of the child Cicely told her all,
and implored her to let her stay in town.  No; a woman's proper place
was with her husband.  That's the sort of venomous old lynx she
is--always comfortable and decorous, and going about with a bottomless
pouch of gossip.  If ever she comes to a steep place she throws herself
upon tradition and conventional morality to save herself from the least
collision with virtue.'

'Stella, dear, that is very severe,' said Cuthbert, fondly stroking his
sister's glowing cheek.  There was summer lightning in her eyes.  Her
voice, when she was moved, had a resistant silvery tone, whereas when
she was indifferent or merely amused, she drawled a little.

'You wouldn't say so, Cuth, if you knew the old dame. But she was the
only relative Cicely has in Australia; so there was nothing for her but
to go back.  Two months after she did so I heard she ran away with
Stoneleigh.'

'I remember how dreadfully cut up you were.'

'Yes, we are often sorriest for people when the worst is over.  Now,
Cuth, don't sermonise; I see it is in your eyes.  Just look how the
hills are catching the sunset glow.'

'Is it so late?  Let me help you up on your beloved gum-tree stump to
see the sun set.'

The ivy-covered gum-tree stump, thirty-five feet in circumference, relic
of an old monarch of the primaeval woods, was close to the northern
boundary wall of the garden.  This point of vantage commanded varied and
lovely views.  Beyond North Adelaide and its sub-adjacent villaships,
looking to the east and south-east, one saw St. Peter's, College Town,
Norwood, and Kensington lying in graduated perspective, and beyond these
pretty prosperous suburbs full of charming houses and rose-filled
gardens, stretched the Adelaide hills.  Their bases and quiet darkling
gullies were now in clear blue and pale purple shadows, their summits
beautifully flushed with the gold and crimson splendour of a brilliant
sunset.  Northward the wide fertile Gawler Plain stretched beyond sight,
thickly sprinkled with tree-encompassed homesteads, and great
corn-fields, now ripely yellowing for the harvest.  Westward lay
Hindmarsh and Bowden, the manufacturing suburbs of the city, Torrenside
in the foreground, with some delightfully old-fashioned, many-windowed
houses, their cream-coloured walls gleaming through fig-trees and
vine-trellised verandas.  Beyond these might be discerned Port Adelaide,
with its forests of ship-masts lying along the wharves, and beyond all,
the ocean flushed to the verge of the wide horizon with the setting sun.
For a moment it rested like a quivering ball of flame on the level
waters, and then dropped out of sight, leaving a fiery glow wide and
high in the sky, passing towards the zenith into the most delicate tones
of pink. The same tints were reflected on the hilltops for some time, as
vividly as though they were mirrors throwing back a not distant picture.

The two gazed on these lovely scenes with crowding associations that
stretched back to the first twilight of childish memories, and lingered
in the garden till the sound of the dinner-bell summoned them into the
house.

Fairacre both within and without bore the traces of easy affluence.  The
house was a large one-story building, substantially built of stone, with
a deep veranda, furnished with Venetian shutters, running all round it.
The principal rooms were large and lofty, and opened by wide doors, half
glass, upon the garden, which from one season to another was never seen
without the radiance of many flowers.  The sparkling old silver, and the
delicately fine table-linen, were family heirlooms, as were also several
rare works of art, and a large proportion of the rosewood furniture.
Mrs. Courtland was now close on sixty-five years of age, invariably
attired in widow's weeds since her husband's death years previously.
She was descended from an old Highland family, and in face and bearing
she bore the unmistakable stamp of high-bred refinement.  Her features
had never been strictly beautiful, but her countenance must always have
been marked by the calm gentleness, the sweet, kindly serenity which
imparted to it so much charm and distinction.  It must even in youth
have been distinguished by that guileless sincerity which formed an
index to a mind curiously free from any taint of worldliness or
self-seeking.

The Courtland family numbered eight in all, though there were at this
period but four of them under the paternal roof. The eldest daughter,
Barbara, was married to the Rev. Joseph Wallerton, an Episcopalian
clergyman settled in Sydney; the second daughter, Esther, Mrs. Raymond,
was a widow of over two years' standing.  Her husband had been a wealthy
squatter in the south-eastern district of the colony, where Mrs. Raymond
and her four children chiefly resided.  There were two unmarried
daughters still at home--Stella and Alice, eighteen months her senior,
but looking incredibly young for her age, being _petite_ and
rosy-cheeked, with overflowing spirits--circumstances which were,
perhaps, providential, as she had recently entered on an engagement that
threatened to be rather indefinite.  Tom, the other son who was at home,
was a lawyer in good practice, and three years older than the young
clergyman. The other two brothers, Hector and Claude, the eldest and
second eldest respectively, had been for over twenty-one years engaged
in squatting pursuits with almost unbroken success in the adjacent
colony of Victoria.  Ten years previously a wealthy cousin of Mrs.
Courtland's in the Indian Civil Service had left her a legacy of
thirteen thousand pounds.  This had been invested in Lullaboolagana, the
Victorian station, which not only ensured the increasing prosperity of
the two squatters, but added handsomely to the general income of the old
home.

The visitors at Fairacre on this Sunday afternoon were Mrs. Harrison, a
daughter and two sons.  It was to Felix, the younger of these, and an
architect by calling, that Alice was engaged.  The elder brother,
Andrew, was a journalist. The support of the rest of the family depended
largely on the two young men, as the father, a clergyman and an old
college friend of the late Mr. Courtland's, had died a few years
previously, leaving his widow with but a small annuity and younger
children to be educated.  The elder daughter, Fanny, was now eighteen,
and there were growing symptoms of an attachment between herself and
Tom--a circumstance which drew the remark from Stella that it seemed as
though some families had hereditary tendency to catch infantile maladies
from each other.  It was when she made observations of this kind that
Tom used to wonder why the youngest of an otherwise well-conducted
family should be hopelessly spoiled.




                             *CHAPTER III.*


On the following Monday afternoon Laurette Tareling, or, to give her the
designation which was dear to her as a title, the Hon. Mrs. Talbot
Tareling, paid the call of which her brother had spoken on Sunday.

She was of the medium height, though something in her face and figure
gave the impression that she was small, being slight and fair with a
faint colour deepened with a little rouge so skilfully that it was
unsuspected by all save the most practised eyes.  She had fair fluffy
hair, lightened by gold dust, descending in a fringe of infantile
curliness to within a short distance of her eyes, which were dark brown,
rather small, but very bright and keen, and altogether somewhat like
those of a parrot that is bent on finding out a great deal.  An
expression that was further carried out by the nose, which took the
liberty of turning up a little, and a mouth which, though it smiled very
often, had something rather hard and beakish in its formation.  Yet, on
the whole, Mrs. Tareling was considered pretty.  She dressed extremely
well, and was never seen beyond the domestic circle without an air of
determined vivacity.  She had the reputation of being one of the
'smartest' talkers in Melbourne society, and had a knack of telling a
story against those to whom she owed any grudge, which at once made her
popular, and created many enemies.

Mrs. Courtland and her two daughters were in the drawing-room when the
visitor was shown in.  Mrs. Tareling bestowed sharp little explosive
kisses on each, ending with Stella, at whom she looked inquiringly, her
head a little to one side.

'Why, Stella, you have grown thinner,' she said, half pensively.  'My
dear Mrs. Courtland, has Stella been ill?'

'Oh no; Stella is never ill!' answered the mother with a fond smile.

'Well, just look at the two--who, to see them, would think Allie was
older?'

'Ah, Laurette, you are letting me down gently,' said Stella, trying to
keep back the mischievous smile that lurked round her lips.  'What you
mean is that I am "going off"--that my first youth is over.'

'Oh, well! in a climate like ours we must make up our mind that we shed
our first youth when we leave our teens--except fortunate people like
Allie, who discover some elixir----'

'Which they don't give even their sisters,' laughed Stella.  'Well,
Larry, I promise you if ever I get the chance I shall have a sip--if
only to save you pain.'

'Oh, as for that, who is such a wreck as I am myself for my age?  I
assure you the day before I left Melbourne I nearly wept at finding that
I was suddenly an old hag.  Oh, positively!  In the morning I found two
gray hairs in my comb.  I always heard people speak of the first gray
hair, but there were two, showing that somewhere my head was getting
powdered with the frost of age.  And that wasn't all.  In the afternoon
I stood in a cross light, opposite a mirror.  I turned round with a
start; who is that creature, thought I, with her cheeks so hollow and a
faded colour, and lines deepening round her mouth?  And then, to crown
it all, Talbot came in that moment leading Gwendolen by the hand,
looking atrociously tall for her four years----'

'Is that your little daughter, Laurette?' asked Mrs. Courtland, who was
getting a little hard of hearing, and did not quite catch the drift of
these remarks, which were delivered in a rapid, semi-staccato tone
levelled especially at Stella.

'Yes, dear Mrs. Courtland; and growing such a big girl, and so
precocious.  She wanted to know, the other day, whether her little
brother Howard would not be Lord Lillimore when he grew up.  And then
she was sure, she said, that Uncle Ted would be Sir Edward Ritchie.'

'My dear, you must not let her be too much with the servants.  You
should get a nice young lady as nursery-governess for her,' said Mrs.
Courtland, in a motherly way, never dreaming that this precocious tattle
had been invented by Laurette on the spur of the moment.

'Well, life is full of accidents; who knows but both these events may
come off one day,' said Alice solemnly, though there was a merry gleam
in her eyes.

And then Mrs. Tareling went off on another tack.

'You are always so beautifully quiet and sedate in Adelaide, it is
really like coming to another world from Melbourne.  And the season was
so late with us this year. What with the Russian and German men-of-war
and the visit of the Sultan of Morocco, it was a perfect whirlpool. I
felt at last I would like to retire to the Grande Chartreuse.'

'But I suppose you find the dear little farinaceous village almost as
quiet.  Hardly anything happens with us,' said Alice.  'People die
occasionally, but only once and very seldom.  Yes, and holes come
occasionally in the carpets--of the poorer classes, you know;' and Alice
glanced half ruefully at the Brussels pile which had been in the
drawing-room for twenty years and began to show signs of wear in places.

'Yes; and even your Governors last longer than they do elsewhere,'
answered Mrs. Tareling.  'Now, with us in seven years we have had two;
and next month Sir Marmaduke leaves; and who do you think is his
successor?  Why, Lord Weavelow, whose wife is Talbot's first cousin, and
Lord Weavelow a connection of his sister-in-law, Lady Gertrude.  It is
rather trying to be so closely related to the new Governor in our
circumstances.'

'Oh, my dear, it is very likely they will be quite nice people.  I dare
say you will like them very well,' said Mrs. Courtland soothingly, which
amused her daughters not a little.

'Mother never did, and never will, comprehend the little subtleties of a
snob,' as Alice said afterwards half despairingly.

'Oh, I dare say we shall like them very much.  But then we are so
poverty-stricken; and the people who entertain most in Melbourne get
more ostentatious every year--private theatres, and enormous ball-rooms,
and French cooks who keep a tandem and a Cremona violin.'

'Fancy all these complexities off the back of the idyllic sheep!' said
Stella, laughing.  'Well, Laurette, if I were you, I would go in for a
sweet and severe simplicity.  It would really be more _distingue_.'

'That is true.  But nothing is so costly as the only form of simplicity
open to you if you have the right of tambour at Government House,'
returned Mrs. Tareling, with the air of one who is laying down axioms
for the guidance of society from Olympian social heights.

At this moment a little diversion was caused by the entrance of two
elderly Quaker ladies, maiden sisters, in soft dove-coloured dresses and
bonnets, and white fichus of Indian muslin.  They were followed by
afternoon tea, over which the older ladies fell into a group to
themselves, talking softly over sick and afflicted people, and new
candidates for admission to the Asylum for Incurables.

'Still, I suppose you will hardly retire to the wilds of Kannawijera
when your relatives begin to reign at Government House?' said Alice,
taking up the thread of conversation as she presided at the tea-tray.

'No; not this coming season, at any rate.  We had to give up our house
at Yarra Yarra; they raised the rent so atrociously.  But we have
secured a smaller one at Toorak, with the principal rooms _en suite_;
almost all the partitions in folding-doors, that can be pushed back in
the most wonderful way.  Just like one of those knives--at least, they
look like knives, but when you open the handle it turns into corkscrews,
and toothpicks, and glove-buttoners, besides several blades.  Everyone
says Melbourne will be awfully full by May; so we caught time by the
forelock, and took this house from November.  But we don't pay a penny
more than if we waited later.  It is to be a most brilliant season,
everyone says.  And now, Stella, I want to arrange about your
long-promised visit.'

'Oh, you are very kind,' said Stella.

'Don't say that: it's a bad omen.  Always before when I asked you to
come, you said, "You are very kind," and didn't turn up.  It's no use
coming for a couple of weeks, like the girls who come from the wilds of
the Bush for a birthday ball, and don't know a soul but a few lanky men
in split gloves, who don't waltz, and huddle up together behind the
doors.'

'Ah, Laurette, you had better think twice before you are burdened
through part of a brilliant season with a country cousin like me,' said
Stella, laughing merrily at the picture called up by Laurette.

'I suppose it would be no use asking you to come as well, Allie, just
for a couple of weeks?' said Mrs. Tareling graciously.

Allie raised her hands in mock despair.

'How can you ask?  I am in training to keep a house on nine or ten
pounds a week, and save out of that for a rainy day.'

'Oh, how very romantic!  But surely no rainier day can come than nine or
ten pounds a week?' said Mrs. Tareling, with well-simulated wonder.

'You see, Larry, you who are poverty-stricken on over three thousand a
year can hardly plumb the depths of real destitution,' said Alice.
'There is the poverty of hot joints and "frugal days of interlinear
hash----"'

'Allie, whatever you do when you and Felix marry, do not have large
joints,' said Stella gravely.  'I am confident that the happiness of the
Australian household is more frequently wrecked by hash than any ethical
point.'

'Well, I am studying the question.  Perhaps I may one day publish a
shilling cookery-book for young couples who ought not to have married.'

'Surely Felix's income must be considerable now.  They say he is the
best architect in the place,' said Laurette somewhat abruptly.

This laughing raillery about poverty did not commend itself to her in
the least.  It is mortifying, when one wants to make a girl feel how
comparatively humble her prospects are, to find her treating the subject
in a serio-comic vein.

'But then there are the younger children to provide for--quite dependent
on Felix and Andrew,' returned Alice.

'Well, it's a pity you girls couldn't go in for a little division of
poverty,' replied Laurette.  'Here is Stella's _fiance_ rolling in
money.'

'As it happens, that young woman hasn't got a _fiance_,' returned Stella
quickly.

'No?  You and Ted keep on such good terms, I always forget the affair
was broken off,' said Laurette rather maliciously.  'But now for your
visit, Stella.'

'I must talk it over with mother before making ultimate arrangements.'

'But we all know beforehand what that means.  Your mother says, "Yes,
darling," to all you propose.  Pray, my dear, don't forget that I've
known you from childhood.  It was never a secret you were rather
spoiled.'

Thus pressed, Stella said half hesitatingly:

'Well, if you let me come to you on my way to Lullaboolagana, without
pledging myself to the length of the visit.  But do you know that
Dustiefoot insists on coming wherever I go?'

'Oh yes; and you always take Maisie when you pay a long visit--at least,
someone said so the other day----'

'Yes,' put in Alice; 'we spare Maisie to Stella because she could never
bear to brush her dresses or sew on bits of braid.  It is a case of
atavism.  She has reverted to the only duchess that was in our
family--more than three centuries ago.'

'That is curious,' said Stella, maintaining the mock gravity with which
her sister spoke; 'for after twelve generations the proportion of blood
of any one ancestor in only 1 in 2,048.'

'At any rate, it is settled you are to come--Dustiefoot, Maisie, and
all,' said Laurette.  'By the way, how did you enjoy the Emberly ball?'

'Oh, immensely,' answered Stella; and then a quick wave of colour
suffused her face, mounting even to her forehead.

'We enjoyed it "not wisely, but too well."  We fancy there has been no
nice weather since that ball was over,' said Alice, who sympathetically
noted this uncompromising blush, and tried to attract Laurette's
gleaming eyes from her sister's face.

But Laurette had in an eminent degree what Talleyrand considered the
whole art of politics--that is, the art of seeing--at any rate, what was
on the surface.

'Oh, very much, did you?  And you used to be so disdainful of dancing.
But, to be sure, that was when you were much younger.  And those alcoves
one heard so much about--were they a great success?  I declare, Stella,
there must be something behind this.  Do you know you are blushing most
furiously?'

'Oh, I always blush when I ask Alice for a second cup of tea,' replied
Stella, recovering her self-possession.  'As for the alcoves--the half
was not told you.  There are eight windows in the ball-room, and round
each window an alcove much larger than an ordinary bay-window, all lined
with salmon-coloured satin with a seat running round each; up the front,
on both sides, brackets with great vases full of ferns and roses, and
lotos blooms and asphodel; overhead an electric light in an opal globe,
exactly like a great piece of the full moon put into a crystal prison,
only more lambent.'

'And don't forget the cream lace curtains in front lined with salmon
satin, Stella,' said Alice, looking at her sister with a dancing light
in her eyes.  And then turning to Laurette: 'The thing was to meet
Prince Charming at the ball--dance and chat with him, and then sit out
the rest of the evening in an alcove, behind the curtains and two
chaperons, just fashioned by Providence so as to completely screen you
from the other men to whom you might have promised dances.'

'Indeed, and who--who was your chaperon?' said Laurette, looking from
one to the other of the sisters.

Stella had grown suddenly grave, though the remnants of her 'furious'
blushing still lingered in her cheeks.

'Oh, Mrs. Marwood and Tom and Felix and Andrew,' answered Alice lightly.

'And which of you retired into the alcove with the imprisoned moonlight
and asphodel--and Prince Charming?'

'How literal you are, my dear!' said Alice, laughing. 'But you see,
after one's ideals of life have been exalted by such alcoves you must
not expect Stella to fall quite prostrate before the grandeurs of
Melbourne society.'

Laurette seemed only half satisfied with this explanation, but feeling
that further investigation would be useless just then, she allowed the
subject to drop.

'I wonder what has given Laurette this ardent attack of friendship just
now,' said Stella, when the sisters were alone.

'About insisting on your visit?  Oh, she means to show you the kingdoms
of the world and the glory thereof.  And I expect it's not so much
Laurette as Ted.  It's a change of venue so as to get a different
verdict.  You have got into the habit of saying "no" at Fairacre, but in
that "smaller house" at Toorak, surrounded by magnates who have private
theatres and French cooks--after all, Laurette is very amusing.'

'Oh yes; for a day or two.  But get a little below the surface, and she
always has the hard, crude touch of the social amateur.  And Allie--how
could you be such a little jackdaw as to say that to her--about Prince
Charming?'

'Well, it was partly my instincts as an artist.  I could not bear to
hear you give the light, graphic touches of the setting and leave out
the very core.  Besides, even Laurette cannot unravel that little
mystery.  Do you know, Stella, it's the nearest thing to a romance that
has happened for--twice one year.  A great brilliant ball--a wonderful
Austrian band--electric lights, flowers--an introduction without
surnames--one dance--intellectual kinship--mysterious sympathy between
two souls--a long talk behind ferns and chaperons in an alcove--duty
thrown to the winds--till the fugitives are discovered by an irate
ci-devant lover who is down for two waltzes--separation without even a
lingering farewell--disappearance of the Prince before midnight--no
name--no trace.  Even the people who got him the invitation depart next
day by the P. and O. steamer.  Ah me! he was on his way to the Princess
of China--or to awaken the sleeping beauty with a kiss.  Would I were
the sleeping beauty!  He really had a distinguished air.'

'I wish Felix would overhear you,' said Stella, who listened to this
little rhapsody with a half-tender smile.

'Ah, my dear, when people are so desperately fond of each other as Felix
and I, the shadow of romance never eclipses their gaiety.  But the more
I have thought over the episode, the more does it appear to me in the
light of an allegory.  You were from childhood the victim of the ideal.
You always forsook your dolls when you perceived they were stuffed with
sawdust.  When you found the kitten of commerce mewed by means of a
spring, you would have no more of it.  And so in the central fact of a
woman's life, as someone has called marriage.  You ask for better bread
than is made from wheat.  Well, just for one evening you saw one cast in
that higher mould, and then you were for ever secured from disillusion.'

'Allie, you have got into one of your random fits. Remember, it is you
who have been spending yourself on theories and imaginings concerning
the unknown.'

'Ah, my dear, it is what you do not say that I try to interpret.  But
take it, I say, as an allegory--not a real event; and then turn your
mind to the sober realities of life.  Now confess, if at the end of
October you had not gone to a certain assembly, in November you would
have fulfilled your engagement and gone to Laurette--seen the Melbourne
Cup and made certain promises--renewed them, rather.  Remember our
conversation two days before the ball, when our dresses came home.'

'I like your way of measuring life, Allie.'

'By the dressmaker's thread?  Well, it's much more cheerful than that of
the Parae.  But you do remember that conversation?

'Yes, I think we came to the conclusion that some people married because
they were in love; others because they thought they were; but the
majority because they couldn't be.'

'And that you belonged to the last named; but would very likely find the
unholy estate of matrimony as brilliant an affair as most others.'

'Well, for goodness' sake don't let us go on quoting ourselves as if we
were classics in Russia backs.  I still hold to that.  I begin to see
that Ted is my fate.  I shall have to succumb.  On the whole, it will be
less tiresome.  And then I want to go to Rome and places.'

'You might have gone with Claude and Helen.'

'Well, it was heroic of them to offer to take me; but I think it would
have been still more heroic of me to have gone.  Oh, every reason--Can
there be anything in life more unendurable than the confident air of
prosperity which envelops your newly-married couple?  The melting stolen
glances, the becoming humility, the timid anxiety to please that in
pre-nuptial days marked their demeanour, disappear as if some witch had
exorcised them with black magic.'

'Oh, let it be white magic, Stella, if only for my sake!'

'Till at last we have that placid semi-unconsciousness of each other's
presence which decks your full-blown married pair as a cankerworm adorns
the rose.'

'Oh, Stella, Stella!  I believe you really were born with a mistrust of
marriage,' laughed the elder sister.

'Yes; ever since I have been able to think or observe I have been
convinced that marriage is the most foolish, faulty old institution
going.'

Alice at this laughed louder than before; and then, still smiling, with
the joyous, confident smile of a woman triumphantly in love, she said:

'I wish, dear, you would throw out a few hints for the improvement of
this heaven-forsaken arrangement.'

'Well, you see, really to improve it would be to destroy it.  To begin
with, people see too much of each other, which seems to be destructive
alike to passion and good manners.  Oh yes; you are ready to _mourir a
rire_ at all this.  Nevertheless, fate and the comedians are lying in
wait for you.'

'As for the comedians, I care nothing for them.  Most of them were men
who married dreadful creatures--as even Moliere did.  And fate--well,
the most terrible sting it can have is that after living all our lives
together, Felix and I may not die together.'

'Like the babes in the wood, or Philemon and Baucis.'

'Yes; or those dear old people one so often sees in common life, who
survive each other only a few quiet uncomplaining weeks or months.  But
as for you, Stella--well, I suppose you would have your husband come
with his hat in his hand, asking in an agitated voice when he might pay
you a morning call?'

'Yes; and then I would look at my ivory memory--the pretty one you gave
me a year ago, with a tablet for each day in the week--and I would say,
"To-morrow is Goethe's birthday, and I see only people who write sonnets
in honour of that occasion.  Ah, but yours, my friend, do not scan! No;
nothing in prose, however felicitous, will pass muster."'

'Well, the next day--wouldn't you let him come on the next day?' pleaded
Alice, a wicked light gleaming in her eyes.

'No; the next day, "I have an appointment with a white fairy rose-bush.
It has four hundred and fifty buds, and some of them have promised to
open on that day.  Well, yes; perhaps Wednesday.  But, mind, you must be
very amusing, and whatever you do, don't tell me old stories."'

And so, grave and gay by turns, they talked of love and marriage, as
girls are wont to do in the sheltered sanctuary of the parental home,
while life is a sort of isthmus between early youth and the deeper
responsibilities of womanhood.  Behind them lies childhood, full of
sunshine and laughter, of bird calls and opening roses and passionate
little griefs that passed into oblivion in the sleep that came with the
glimmering twilight.  Yes; looking backward there lie the fairest
meadows, sunny nooks made cosier with the blue haze of smoke rising from
familiar hearths; and always in the air the refrain of cradle songs, the
sound of bells calling to prayer, the faces and voices that they first
loved, that they must love to the end.  They are still merely onlookers,
seeing but selected replicas of the play of life, jealously guarded from
the vulgar collisions of the crowd.  But what is there on the farther
side of the isthmus?  It is far off, and the land is veiled in mist.

But there are arenas there in which terrible things happen.  There is
reckless trampling as of wild beasts, and there are dark stains of
bloodshed quickly sanded over. Often there come rumours of those
overtaken with worse than the throes of dissolution.  The shadow of the
valley of life is much more intolerable oftentimes than that of death.
There are whirlpools that suck in more than life.

And those who have been so delicately guarded: will their path trend
towards sinister pitfalls? will they be overtaken by those catastrophes
that mutilate human lives, smitten with those fiery darts that with a
touch work moral paralysis?  How will it be with them in the unborn
years, far from the old sacred shelter of their early home?  Will they
moan for help in the darkness, with no ear to listen to their cry?

Ah, dear God! how strange and pitiful it all is--this incredible saga of
human life, whose beginning we have lost, whose end we cannot tell; in
which we lose one by one those who are our companions, and in the end
lose ourselves; in which we are first robbed of all we love, and then of
all we know.

The sisters had wandered from lighter topics, and were talking in hushed
tones of their father's death, when Mr. Edward Ritchie was announced,
and the young man entered with that air so characteristic of him, of
being in and belonging wholly to a world without visions or anxious
forecasts.  His mere presence threw discredit on the sophistry of
speculation.  He was, to use an old figure of speech, for ever planting
cabbages, and when one foot was on the ground the other was not far off.
Nothing in books, or the destiny of the race, or the life of the soul,
had ever moved him.  But, then, he was never without a horse or two that
had achieved something wonderful, or were just going to do so, or might
do it if they chose. Without being exactly excited over this, he was so
deeply interested, and so sure people wanted to know all about it, that
he often, even in the breasts of those who cared little for equine
performances, created a glow of enthusiasm, which banished every subject
of a less abstract nature than an animal of good lineage, with four legs
and a mane.

There was Spindrift, now, who could do anything he liked at home, and
yet, put him on a race-course, you would swear he was dickey on every
leg he had got, and had sprung a hock into the bargain.  It was enough
to make a fellow eat his hat, and the horse, too.  And such a beautiful
creature--almost perfect in all his points--perhaps the shoulders were
not quite oblique enough.  But the only thing by which you could guess
there was a bad 'nick' in him was his eye.  Never trust a horse unless
his eye is bold and full, etc., etc.

Ted's ostensible mission, on this occasion, was to invite the Courtlands
to a dinner-party at his father's house before Cuthbert left for
Melbourne.

'My mother and I put our heads together, and planned it after Larry came
to see you to-day,' he explained. 'When Larry comes on a visit to the
old house now, she wants to drive everyone tandem, full swing.  But we
just gave her the slip, and settled how many and all, and I wouldn't
even wait till to-morrow morning--I shall be here at ten sharp to take
you out riding, you know, Stella.  I thought perhaps Cuth might have
some parsonic concern on, if he didn't get early notice.'

'But a dinner-party on the 26th December!' said Stella, in a voice of
consternation.  'Everyone will be so frightfully used up with the
tradespeople's Christmas cards, and the heat, and the Athanasian Creed
the day before!'

But Ted overruled every objection.  He had to return to Strathhaye soon
after Christmas, and the 26th was the only day, and come they must.

Then the three went out into the garden to see the sun set across the
sea, which was one of the traditions at Fairacre.  All over the west the
heavens seemed on fire, and underneath lay the sea, wide and silvery,
and calm as a great inland lake.  A white-sailed craft going southward
stood out with startling distinctness.

'Where lies the land to which yon ship must go?' said Stella, watching
its course with a far look in her eyes.

'To Normanton, I expect, for potatoes,' said Ted promptly.

And then when his companions laughed involuntarily at this explanation,
he asked very placidly where the joke came in.

'Well, Ted, you must know that a man called Wordsworth wrote sonnets,
and that is a line out of one of them,' said Alice.

'I'm blessed if ever I could make out why these old buffers of poets
want to jaw so much about things.  If he didn't know where the boat was
going, why didn't he ask at a shipping office, instead of writing a
sonnet?'

This reflection, delivered in a wondering, half-aggrieved tone, made
Stella laugh more than before.  Though Ted could not always very well
divine the cause of her clear rippling laughter, no sound was pleasanter
to his ears. The elder sister watched the two with an amused interest
that was always renewed.  It was apparent that the blunt, shrewd way in
which the young man so forcibly used his limited outlook on life, formed
a kind of attraction to the girl, who had that wide sympathetic range of
view which a many-sided culture imparts; who was infected, too, by that
dreamy, sceptical attitude of mind born of a nature innately
introspective, and early inured to flights in mental dialectics.

'I suppose I ought to go now,' said Ted lingeringly.

'No; stay to dinner and spend the evening with us,' said Alice.  'Oh, it
doesn't matter about your clothes. Tom and Cuth seldom dress when we
dine _en famille_ in the summer-time.'

'Will you play two-handed _euchre_ with me for sixpenny points if I
stay, Stella?'

'Oh, I must play for love.'

Ted coloured with pleasure to the roots of his hair, and Stella hastened
to explain.

'You see, it is near the end of the quarter, and I have nothing in my
purse but a doubtful threepenny-bit and a damaged stamp.'




                             *CHAPTER IV.*


Godolphin House, the town residence of Sir Edward Ritchie, was a large
pile of buildings near the foot of the hills, a few miles to the
south-west of Adelaide.  Everything was on a large scale--the house, the
grounds, the conservatories, the trees, and even the views.  The place
had been well planned and built, from the neat little semi-Swiss lodge
at the chief entrance, to the handsome gable-ended stables, with their
luxurious appointments, at some distance to the rear of the house; and
the house itself lacked no comfort or convenience of modern days, and,
to a certain extent, had been even pleasant to the eye, till, in an evil
hour, the emissary of a great 'decorative' firm had prevailed on Sir
Edward to have the 'mansion' 'done up' from top to toe.  This took the
form of a carnival of unlimited expenditure, and that unhappy outburst
of British Philistinism known as the aesthetic craze.  There was one
apartment, known as the peacock-room, which upset an old Bush comrade of
Sir Edward's in a surprising way.  The man was one to whom money had no
value apart from the excitement of earning and losing it.  His life was
impartially spent in tents in the wilderness and costly hotels. He and
Sir Edward had worked together as wood sawyers in a great gum-forest for
over seven years.  This long period of hard lucrative work had laid the
foundation of the worthy knight's large fortune, while for the other man
it started the habit of alternately drinking bad champagne, etc., at a
guinea a bottle, out of a quart jug, and humping his swag to the last
new rush.  For it was always gold that attracted him, and that, with
astonishing frequency, retrieved his fallen fortunes.  But through all
the reverses of the one, and the climbing grandeurs of the other, the
friendship between the two men was unbroken.

It was when Godolphin House was at its most appalling stage of
unmodified aestheticism--from sage-green portieres to nymphs with
exaggerated chins holding bronze lamps aloft--that the Bushman paid one
of his periodical visits. Sir Edward took him all over the house, and
finally the two sat down in the peacock-room.  Here they dug their
saw-pits and felled mighty giants of the forest over again.  But the
more adventurous spirit had recently 'knocked down' a large nugget, and
his nerves were not what they ought to be.

'Ned, my boy, I can't stand these blazing eyes any longer.  They get
upon my liver somehow.  I'll take a turn in the fresh air.'  With that
he stepped on the terrace, but the next moment he rushed back white and
breathless.

'Look here, old man, I must hook it out of this.  Why, you've hung the
very birds with these damned staring eyes!'  He had come upon a row of
peacocks sunning their gorgeous tails on the terrace on which he had
taken refuge.

Even Ted used to grumble that it was all very well to lick the place
into a cocked hat with screens, and fans, and dados, and soup-plates,
but it was a jolly shame not to leave a den or two in which a fellow
could live.  Laurette adored all the transformations as long as they
were 'quite the thing'; but when the tide turned she wrought various
changes from time to time during her visits to her parents, and in
several rooms had quite wiped away the disgrace of conventional
aestheticism.  But the air of 'no expenses spared,' and of being _en
rapport_ with a rampant art-decorator, who has forsworn the old honest
British hideousness for a sickly unreality, was apt to weigh heavy on
the spirits.  It was a house in which above all others to taste the
wormwood of ennui to its last dregs; in which to be overcome by that
lassitude of body, and bitter languor of mind, in which these symptoms
may be successively noted.

You have a growing conviction that you can draw your breath but an hour
longer without a change of environment.

You find yourself yawning irretrievably when you essay to add your mite
to feeble anecdotes of the weather.

You find your face turning to stone when you strive with all the anguish
of despair to call up a smile in response to a faded joke.

You reply with withering platitudes to every observation, and you find
the kindliest attempt at pleasantry an unpardonable offence.

You sit on and on with the uncommunicating muteness of a fish, till you
are overpowered by the thought that if you do not creep into the
solitude of your own room you will be driven to commit some desperate
deed, so that you may be imprisoned or sent to an asylum for the insane,
or some equally genial retreat that will mercifully shield you from the
joys of social intercourse.

But the culmination of all was the library.  It was a marvel in its way.
Horace Walpole somewhere speaks of one that contained only a broken
chair, a chart, and a lame telescope.  But this was an enchanting bower
for the muses compared to a room full of lame and impotent compilations
in 'books' clothing.'  Thinglets fit only to wrap candles in, or make
winding-sheets in Lent for pilchards, or keep butter in the market-place
from melting.  There were rows upon rows of such stuff as the Rev.
Ebenezer Slipslop on Corinthians; awful Encyclopedias and Treasuries of
Knowledge, and biographies of self-made men who, to the prime sin of
having existed at all, added the no less unpardonable one of swelling
the dreariest form of fiction.  So many and so many and such woe.  In
proportion to the keen pleasure we associate with real books is the
gloom which the bare sight of such biblia-a-biblia can induce.  The
tradition ran that Sir Edward had ordered 'a ton of books' from a
third-rate bookseller in distress, and that this enterprising tradesman
had bought up and bound for the Godolphin House library an astounding
collection of the young men's mutual improvement type of rubbish.  There
was probably not a fact in the known world of the callow sort one hears
only to forget which did not repose on these shelves.

Even in venturing out in the grounds at Godolphin House, everything
still breathed of money recklessly lavished by hirelings.  One was
constantly taken to gaze at some double or triple monstrosity,
perpetrated by gardeners who were so highly paid that it would
compromise them to let Nature have much of her own way.

When Ted returned to his father's house that night, he found Mrs.
Tareling--Larry as he usually called her--in a bitterly discontented
frame of mind.

'Who do you think has come to stay for two weeks, Ted?' she cried, the
moment she caught sight of him.

'Tareling?' questioned Ted carelessly, taking possession of one armchair
and resting his feet on another.

'Oh, you know very well he wouldn't come to stay so long, especially at
Christmas-time.  It is Uncle John!'

'Well, I'm glad the old chap came while I'm here.  It's ages since I saw
him.  Did he bring aunt along with him?'

'Upon my word, Ted, you are horribly provoking sometimes. You take it as
coolly as if he were the most agreeable company in the world.'

'Well, one's relations aren't often that; but still, there they are, you
know, and there they were, before we showed our noses in the world.  Has
the old man gone to bed?'

'Yes, long ago.  That's his way.  He'll go to bed when the hens do, that
he may rise at daybreak, to go creaking all over the house and burst
into guffaws of laughter at the decorations and things, and tell
abominable stories before the servants.'

'Now draw it mild, Larry.  The old fellow can tell a shady yarn as well
as most men of his age, especially if he's a bit sprung, but he doesn't
before the servants, and I'm sure he wouldn't before you.'

'Oh, I don't mean what you call "shady yarns."  It's much worse when he
tells how he left London as a stowaway, with two and threepence in his
pockets, and not a second shirt to his back.'

'Yes he had.  Don't you remember the little bundle done up in a red
cotton handkerchief--a pair of go-ashore breeches and a Crimea shirt?'

'Goodness knows, I ought to remember it all; I've heard it often
enough.'

'Well, it's natural when a man comes to be sixty-eight he should like to
tell how he kicked up his heels at seventeen. If a horse has got much
gumption, he doesn't care to race after he's two years old.  But a man
goes it as long as he can, and afterwards he likes to speak of the old
days.  And, by Jove! it's only what you might expect,' added Ted
reflectively.  'I'd sooner be a stowaway, without even a bundle,
to-morrow, than be close on seventy with a million of money.'

'Ah, yes; but if you became a stowaway to-morrow, it would be a very
different tale.  You've been brought up with the command of money and
servants, and never took your hat off to anyone save on equal terms.
But when Uncle John tells his stories, you know, he used to stand in his
smock frock, staring at the "gentry" as they drove by. And the way he
eats his soup, and chuckles when the servants say "your ladyship" to
mother!'

'You see, Larry, he didn't have four daughters to sit upon his manners,
and train him up the way he should go, like the governor,' said Ted,
smiling broadly, as certain reminiscences rose in his mind.

'The worst of it is that Colonel and Mrs. Aldersley are coming here from
Friday till Monday.  Yes, they came over here from Melbourne three weeks
ago.  They've been at Government House for two weeks.  Look here, Ted,
couldn't you take the old man away somewhere during that time?'

'Well I'm blowed!  You have got a cheek, Larry,' said Ted, sitting
straight up at this proposition.  'Smuggle the old bird away as if he
were a convict, and all for what? An elderly frump of a woman, who says
"Yes, to be sure," eighty times a day, and a man who would rook a young
cub that had hardly shed his milk teeth.  Oh, I happen to know a good
deal about Aldersley.  I tell you what, in the matter of
straightforward, fair play, the man isn't fit to brush Uncle John's
shoes!'

'He never wears shoes--it's always great creaking Wellington boots.  And
can't you see, Ted, that to have embezzled money years and years ago
would be pardonable compared to taking an orange in your fist, and
sucking it at dessert, as Uncle John does?  But nothing is so bad as his
stories; and it's no use interrupting him: he only gets red in the face
and talks louder.'

'Yes; as he did when he was telling once how he and father borrowed an
old donkey to go and see the young squire's first meet; and there were
you and Henrietta, pitching away about the Queen's drawing-room, at
which our Lotty was presented.  By Jove, it was as good as a play,' and
Ted laughed.

'As good as a play!' echoed Laurette, her face reddening with vexation.
'Yes, I dare say it will be as good as a play for the Aldersleys.  You
may call Mrs. A. a frump and think she's slow, but let me tell you she
is as sharp as a needle.  She agrees with everything, so that people may
give themselves away more completely.  She keeps a diary, and writes
pages upon pages in it every night.  Two people that know her well have
told me she means to publish a book on "Life at the Antipodes" when she
gets back to England, and, of course, Uncle John would be regular nuts
for her.'

'But who the deuce cares what these tourist people say? They either put
down stuff that everybody knows from the beginning of creation, or they
tell crammers that suck in nobody but their own friends,' said Ted,
lighting a cigar, and resuming his semi-recumbent attitude.

'And it isn't even as if one could make him out to be eccentric or an
oddity,' went on Laurette in a bitter tone. 'He won't change his boots
in the house, but he'll put on a dress-suit and a white tie that goes
slipping round his neck like a third-rate hotel waiter's.  And it's ten
to one if he doesn't blurt out how long his wife was in service with him
before he married her.'

'Well, you may put your money on it that all the world over people have
got to be in service, or have enough money of their own to live on, or
live on someone else,' returned Ted, with philosophic calm.  'You're
always kotooing at Government House here and in Melbourne--and aren't
they all in service?  Living on money they get out of the country, for
looking on while other people manage affairs.  It's a perfect chouse.
When Aunt Sally was in service at Kataloonga she worked for all the
money she earned, I bet.'

'You talk as if you hadn't a scrap of proper pride about you.  You take
good care only to ask a lady to be your own wife,' retorted Laurette
rather vindictively.

'It's not because she's a lady; it's just because she's Stella, and I've
known her all my life, and every other girl seems common and flat beside
her,' answered Ted, holding his cigar in his hand as he spoke.

A half-resentful expression came into Laurette's keen dark eyes at this
speech.  But before she could make any rejoinder Ted laughed softly in
that gratified way which is significant of pleasant recollections.

'By Jove!  I had a jolly evening!  I never knew any girl that can make
as much out of a little thing as Stella does sometimes.  We played
euchre together,' he went on, in answer to Laurette's interrogative
'Oh?'  'Stella at first wouldn't play for money, because she hasn't a
sou, being near the end of the quarter.  Think of that, you know; and me
with over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in spanking investments,
not to mention the yearly income of Strathhaye.  I'd like to fill all
her pockets with gold and diamonds, and I can't offer her even a shabby
tenner.  She had a great run of luck with the cards at the
beginning--right bower and joker and a couple of high trump cards--time
after time.  At last she consented to play for money, and then--confound
it!--the luck changed.  I tried to pack the cards so that she might win.
But she's got eyes like an eagle-hawk, and bowled me out at once.  You
should hear all the penances she set me.  She lost five shillings and
gave me an I.O.U.'  Ted took a note out of his pocket-book and gazed at
it fondly.  'I'll keep this till all I've got belongs to her.'

'Well, I sometimes fancy that will never be the case, after all,'
returned Laurette, who, for various reasons, was in that 'put out' frame
of mind in which one finds a gloomy satisfaction in dashing the hopes of
another.

'What do you mean by that?' asked the young man quickly.  'Hasn't she
promised to come to see you in Melbourne?'

'Yes; in a sort of a way.  Instead of being grateful and pleased at the
idea of seeing some good society, she said, "Well, if you let me come on
my way to Lullaboolagana, without pledging myself beforehand as to the
length of the visit,"' and Laurette mimicked Stella's tone as well as
she could, grossly exaggerating her little drawl.

'Excuse me for saying so, Larry, but if the Lord meant you to talk like
Stella He'd have given you a prettier mouth,' said Ted, with slow
deliberation.  'And as for good society--what have you better than she
has been in all her life?'

'Oh, yes; a narrow, Churchy little clique, mixed up with all sorts of
outsiders.  People here always rave about Mrs. Courtland being so sweet
and unworldly.  It's my belief she's full of old Highland pride at
heart.  They're on a sort of little suburban pinnacle, without the least
idea of anything like real style or _chic_.  And that Alice speaking of
themselves as "the poorer classes."  If that's not the pride that apes
humility I should like to know what is...  I don't know why you've set
your heart so on wooing that girl.  Why, with your fortune you might
easily marry a lord's daughter.'

'But what the devil do I want with a lord's daughter?' cried Ted, in an
amazed voice.  'The only one I ever knew had a scrag of a neck, and was
as yellow as a buttercup.'

'Oh, it's just like a man only to think of looks.  I'd like to know who
all Stella's partners were at the Emberly ball. I fancy there was
something in the background.  The moment I spoke of the affair she
blushed up to the whites of her eyes----'

'But Stella always does that.  I never see her but she colours, off and
on, twenty times an hour.'

'Yes; she's one of those girls that always look more charming when an
admirer is by, whether they care for him or not.  She has that slow kind
of half-smile and a droop in her eyes, as if to show her long lashes,
and she sometimes says the most biting things with that gentle sort of
drawl, and then she laughs right out when you least expect it.  I never
did like girls that find things so amusing which are serious to other
people.  They're always coquettes, more or less.  Oh, you don't half
understand Stella Courtland!'

'Well, perhaps a fellow sees rather more than is good for him of the
sort of women who are too easily understood.... At any rate, I
understand this much about Stella.  I'd sooner hear her laugh without
quite understanding why she's amused than have any other woman in the
world at my feet.  And, by George! if she throws me over at the
last--well, it's all U P with me.  I know that....  They're coming to
dinner on the 26th,' he added, relighting his cigar, 'and we're going
out riding together most mornings till then.'

'Well, Ted, you've always been very good to me when we've been in a
financial fix,' said Laurette, 'and I'll do what I can for you.  As I
said before, I think part of a season in Melbourne among people who are
really in the swim may open Stella's eyes a little.  She'll find what it
is to have a fashionable connection and good horses, and dresses from
Worth, and the last touch in a Parisian bonnet. She'll see the crowds of
girls nearly as well born as she is, and more fashionably dressed, and
handsomer, whose mouths would water at the chance of an offer from you.'

'Now, Larry, there you're out of it completely.  The girls you call
handsomer would have their numbers taken down the instant they stood in
the same room with Stella.  As for being more fashionably dressed--why,
whatever she puts on is the best and most fashionable.  And it's just
the same with what she says.  She may mock at me, or say things I don't
quite catch, or laugh when I don't know the reason why; but whatever she
does is just right--except refusing me--and, by the Lord, I sometimes
think that just a proof she's really long-headed.  And yet I believe I
could make her as happy as any other fellow would.'

Ted had ceased smoking, and now stared before him with a look of care on
his face which was very unusual.

'Now, Ted, whatever you do, don't let your spirits go down,' said
Laurette.  'Of course the life of a man is as different from that of a
girl as chalk is from cheese.  After all, the more high-falutin' a girl
is, the more she has to knuckle under to the inevitable....  I remember
when I used to stay at Fairacre in the old days Stella was always
reading some rubbishy old fathers, or tragedies, or wild German stories.
Her father used to call her his little "improvisatrice," and she would
sometimes start off and tell stories that would make your backbone
quiver.  She always had too much imagination; and that's the one thing a
woman can best do without.  It makes her draw pictures of life each one
more unlike reality than the other.  But in the end she'll have to put
up with things as they are, just like the rest of us.  Women have
dreams, only to give them up when they marry.'

When Laurette took to moralizing it was in the robust strain of one to
whom delicacy of mind was not a lost, but an unknown attribute.

'Well, Larry, if nothing comes of this visit to Melbourne--if before
this time next year Stella is not my wife--why, I think I must give the
affair up for good and all.'

'Quite right, Ted.  The end of everything ought to come before it's too
late.  Whatever lies in my power shall be done.  I think Melbourne will
open her eyes a little.'

'And if you're in a fix for some tin, Larry, before the end of the
season--why, just let me know,' said Ted, who knew by experience that a
season in Melbourne seldom passed in which a hundred pounds or two was
not a welcome, if not an indispensable gift to Laurette, notwithstanding
the station in the Mallee country, worth over three thousand a year,
which her father settled on her when she married the Hon. Talbot
Tareling five years previously.

A look of vivid interest suddenly came into Laurette's face.  It was the
being 'in a fix' for some time which had mainly inspired her present
visit to her father.

'Well, Ted----' Laurette began, and suddenly paused. Various thoughts
swept through her mind, and then what she had intended to say ended in
the bald statement: 'It is really very late.'  But at that moment
certain seed had dropped into fertile ground--seed that was destined to
bear fruit in the not distant future, which, to their bitter ruing, must
be eaten by others rather than by herself.




                              *CHAPTER V.*


Cuthbert Courtland left for Melbourne on the 28th of December.  On the
afternoon of the same day Edward Ritchie called at Fairacre to say
good-bye.

He looked dejected and very much out of sorts; weary, with an unusual
pallor on his face.

'You really were ill, then, on the 26th?' said Stella, noticing the
change in his appearance.

'Yes, of course.  Did you think I would stay away for a trifle when you
went to my father's?  It was a horrid sell altogether.  Two of the best
horses behaved like shoe-trunks.'

'Why, I thought you were at Mr. Edwin Emberly's place near Reynella?'

'Yes, and we had a private steeplechase--gentlemen riders--and the day
was most abominable.  Everything went wrong.  If I had only stayed at
home----'

'You see, Ted, you cannot have your cake and eat it.'

'Cake? it was a cake.  You seem to have an idea I stayed away on
pleasure.'

'Well, you know, it was an atrocious day, with a fierce east gully wind.
It's always a little cooler at Reynella.'

'Not on the 26th, with an amateur steeplechase and only a mob of young
bachelors together.'

'But then, in the evening, instead of dressing for dinner, no doubt you
lounged in pyjamas and smoked, and had "long drinks" out on the
verandas.  Whereas we fanned ourselves languidly through thirteen
courses, and listened to the good old Bishop speaking on surpliced
choirs and the ultimate cost of the cathedral.  I certainly thought you
had the best of it.  But now I see you really were ill.  Did you have a
sunstroke, or did your horse roll over you--or what?'

'Oh, it was just what!' answered Ritchie grimly.  'The fact is, I'--he
was staring hard at the girl as he spoke, but something in her gay
smiling unconsciousness arrested the words on his lips--'I believe my
heart has gone back on me rather badly.  It keeps thumping about in the
most confounded manner.'

'Your heart, Ted?  Now do you know what side it is on?' she asked
laughingly.

'Oh yes, Stella, it's all very well for you.  You're on the right side
of the hedge.  You never had a day's illness in your life since you were
a baby.  I've had many an attack. And to have old Mac and his wife
bringing you in beef-tea you can't drink, and lie awake half the night,
and no one to talk to, or ride out with in the morning and have some
fun----  You can't wonder I run off to Melbourne pretty often.  What is
there to keep me at home?  Now, if you were there--but I'm not going to
say any more just now. I am going on to Strathhaye, to see to a few
things there; and then I'm going to have a complete change for some
months.  I've been feeling rather dicky off and on for some time.  Oh
yes, I look well enough generally; but you can't always go by that.  I
think I shall give up horse-racing--it keeps a fellow racketing about
so.'

'What! sell Konrad and Circe, and all the rest, and have no more "sweet
little fillies" and year-old colts, that are so knowing and thoroughbred
they take to racing almost without being told?  What in the world would
you talk about, Ted?'

'Oh, I wouldn't sell them all.  I'll always keep good horses.  I can't
stand any other kind; but not to go flying about from one race-meeting
to the other.  It begins to tell on a fellow after a few years.  I think
I'll try and read a little more.  You remember the list of books I got
you to give me once?  Well, there's a big boxful at Strathhaye never
opened.  I'll take it with me.  But I don't think I can ever make much
out of sonnets, Stella.'

'Why, have you actually been reading sonnets?  Ah, poor Ted! you must
have been feeling bad.'

'Yes, I felt very low last night, after I got home; and I thought I
would try to improve my mind, as Edwin Emberly calls it.  I thought I
would try to understand more about the things you care for.  I have a
Wordsworth that was given me for a prize at St. Peter's.  Oh, it was for
regular attendance.  When a fellow was there for a couple of years, and
they couldn't give him a prize for anything else, they gave him one for
not playing the tally.  As I was a boarder, I couldn't do that very
well.'

'And did you really get out your prize Wordsworth and read it?'

'Yes, I read some of the sonnets; but it was for all the world like a
bullock trying to jump in hobbles.  He makes a great clanking with the
chains, and he heaves up his horns, but he doesn't get any further.  And
there's no story in the thing.  At least, if there is, it's so thin I
can never catch it.  Now, when I was about ten, I remember, you read me
"The Lady of the Lake" once, and, by Jove! it made my heart beat.  It
was one Saturday.  I came from St. Peter's to stay till Monday.  Cuth
was always very kind to me, though he was at the head of his class and I
was always at the bottom, and one below my age.  You sat up in the
branches of the Moreton Bay fig-tree, and I sat beside you and turned
the leaves.  Good Lord! I wish I was ten to-day, and you nine!'

'Why?--that we might go and sit in the branches of the fig-tree?
Perhaps it isn't too late even now----'

'I hate those words "too late!"' said Ritchie, with unusual
irritability.

He rose and strode about the room, and stared out through one of the
windows overlooking the garden.

'Really, Ted shows himself in quite a new aspect to-day. It is as though
he had the first faint beginnings of a soul,' thought Stella, looking at
him with a new interest.  'Why do you hate the words "too late," Ted?
Have you any association with them?' she said, going up to him where he
stood at the window.

'Yes; we had a knock-about hand at Strathhaye once, and I can't forget
the way he said the words over and over at the last.  Well, he was
hardly middle-aged, really; but the life he led made him seem so.  He
belonged to one of the old swell families in England, and got engaged,
but had no money to marry on.  So he sold out of a crack regiment and
came to try his luck at the diggings.  He was among the lucky ones--he
and his mate, who had been a gamekeeper on his uncle's estate.  They got
one nugget worth four thousand pounds, and there was more to follow; and
there, in the very middle of his luck, came a letter telling him his
sweetheart was married to an old baboon with ever so many thousands a
year.  It put him off his chump entirely.  He went completely to the
bad.  He was two years at Strathhaye.  He would go off every now and
then with a cheque, and come back blue with the horrors--even his coat
and his blanket sold for a last nobbler or two.  At last he stayed away
for over a month, and came back one night more dead than alive.  Why he
didn't do away with himself, I can't make out.  Sometimes, I believe,
people get too miserable even to hang themselves.  We had the doctor for
him; but there was nothing he could do except give him some stuff that
made it easier to die.'

'Was there no one to look after him?' asked Stella, her eyes large and
dim with pity.

'Oh yes; he was in the men's hut, and Mrs. Mackenzie used to go to him
for a couple of hours every day.  I used to go in, too, most days; but,
by Jingo!  I can't think of anything more awkward than to sit by a
fellow like that when you know he's dying, and he knows that you know.
You can't even say you hope he'll soon be better.  You know nothing of
where he's going; and it would hardly be decent to talk of horses and
classifying wool to a man with the death-rattle in his throat, so to
speak.  I offered to read the Bible to him, but I was always coming
across some queer yarn that made one feel anyhow.  At last he gave me a
little purple Book of Common Prayer to read; but there, what was the
good of reading "The Publick Baptism of Infants," or "The Churching of
Women," or "The Solemnization of Matrimony"----'

'Oh, Ted! why didn't you read "The Psalms," or "The Visitation of the
Sick," or a collect?' said Stella, unable to refrain from a smile,
though the picture called up by the young man's unstudied narrative
touched her deeply.

'Well, you see, you know the run of the Prayer-Book, but I don't; and I
just used to start off where I opened it. Once I began with "The Burial
of the Dead;" but I wasn't sorry, for it made poor old Travers laugh so.
"Not yet, my boy--not yet!" he said.  That was a few evenings before he
died.  And just two days before, a lawyer's letter came, telling him he
was heir to his uncle's estate.  The old man was dead, the eldest son
had come to grief hunting buffaloes somewhere in North America, and the
second had got killed in the Zulu War years before.  So there was this
estate, with thirteen or fourteen thousand a year, for Travers to step
into, just as he got his last marching-orders--barely two days before he
turned up his toes.  I was sorry the letter came before he died.  He was
rather gone in his mind, what with sleeping-draughts and one thing and
another.  And after he read the letter everything about him passed out
of his mind, and he thought he was a young fellow with the ball at his
feet, and he and his Nellie were to be married.  I sat by his bedside in
the dusk, and he kept on saying, "I am so glad this has come before it
was too late, Nell!  It is sometimes awful.  I knew of a fellow that
went to the dogs away in Australia; but then the girl he loved threw him
over.  You would never do that, Nellie darling!  Thank God, it's not too
late--it's not too late!" By Jove! you know, it gave me a lump in the
throat as big as a potato.  Somehow it was worse than if he said it
_was_ too late; and he kept on hammering at the same thing, and thanking
God she was so true to him, and marking down on a map where they were
going for their wedding-trip. And then he would say, "Now, Nell, don't
keep me waiting long at the church.  I have been waiting such a long
time; and sometimes I had the most awful dreams.  But it's not too
late!" he would begin again.  I was glad when it was all over.'

'Ah, what pitiful broken episodes many lives are!' said Stella softly.
'All that might have saved them is defeated--every touch leads to the
catastrophe, and then silence and darkness--and the great play goes on
just the same. And yet how good it is to be alive and see the sky and
look at the roses!'

'Will you give me a rose before I go, Stella?'

'Yes--what kind would you like?'

'One of those you're fondest of.'

'Well, those I love the very best are the white fairy roses, and the
cruel east wind on the 26th scorched the last of them, buds and all.
But I can give you a Gloire de Dijon.'

'And, Stella, would you mind giving me that book with the "Lady of the
Lake" in, and----'

'Oh, with great pleasure!'

'And just write my name in it, Stella--and the date--and here's a little
parcel.  Don't open it till I'm gone.  You know you said you liked
opening parcels.'

'But, Ted, I should see what it is before I take it.'

'No, you can settle about that when I see you in Melbourne.'

Stella took the little square parcel, and looked at it doubtfully.
'It's not another Kooditcha shoe?'

They passed into the library, where Stella got the book, and wrote 'E.
Ritchie, 28th Dec.,' on the fly-leaf.  Then they stepped out into the
garden, and got an unopened rose, fragrant and smiling red at the lips.

'I am sorry your mother and Alice are out--say good-bye to them for me,
Stella--next time I meet them I hope--well, we shall see.....  Now,
Stella, give me your two hands, and say, "God bless you, Ted!"'

She gave him her hands, and he looked into her face so long and
steadfastly that she suddenly crimsoned under his gaze, and said with a
little pout:

'Ted, you mustn't be so solemn.  One would think you were going to
Central Australia, or whale-fishing to Greenland in very bad company.'

'Say it, Stella.'

'God bless you, Ted!'

He bent and kissed her hands, and then hurried away without once looking
behind.

Stella stood where he left her, till she heard the sound of his horse's
hoofs ringing on the roadway as he passed up Barton Terrace.  And then
traces of contending emotions swept over her face.

'Poor old Ted!  I believe he is in some trouble.  What if his health is
really affected?  But I can't believe it. That is a way men have if the
least thing is wrong--they take themselves as seriously as if they were
stuffed llamas. Well, I'm almost sorry I wasn't more sympathetic ....
only it is so dangerous.'  And the thought of Ted trying to read sonnets
for her sake overcame her with amusement. Yet this was soon followed by
a feeling akin to self-reproach. In the old days she had read to
him--talked to him of what interested her most--but for the last two or
three years, when they met, her chief feeling was a wondering amusement
that one who had learned to read at all should so completely escape all
tincture of books.  She had got into the habit of listening to him--of
apprehending his point of view--almost avoiding any direct personal talk
that might influence him or modify his mental habits.  But was he so
entirely beyond any intellectual sympathy--so far removed from kinship
with matters that lay beyond the common grooves of common life?  Why had
she relinquished those ardent dreams of being a power for good in the
lives of those to whom she was dear?

Her face grew hot as she recalled the frivolous way in which she had met
his half-expressed resolution of giving up horse-racing.  And yet was
there any other pursuit that seemed so completely to arrest the better
development of a man's nature--to paralyze the worthier interests of
life? The perpetual contact with the ignoble rabble, whose keenest
interest was the excitement of betting, and winning money for which they
had not worked--must not this render the mind more and more callous to
all that was worth living for?  And yet she had almost mocked his recoil
from his past devotion to the racecourse.

Her action suddenly appeared to her in so odious a light that she longed
to see Ted again for a few moments, to ask his pardon for her mocking
indifference--to encourage him in his new-born resolve--to tell him that
their native country was full of work which needed honest men and honest
money.  How many fields were white for the harvest--how many labourers
were needed to dedicate their whole powers to the world's service!

'Oh, I shall have to come back to being as much in earnest as ever,' she
thought, half smiling at her rising zeal; and then the thought of Ted
blundering through 'The Publick Baptism of Infants' beside the poor
dying man made her feel inclined to laugh and cry at the same moment.

The strange, bitter pathos of that human wreckage which drifts into so
many currents of our Australian life fastened on her mind--men
delicately nurtured in the old homes of the Old World, as well as the
luxurious ones of the New, and in the end going completely under, in the
rough, wild manner of the veriest waifs.  This is misery of the kind
which weaves the most tragic thread in the web of existence. The slow
but inexorable deterioration of character makes oftentimes a strong
seizure on the startled spirit.

'Oh, it is all too cruel!' said the girl to herself.  And then a curious
sense of undefined peril came over her--one of those quick unreasoning
apprehensions, often strong enough to give a sense of physical pain, to
which minds of over-reflective fibre are sometimes subject.  It is as
though chains of consciousness, apart from the centre of thought, were
at work storing up half-understood impressions, piecing together
disconnected events, casual words and signs that have floated through
the brain without leaving traces strong enough for waking memory, till
the total is summed up in an expression of imminent or latent danger
which is suddenly flashed on the mind with bewildering vividness. And
yet the process by which this is conveyed is sealed from knowledge.
There is no orthodox channel of intercourse between these swift
intuitions and the workaday brain immersed in the details of daily life.

'Do you think it does a fellow any good to come a cropper in that way?'
was one of the reminiscences Stella found rising in her mind after the
vague little shock of dread had left her.

She went back into the drawing-room, and there was the little square
parcel still unopened.  It was a brown morocco case which opened on
pressing a spring and disclosed a magnificent pearl brooch in the form
of a horse-shoe--row upon row of graduated pearls, with a very large one
in the centre, and large ones round it; the next a little smaller, and
so on to the last row, which were small exquisite pear-shaped pearls.
There was a little note in Ted's round, schoolboyish hand:


'DEAR STELLA,

'This is for your birthday in April.  They are Shark Bay pearls, got by
the boat I have an interest in.  You used to take little presents from
me before on your birthday. Once I brought you a little beggar of a
sparrow, with only a few feathers, and tried to get a kiss for it, but
you didn't see it.  By Jove! you owe me an awful lot, you know.  I hope
you will like the pearls.  I got the jeweller--should there be two _l_'s
or three in that word?--to make them up in a horse-shoe for good luck.
Mind you, I know very well I'm not half good enough for you; but then
neither would any other fellow be.  I wish to-morrow was the day I was
to see you in Melbourne.  You must be a bit of a flirt, Stella.  The
governor is always quite gone on you afresh after he sees you.  He likes
a girl with plenty of go in her; and you always tell him some funny
story over which he keeps on chuckling.  If you're not in when I call
to-morrow, I may tell you that I was awfully cut up I couldn't leave
Heronshaw on the 26th, so as to dine at home.  I'm getting full-up of
races.  I shan't go to one till I see you again.  I am going quite into
the Bush for a thorough change.


'Good-bye, Stella,
       'Always yours,
              'ED. RITCHIE.'


Stella looked long at the pearls.  They were so soft and lustrous, with
that glowing moist look as if damp with the sea under whose myriad waves
they took shape and grew within a creature that had the breath of life.
Is it this that gives them the wistful tenderness which marks them from
all other jewels?  That, and perhaps the melancholy moanings of the sea
in which they were cradled.

'It is much too costly a gift--unless, indeed, this endless wooing is to
have an unfortunate close,' thought Stella with a smile.  'Well, it
should rob matrimony of some of its terror to marry the youth who at
nine or ten tried to bribe one to kiss him with a half-fledged
sparrowlet.'

From that day till she met him again she consciously from time to time
faced the possibility of this 'unfortunate close.'




                             *CHAPTER VI.*


Some of the letters which Stella wrote to her brother will best convey
the tenor of her life during the months that intervened before she left
for Melbourne and Lullaboolagana. They were the last she wrote from the
home of her infancy and girlhood--that serene and happy resting-place in
the chequered journey of life.  They show her on one side gay, playful,
open to every impression, in love with life and beauty as ardently as a
Greek, finding food for mirth at the core of much which outwardly wears
a mask of solemn gravity.  On the other side she exhibits a cold logical
faculty for drawing pitiless inferences from the laws of nature, from
those lives which had touched her own and had become bankrupt in all
life's promises of joy.  Prone also to that severe disenchanted estimate
of human affairs, springing from the austere strand inevitably woven
into minds that have at one time been nourished on the sustained
enthusiasm of supernatural ideals--on the writings of saints and fathers
whose keynote is the lofty renunciation of those who look on the world
and its most coveted distinctions as the empty pageant of a passing
show:


'Fairacre, N. Adelaide, 15th January.

'You ask me to be sure and write when the thought arises: "How I should
like to tell Cuthbert about this!" "If I could only have a good long
talk with him now!" But consider, my friend, what a cold little viper a
pen is when you want really to talk face to face!  When a word, a look,
suggests thoughts that had else hardly struggled into existence!  And
then, apart from the chill which the frosty tip of a pen engenders in
one's most communicative moods, has not ink an immemorial right to be
dull?  Still, I perceive a certain advantage in saying whatever I like,
feeling sure that in a day and a half you will gravely read it all.
Whereas in a _tete-a-tete_ one is open to contradiction--to
interruption--to be skipped like an elderly newspaper, yawned at like a
tedious play.  One is afraid to skip a letter too cavalierly.  There
might be something in it.  For after all life has many surprises.

'As women generally sit by the hearth all their lives, like a cat that
has given up hunting, they should early learn how to purr and write
letters.  Do you know the tradition among some of our aboriginal tribes,
that their Creator taught men how to spear kangaroos and women how to
dig roots?  Now that you are on the pacific war-path of a spearer of
souls--what a vile simile!  I am sorry, but that is the worst of
primitive races--they seldom afford good metaphors.  I imagine that I
meant to say I must learn to dig with my pen--grow intimate with it,
make it loyal to me, so as to keep at bay that estrangement which often
creeps between people when they are apart.  What a fierce jealousy stirs
me at the thought that time and absence might dare to nip with lean
fingers at our lifelong friendship!

'Shall I divide my letters between daily events and the natural sprouts
of my own understanding?  Someone has said that matter of fact is the
comfortable resource of dull people.  But when you come to fold it up in
pages, stamp it and send it five hundred miles or so, matter of fact
should have its whiskers trimmed, and its obesity buttoned up in a slim
jacket, like an organ-grinder's monkey.  But if you do this when you are
so good and calm that you have no history, what remains?

'All this day the north-east wind has abused the privilege it has of
being intolerable.  How I envy people who, unless they go out on foot,
hardly perceive that this _bise_ of Australia is running riot!  You know
the habits of our climate at such times.  The air dry and parching, with
ever-recurring puffs and gusts, warm as if they had escaped from
caldrons of red-hot sand, and that unceasing undertone, whether the wind
blows high or low, as of things being swirled along the earth.  It is
the motion of countless little twigs, of skeleton leaves, of bits of
bark, of old frayed nonentities, of desert grit borne along in a whirl
of dead resurrection by a wind that surely has not its compeer on earth
for dragging things from near and far that have been long spent and
buried into the unmerciful light of day. You were spared another page or
two regarding the hot wind by Kirsty, who came half an hour ago to the
library-door, saying that poor old Honora wanted to see me.

'"She's the warse o' drink, and as hoarse as a corbie. There's nae use
in helping her at a'.  It's mony a day sinsyne that she began thae evil
ways," said Kirsty, with those severe lines round her mouth growing
still severer. "Sall I say you're too busy, Miss Stella?"  Needless to
say I was not.  Poor Honora!  She was more sunburnt and draggled than
ever, her clothes more weather-beaten, her hat more desperately broken.
Altogether she looked one of the most forlorn targets of the darts of
misfortune that could well be seen on the world's turbulent stage.
Still, with it all she maintained that inflexible air of being only one
more victim of the stratagems of fate.

'Oh, she was well, all things considered!  Many a poor thing with a bad
husband and undutiful children would even now like to change places with
her.  But things had gone against her again.  Work was not easy to get,
and since she had set up housekeeping she had more worries.  "Yis, Miss
Stella, wid the foive shillins' ye gave me whin I met ye three weeks
ago, and I had neither bed nor sup, nor anny other av the luxuries av
loife for two or three days. May the Blissid Virgin reward ye, and pray
for ye, now and at the hour av your death.  Ye see, it was loike this,
me darlint."--Honora always grows more affectionate when she is going to
tell you a bit of her life.

'"I luked at the two half-crowns, and thought to meself, 'There's a dale
may be done wid so much capital.  If 'twere one mane shillin' it
wouldn't help anybody to turn over a new leaf, so to speak.'  So I spint
two an' a penny on a supply of groceries, and I bought a taypot and cup,
and an old tayspoon in a second-hand shop, kep' by an honest,
hardworking, straightforward, onfortinate woman as ever the sun shone
on, Widdy Ryan, in Brown Street. I tould her how I was resolved, wid the
help of God and a little capital, to be no longer a sthray vagabond,
loike a cat left in an impty house.  And she, poor crather, knowing what
the hardships and mocks av this world are, let me have the few
crockeries as chape as dirt.  Thin I hired one room from an old comrade,
Johanna O'Connor, a cook, who has come down from the north to take a
spell for a few months.  Indade, Miss Stella, I was as proud as an
Impiror when I heard the chip crackling under the saucepan I got the
loan av from Johanna, for 'twould have made too big a hole in me funds
to buy a taykittle.  And nixt day I just tuk it aisy, and wint for a
walk in Loight Square, and who should I meet but two av the Sisthers av
Saint Joseph, that used to give me a bed now and thin, but av late have
been moighty cool.  'Well, Honora,' sez Sisther Lucy, 'we haven't seen
ye at chapel at all av late.  Where do ye go?' 'Indade, sisthers,' sez
I, 'I must go to thim as will help me.  I've been thinking of giving up
religion altogether and turning Proteshtant.'"  Do you not find this
interview worth all the "capital"?

'Kirsty is quite scandalized at my liking for the poor old soul I
suppose it is a sad vulgar taste, but I love to listen to these details.
I want to go and see them all: Widdy Ryan, with her secondhand shop, who
knows what the mocks of this world are; Johanna, who is taking her ease
in her own rinted cottage; and Honora boiling water for tea in a
saucepan.

'Dustiefoot is well, but, can you believe it? not quite so young as he
was.  It seems that as soon as he is a year old a collie dog begins to
fall into sombre reveries on the flight of Time, on free will, and the
yoke of necessity.  Or are there infinitely more important themes that
occupy the thoughts of a creature who has the felicity to be born with
four legs and an oblique tan spot above each eye?  I whispered your name
to him this moment, and he wagged his tail thirteen times.  Have angels
a more eloquent mode of expressing goodwill?  Certainly man has not.
Still, I am not sorry that in our arduous ascent in the scale of nature
we lost our tails.  Do you not know by instinct the people who would
jocularly catch us by them, as a token of good fellowship?  Notably
those who pride themselves on being too sincere to take kindly to the
conventionalities of life, and on being the artificers of their own
manners. Now think over it, and see if Blank, and Dash, and Snap do not
appear to you in a more lurid light than ever.  Do you not find a fresh
glow of dislike welling up as you reflect: "Yes, that is the stamp of
man who would infallibly pull one's tail"?'




                             *CHAPTER VII.*


'Fairacre, 13th January.

When a benevolent fairy bestows on me a cast-off island, or some
old-fashioned kingdom upon the mainland, I shall have a carriage as
capacious as a state barge, drawn by two iron-gray horses, tall and high
stepping, likewise a slim footman, and a fat elderly coachman.  This is
the state with which I was encircled yesterday, when I drove out with
Mrs. Marwood in her brand-new equipage.  And let me tell you, my dear,
that I found the change from our lowly pony carriage, and Leo's
diminutive trot, to these exalted prosperities very soothing.  How
deferential shop-people and all that ilk are, when one goes about with
such a halo of wealth!  But never suppose that I am going to revile
human nature on these grounds.  No; when I reflected on the matter, I
was unmoved and dispassionate to an edifying degree.  "After all," I
said, "money is a great power."  Pray, are you dazzled with the
brilliant originality of this? But don't interrupt reflections, for
though doing so may add much to your joy, it is death to the homilist.
"Money is at the root of all civilization and art."

'At this point an aboriginal family bore in sight, who pointed the moral
in a striking way--father, mother, and two picaninnies were all
barefooted.  In a word, a tattered Government blanket, a couple of
waddies, and the rakings of a dust-bin, by way of clothing, comprised
all their worldly possessions.  Thrilled with the justice of my remarks,
I went on: "Society is held together by mutual wants.  The unfortunate
devils who have not wherewithal to satisfy these must go to the wall.
How unavoidable, then, that money should confer distinction!  It is true
that wealth draws out the flunkeyism of the average week-day mortal in a
pitiful way.  But may not flunkeyism itself be termed the exaggerated
respect of poor natures for an absolute power?" etc. I do not know any
place in which one may make reflections so fairly and comfortably as in
a deep-seated, plush-lined carriage.

'Do you know how profoundly benevolent and incoherent Mrs. Marwood is in
her charities?  She really is a perfect _point de raillement_ of
incongruities.  You find her telling you how atrociously Worth charges
for a simple gray silk, and before she has finished marshalling her
figures she ejaculates, "But why should we worms of the earth take so
much thought wherewithal shall we be clothed?  The sheep and caterpillar
wore that very clothing long before."  My imagination is not nimble
enough to take in so varied an assortment of metaphors without bruising
its shins.  First as to the phrase "a worm of the earth."  I no sooner
hear it than I picture myself as a creeping thing, without hands or feet
or face, living in a carcase underground, without light or sun or air.
Before this gruesome picture is complete, enter a sheep with a waist, in
a fine homespun, and a caterpillar trailing a trained silk.  You see,
they wore "that very clothing long before."  'Tis to no purpose for a
sober man to knock at the door of poesy, says Plato.  So it is with me.
The flights that people take to read a lesson to man's pride confuse
rather than edify me.

'One of the visits Mrs. Marwood paid as we were on our way to her house
was to a family whose head she described as a "brand plucked from the
burning."  Judge whether one who lounges about his house in the
afternoon with unlaced boots, a stubbly beard of a week's growth, and
smoking a short black pipe, seems a fit subject for such a description.
But then perhaps the appositeness of a "plucked brand" rests with the
eye that sees it.  Certainly he might have been engaged in drowning his
youngest child in the tank, or dancing on the prostrate form of his
wife.

'You hope that I am going on with my collection of aboriginal myths and
customs?  I hope the same.  So it is evident that life is partly given
us that we may keep on hoping, and nothing come of it.  "Why do I not
set to more seriously?"  In the first place, I hate to "set to"; in the
second, I abhor "more."  And if I could hang myself for aught, it would
be because there is such a word as "seriously," not only in the
dictionary, where one may endure anything, but also in people's mouths.
Have I expressed myself too strongly?  Then I repent--but without any
thought of amendment.  This, I believe, is the only thing that makes
repentance tolerable.'




                            *CHAPTER VIII.*


'Fairacre, 3rd February.

'Thank you for your kind inquiries after my chickens. They thrive apace.
Ten out of twelve of them seem to have gained a firm footing in the
world.  One especially, a buffy white, nimble creature, is so trenchant
a warrior in the battle of life that we have named it Hector, not after
the family, but the classical hero.  He picks crumbs out of his
brothers' mouths as if he were a Christian merchant; he hops on his
mother's back, and, stretching his neck, spoils twenty muscatel grapes
in half a minute.  He snatches happy insects out of the sunshine, and,
with one slight arch of his neck, hurls them into an unshrived eternity.
The place where his tail ought to be is fast developing; a tiny yellow
comb is faintly visible.  Alas!  I see plainly that Time, who scatters
his poppy-seeds with a ruthless hand, is bent on his destruction.  For
the day on which he becomes what Kirsty terms "a cockerel," his fate is
sealed.  But, then, our own special doom awaits each of us; and Hector
has this advantage in being shelled a fowl: he never sinks into sallow
meditations as to his coming fate.  The present hour, with its worms and
sunshine and sweet opportunities of theft, is enough for him.  He
listens to all the speculations that can be addressed to him with
unmoved composure. Only this morning one held him in her hand, and said:
"Ah, little feathered atom, so lately shelled from one eternity into
another; fleeting pilgrim in a passing show; confined to a few roods of
earth, yet linked by subtle chains to the remotest star--nay, perchance,
to spirit itself!  To know thee wholly, how largely must the boundaries
of human knowledge be widened.  Time and space, and the solar
system--all are necessary to thy existence----"

'Hector listened with round rolling eyes, but at this point he made a
sudden dart at the speaker's mouth, as if it suddenly struck him that it
was alive, and possibly as good to eat as a beetle.

'Yesterday I made several visits to sick people.  Two of them--Mrs.
Rupert and Mrs. Morland--have been slowly dying for nearly two years.
Do you remember hearing mother speak of them?  One of consumption, the
other of some internal malady.  Can one witness such long unavailing
struggles without pondering why human beings should endure so much, all
to no purpose? .... People speak about waiting for the end.  But has not
the end of the body come when it is smitten with an incurable agonizing
malady?

'It would seem that when I enter on moralities, my dear, you and I are
undone, like salt in water.  At any rate, you will not feel disposed to
grumble that, just at the moment I was dipping the inquisitive beak of
my pen in ink, to come without further phrase or disguise on the yolk at
the heart of euthanasia, who should call but Mr. Willie Stein. You know
how he makes these sudden appearances from the far north.  The
thermometer is very high; the wind is from the east, and threatens to
veer to the north; there are crowds of undelightful things that ought to
be done the day before to-morrow; Duty, like an old hag that ought to be
burnt at the stake for sedition, peers in at you from time to time; and
then, to fill up the measure, in comes Mr. Willie!  Here is an
aboriginal myth he told me: Once upon a time the pelicans went to fish
and found a great deal of barracoota, which they left in a gully while
they went for more.  Up came some greedy thieving magpies and stole the
booty.  The pelicans, in revenge, rolled them in the ashes, and that is
the reason why they are partly black. This belongs to the same class of
legend as that of the venomous snake who made the moon angry by killing
so many blacks, till at last she burnt its head as it slept in the grass
at night.  So that is the reason why its head is black and its bite
harmless.  You see, Australian myths have this in common with those of
classic Greece, that they also endeavour to give an account of the
origin of things.

'You ask about my translation of "Faust."  I have not done so many lines
per day since you left.  You see the second part is to our speech, with
its many one-syllable words, a perfect trap for the translator.  I am
glad, however, you encouraged me to undertake this task, for in no other
way can one draw so near to the heart of a work in a foreign tongue.
But as for any literary value, of course the thing is naught.  I could
make you die of laughing at subtilties, screwed words, and rhymes hacked
and raked all to no purpose.  The performance is like nothing so much as
a barb-horse that hath his eyes blinded trying to race a soaring eagle.
But then I feel that I have climbed a little nearer to Goethe--and is
there anything in life more delightful than the tranquil friendship that
grows out of long and frequent intercourse with a great writer?  One who
is not only among the most majestic sons of light, but a frontier savant
of life--who penetrated to the outposts of human nature, and
unflinchingly noted the vantage-ground of good and evil.

'Early next week I am going on one of my periodical visits to Dr. and
Mrs. Stein.  They have staying with them, just now, an old friend, who
arrived from Germany a few days ago--a man who is as steeped in research
as a seaweed is in ozone.  But is it?  Well, if not, it ought to be.

'It is cruel of you to vaunt the praises of the Melbourne climate over
ours, when we are having such atrocious hot winds.  Yesterday, some of
us did nothing but lie on the floor in Apostolic raiment, swallow ice,
and feebly murmur the old aboriginal incantation: "Sun, sun, burn your
wood--burn your internal substance and go down!"'

'Fairacre, 15th February.

'If I were a South Sea Islander, this is the day on which I would beat
my idol black and blue.  I have completely fallen out with myself.
Dearest dear, do not put up your eyebrows in that unbelieving way.  You
should have heard me speaking to myself a little while ago.  "What sort
of a creature do you call yourself?" I said.  "If the wind is from the
north-east, if a dress is a misfit, if people say the same things to
you, if they say nothing at all, you are like a bundle of
stinging-nettles--cross and disagreeable all over. What have you done to
your soul that it does not raise you above the petty malice of the
passing hour?  Go away--go to someone who does not know you so well as I
do--no, I won't have you at any price.

'And, lo! my friend, here I am, with a pen and a scrubby little
ink-bottle, and a sheet of paper, and a shivering, homeless ego, thrust
from its accustomed throne.  May I come to you?  Do not ask me inside if
you are busy writing sermons.  No, it wouldn't be safe.  Just give me a
mat at the door and one of the old poets till you have finished.  It
would be no use making a confidant of me.  You could not feel for me.
If I said my pretty pink _crepe de chine_ has been spoilt in the
sleeves, you might try to look sympathetic, but you would really be
smiling inside.  And yet greater failures have much greater
consolations.  If you construct a wrong system of ethics you make your
claim surer to be ranked a philosopher; if you make it clear that the
majority of mankind must be damned, you may possibly be reckoned severe,
but are sure to be considered a sound Christian. But what comfort can be
drawn from having the wrong sort of sleeve?  I defy you to find any; or
if you do, 'tis because you are not a woman.

'You.  Is that the only reason why you have become "a house divided
against itself"?  Well, some of your sex have ere now pretended to be
racked with toothache, when they were really suffering from heartache.

'But I deny the imputation; besides, what so reasonable as to be quite
out of humour with one's self from time to time?  And yet an invincible
self-approbation is one of the boons I envy your full-blown Philistine,
man or woman. Take Mrs. Towers, for instance, who chants eternal paeans
to everything she possesses, from her eleven children to her apricots;
from her husband to her Ligurian bees.  You know how one seldom meets
her, without hearing of some visitor who has travelled far and wide, and
yet regards his visit to Hawthorn Vale as the happiest event in a life
not barren in joy.  How it must save the tissues of the brain to be in
such a state of mind as that perennially! ...

'This afternoon Esther and the three children arrived. Poor dear! it is
so sad to see her in mourning still. Unless husbands have been very
angelic, it seems rather a mistake to wear mourning so long.  But I
think this is one of the subjects I should skip.  I have some thoughts
in future of trying to imitate Providence in letting events fall heavily
or lightly as they may, but without remark or expostulation.  This will
be all the easier, because the children have taken entire possession of
me.  To-morrow we are going for an endless ramble by the Torrens away
towards the hills, beyond Windsor, and all the other pretty little
townships, crowded with gardens and orchards and orangeries and fields
of vegetables.  Perhaps we shall see some mountain ducks on the river,
and hear the loud ringing calls of ash-coloured cuckoos away in the
gum-tree tops.  Here is a _bon mot_ from your nephew Clement:

'_I:_ "Why, Clem, you are growing frightfully tall!  And yet it is not
so very long since you were in petticoats!"

'_Clem:_ "No; but you, Aunt Stella, are in them still; Will you never
grow out of them?"

'I felt too crushed to attempt a reply.  I think I shall send this to
Mr. _Punch_, as a specimen of an Australian boy's idea of repartee at
nine.'




                             *CHAPTER IX.*


'Fairacre, 1st March.

'I have just returned from Mrs. Stein's, laden with roses and early
white China asters and double balsams of the most celestial pink.  You
know of old what a delightful event a visit to Rosenthal is.  But you do
not know what it is to listen for hours to Professor Kellwitz, the
Primitive Dwelling man, talking for hours on the prae-Deuteronomic
Pentateuch and "Die assyrisch-babylonisch Keilinschriften," and the
early twilight of man's history on the earth. Nay, he one day went back
still further, even to the time when our world was without form and
void--when what is above was not called heaven, and that which is the
earth beneath had not a name--ere a sprout had yet sprung forth and "the
generative processes at work were all hidden in chaotic vapour."  The
two old friends spoke, of course, to each other in German, and sometimes
I lost the thread of what they were saying, and I would not ask a
question for the world.  I love too well to listen to men talking when
they are oblivious of a woman's presence.  The second day I was there is
especially memorable to me.  Mrs. Stein was busy preserving Duke
cherries in brandy.  The sparrows are so bad this year that the cherries
have been gathered off some trees before ripening.  Don't you think the
sparrow in Australia is an awful example of a bird with a conscience
seared as with a hot iron?  In his native countries he is, it seems,
undainty to a discreditable degree, seldom tasting fruit and never red
nectar.  But with us he not only becomes an epicure beyond the wildest
dreams of the pagan world, but a reckless destroyer--a small Attila with
a pair of brown wings.  Not merely does he disdain to eat the skin of a
freestone peach and the transparent rind of sweetwater grapes, but for
each one he eats he spoils twenty by pecking at them.  Here at
Rosenthal, where he lives meal-free and at ease, the ungrateful little
varlet nibbles two score of cherries to each one he eats.

'Ah, true!  I have not told you about the second day of my visit.  There
was rather a horrid gully wind blowing. So early in the afternoon the
Doctor and the Professor established themselves in the western veranda
with the curtains drawn, with their pipes lit, and between them a table
that groaned under its array of Lager-bier bottles.  I was sitting, with
a book and a small Rupert garment half made, by the French window of the
drawing-room, when the two took up their quarters close beside me, with
only the window-curtains between us.  There were peals of Homeric
laughter as they recalled incidents of their student days; and there was
talk of a Lischen, who seems to have been celebrated for the length of
her golden hair, "long since turned to dust."  Then they talked of their
work.  The Doctor told tales of the early days of the colony, and how,
twenty-four years ago, he and Courtland became intimate friends.  When
he spoke of father's learning and rare goodness of nature, it was all I
could do to keep myself from stepping out and kissing him on the mouth.
Then the Professor spoke of his early struggles.  For many years he held
a subordinate post in a small university, where he had three-quarters of
the day to himself.  He seems from the first to have been devoted to
that kind of literature which no reference library should be without.
One of the incidents he told was of a far journey he made during one
vacation to a little town, to which some Grand-Duke had bequeathed a
singular collection of books.  It was a long journey, and cost more than
he anticipated; so that before he returned he was forced to leave his
watch in pawn, though he trudged the greater part of the way.  And the
object of all this was to authenticate _one date_.  On hearing this, I
shifted my chair, so that I could see the Professor's face better.  A
spare keen face it is, with many lines and furrows, and yet distinctly
human, as though in all his researches and wanderings he had never lost
sight of the fact that man himself is a more insoluble interesting
problem than any facts to be gleaned regarding him.

'There was a sound of cork-drawing, and discovering that I was thirsty,
I went into the dining-room for a glass of seltzer.  When I returned the
talk had veered to Australia--its inhabitants and resources, and future
prospects.  The Professor found a grave drawback in the thought that as
most colonists originally came to the country for material reasons, true
patriotism must be of tardy growth: "Your young people do not love it as
their native land in the same way that ours do."

'"Yes, Herr Professor, they do!" I cried, obeying an irresistible
impulse to bear witness to the love I have for my own country.  And then
a long animated talk followed, during which I was obliged to turn to my
own tongue--for the Professor talks English much better than I talk
German. I drew up the veranda curtain, and bade the good Pundit mark the
loveliness of my birthplace--the city with its white buildings and
scores of spires encircled by shady parks, the sea beyond stretching to
the western horizon, the fertile plain to the north sprinkled with wide
fields that yield bountiful harvests from year to year; the hills close
at hand, with their tree-crowned heights, and graceful curves, and
shadowy gullies--all thickly studded with prosperous homes, with
orchards, and vineyards, and flowery gardens, and olivets--and over all
the overflowing sunshine, which encompasses the land year in, year out.
Who could be born in such a place and not love it for its beauty and
fertility?  If our fathers were crowded out of the old world--or left it
because they feared their children might sink into poverty--was not that
an added reason to love the new one, which had offered them comfort and
prosperity, and a fair field for the energies of their sons?  We have
great wastes and atrocious hot winds--but shall we receive good and not
evil also?

'"Yes, after all, each one must remain in his own skin," said Dr. Stein,
taking up the parable.  "If I were in bitter poverty in the Fatherland,
as many men are who are more gifted than I am, I might be a dangerous
Socialist hatching plots against the safety of the State.  There is a
point beyond which history and the traditions of the past touch the
heart but little.  The great kings and nobles who figure so largely in
our history were mostly men who commanded the lives and wages of others,
while they themselves were hedged round with privileges and wanton
luxury.  I want my own share of the pleasant things of life, and the
country which gives me this, and in which my children were born, has as
strong a claim on their love and gratitude as the oldest country of them
all.  Practically you owe your life to the country in which you were
born.  Stella, here, who is the granddaughter of a man that fell
fighting for Old England, do you think she would not make as much
sacrifice for her native land as any German maiden of old times?"
"Hear, hear," said I, clapping my hands in honour of myself in true
democratic fashion.

'Enter Mrs. Stein, followed by Hetty with a trayful of slender pink
glasses, and a flagon of Rosenthal cup.  The pure juice of the
Australian grape mellowed by ten years' repose in the Doctor's cellar.
It was a lovely amber colour, with an excellent bouquet, and though I
always like wine best when I do not drink it, I felt bound to honour the
Professor's toast, which was "The Old Fatherland and the New."  We
became great friends, and, in fact, I have promised that when you and I
go on our travels we shall pay him a visit in Berlin.'




                              *CHAPTER X.*


'Fairacre, 14th March.

'MY DEAR CUTHBERT,

'A very disconcerting thought hopped into my head after reading over
your last letter.  You seem to go to see the Rev. S. Carter very often.
Tell me true--is it the quality of the good man's theology, or his
daughters, that attract you?  Perhaps you have not yet arrived at the
conscious stage.  Oh yes, I am quite an authority on the tender passion.
I have read and re-read Mr. Harrison's play, and made endless
suggestions.  There are two young people who are madly in love with each
other, but do not know it till a certain crisis.  I object to this
rather, but A. says that it is for the stage, and not for posterity.
You would have laughed if you had heard us deciding such knotty points
as to whether a certain young man would have the presence of mind to
improvise a story when he was interrupted in making a declaration of
love; whether the heroine was not disloyal in believing her lover guilty
of a crime because appearances were strongly against him, etc., etc.
There is an unusual and interesting plot, and the dialogue is crisp. A.
calls it "Macaroni" for the present, because he says I have been
sticking feathers in it.  I found him out using up some things I said,
and he declares it is because Evelina resembles me, and would naturally
speak a little like me.

'I have now a very nice riding-horse, from Zembra's, named Ivan.  Our
favourite ride is to the seaside, which we reach in half an hour when we
make for the Grange or Henley Beach.  The latter is my favourite ride.
We pass such old-looking gardens, and hedges still full of Macartney
roses--altogether a flat, shadowy tract in which there are always
sea-birds wheeling slowly above the trees--sea-gulls, white terns, and
occasionally those lovely little gulls, snow-white and pale gray, with
blood-red feet and bills.  When disturbed by the trampling of our horses
they utter mournful cries, and fly before us seaward.  They remind me of
something in an old author somewhere on the shelves: "About thee
gathered the daughters of old ocean, uttering cries of grief. They
spread over thee vestments perfumed with ambrosia."

'But I have been strangely neglectful in not introducing you before this
to Major Foster and Mr. Paul Ferrier. Though we have known them only
since you left, they are now habitual visitors--in fact, they may be
called our _amis de la maison_ in the antique line.

'The cause of the Major's visit to Adelaide is a great joke.  He came to
administer consolation to an old friend who had lost his wife, and was
inconsolable--for nine months.  Do you not find this very funny?  But
when I tell you that this friend is Mr. Inglis Taylor!  During the first
six months of his widowhood Mr. I. T. wrote repeatedly to his old
friend, urging him to come on a long-promised visit; he was so
broken-hearted, but could not leave his clients to go for a change.  But
the Major being long a widower, with his only daughter settled, and
having retired from the army, why should he not come?  So, moved by the
sacred ties of old friendship, and the duty of administering
consolation, the Major came, and found his friend enjoying the sober
ecstasies of his third honeymoon.  You know already something of Mrs. I.
Taylor and her many matrimonial adventures.  I have not the slightest
doubt that on the voyage the Major read standard works of philosophy and
religion, so that he might be better able to bind up a prostrate and
bleeding spirit.  I have tried to glean information on this point, but
the Major is reticent. In fact, I think he mistrusts my motives.  He
does not know that my curiosity arises from my wish to be a beautiful
soul,  Don't you remember that Montaigne says the beautiful souls are
they that are universal, open, and ready for all things; if not
instructed, at least capable of being so?  Now, I do want to be
instructed how a man feels when he has come fifteen thousand miles to
weep on the neck of a widower, and finds him married for the third time
to a woman who has been thrice married before.  Well, perhaps this is
only her third husband, but I cannot make any other reduction in the
number.  I never see her without recalling the woman of Samaria.  But I
suppose it makes a difference if there is only one of them living at a
time--I mean of the husbands.

Mr. Ferrier is an ex-missionary.  He lived among the blacks for twenty
years; but he has been so much concerned for their souls that he does
not know any myths, and their customs, I suppose, are not to be spoken
of.  He called shortly after you left, to ask if mother would subscribe
to the mission in which he was so long engaged till severe and repeated
ophthalmia threatened him with blindness.  Indeed, he had almost lost
his sight when he came to be treated in the hospital here six months
ago.  Even now, when he is outside, he always wears a green shade over
his eyes.  He has about sixty pounds a year to live on, and out of this
he subscribes ten pounds a year to the Mandura Mission.  He is nearly
seventy, but looks older, being very weather-beaten and brown, and his
eyes so dim. There is something heroic and ardent about the old man; and
imagine being so enthusiastic about the conversion of the aborigines!
You know mother's angelic kindness to poor and lonely people.  He is
quite alone in the world, and no doubt his leisure engrosses most of his
time.  It is an understood thing that he comes to Fairacre twice or
thrice a week, and we all subscribe to his beloved mission. I think he
has more of Don Quixote in him than any other I have ever known.

'You say that you never think of me now as doing anything but making
snares for the stubble-loving grasshoppers or watching birds on the
wing.  Well, we do pass a great deal of our time outside.  The worst
ardours of the summer are over; the woods are so shady, and the children
and the dogs tempt me out constantly, when I have serious thoughts of
confusedly tumbling over divers authors.  After breakfast we go out to
feed the pigeons and the chickens.  There are so many pigeons now, they
darken the air, flying down to be fed.  They alight on our shoulders and
make such pretty cooing sounds.  It is not to be credited though, how
long-legged and everyday Hector grows in common with his family.  Time,
who is the most impertinent busybody in the world, so soon spoils
chickens--and alas!  I suppose I ought to say, young women.  Ivan begins
to distinguish my voice, and makes me very happy sometimes by whinnying
when I speak to him....  Often we follow a string of ants to their home,
and watch them descend with the booty they have gathered.  We drop
crystals of sugar and grains of wheat and rice so as to watch them
carrying off their loads in triumph.  This afternoon we discovered a
hive of bees in Hercules.  Is it necessary to explain that this is the
gigantic gum-tree opposite us in the Park Lands?  Their hum is never
absent there; but near that great old tree it is as though one were
inside a hive.  We watched numbers passing in and out of the hollow
stump of a broken limb, high up, and, looking closely, we saw the ends
of their waxen cells.  How many jars of honey are hived away there is
now an all-absorbing thought--second in interest only to the
chrysanthemums, which are swelling visibly and promise to open early
this season.  After discovering the wild hive, we wandered homeward; and
when we got back, we ate grapes in the vine arcade.  It is quite a show,
literally bending beneath its loads of grapes; so are all the
fruit-trees, each after its kind.  The jargonelle pears are as yellow
and soft as cream, and the large purple Turkish figs melt on the trees.
The peaches and apricots blush at each other, like lovers in a play.
(Mem.: Offer this comparison to Mr. Harrison for "Macaroni")  There are
some pomegranate-trees, whose fruit looks like fiery blossoms. They are
not quite ripe yet, but we got one each, and sat down picking seeds from
the crimson rinds, like sparrows.

'"Now, Dustiefoot, it is extremely wrong of you to thrust your cold
black nose in my face----"  My dear, don't you think it is time I
stopped?  That is the way with us in our dear, quiet Adelaide!  We have
so little to distract us, that when we begin to do anything the
difficulty is to leave off.'




                             *CHAPTER XI.*


'Blumenthal, Easter Sunday.

'I must write to you while I am at Pastor Fielder's.  I came on
Saturday, so as to be at the Dankfest to-day.

'You know what an old-world charming little German-looking township
Blumenthal is, with the Coolie Hills in the distance, to the south-east,
and the quiet, shadowy woods all round, broken up by farms and vineyards
and numberless homesteads, nestling among fruit-trees. St. Stephan's,
the new little Lutheran church, is nearly a mile from the pastor's
house, with a delicious untilled valley full of tan wattles lying
between.  There is a good-sized garden and a glebe attached to the
pastorage--a glebe with two milch-cows, likewise two calves, that come
up and let you kiss them on the forehead, and rub their charming little
chestnut noses against your hand.  There is also a fat gray cob, lazier
even than Leo.  You may doubt this; but that is because you do not know
Hans as intimately as I do. But I want you to come to the little church.
The pastor went at ten; Mrs. Fiedler and I half an hour later, and we
brought immense posies of chrysanthemums.  They are out in wide bushes;
at this moment there is a great bowl of them close beside me.  They are
in the little hall in the sitting-room, on the tiny lawn, in the
garden--everywhere. We also brought some of our best roses and crocuses.
How I love the yellow crocuses that come up in wide golden bubbles, so
close to the ground!  Sunday was an entirely perfect day.  I believe it
was really the first day of autumn. The sun was at times half veiled
with fleecy gray clouds. The sky was not so staringly blue; a tender
tint of gray had stolen into it.  And there were such gentle pastoral
sounds: the distant tinkling of bullock-bells; the bleating of sheep not
far away; the lowing of a cow whose calf had been weaned; the high,
sweet carol of a white-shafted fantail.  Autumn leaves fluttered in the
wind down from the willows and fruit-trees; but they did not speak of
decay, only of rest.  Everything rested--from the great foliage masses
that bounded the horizon on every side, to the bees whose buzzing was
faint, as if they were half drugged with the ambrosia of deep
flower-bells.  No rumble of dray or waggon, laden with wool or wheat or
grapes or hay, invaded the Sabbath quiet.

'My old friends the Schulzes, Grossvater and Grossmutter, greeted me
with all their old cordiality.  Their seat was crammed with sturdy young
Schulzes of the third generation.  I should be afraid to say how many of
the sept there were in all.  It was good I was in the church before the
service began, for I could not have kept my eyes from wandering.  Such
lavish heaps of flowers, fruit, and vegetables!  No wonder the good
Germans of Blumenthal hold a harvest festival.  There are ten windows in
St. Stephan's, with wide, deep sills to them.  On each side of these an
overflowing horn of plenty had been emptied.

'It was a triumphant exhibition of what Nature can do in our land when
her lap is shaken out.  The apples alone were a feast to the eyes--so
large and smooth and beautifully tinted.  As for the pears, they were so
ripely yellow one dared not look at them too fixedly lest they should
melt at a glance.  There were mounds of great purple figs gaping with
mellowness.  Citrons large as pumpkins, quinces not much smaller, plums
of all kinds, from the little piquant damson to the generous Orleans;
blood-red mulberries, fragrant peaches with their crimsoned cheeks,
nectarines, and oranges of a lordly size, though still, of course,
unripe. On the altar--a plain table with a white cloth and
crucifix--were grapes, heaped up in splendid profusion.  The robust
Black Prince, the small berries of the Cabernet Sauvignon--no, I must
not put you out of patience by naming all; besides, if I did, half would
still be forgotten, if you will pardon the bull.  I noticed one bunch of
Doradillas which must have weighed five pounds.  You are in deadly
terror of hearing about the spies and Eshcol--but I spare you.  I also
let you off in the matter of vegetables. They were all there, from the
asparagus to the virtuous potato.  The ends of the seats were wreathed
with hop and vine leaves, and round the chandeliers were hung sheaves of
fine wheat, of oats, of barley, and maize.  The pastor preached a divine
little sermon--sincere, simple, and to the point.  It was the discourse
of a man who knows that there are two sorts of ignorance, and two sorts
of lying, in the world.  The ignorance that knows and cares for little
beyond the daily round; the ignorance that cares for so much, yet
apprehends that so little can be really known. The lying--that of
statements known to be untrue; the other, which takes the form of
treating as certainties matters that can never be subjectively proved
true.  And yet, because he knew all this, it seemed to me that he was
all the better fitted to speak with authority on what we do know to be
true.  We know that if we put aside the baser temptations of life we can
bear our share of fruit to nourish man's spiritual nature, even as the
fields around us, year in, year out, bear harvests that sustain material
life.

'As we came home the wattlewood valley rang with the peculiar mournful
pipe of some birds.  "They are quite new here," said the pastor and
pastorin as we stood to listen.  I felt I ought to know whose notes they
were, yet could not tell without seeing the birds that uttered them. I
left Dustiefoot in the pastor's charge and stole away as noiselessly as
an aboriginal in Kooditcha shoes.  Dear, how you will begin to hate this
comparison--to me it still has something of the freshness of primeval
woods.  They were white-winged choughs.  I saw three of them perched in
the very top of a tree.  One knows them from afar by their scarlet
irides and the glossy green reflections of their plumage.

'In the afternoon we drove to the Schulzes.  Grossmutter, as usual,
kissed me repeatedly, as if I were a little child--and very good.  But
it is true, if ever I am good at all, it is among these kindly, sincere
German people.  Not even the sort of impertinent pen you wot of would
tempt me to cast reflections now on a world that produces such fine
grapes and wholesome-natured people.

'Grossvater was in one of his blithest and serenest hours. Their golden
wedding-day is next month--on his eighty-first birthday.  After that he
will give up all active part in the management of his vineyards.  His
son Karl is a good and skilful vigneron.  "I counsel him to be true to
his Australian Fatherland--to make nothing but good wine from good
grapes," said the old man, with the genial smile that makes his face so
young.  "Wine fit to drink at the table of the Lord's Supper, at the
marriage feast, at the christening of the eldest son, on the death-bed,
when the dear God calls us to another world."

'One sees how much better it is for the pastor to be in the country with
a congregation that grows grapes and tills the soil.  Life passes with
such leisurely tranquillity, and the baser denominations of our kind
seem more unreal.  I feel sure, too, that no one here tempts him to read
the "Kritik of Pure Reason."'


'Fairacre.

'I left Blumenthal yesterday, vowing to make a longer visit in the
spring.  I carried away with me from the pastor an old ballad in early
German, called "Two King's Children," which I am translating into
English for your special benefit. This is the anniversary of Esther's
wedding-day.  No one had the courage to say a word about it.  After what
you said so admirably as to the necessity of sometimes showing a little
of the sympathy that one feels, I made an effort. But, heavens, how I
blundered!  It was after sunset.  I sat in the drawing-room bow-window
sewing, when Esther came and sat in a far corner already dusky with the
gathering twilight.  She sat with folded hands, her face pale and set.
At last I crept up to her and touched her cheek with my hand; and
presently we were both crying. To make one weep bitterly who had before
been calm, is that shedding any of the balm of consolation?  Don't you
think you had better dissuade rather than encourage me in such painful
bungling?  It is better to recognise one's limitations.  If people are
badly hurt, I can make them cry worse, but can never tell them it is all
for the best.  I could tell them that no one understands the refinements
of hangmanship like Nature, and that life is a finished artist in
defeating the heart's insatiable yearning for happiness; but on the
whole I think I had better hold my tongue--likewise my pen.  But not
till I tell you a little _conte a rire_ related to me by the pastor when
he drove me into Gawler for the two o'clock train.  Two Sundays ago he
visited the little Lutheran Sunday-school at Detmold, and found the
teacher--a very stout, placid-natured man, who likes to arrange things
in a tranquil, unexciting way--with a class around him repeating the
Creed.  The plan was that each child should say a clause, thus: "I
believe in ... the Holy Catholic Church;" next child, "the communion of
saints;" next, "the forgiveness of sins."  Then there was a long pause,
till a small boy at the tail-end of the class piped out: "Please,
teacher, the girl who believes in the resurrection of the body has got
the mumps!"'




                             *CHAPTER XII.*


'Fairacre, 10th April.

'Alas! the young gentle autumn was a treacherous make-believe.  For the
last week we have had an inordinate fit of hot weather--frequently the
sky overcast and lowering: it promises to rain, but the clouds turn to
vapour; the wind changes, but it is not cool.  To-night, again, the
barometer has fallen; the moon and the stars are all hidden, the air is
intolerably sultry, and there is that further sign of change--unending
swarms of insect life.  I write by my open window, and they come
floating in, hovering round the lamp, creeping on the table, getting in
the way of my pen--creatures on foot and on wing--thinglets that fly one
moment and fall down helplessly the next--morsels that crawl with
half-spread wings, and things that fly as if with legs.  They terrify
me--these purposeless hordes that struggle into existence one moment and
the next are crushed by a footfall, the accidental turning of a leaf,
the scratch of an idle pen.  Do they not throw some light on the
cataclysms of human history?  Are they not linked closely to our race
and lot--part of an incomprehensible world in which, stronger than
righteousness or justice, or any figment of morality, reigns the impulse
of every single organic being to increase in numbers?  Is it true that
some form of thought underlies the lowliest manifestations of life?
What instinct or purpose is subserved by those pretty little pearl-gray
moths, with silver dust on their wings, who dash into the flame of lamp
or candle, as if it were the source of life? Here is one of them which I
have twice saved from consuming itself.  One wing is scorched and it is
very limp, as if rescuing it from burning were defeating its only
purpose, snatching it from the one possible joy of existence.  The
thought possesses me that some higher intelligences than we know may
thus regard our lives.  But have we more power to fashion and to mould
them than this helpless thinglet that was called into being by forces
over which it wields no control, and seeks nothingness by an impulse
equally beyond its influence?


'Last night the rain came down in torrents; towards morning there was a
thunderstorm, of which I heard nothing. But to-day the air and the sky
are clear and fresh, the Torrens is babbling, and the birds are singing
the blithest legends imaginable all over the Park Lands.  The Major and
Mr. Ferrier are spending the day with us.  Poor Mr. Ferrier is forever
telling us about the conversion of some aborigine.  I often wish we
could keep an old black fellow on hand at Fairacre for him to convert
from time to time, and then perhaps he would spare us these endless
recitals. But my heart smites me for speaking like this of the zealous
ex-missionary, and I am sure mother likes to listen to him. Then he is
so entirely in earnest.  Perhaps you would like to know his story of
to-day?  It was about a half-caste boy who, after being at the Mandurang
Mission Station for a year, began to show signs of repentance and grace.
One day he stole some sugar.  "Was that after he showed these signs?"
asked the Major.  From some people the inquiry would sound ironical, but
not from the dear guileless Major, who is evidently quite unused to
theological phrases, and was merely trying hard to comprehend all he
heard.

'"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Ferrier; "it was some weeks after we had great
hopes of him.  The old Adam is strong in all of us, but perhaps
especially so in our poor half-caste natives.  Do you know, my dear sir,
that there was a canon law of the Church in the early ages which
rendered converts from heathenism ineligible for the priesthood to the
second and third generation?  Well, I knew Thomas--we always gave our
people Christian names at their baptism--had taken the sugar; but I said
nothing to him.  I felt the time had come when he must be allowed to
stand or fall. The boy was dear to my wife, and she wished me to take
him aside and remonstrate with him.  But I said, 'He knows good from
evil now; we must see whether the root of the matter is in him.'  We
read the Word of God, and had prayers in the evening as usual.  My dear
wife offered the prayer; she wrestled with God mightily for the soul of
the half-caste boy.  Ah, my dear friends, I wish you had known her--not
a thought for self.  Her only thought was to win souls for the Saviour,
and many of these poor people were verily brought through her means to
the foot of the Cross.  It was only nine months after this it pleased
God to take her from me."

'There was such pathos in the old man's voice, it gave one a lump in the
throat.  The Major hastily drew out his handkerchief and pretended to
cough.  But Dorothy at four and a half can make-believe much better than
the Major at fifty-seven.

'Mr. Ferrier went on to tell how, after the natives retired for the
night, he sat in the sitting-room writing out his monthly report,
leaving a blank where he was to write of Thomas, till he found whether
he would repent him of his theft.  His wife sat with a book in her hand,
but he knew that she was crying, not reading.  At last a tap came at the
open window, and a timid voice saying: "Missie, missie, me want to
gabber!"  It was Thomas.  The wife at once went out, and the boy talked
to her for some time. Presently she came in with "a light on her face,"
as Mr. Ferrier expressed it, and she said: "Paul, you need not leave a
blank for Thomas now.  The Lord has given him to us as a prey snatched
from the snarer."  "And though he had a passionate temper, and sometimes
gave way to it, yet from that day till the hour of his death I never had
reason to doubt that he was a chosen vessel of grace," said Mr. Ferrier
solemnly.

'No one could doubt the good man's sincerity.  But I confess I never
hear him talk in this fashion without a great longing to know what
conception an Australian aborigine could really form of the profoundly
metaphysical dogmas of Christianity.  They are so kneaded into our
literature, so imbedded in the marrow of our minds by inheritance and
instruction, we could not if we would really cast them from us at least
as phases of thought.  But a savage who cannot count beyond three, and
goes out to murder some tribal foe because a kinsman has been killed by
the fall of a tree--what idea looms up in the twilight of his mind when
he is kept at a mission and taught the Creed and the Ten Commandments?
Here is an anecdote I fished from Mr. Ferrier, when I was trying to
glean aboriginal myths from him.  An old man, badly wounded, came to the
mission one day.  They nursed him and fed him, and he seemed so docile
and to accept all he was taught so readily, that they thought he was in
a short time ready for baptism.  One thing puzzled them, however. Though
he bathed often, and had clean clothing on, a peculiar odour always hung
about him.  A few days before he was to be baptized, it suddenly struck
Mr. Ferrier that this was caused by something with which he smeared his
hair.  But this was not the case.  It was the kidney-fat of an enemy
rolled up, and secured among his locks. He would allow no one to touch
or remove it, for it was a point of honour with him to keep this ghastly
memento until he had also murdered the brother of his victim.  In the
meantime he was very anxious to be baptized.

'The rain has rather battered some of our chrysanthemum bushes.  But
then there are such angelic multitudes--in all shades--white and
pale-cream, pink and rose; red are our special favourites among the
Japanese.  This last shade has for me as irresistible a charm as the
pink ear of the maiden which in Tom's Turkish song robbed her lover of
his reason.'




                            *CHAPTER XIII.*


'Fairacre, 20th April.

'After listening to innumerable tales of conversion, after hearing of
aborigines who talked on their deathbeds like leaflet tracts, ever since
we first knew Mr. Ferrier, he has at last told me a charming little
myth.  It bears no traces at all of being the production of natives
that, to use Dr. Stein's expression, had been "tampered with by the
missionaries."  You might put everyone of them that ever laboured in
Australia in rows, and bribe them with the promise of a whole continent
of blacks, all ready to talk broken English and wear second-hand store
clothes on Sunday--and yet between them the worthy missionaries would
never produce anything with the peculiar cachet of an aboriginal myth.
But if I say much more you will vow that I am enamoured of the
subject--it is as a master passion on which people must notoriously be
mistrusted. It is such a short myth, dear, after all, that I am obliged
to add to it with a preface.  Do you notice how Tom is training me to
dabble in bulls?

'The sun is a woman who courses over the sky all day, keeping up
enormous fires.  But at last she uses up all the wood she has for that
day, and she goes down at night among the dead.  They stand up in double
lines to let her pass, and do her reverence.  She has a lover among
them, who gave her a great red kangaroo skin.  Each morning, when she
rises, she throws this over her shoulders.

'Another thing I learned yesterday is that the good little man's special
blacks noticed the stars, and had names for some.  The evening star they
called Kyirrie; the Milky Way Kockadooroo; and there is a cluster of
stars visible in the western sky, during the winter months, that they
knew by the name of Amathooroocooroo, which signifies "claw of
eagle-hawk."  Please to reckon it henceforth among the classic
constellations.

'Then, floating in the Milky Way, is still to be seen the bottom of the
ark of Neppelle, who transported himself in it to heaven to escape the
waters with which another god flooded the earth to drown his unfaithful
wives.  And did you ever hear that three of the stars in the Southern
Cross are two aboriginal Helens and their lover, who escaped with them
to that far retreat from the fury of the deserted husband?  The
astronomical lore of our natives may not have been very scientific--but
at any rate they knew which sex was always causing mischief.  But there,
dear--it is a sore subject--and I know many of you are now sincerely
repentant.


'Fairacre, 30th April.

'You would be very much shocked to hear of Mr. Stanhope's sudden death.
It took us all dreadfully by surprise. It is only seven days ago that
Allie and I met him and his mother at Sir Edward Ritchie's; and then, as
always, he looked the picture of health and strength, and overflowing
with merriment.  We had great fun about Leo, who really is getting quite
past any whipping I can give him.  In his wildest days he would sit at
the kitchen-table and eat sugar, but now he almost gets into the
pony-carriage instead of drawing it.  Mr. Stanhope was particularly
diverted at the trick I told him Leo has acquired of stopping short when
he sees any very poor or disreputable-looking persons, making sure
mother is in the trap and wants to speak to them.

'"When you drive those glossy thoroughbreds that are being trained for
you, you will wonder how you could ever bear to sit behind Leo," he
said, and laughed when I pretended not to understand.  Then he took out
a little pocket-calendar and said: "My mother and I are going to Cape
Town in November.  Mind, the event must come off before then, for it is
a pact between Ritchie and myself that we should see each other go off
the hooks."  The next day he was attacked with violent congestion of the
lungs.  He was ill barely five days.  He was buried this morning.  I
write the words, but they seem to convey no meaning.  I see him strong
and young, his eyes full of laughter, turning over the calendar filled
with engagements and appointments; but not a word of this one inevitable
assignation.  Nothing left of all that eager, vivid personality save a
poor clod of earth hurriedly hidden out of sight!  Good God! is not this
the bitterest insult that could be devised for the last scene of the
last act?

'There is a wonderful fund of unbelief in the heart regarding death.
Yes, we must all die; but individually it is as though immortality were
a birthright we are to inherit without tasting the bitterness of
dissolution.  Is it very bitter? and in the hereafter, does it indeed
matter very much if we pass away with empty lamps?  In that supreme
moment when the soul is sundered from the body, do we perceive that the
life which was all in all to us was but a dream grafted upon a dream--a
passing vision crowded with phantoms? ... And now the curtain is drawn.
We see no more.  All beyond is so shadowy and faltering.

'How is it the thought of death does not haunt us more? The event is so
tremendous.  I have often had the feeling after the death of one I knew,
that never again could I be lulled into such entire forgetfulness of
this one absolute certainty.  But gradually the impression vanishes.  We
are planted so deeply in the life that now is--we may be shaken and
horrified and apprehensive--but the world is like one of those
hydra-animals which may be turned inside out, and the exterior surface
will then digest and the stomach respire.'


'Fairacre, 7th May.

'Fanny Harrison has returned from her Melbourne visit, and has been
telling us tales about your overworking yourself--visiting sick people
day and night--reading to incurables and blind people by the
hour--making superhuman efforts to save larrikins from themselves.
Don't, dear darling; at any rate not so much.  It gave me a shiver all
down the vertebrae when I thought, "What if Cuthbert should turn out one
of those clergymen who take life so seriously that they die of it like a
dose of arsenic?"  Do not forget that it was a neglected cold when he
was so much engrossed with the sick and poor one hard winter that
brought on the lung complaint of which father died.

'I cannot get over a certain awkwardness of not knowing exactly what to
say when I first visit people who are very poor, and hopelessly ill.  So
I mostly listen to them, and read a little only if they wish it.  Poor
Thomson seems to like this, for the last time I visited him he aired his
grievances.  People are very kind, he said, and lots of ladies always
visit him; but they do read so much to him.  "No doubt 'tis very good of
them, but when a chap lies in bed month after month, never expectin' to
get up again in health, and often cussing himself for having been a fool
and partly to blame for his misfortune--why, then, a lump out o' the
Bible don't seem to hearten him up much.  Now, there's Mrs. Cannister
and Mrs. Meadows, and her dorters--'tis my belief as they uses Bibles
not properly divided into chapters.  In course there's a good deal of it
taken up with Jew names, and stories not meant for gineral use.  But I
don't see why them ladies should pick out the melanchorliest psalmses
for me.  Well, I mean them as is all about the horrors of death bein' on
me, and the waters goin' over me, and my eyes bein' consumed from
weeping, and bein' a worm and no man, and the arrers sticking fast in
me, and bein' in a pit, and in a dry thirsty land, and arskin' the Lord
why He cast me off for iver, and that I forgit to eat my bread, bein'
like a howl in the desert and a perlican in the wilderness, and a
sparrer atop o' the house without a mate, which is what niver happens,
as far as I know the varmin; and coals of juniper, and scattered at the
grave's mouth and lying in wait for my soul.  Yes, Miss Stella, ye may
laugh, but it's true--the creepingest things.  Yes, I remember what's
read to me pretty well, but then I've heerd it all over and over
agin--some days twicet over.

'"And then Mrs. Cannister--she sits there as you may be now, only more
frontin' me, so that she can fix her eyes onto me--and she reg'lar ivery
week says to me: 'Now, my good man'--if there's anything I hates it's
them words; if she said 'my wastin' away toad,' I'd like it
better--'now, my good man, do you not begin to feel that it's all well,
and all for the best in the hands of the Lord?'  And if I'm tired I just
mostly gives a nod, so as she may stop jawing.  But other times I says:
'I donno as to things being so very well.  If my family was pervided
for, an' I didn't lie awake half the night coughin' and spittin', I
might be more sartin on the point.  As to things bein' in the hands of
the Lord, I know well, if I'd have been stiddier and different-like in
many ways, I wouldn't be in the fix I'm in now.'

'"When I says anythin' like that, the old dame looks for a more
dismaller psalm the next time.  It licks me, though, how people can go
on saying it's all in the hands of the Almighty, and He does everything
for the best. Now, Miss Stella, if you take it that me--and a good many
of the chaps I've knowed--was the handiwork of the Lord, I'd like to
know who has spiled more horns nor He before making a good spoon!"

'You may not think very highly of this man's theology, but I like him
for his honesty in admitting that he is to blame for what he calls the
"fix" he is in, and a straighter way of looking at things than people
generally allow themselves.'


Fairacre, 10th May.

'The Fortuniana and tea-roses, and the heliotrope and various other
sweet-smelling flowers, still flourish in our garden in golden
abundance.  I brought a great posy to Frau Kettig this afternoon, with
various other things of a more material kind, but the flowers delighted
her most.

'Yes; I have just returned from seeing her.  How angelically good and
uncomplaining she is all through her illness!  She is more grateful for
being destitute than I am for all I possess.  I assure you, dear, I
threw stones at myself nearly all the way home.  I talked with the dear
old woman for a long time, and read her favourite hymn to her, "Ein
feste Burg ist unser Gott."  Then she chanted the two first verses--her
thin, old, toil-marked hands devoutly clasped, her eyes half closed....
Through the little window at the foot of her bed I could see the sky,
clear blue and serene like a great heavenly web woven throughout of hope
and love.

'"Surely it must be so," I thought, looking at the frail old woman with
her load of eighty winters--with all her cruel bereavements and losses,
and now in her diseased old age, after moiling like a slave for
sixty-eight years, dependent on charity for her bread, yet lifting up
her trembling aged voice and hands in tearful love and gratitude to
God--the great Father in whose hands are a thousand worlds full of
treasures--who yet has bereft this sincere loving soul of all.  If there
were not some tremendous force of love behind the "mocks of this world,"
could spirit achieve so signal a triumph over matter?

'"It is a fair summer day of the Lord, full of His sunshine, and yet
cool; and the flowers thou hast brought me, beloved child, take me back
to the sweet Thuringian woods," she said, with the simple directness
which makes the grand old German sound like one's mother-tongue.  I
could not trust myself to speak.  After a little she said, as if
suspecting that I was too sorry for her: "When one no longer hopes to
rise again, how good and dear it is to think on the day when all waiting
and weariness are forgotten in beholding the face of the beloved
Redeemer!"

'Here is Fatima at my elbow, rubbing herself against me and purring
benevolently, looking a little askance at Dustiefoot, who has indeed too
often tried to make a plaything of her tail.  But he is fast asleep just
now, with his nose against my shoe.  Fatima likes those lucid intervals
in which Dustiefoot slumbers and she can purr of "auld langsyne" without
interruption.  Dear old tabby! tell me quick and tell me true, is your
ardent liking for fish a proof that in another world you will sail a
boat and cast a net into the sea?  Certainly, though you love fish even
to felony, you cannot go a-fishing in the life that now is--which things
are a parable.  I begin to see that this infatuated pen of mine will get
me into trouble if I do not stop.'




                             *CHAPTER XIV.*


'Fairacre, 17th May.

'We do not think mother is as strong as usual.  But as neither the
seaside nor the hills suit her as well as Fairacre, we do not like to
venture on a change to either.  She will, however, most probably
accompany Esther to Coonjooree for some months.  Allie has gone for a
couple of weeks to the Emberlys; and I do most of mother's sick-visiting
for her.  She consents to this more readily because I think she believes
it is good for me.  But personally I cannot help feeling how much better
it would be to send Kirsty instead of me.  She thoroughly believes that
under all circumstances people are better off than they deserve.  If a
man has broken his leg, she is ready to say, "What a blessing it is not
his neck!"  If a poor woman is confined of her tenth baby, Kirsty
reflects, "How much better than to have typhoid fever!"  And when people
have typhoid fever, she says, "What a mercy it is from the Lord to have
medical attendance!"  I confided to mother the other day how, in average
sick-visiting, I am haunted by the feeling that I can do no good, and
sit with a long face thinking how horrid it is to be in bed, and
wondering awkwardly what I am to say next.  Then the flies put me out of
countenance.  With the poorer people among us they are a veritable
plague--in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens,
and in their kneading-troughs. Mother answered very gently: "Charity, my
dear, is a kind of Bezer in the wilderness, a city of refuge, which we
must always keep open, because of the many accidents and misfortunes of
life.  Our visitings and readings and half-hours spent by lonely
sick-beds, they may perhaps be compared to the 'Refuge, refuge,' written
in every double way on the parting of the ways, to aid those who,
without help or sympathy, might be in danger of perishing in the great
desert.  Think, my dear, what it is to lie, for month after month, in a
poor little room, without ever hoping to be well again.  Even to make
hours a little pleasanter, that would otherwise be dark and lonely, is
something.  In such matters we must be content to live from hand to
mouth, without looking for great results."

'You know how mother's words, "delicate as honey born in air," at once
soothe and convince the heart.

'Yesterday the Major told us about one of his funny episodes with
Adolphe.  That is his man--an Austrian by birth, but with a cosmopolitan
command of tongues.  The Major and he bid each other an eternal farewell
every three months, if not oftener.  Adolphe went yesterday morning to
send a telegram for his master, and did not return till late in the
afternoon, very much the worse for liquor, which he often takes beyond
the bounds of moderation, as he candidly explains, "pour la guerison de
doleur." He always knows when he has taken too much, and his custom is
to come to the Major with a virtuously determined air and say, "Sir, it
is wrong that I should longer anguish the heart of a true and loving
woman.  I must r

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