CHAPTER XXIV.Stella had not been unfair in conjecturing that Laurette's absence from the drawing-room, after her brother came in, was not accidental. It had not, however, been her design to stay away so long, a circumstance which was in point of fact due to her having a bitter fit of crying. This was with her an extremely unusual circumstance, and was caused by no sentimental weakness. The laconic telegram she had received would not of itself have thrown much light on her emotion. It was dated from Sydney, and merely contained the words:'Cannot be back for some days to come.'TALBOT TARELING.'That was all; but its bitterness, like that of many other events, lay in the context. There was no legitimate excuse for his sojourn in Sydney. Even business, elastic as it is in the hands of a wary and unfaithful husband, could not in any possible guise be held accountable for this move. In order to go to Sydney from Banjoleena, Tareling must have passed through Melbourne. Laurette had no need to waste time in asking herself why he had done so, like a fugitive. It was owing to the recent departure for Sydney of a wretched little opera singer who was Tareling's last infatuation. Laurette reviewed the situation in the light of past events.Cheered by his success in Celestial Hills, she had, without a murmur, allowed him to retain possession of the nine hundred pounds that had been netted by the timely sale of her shares in that mine. Tareling had gone to Banjoleena with this money to his credit, confident of doubling or trebling the amount in a few days. Perhaps he had. But she knew that he would return from Sydney penniless, yet imperturbably unrepentant. It was one of Tareling's aristocratic characteristics, that he never attempted therôleof the Prodigal Son. He was obliged to come home when the fun was over; but there any simulacrum of repentance began and ended. So it had been before, so it would be no doubt to the end. But just now, owing to a conjunction of untoward events, this spell of riotous living meant for Laurette—unless she could by some means or other raise the wind—the almost immediate giving up of the costly furnished house at Toorak, and retirement to the intolerable solitude of Cannawijera. And this to Laurette presented all the concentrated bitterness of a hopeless defeat in the hour of greatest triumph. She had married Talbot Tareling not for love, for even if she had been capable of it, he was the last one qualified to evoke any such passion when the two met; not for his good looks, for he had none; not for his morals, for if he ever possessed any, the world, the flesh, and the devil had wholly despoiled him long before he left his native shores. She had married him simply because he was the younger son of an English peer; relying on this circumstance, and her own tact and heiress-ship, to become one of the elect of Melbourne society. Yet, with all these advantages, the struggle had been very uphill. Her income, when the marriage took place, was over three thousand a year. The Hon. Talbot was supposed to have five hundred a year, but it was invariably in the hands of disreputable Hebrews twelve months in advance. The sinews of war were wholly inadequate to the sort of campaign that Laurette undertook. And then, even in a frankly democratic country, the cadet of a noble house, bankrupt in money and reputation, does not meet with unqualified social success. But Laurette was indefatigable, and year by year she made a little headway. Only year by year there was an accumulation of debt, and tradespeople made their terms harder, and her father and brother were more reluctant to supplement her income from Cannawijera by random cheques for a couple of hundred pounds.But then came the brilliant windfall of the new Governor and his wife—high in rank, and nearly connected with her husband's family. This gave her at one stroke that right of tambour at Government House which had been her cherished dream from early girlhood. She planted her feet on the neck of recalcitrant tradesmen and spiteful foes of her own sex, in the inner cliques of that curiously disintegrated mass which calls itself 'good society' in the capitals of Australian colonies. Her hour of victory had come. The Governor's wife was not only closely related to Tareling's family, but an intimate friend of his mother's. Before leaving London she had pledged herself to do all she could for Talbot, vaguely imagining that, in a wealthy young country like Victoria, it would be easy to smuggle a relative into some cosy sinecure worth, well, say seven or eight hundred a year.But a very brief sojourn in Australia reveals the fact that to appoint a man to a post worth even one hundred a year, apart from fitness for the work or claims on the country, would at once arouse a ferment of Parliamentary inquiry. Now the Hon. Talbot Tareling's fitness for any appointment was limited to a well-cultivated and hereditary incapacity for any form of steady employment. His claims on the country consisted in having spent all his own and a great deal of his wife's money in very equivocal ways. The profound etiquette and the glamour of monarchical institutions are needed to elevate such traits into an irresistible claim on the public finances.But at least it was in Lady Weavelow's power to shower those delicate attentions on her cousin and his wife which, from a viceregal personage, are objects of keener ambition in Melbourne than money or appointments. In Laurette, Lady Weavelow was agreeably surprised to find a lady whose demeanour, dress, and generalsavoir fairewould bring no discredit on her husband, even among the order to which he belonged. Stella had once spoken of the hard, crude touch of the social amateur in Laurette. But like all who do not possess the ultimate distinction of manners moulded by hereditary culture, or the spontaneous courtesy of an essentially kind heart, Laurette's behaviour was largely dependent on circumstances. With people like the Courtlands, whose unostentatious family pride made them indifferent to those forms of social distinctions which had the keenest fascination for Laurette, she was probably at her worst. Their simple mode of living, their ardour for books and ideas, their absence of chic measured by local standards; the humble nondescript sort of people, marked only by unselfish aims of life, that one constantly met at Fairacre—all gave her a certain sense of superiority to them, and yet a baffling sense that they would regard such an assumption as very amusing, and not to be taken seriously. She was at her best with those whose rank and position towered above her own. She was then on her guard against the robust vulgarity that formed the real substratum of her nature. She was quick and clever in her own way, and prided herself on knowledge of the world. In her case, as in that of all intrinsically shallow natures, such knowledge is largely, though unconsciously, founded on the dictum of the Scotchman: 'There is no an honest man in the world; I ken it by mysel'.'But probably the very narrowness of Laurette's aims made her feel all the more acutely the prospect of speedy social extinction. After she reached her own room, she reread the telegram with a sickening heart. She recalled her father's obstinate refusal at Christmas-time to advance a few hundred pounds till after shearing-time. Of course he knew that to 'advance' was merely a euphemism for giving. He told her that till the rabbits were exterminated on his runs he would neither give nor advance a single copper, and advised herself and her husband to live quietly on their Cannawijera property, instead of running head over ears into debt in Melbourne. To go to these desolate wilds from the very apex of her triumph—from the haunts and assemblies whose open-sesame had cost her so many toilsome years of guerilla warfare with millionaire women, whose dull resentment she had aroused with the unguarded malice of a sharp and vindictive tongue! In a week after her departure her place in society would know her no more. The world abounds with those who are terrified at nothing so much as being forgotten. If people are buried in the Mallee Scrub, society has no alternative but to forget them. The thought suffocated Laurette in advance. And then Talbot—she knew—he would not stay at Cannawijera more than a week at the outside.To make life endurable to him in such acul-de-sac, it would be necessary to erase twelve hours out of the twenty-four. Even in Melbourne he was often dull. Against dulness he had not one honest resource. Still less would this be the case when his wife was permanently at Cannawijera, and he was permanently a man about town. He had an incredible knack of obtaining credit. It must have been inherited with his blue blood. A man habituated to the brutal habit of paying for what he got could never attain such perfect mastery of the art. He was skilful too, or lucky rather, at games of chance. Yes, he would keep afloat for a few months. But after that? He would join some theatrical company, and leave the colonies. Laurette was sure of it. He was a good amateur actor: he had been trained by experts. There wererôlesin many popular plays in which he could give well-salaried actors points, and yet come off winner, from the fact that in suchrôleshe had only to present his own character in the less habitual parts that were fitted for stage representation—that of a well-bred, cool, unscrupulous man of the world. It was his one chance of getting a livelihood. He had more than once spoken of taking it up, when the dark desolation of Cannawijera loomed in the foreground as the only refuge open to him apart from gaining an independent livelihood. 'He will attach himself to Mademoiselle de Melier's company, and go to San Francisco,' thought Laurette; and she turned cold and faint with the conviction the thought carried—all that she had lived for seemed to be crumbling around her.She covered her face with her hands, and felt better after she was able to cry. She heard Stella leave the drawing-room, and she debated with herself whether she would go to her brother and throw herself at his feet and implore him to save her from the ignominious series of defeats, of social annihilation, which she saw in store for her. But the next moment she rejected the thought. If a couple of hundred pounds would do her any good Ted would give a cheque at once. But he was far more obdurate about larger sums than ever her father had been. He knew too well what Tareling's mode of life was. He himself had worked hard from the age of sixteen till his uncle's death left him sole master of Strathhaye, and he had an invincible objection to placing an unlimited supply of cash at the disposal of 'an image of a man who never did a stroke of work in his life, for himself or anyone else.'Laurette buried her face in her hands, and one design after another flashed hastily across her mind. To write and tell her father that some dire catastrophe impended, unless he could send her, say, a thousand pounds? No, she had done that more than once before. It was the story of the shepherd-boy and the wolf over again. Then slowly something like a feasible plan suggested itself. But she determined to ponder over it for a day or two. At the end of that time, however, events ranged themselves precisely in the direction she wished. Stella announced to her that Louise was not well, and asked her to hasten her visit as much as possible. 'If you will let me leave by the early train to-morrow, Laurette, I shall write and let Mrs. Coram, and the others whose invitations I accepted, know that I have been called away, and then I can see you again on my way home if you wish.'Stella spoke in an apologetic tone, feeling half guilty for beating so hasty a retreat. But the enforced companionship with Laurette began to be intolerable. Her sustained enthusiasm about trifles, the glow of inextinguishable interest with which she retailed Lady Weavelow's opinions and sayings and doings, the solemn reverence with which she went over the connections of Lord Harry, the aide-de-camp, and entered into endless details regarding those she held to be the great people of Melbourne, bored Stella to the last point of ennui. It was like being in the society of servants, but without the interest of the servants' point of view at first hand. Then the whole atmosphere of Monico Lodge oppressed her so that she could not even read any book she cared for. The very walls and chairs seemed to whisper endless anecdotes full of foolish self-importance, and count over the provincial notabilities who paid them visits. 'We never know,' says Goethe somewhere, 'how anthropomorphic we are.' Probably those who do have a glimmering of it conceal the fact, because the habit of endowing lifeless objects with a personality of their own has, in the eyes of most practical people, something in it dangerously silly.'Well,' said Laurette, a sudden light coming into her face, 'I will let you off on condition you promise to stay two weeks with me when you return. There is an English man-of-war to be here early in September, and a French royalty incog.; so we shall have the placeen fêteagain.' But as Laurette spoke her heart sank as she thought: 'I may then, perhaps, be entombed in the Mallee Scrub.'Stella had spent the previous day with her brother by the seaside. Had she made any irrevocable decision? Perhaps she meant to write to Ted. Laurette had noticed the pearl horseshoe wrapped up on Stella's toilet-table, in an isolated fashion, as if she did not mean to include it in her belongings. Ted had gone to St. Kilda, and would not be back till the next afternoon. Stella's departure in his absence was so far fortunate—if no communication passed between them. Laurette was just then in a curiously strained and watchful mood. She was all eyes and ears.She determined on a little conversation that might help to fetter Stella's action till they met again—a conversation that might also aid in the development of her little coup. It was not that facts were at all necessary to her when she found a little impromptu history helpful. But facts, even when twisted entirely from their true drift and context, are valuable as imparting a certainvraisemblanceto supposed events. There are people who will report an entirely imaginary conversation, and find a kind of moral support in adding: 'Yes; he sat in an armchair all the time, with his slippered feet on the fender.' The 'he' in question may not have uttered a word of the many ascribed to him—but then he did sit in an armchair, and his feet were really on the fender. After all, human veracity has severe limitations. We cannot have everything limning the severe countenance of truth. Let us remember this when, in contemporary history, we have the conversation all askew, but the armchair, the slippered feet, and the fender true to the life.'Stella, may I speak to you a little about Ted?' said Laurette, with an engaging air of timidity.She was really very quick at times in diagnosing the frame of mind in which people happened to be, and she had a prevision that her subject just then must be cautiously broached. Stella had not gone out riding with Ted since the evening he had offended her, and he had admitted to Laurette before he went to Flemington that he had been a deuced jackass, but when she questioned him he had relapsed into dogged silence.'Why, Laurette, you speak as though Ted were at the other end of the world. What do you wish to say?''Well, no doubt I am rather foolish to be so much concerned. You see, Stella, you have so many brothers, you do not know how a woman feels when she has only one. Poor dear Ted is so unhappy just now. He offended you. Well, I undertook to make his peace with you. He did not go into particulars; perhaps he begged for one of the many kisses you owe him. Dear me, what a freezing air! I wonder how many kisses your brother Tom snatched from me; and yet he never proposed to me even once. Certainly I never set up for a monument of icy hauteur. Still, I never forgot that I was Sir Edward Ritchie's daughter, any more than I am likely to forget that I am the wife of the Hon. Talbot Tareling.'Laurette drew herself up to her full height, and Stella was too much amused to retain an air of offended majesty.'At the same time,' said Laurette, astutely taking advantage of this to show a sudden change of front, 'I don't think you need be afraid of Ted pestering you again. Now, my dear, let us have a proper talk over this. Sit down here; we may as well be comfortable, and not stand staring at each other like two strange cats on the roof. I believe there were tears in Ted's eyes when he took me into his confidence. "What do you think I'd better do, Larry?" said he. "Do?" said I. "Why, nothing." "But I am afraid she's very angry," said he. "She hasn't even ridden out with me since, and now she's away for the whole day. It feels as long as a month of Sundays. I shouldn't wonder if she sent me back that dashed horseshoe"—indeed, I am afraid he used a stronger word. Poor old Ted! you know he is a little rough sometimes. But how good and generous he is!—though I sometimes call him stingy in fun. There he was yesterday, trying to make me take a cheque for I don't know how much. But, of course, when a woman is married, there is a limit to what she can accept, even from a brother. Besides, I had a sort of feeling that it was more for your sake than my own—a sort of testimonial because I am nice enough for you to visit me.'Laurette, when it suited her purpose, was a finished mistress of that adroit flattery which seema inseparable from radical insincerity of nature.'I must say that was very humble of you,' said Stella, laughing outright.It is foolish to flatter people with a strong sense of humour; even if they like it, they must see through it.'Well, but to return to this storm in a teacup. I couldn't help laughing about the horseshoe; and I said, "If Stella wants to get rid of that in a huff, why, I'll take charge of it."''I wish you would, Laurette. I'll leave it in your hands,' said Stella.'Oh, certainly,' returned Laurette, with an indulgent smile; and she mentally ticked this off as one point gained. But she had not finished yet. 'Then Ted said to me, "Now, Larry, tell me—do you think I'm any nearer the end of this long courtship, one way or the other? Is it more likely or unlikely that Stella will have me?" "Ted," said I, "don't ask me what Stella will do or will not do. I've long ago felt about this affair as if I were looking at a play—one of the sort that nearly makes you fall in pieces with yawning, don't you know. It's so long, and people come on and off, and you sit through one act after another, thinking that surely something will happen soon; but it doesn't, and there you gape till the curtain is rung down, and you feel like a perfect fool." At that Ted got rather angry, as if I were prophesying evil. Of course, I didn't mean to do that; so I simply said, "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years——"''You had no right to say——' said Stella, colouring hotly.'Well, please remember this was a confidential chat with my only brother. "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years, and prevents him from thinking of anyone else, and in the end doesn't know whether she'll have him or leave him—why, then I think it is time for him to take his fortune into his own hands."''Well, that, at least, was good advice,' said Stella, 'and I hope Ted will act on it.''Will you believe it?' said Laurette, laughing—'he has solemnly made up his mind that unless you write to him about something, or give him some direct encouragement, he will from this time forth try to think of you only as a friend. I believe that is partly why he has gone to Flemington.''I am glad that he is reasonable at fast,' answered Stella; but, notwithstanding the words, Laurette felt sure there was some pique in the flush that settled in the girl's cheeks.CHAPTER XXV.When Ritchie returned, and found that during his absence Stella had taken her departure for Lullaboolagana, his chagrin was extreme.'She asked me to say good-bye to you for herself and Dustiefoot, and gave her kind regards to Shah,' said Laurette, as she sat skimming a budget of letters and notes that had just been delivered.Ted felt like one who has suddenly been dragged out of the sunlight, and has had the key turned on him in a cheerless dungeon.'She is to finish her visit in September,' said Laurette, when she found that Ted made no response.He stared at theAgefor some time in gloomy silence, glancing from one column to another as if he were reading, but not seeing a line.'Well, I don't suppose it's to make much difference to me whether she comes here or anywhere else,' he answered.Laurette made no reply.'Was that all Stella said?' asked Ritchie after a pause; 'just to say good-bye? Was she at all put out that Louise wanted her at once, or was the thing a plant, do you think—just an excuse to be off?''Ted, don't ask so many questions, or I shall betray confidence,' said Laurette.'Betray confidence? Bosh!' retorted Ritchie in a disdainful tone. 'You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. At Christmas-time you thought you were going to do great shakes by getting Stella here, and showing her what a dash you cut; and now she's gone off in less than two weeks without even saying good-bye to me. And then there's something that you know in confidence. I should think I am the proper person to be taken into confidence, if there's anything to confide.''You asked if Stella only said good-bye,' said Laurette, in an impressive tone. 'Well, we had a long, private talk.'Ted leant forward, no longer pretending to read the newspaper.'Yes; and what was the talk about?''Before telling you that, I must get your promise that you will not let Stella know I told you.''I'm not such a confounded blab as to carry yarns between people.''Then tell me, has Stella, since she came here, said anything that led you to think she had been debating in her own mind whether or not she would accept you?''Yes; she told me that since I last saw her she had sometimes thought she would come to the scratch.''Ah! Well, after all, you understood her better than I do. They say that women have so much penetration; but I think some men have. You asked me one day if I thought Stella had heard anything.''Well?''She has.''Ah, I suppose Cuth, the parson, has fossicked?''I don't think so. I believe it is a slight rumour, but enough to disquiet her—to make her uncertain.''I shall write and make a clean breast of it; tell her all.''Not for your life. At least, not if you don't mean to lose her.''Lose her? I haven't got her, and not likely to now!''Ah, there you are mistaken. Stella loves you, Ted,' and Laurette, without a quiver of her eyelid, gazed into the young man's face. He flushed deeply, and walked about the room with signs of evident emotion.'If I could believe that——' he said, and stopped.'You may believe it,' she said, in a tone of quiet confidence which thrilled him with joy.'And in spite of—what she has heard?''Yes; and when she returns here in September—well, I can only judge by what she said, and by what she did not say, which is often quite as important, and by what I observed—I believe you will get a speedy answer. But, whatever you do, don't write to her till you do see her, for she would instantly think I told you all that passed between us, and I have not done that, and don't mean to.''Well, Larry, this is very good news you have given me,' said Ted, and he was so much moved that his voice trembled.Some visitors were announced, and Ted took himself off, and went for a long spin on Shah, trying to realize that his tedious years of waiting were after all to be crowned with the one great joy that had so long seemed a vision beyond his reach.The next little scene in Laurette's coup took place three days later, in the evening. Ted was to return to Strathhaye on the following day. A servant brought in some letters on a salver. Among them was one which Laurette had posted to herself, containing a long letter that Tareling had written to her a year or two previously. Latterly he never wrote long letters, even on business. Laurette crushed the envelope into her pocket, and began to read this letter with an air of absorbed attention. Presently she gave a little sharp cry.'What's the row?' said Ted, looking up. 'A letter from Tareling?' he said, glancing at the sheet, which Laurette re-perused with a most dejected countenance. But she said nothing. She read one or two more notes; one of them a delightfully intimate one from the Hon. Miss Brendover, Lady Weavelow's sister, asking Laurette and Miss Courtland to spend an afternoon at Government House in an informal way two days hence.'Tell me, Ted,' said Laurette suddenly, 'how much is father really affected by the rabbits?''How much? Well, there, you ask a question that neither he nor I can answer at present. Within the last twelve months he has spent £9,000 on sending the bunnies to kingdom-come; and how much he'll spend during the current twelve months, the Lord only knows!''But I thought this rabbit extermination was partly at the expense of Government?''Exactly; and that's why the vermin have been increasing head over heels. Why, the governor himself has had forty-three rabbits trapped, with the scalp taken off, and let run again that they may go on breeding. You see, these scoundrels in Government pay mean to make a permanent job of it. They get so much for every scalp, so, instead of killing the little brutes, they sometimes carefully take the skin off the top of the head, and in the course of a few months there are thousands more bred by the animals they have been paid for killing. When the governor saw what was going on he jacked up at once—gave the Government notice he would see to doing away with the rabbits on his own account. So there he is paying at the rate of £30 a day, and putting up a rabbit-proof fence between his land and the land in Government possession.''But, then, of course, father has been saving a lot of money all these years. It doesn't take more than eight or nine thousand a year to keep Godolphin House going.''Yes, he has unfortunately put four or five hundred thousand pounds into good investments in South Australia,' said Ted grimly. 'He had £150,000 in Commercial Bank Shares, which at the present moment may be had wall-high for an old song; he has £100,000 in the Town and Country Bank, which is more shaky than a poplar leaf; he has a pot of money in tram lines that will yet be sold for old iron; and he has heaps of tin in houses that cost him a handsome sum every quarter for broken windows, and advertisements for tenants that don't turn up. Perhaps you thought the governor cut up rather rough when he had to shell-out a thousand pounds over that shady concern of Tareling's six months ago; but, by Jove! if you knew how much money the old man has dropped lately in one way or another——''Well, I suppose we'll have to take up our abode permanently at Cannawijera,' said Laurette in a resigned tone.'Yes. It licks me why you don't make more of a home of that place,' said the unsuspecting Ted—'make a garden—you've only got to irrigate, you know: it's ridiculous to pay a manager on a little station like that—and make the place trim and comfortable. In fact, Stella told me she liked Coonjooree so much the last time she was there, she means to go again before long. Jove, I hope I may be there if she does!''Well, you see, I am not one of the gifted souls that love a worm-eaten old poet so much better than my fellow-creatures,' said Laurette a little viciously, and the next moment regretted giving any indication of the loathing that the place excited in her mind; but she had the faculty of saying sharp things, and found it hard to resist the temptation. 'But now that nothing else is left to us,' she said with a pensive resignation—'well, I dare say we shall make the best of it. Perhaps, if you come to see us next month, Ted, you will find Talbot planting a grass-tree against the wash-house wall.''You must bet him it won't grow, Larry, or he'll never finish the job,' said Ted, laughing. 'You mean next year, though; not next month?'By way of answer Laurette unfolded her husband's letter, and read aloud:'"It is only fair to let you know at as early a date as possible that I have lost every stiver of the money I brought with me, and am probably liable for as much more. This comes of trying to earn money by downright honest work——"''Baccarat!' interjected Ted; but Laurette did not heed this.'"If I had been content, as so many are, to take the words of thieving brokers, instead of coming here to see for myself, we would probably have trebled our little haul from the Celestial Hills. But it's no use crying over spilt milk. And I am determined that neither you nor I will ask a loan or an advance from your father or——"'Laurette stopped short.'That close-fisted hunks of a brother of yours, that's about it, isn't it?' said Ted, without asoupçonof malice. 'Don't mind me, Larry; Tareling and I understand each other. Well, what then?''"But we must at once leave Melbourne. So please put the house immediately in Sibworth's hands, and make all your preparations for leaving on or before the 24th of this month."'Ted gave a low whistle, and Laurette folded up the letter with an inimitable air of resignation.'But if you go, then, what of Stella's visit?' said Ted, with folds in his brow.'Stella's visit?' repeated Laurette absently. 'Oh, to be sure! To tell you the truth, my dear Ted, I am too much taken aback by the position to think much of anything beyond the domestic horizon. It is so sudden—yes, and unexpected—for if Talbot had had a little luck we should have paid off nearly all our little arrears; and then, of course, there would be the shearing in October.'Laurette avoided allusion to the fact that this had been long ago discounted and the advance used up, and creditors appeased only with fictitious promises of payment after the shearing already disposed of.'Of course you will see Stella at her own home, though I think there is something in the wind about her going abroad with Mrs. Raymond. It is to her I trace the rumour that has set Stella—— But there, I must not mix up things and other people's secrets!''Larry, you mustn't leave—you mustn't give up Monico Lodge till after September.''Ah, my dear boy, I would be only too happy, but it's beyond my power. It did flash across my mind that I would write and ask father; but now that you've explained about the rabbits and things——''But there are no rabbits at Strathhaye!'Laurette looked wonderingly at her brother, and then a sudden light seemed to dawn on her.'Oh, Ted, don't tempt me. I'll be honest. It isn't what would keep Monico Lodge going; but being so nearly connected with the Weavelows, we are in the swim of everything. I wouldn't undertake to stay for the rest of the season—not unless Talbot's aunt was kind enough to die, and he got the few thousand pounds for which he is down in her will. But she was always a cantankerous old cat. I dare say she'll live for fifteen years to come. And lately she has taken quite a passion for the Burmese. She helped to scud two missionaries among the Chins there, but they were eaten or something. I don't know whether they do eat them in Burmah; but at any rate she's going to send more. How old ladies of the aristocracy of England should send missionaries anywhere while the young men of their own class are what they are—and the old ones, too, for the matter of that!—but I dare say they know how hopeless it would be; whereas people that you never see, you can believe all sorts of romantic things about them, their conversions and things; and then, I suppose, wild creatures, who haven't got a stick of furniture or a shirt to their backs, can afford to be really Christianized.'Laurette had taken up a seam from a work-basket near, and was sewing away most industriously, while she rambled on in this artless fashion. Ted rose abruptly, and, without saying a word, went to his own room. He returned presently, and Laurette noticed, with a beating heart, that he had a cheque-book in his hand.He sat down at a davenport in the corner of the room, and wrote for a few minutes rapidly, blotted the cheque, and stood near his sister.'Don't talk in that cold-blooded way about the old woman, Larry. I think you may always reckon that the Australian side of your clan will do more for you than the "English-nobility" side. Keep this as much as you can in your own hands; and, if you want it, you can have as much again at the end of September.'With that, Ted put down the cheque before Laurette, and hastened to leave the room. It was for fifteen hundred pounds. It seemed to Ted that Larry didn't look at the amount at all, when she rose with a little exclamation of joy, intercepted him, and threw her arms round him.'There, Larry, don't slobber! I think you ought to say your prayers for that old woman. It sticks in my gizzard entirely to hear people talk in that way of old people—grudging them their bit of tucker and their own fireside. Why, even the niggers never knocked the old ones on the head unless there was a big famine.'With this little homily, Ted went out; and Laurette, hardly able to believe her senses, stared at the cheque with beaming eyes. She had hardly dared to hope for such complete success.'As much again at the end of September!' But of course that was spoken in the elation of believing his suit was to prosper. Like a wary general, Laurette began to sum up the situation. She was secure against detection as to those excursions of the imagination she had dealt in till her brother and Stella met; and as far as Ted was concerned, probably altogether secure; for if that idiotic girl finally rejected him, that was the ultimate misfortune to him, and everything else would sink into insignificance. Stella would be the first to let the cat out of the bag; for if she were still obdurate, the first thing she would say, no doubt, would be: 'Now, Ted, I thought you had made up your mind that we were just to be friends. That is not the sort of thing friends say.' She mimicked her half aloud, and for the first time felt her smouldering dislike to the girl warm up to something like hatred. She was almost sure Stella would cheat her out of the other fifteen hundred pounds. Well, but it was good of Ted—at least good, considering he had never given her more than three or four hundred pounds at a time before. But, after all, a young man with about fifteen thousand a year: 'If we only had a run like Strathhaye instead of that desolate hole! Oh, thank God, we can stay in Melbourne after all!'It may seem curious that one should thank God for the result of so much devious by-play and deception. But when we consider how a strong nation will attack a weaker one for no better motive than greed or ambition or the lust of tyranny, and then go to churchen masseto chant the praises of the Almighty because tens of thousands of human beings have been slaughtered and tens of thousands of homes have been desolated and impoverished, the wonder of the solitary case diminishes. It is not safe to assume that the individual conscience is invariably less frayed than that of the collective nation.CHAPTER XXVI.The home-station of Lullaboolagana was one of those delightful places which at once convey an assurance of welcome, comfort and repose. It was partly of wood, partly stone, with additions that formed an irregular chronology of the past. The snug-looking detached cottage, with a billiard-room and two or three bedrooms, marked the season in which the number of sheep shorn touched fifty thousand. The addition with the gable end dated the year in which the little Courtlands first had a governess, etc., etc. The house had deep verandas round three sides. The roof, washed snow-white, so as to lessen the force of the summer sun, gleamed with a seductive cheerfulness and air of salutation among the encircling foliage. Several outbuildings at varying distances made the home-station look at a little distance like a miniature village. The wool-shed and shearers' house, with two or three huts, formed a second group of houses westward, beyond the confines of what was known as the Home Field. This consisted of over forty acres of land, which had been subjected to an artless form of landscape gardening by a relative of the Courtlands, who had left England under sentence of death from consumption, and had lived at Lullaboolagana for eighteen years, though it had been authoritatively predicted he could not survive the long sea-voyage. Here, then, he had employed his lease of semi-invalid life in testing the capabilities of Australian soil in growing trees and plants from widely-separated countries. Here, like Shenstone, though on a smaller scale, he planted groves and avenues and alleys, diversified his woods, pointed his walks, and entangled his shrubberies. The result was a charming semi-Englishmilieuof the kind that the British race are so skilful in creating in the far regions of the earth, giving their dwelling-places under alien skies a touching resemblance to the old quiet homes in which their forefathers may have lived for many generations.There were avenues on every side of the Home Field, composed chiefly of Italian pines, which in twenty years had attained a size almost incredible for that period. The Home Field was not closely planted. All over it there were wide open spaces between the groves and woodlets and groups of trees that embraced endless species, from the firs and pines of the north to the palms of the torrid zone, with a liberal proportion of Australian trees. Simplicity was certainly the governing taste, but combined with a blending of effects which, when perceived, added a new attraction. All round the house there were blossoming shrubs, rose-trees, and a great variety of flowers that kept up a procession of blooms year in, year out. The secret of perpetual spring in flowers is well-nigh solved by gardeners in the more favoured portions of Australia. There were several gentle hillocks in the Home Field, which lent themselves to landscape effects in a very agreeable manner. But the most charming natural feature of all was the creek known by its native name, the Oolloolloo. It meandered through the whole length of the Home Field. The orchard, which was half hidden in a deep little valley, lay in two unequal portions, one on each side of the creek. Its course was still marked by the tall eucalyptus-trees, seldom absent from the banks of creeks. Indeed, these trees never attain their finest development except by running water; and yet they have to live through centuries in waterless wastes. Is there not here something of the same curious contradiction that we find between the complex social etiquette of the aborigines and their very primitive stage of savagedom? It is often forced upon the observer of nature in Australia that in the past she has been playing strange pranks; among other trifles, brewing pepper for her children instead of nourishing them with milk.But the eucalypti were far from being the only trees that grew by the Oolloolloo. Side by side with these natives of the primeval woods were copses of alders, overgrown bushes of sweetbriar, bamboos springing up tall and slender, and falling wide apart, making pictures against denser foliage like Japanese screens; here and there a hazel with its 'artless bower'; wide clumps of pampas grass, with their silky, flax-like blooms softly stirred by every breath of wind. Then one would come on a dense little grove of elms and native cherry-trees, mingled with scrub cypress—a combination which, of all others, makes the most alluring secular cloisters; a place in which to dream with open eyes; to catch phantasies by the wing; to read Shakespeare to one's self aloud; to muse, to brood, to meditate. Over all there was an enchanting air of leisure, of tranquil repose, which was heightened by the woods that lay on every side except to the south, where Minjah-Millowie, a township of seven or eight hundred inhabitants, extended in an irregular fashion within two miles of the Lullaboolagana home-station.This was the direction the house fronted, and opposite to it there was a bridge across the Oolloolloo of solid masonry. It was the third that spanned the creek in the Home Field, but the only one that could be depended on when the winter rains were heavy, and the sluggish little creek, with its silent pools connected by a slender trickling thread of running water, was transformed into a rushing, turbid fury of a rivulet that filled the adjacent groves with its enchanting sound. The second bridge was an enormous gum-tree, which from time immemorial had lain across the creek as it fell, its great old withered branches extending over a hundred feet beyond the creek on the Home Field side of it. There were marks all along the upper side of this tree made by the stone axe of the aborigine, who had climbed it in quest of opossums, or to place his bark-enclosed dead among the boughs, or perhaps to scan the surrounding country for the little column of pale blue smoke that might proclaim the presence of a tribal foe not far off.The third bridge, so called, was beneath a tall, slim white gum-tree, close to the orchard, and was a little rustic erection perched high up, completely covered on both sides with trailing creepers, conspicuous among them the wide-leaved passion-flower plant, now loaded with blossoms, scarlet and pale purple and white.'What a graceful creature it is, garlanded with leaves and flowers,' said Stella, as she approached it with her sister-in-law the morning after her arrival. 'It looks like the beginning of a poem, or some place that should come into a story. Has nothing ever happened there?''Let me see. Hector and I often walk to and fro on it in the moonlight, when the nights are very warm.''Ah, if you were only lovers—that had to part, you know, Louise——''Thank goodness we are not!' laughed Louise.'Not lovers? Oh, of course not—you are married people.''Well, Baby, you are as wicked as ever. I do like to hear Hector call you Baby. You see, though you may be very grown-up, and serious at times, Hector best remembers you as the baby of the household, when he left home twenty-one years ago. What ancient folk we are getting, to be sure!'They had by this time reached the passion-flower bridge, which was provided with seats on each side, and was, indeed, much resorted to as a sort of outside sitting-room. It was a point of vantage, and commanded a good view of the country round. Eastward there were low ranges. Between those and Lullaboolagana lay one of the tracts of dead trees that in Australian scenery make up so weird a picture of desolation. It was known as the Wicked Wood, from some unknown aboriginal tradition. Looking steadily northward, one became sensible of a break in the distant woods that betokened the beginning of a great plain, which stretched many scores of miles in that direction.'The Messmate Ranges, where I first saw a lyre-bird; the Wicked Wood, where only grass-trees and scorpions live; the Weeloo Plain, where a buggy seems to glide along like a boat—everything is just as it was over three years ago,' said Stella, looking around with glad recognition.Here the sisters-in-law indulged in one of those long wandering and delightful chats possible only to people who have had interests in common for many years. This lasted till a servant came to announce that Mrs. and Miss Morton had called.'My dear, how you have grown since I saw you!' were Mrs. Morton's first words as she kissed Stella. 'This is Julia; you did not see her when you were here—how many years since?''Oh, a dreadful long time ago,' said Stella; 'but not long enough for me to have grown, Mrs. Morton.''Oh, but positively you have, love,' said Mrs. Morton, surveying the new arrival with fond eyes.She was a fair, stout woman, long past middle life, but endowed with one of those exuberantly kind natures which seem to defy the worst inroads of age. She certainly never wore a face of joy merely because she had been glad of yore. The annals of daily life almost invariably supplied her with food for wreathed smiles. Not that she was callous to the accidents that marred other people's pleasures, though mishaps of all sorts had hitherto been unfamiliar to her personally. Only, though she knew well how to mourn with the unfortunate, she made an offering to oblivion of all that bordered on sorrow in an incredibly short time. Still, no one unconnected with a local catastrophe took it to heart so thoroughly for a day and a half as Mrs. Morton did. And on this very occasion she gave proof of this.'Oh, my dear, have you heard of the dreadful accident?' she said to Louise after a few casual remarks had been interchanged.'No—what accident?' said Louise, a little startled by the concern depicted on Mrs. Morton's face as she spoke. It is curious how the people who feel the most acutely connect any show of deep concern with personal misadventure.'Well, it was at Dr. Morrison's yesterday evening. We called at one of the Minjah shops on our way, and heard all about it. A man came in from the Bush with a fearful gumboil. Dr. Morrison found the tooth would have to come out. He put the man under chloroform, and extracted the tooth most successfully—but the man never got over it. The chloroform killed him. Oh, my dear, wasn't it dreadful?' and Mrs. Morton took out her handkerchief—not unnecessarily, for the tears were trickling down her cheeks.'Oh, I am sorry—and poor dear Mrs. Morrison so easily upset, it would give her a dreadful shock,' said Louise.'That is the best of using ether,' returned Mrs. Morton tearfully. 'If it hurts the patient it does not show till afterwards. But for a man to die under your hands—without getting away from you! Oh, it is so very shocking!''But, after all, mamma,' said her daughter, 'he was quite a common man, and very fond of drink.''Well, Julia, my dear, if you were his wife, or his mother, or his sister, that isn't the way you would speak,' said Mrs. Morton, wiping her eyes. 'It's of them I think.''But he didn't have any, mamma. He was just a knock-about hand on the Tarra-tarra Station.''Oh, my dear, not have a mother? how thoughtless you are. If Dr. Langdale had been there, I cannot help thinking he would have seen the man couldn't stand chloroform.''But isn't Dr. Langdale there? He was here the day before yesterday, and didn't say a word of leaving for any length of time.''He is at Nareen, staying with the Kenleighs. You know, they worship the ground he walks on since he performed that wonderfully successful operation on Mark.''Do you think he'll really stay in Australia, Mrs. Courtland?' said Miss Morton.'I do not know,' answered that lady; 'I am afraid not. You see, it was not to stay he came, but for a year's change and rest.''But then he's always writing—he must be writing a book,' said the young lady. 'I asked Mrs. Morrison the other week whether he wasn't, but she only shook her head and smiled. I don't know why some people are so fond of making secrets of things. Either he is or he is not. Why shouldn't she say "Yes" or "No"?''Perhaps she doesn't really know,' answered Louise, smiling. She knew that anything in the nature of a secret was abhorrent to Miss Morton, who loved nothing so well as talking of other people's affairs, except talking of her own. She was a tall, good-looking young woman of twenty-five, with large brown eyes, a brilliant complexion, and that stamp of figure which milliners call 'stylish.'The visitors stayed for many hours in the friendly leisurely fashion of neighbours in the Bush, who are separated by fifteen miles of unpeopled woods. Miss Morton had three weeks previously returned from a visit to her brother, Mr. John Morton, coming back by way of Melbourne, where she had stayed a couple of days with Mrs. Tareling.'I would have seen you there,' she said to Stella, 'only you were so long in coming. Laurette thought you were going to give her up altogether. What a dear Laurette is, to be sure!'To this Stella assented, in the facile way in which we all help to swell social fictions.'I do not feel as if I remembered much of my new sister-in-law. Is Helen like Julia at all?' Stella asked a little hesitatingly, after the Mortons had gone.'Not much. Helen takes more after her father. Not but what Mrs. Morton is the dearest and kindest of women. You will like Helen, dear,' said Louise, who was essentially one of the peacemakers of life, who not only prophesy smooth things, but help materially to bring them to pass.'And who is this Dr. Langdale you all conspire to——''Now, Stella, I warn you to say nothing disparaging,' said Louise, laughing. 'Dr. Langdale is an immense favourite with us here. You are sure to see him as soon as he returns from Nareen. He strolls across from Dr. Morrison's house in Minjah Millowie most days in the afternoon, when his writing for the day is over. He does write, for Hector told me. You know how slowly Hector makes friends.''Does he? You see, I really know very little of Hector and Claude.''I always forget that. Of course, you see them only at long intervals, and for a short time. Well, it's about five or six months since Dr. Langdale came. He had been in the other colonies some little time. He and Hector became great cronies almost at once. He is related to the Morrisons. We heard a good deal about him before he arrived. He has inherited a pretty good income, and does not need to work for his living. But he always had a great liking for the medical profession. He is much interested, too, in all sorts of social questions. He had an appointment in a large London hospital; in fact, he has never practised anywhere else. He previously held a merely honorary post there for two or three years. Then an uncle—a great physician in the West End—died, and his son wished Dr. Langdale to enter on a partnership with him. Before deciding on this, he came away for a year's rest and change.''How old is he?''About thirty-one, only, like most Englishmen, he looks younger, at least as compared with Australians. But he isn't all English; he is German on the mother's side.''Indeed! What is he like?''Now, Stella, you are interested. You do so love the Germans. I know you will like Dr. Langdale, if only for that reason.''Yes; and because you are giving me such a vivid description of him,' said Stella, laughing. The soft flush in her cheeks would have shown one who knew her that she was more interested than she chose to appear.'Well, I'll do my best, only the moment you see him you'll say——''Oh, here you are, both gossiping away nineteen to the dozen! Well, Baby, are you tired from your journey yesterday? After all, you are really quite grown up.'It was Hector Courtland who made this little speech, standing in the doorway of the drawing-room, where his wife and sister were seated, with Lionel, the eldest boy, just then an invalid, on a couch, buried in the enchanted pages of the 'Arabian Nights.' Courtland was a tall spare man, with that slight stoop which tall men, who are in the saddle often ten hours out of the twenty-four, are apt to acquire. He was bronzed with the sun and constant exposure to all sorts of weather. He was barely forty, but his dark-brown hair, beard, and moustache were plentifully sprinkled with gray. His face, when in repose, was grave almost to sadness, and he would often pass hours without uttering a word. These are some of the characteristics of a life passed in the Bush from early manhood. Courtland had been at Eton three years, when sudden and disastrous reverses, coupled with failing health, led his father to decide on leaving England for Australia. No one who knew Hector Courtland when he left Eton—a lad of seventeen—would have prognosticated that he would become grave, silent, and uumirthful long before he reached the uplands of middle age. But there are probably few natures which are not profoundly modified by a semi-Carthusian existence during the most susceptible years of life.'You look tired, Hector. Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?' said his wife.'Yes, a quart potful. Some sheep got boxed up at the seven-mile hut, and we had a high old time of it drafting them. Well, Liny, what are you doing, young man?''Reading about Sindbad the Sailor, father. Do you know that Aunt Stella can tell stories just like a book?''No; I never heard her. What sort of stories?''The one she told me this morning was about strange people who live always in the woods.''What kind of people, my boy?''Well, when they are in the sunshine they are all light. When they are in the moonshine, it goes through them, so you must step very gently, and follow them till they get into the shadow; and when they are in shadow, you cannot tell them from the darkness.''Then it seems you do not see them at all?''No, father, never; and all the time they are there doing the strangest things. They catch falling stones and toss them back into the sky, and there they give more light than fever, and don't fall down any more. They take old bits of dead bark and make them into butterfly wings, with gold and purple spots on them. When an old log is burnt up they make the little geraniums, that smell so sweet, out of the ashes. They never go to sleep, and they never stop working, and they are never tired and never seen, and they never let the tiniest scrap of anything go to waste.'The father listened with smiling seriousness to these wonders of the wood. Later on he pleaded to be among the audience when Stella told twilight stories to the children, and he would listen with profound interest to the mystical events and subtle fancies that rose to 'Baby's' lips with tireless vivacity. She certainly had something of the improvisatrice in her, for never, except when she threw the reins on fancy's neck in speaking, did such winged words, luminous reaches of imagination, and quick touches of pathos come to her. Sometimes, when the grave elder brother listened, he would almost question whether this could be the merry little child with wide open eyes who had been the baby among them all when he left home. She had in a manner remained 'Baby' to him ever since.There is something pathetic in the way that those who are most closely related may come to be entire strangers. When we are in daily communion we inevitably weave fancies one concerning the other, which stand to us in place of knowledge. But all the time—between not only dumb natures, but those most subtly gifted with utterance—there is that baffling, inexorable wall of division, that unfathomed abyss in which each human soul is shrouded from the cradle to the grave.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Stella had not been unfair in conjecturing that Laurette's absence from the drawing-room, after her brother came in, was not accidental. It had not, however, been her design to stay away so long, a circumstance which was in point of fact due to her having a bitter fit of crying. This was with her an extremely unusual circumstance, and was caused by no sentimental weakness. The laconic telegram she had received would not of itself have thrown much light on her emotion. It was dated from Sydney, and merely contained the words:
'TALBOT TARELING.'
That was all; but its bitterness, like that of many other events, lay in the context. There was no legitimate excuse for his sojourn in Sydney. Even business, elastic as it is in the hands of a wary and unfaithful husband, could not in any possible guise be held accountable for this move. In order to go to Sydney from Banjoleena, Tareling must have passed through Melbourne. Laurette had no need to waste time in asking herself why he had done so, like a fugitive. It was owing to the recent departure for Sydney of a wretched little opera singer who was Tareling's last infatuation. Laurette reviewed the situation in the light of past events.
Cheered by his success in Celestial Hills, she had, without a murmur, allowed him to retain possession of the nine hundred pounds that had been netted by the timely sale of her shares in that mine. Tareling had gone to Banjoleena with this money to his credit, confident of doubling or trebling the amount in a few days. Perhaps he had. But she knew that he would return from Sydney penniless, yet imperturbably unrepentant. It was one of Tareling's aristocratic characteristics, that he never attempted therôleof the Prodigal Son. He was obliged to come home when the fun was over; but there any simulacrum of repentance began and ended. So it had been before, so it would be no doubt to the end. But just now, owing to a conjunction of untoward events, this spell of riotous living meant for Laurette—unless she could by some means or other raise the wind—the almost immediate giving up of the costly furnished house at Toorak, and retirement to the intolerable solitude of Cannawijera. And this to Laurette presented all the concentrated bitterness of a hopeless defeat in the hour of greatest triumph. She had married Talbot Tareling not for love, for even if she had been capable of it, he was the last one qualified to evoke any such passion when the two met; not for his good looks, for he had none; not for his morals, for if he ever possessed any, the world, the flesh, and the devil had wholly despoiled him long before he left his native shores. She had married him simply because he was the younger son of an English peer; relying on this circumstance, and her own tact and heiress-ship, to become one of the elect of Melbourne society. Yet, with all these advantages, the struggle had been very uphill. Her income, when the marriage took place, was over three thousand a year. The Hon. Talbot was supposed to have five hundred a year, but it was invariably in the hands of disreputable Hebrews twelve months in advance. The sinews of war were wholly inadequate to the sort of campaign that Laurette undertook. And then, even in a frankly democratic country, the cadet of a noble house, bankrupt in money and reputation, does not meet with unqualified social success. But Laurette was indefatigable, and year by year she made a little headway. Only year by year there was an accumulation of debt, and tradespeople made their terms harder, and her father and brother were more reluctant to supplement her income from Cannawijera by random cheques for a couple of hundred pounds.
But then came the brilliant windfall of the new Governor and his wife—high in rank, and nearly connected with her husband's family. This gave her at one stroke that right of tambour at Government House which had been her cherished dream from early girlhood. She planted her feet on the neck of recalcitrant tradesmen and spiteful foes of her own sex, in the inner cliques of that curiously disintegrated mass which calls itself 'good society' in the capitals of Australian colonies. Her hour of victory had come. The Governor's wife was not only closely related to Tareling's family, but an intimate friend of his mother's. Before leaving London she had pledged herself to do all she could for Talbot, vaguely imagining that, in a wealthy young country like Victoria, it would be easy to smuggle a relative into some cosy sinecure worth, well, say seven or eight hundred a year.
But a very brief sojourn in Australia reveals the fact that to appoint a man to a post worth even one hundred a year, apart from fitness for the work or claims on the country, would at once arouse a ferment of Parliamentary inquiry. Now the Hon. Talbot Tareling's fitness for any appointment was limited to a well-cultivated and hereditary incapacity for any form of steady employment. His claims on the country consisted in having spent all his own and a great deal of his wife's money in very equivocal ways. The profound etiquette and the glamour of monarchical institutions are needed to elevate such traits into an irresistible claim on the public finances.
But at least it was in Lady Weavelow's power to shower those delicate attentions on her cousin and his wife which, from a viceregal personage, are objects of keener ambition in Melbourne than money or appointments. In Laurette, Lady Weavelow was agreeably surprised to find a lady whose demeanour, dress, and generalsavoir fairewould bring no discredit on her husband, even among the order to which he belonged. Stella had once spoken of the hard, crude touch of the social amateur in Laurette. But like all who do not possess the ultimate distinction of manners moulded by hereditary culture, or the spontaneous courtesy of an essentially kind heart, Laurette's behaviour was largely dependent on circumstances. With people like the Courtlands, whose unostentatious family pride made them indifferent to those forms of social distinctions which had the keenest fascination for Laurette, she was probably at her worst. Their simple mode of living, their ardour for books and ideas, their absence of chic measured by local standards; the humble nondescript sort of people, marked only by unselfish aims of life, that one constantly met at Fairacre—all gave her a certain sense of superiority to them, and yet a baffling sense that they would regard such an assumption as very amusing, and not to be taken seriously. She was at her best with those whose rank and position towered above her own. She was then on her guard against the robust vulgarity that formed the real substratum of her nature. She was quick and clever in her own way, and prided herself on knowledge of the world. In her case, as in that of all intrinsically shallow natures, such knowledge is largely, though unconsciously, founded on the dictum of the Scotchman: 'There is no an honest man in the world; I ken it by mysel'.'
But probably the very narrowness of Laurette's aims made her feel all the more acutely the prospect of speedy social extinction. After she reached her own room, she reread the telegram with a sickening heart. She recalled her father's obstinate refusal at Christmas-time to advance a few hundred pounds till after shearing-time. Of course he knew that to 'advance' was merely a euphemism for giving. He told her that till the rabbits were exterminated on his runs he would neither give nor advance a single copper, and advised herself and her husband to live quietly on their Cannawijera property, instead of running head over ears into debt in Melbourne. To go to these desolate wilds from the very apex of her triumph—from the haunts and assemblies whose open-sesame had cost her so many toilsome years of guerilla warfare with millionaire women, whose dull resentment she had aroused with the unguarded malice of a sharp and vindictive tongue! In a week after her departure her place in society would know her no more. The world abounds with those who are terrified at nothing so much as being forgotten. If people are buried in the Mallee Scrub, society has no alternative but to forget them. The thought suffocated Laurette in advance. And then Talbot—she knew—he would not stay at Cannawijera more than a week at the outside.
To make life endurable to him in such acul-de-sac, it would be necessary to erase twelve hours out of the twenty-four. Even in Melbourne he was often dull. Against dulness he had not one honest resource. Still less would this be the case when his wife was permanently at Cannawijera, and he was permanently a man about town. He had an incredible knack of obtaining credit. It must have been inherited with his blue blood. A man habituated to the brutal habit of paying for what he got could never attain such perfect mastery of the art. He was skilful too, or lucky rather, at games of chance. Yes, he would keep afloat for a few months. But after that? He would join some theatrical company, and leave the colonies. Laurette was sure of it. He was a good amateur actor: he had been trained by experts. There wererôlesin many popular plays in which he could give well-salaried actors points, and yet come off winner, from the fact that in suchrôleshe had only to present his own character in the less habitual parts that were fitted for stage representation—that of a well-bred, cool, unscrupulous man of the world. It was his one chance of getting a livelihood. He had more than once spoken of taking it up, when the dark desolation of Cannawijera loomed in the foreground as the only refuge open to him apart from gaining an independent livelihood. 'He will attach himself to Mademoiselle de Melier's company, and go to San Francisco,' thought Laurette; and she turned cold and faint with the conviction the thought carried—all that she had lived for seemed to be crumbling around her.
She covered her face with her hands, and felt better after she was able to cry. She heard Stella leave the drawing-room, and she debated with herself whether she would go to her brother and throw herself at his feet and implore him to save her from the ignominious series of defeats, of social annihilation, which she saw in store for her. But the next moment she rejected the thought. If a couple of hundred pounds would do her any good Ted would give a cheque at once. But he was far more obdurate about larger sums than ever her father had been. He knew too well what Tareling's mode of life was. He himself had worked hard from the age of sixteen till his uncle's death left him sole master of Strathhaye, and he had an invincible objection to placing an unlimited supply of cash at the disposal of 'an image of a man who never did a stroke of work in his life, for himself or anyone else.'
Laurette buried her face in her hands, and one design after another flashed hastily across her mind. To write and tell her father that some dire catastrophe impended, unless he could send her, say, a thousand pounds? No, she had done that more than once before. It was the story of the shepherd-boy and the wolf over again. Then slowly something like a feasible plan suggested itself. But she determined to ponder over it for a day or two. At the end of that time, however, events ranged themselves precisely in the direction she wished. Stella announced to her that Louise was not well, and asked her to hasten her visit as much as possible. 'If you will let me leave by the early train to-morrow, Laurette, I shall write and let Mrs. Coram, and the others whose invitations I accepted, know that I have been called away, and then I can see you again on my way home if you wish.'
Stella spoke in an apologetic tone, feeling half guilty for beating so hasty a retreat. But the enforced companionship with Laurette began to be intolerable. Her sustained enthusiasm about trifles, the glow of inextinguishable interest with which she retailed Lady Weavelow's opinions and sayings and doings, the solemn reverence with which she went over the connections of Lord Harry, the aide-de-camp, and entered into endless details regarding those she held to be the great people of Melbourne, bored Stella to the last point of ennui. It was like being in the society of servants, but without the interest of the servants' point of view at first hand. Then the whole atmosphere of Monico Lodge oppressed her so that she could not even read any book she cared for. The very walls and chairs seemed to whisper endless anecdotes full of foolish self-importance, and count over the provincial notabilities who paid them visits. 'We never know,' says Goethe somewhere, 'how anthropomorphic we are.' Probably those who do have a glimmering of it conceal the fact, because the habit of endowing lifeless objects with a personality of their own has, in the eyes of most practical people, something in it dangerously silly.
'Well,' said Laurette, a sudden light coming into her face, 'I will let you off on condition you promise to stay two weeks with me when you return. There is an English man-of-war to be here early in September, and a French royalty incog.; so we shall have the placeen fêteagain.' But as Laurette spoke her heart sank as she thought: 'I may then, perhaps, be entombed in the Mallee Scrub.'
Stella had spent the previous day with her brother by the seaside. Had she made any irrevocable decision? Perhaps she meant to write to Ted. Laurette had noticed the pearl horseshoe wrapped up on Stella's toilet-table, in an isolated fashion, as if she did not mean to include it in her belongings. Ted had gone to St. Kilda, and would not be back till the next afternoon. Stella's departure in his absence was so far fortunate—if no communication passed between them. Laurette was just then in a curiously strained and watchful mood. She was all eyes and ears.
She determined on a little conversation that might help to fetter Stella's action till they met again—a conversation that might also aid in the development of her little coup. It was not that facts were at all necessary to her when she found a little impromptu history helpful. But facts, even when twisted entirely from their true drift and context, are valuable as imparting a certainvraisemblanceto supposed events. There are people who will report an entirely imaginary conversation, and find a kind of moral support in adding: 'Yes; he sat in an armchair all the time, with his slippered feet on the fender.' The 'he' in question may not have uttered a word of the many ascribed to him—but then he did sit in an armchair, and his feet were really on the fender. After all, human veracity has severe limitations. We cannot have everything limning the severe countenance of truth. Let us remember this when, in contemporary history, we have the conversation all askew, but the armchair, the slippered feet, and the fender true to the life.
'Stella, may I speak to you a little about Ted?' said Laurette, with an engaging air of timidity.
She was really very quick at times in diagnosing the frame of mind in which people happened to be, and she had a prevision that her subject just then must be cautiously broached. Stella had not gone out riding with Ted since the evening he had offended her, and he had admitted to Laurette before he went to Flemington that he had been a deuced jackass, but when she questioned him he had relapsed into dogged silence.
'Why, Laurette, you speak as though Ted were at the other end of the world. What do you wish to say?'
'Well, no doubt I am rather foolish to be so much concerned. You see, Stella, you have so many brothers, you do not know how a woman feels when she has only one. Poor dear Ted is so unhappy just now. He offended you. Well, I undertook to make his peace with you. He did not go into particulars; perhaps he begged for one of the many kisses you owe him. Dear me, what a freezing air! I wonder how many kisses your brother Tom snatched from me; and yet he never proposed to me even once. Certainly I never set up for a monument of icy hauteur. Still, I never forgot that I was Sir Edward Ritchie's daughter, any more than I am likely to forget that I am the wife of the Hon. Talbot Tareling.'
Laurette drew herself up to her full height, and Stella was too much amused to retain an air of offended majesty.
'At the same time,' said Laurette, astutely taking advantage of this to show a sudden change of front, 'I don't think you need be afraid of Ted pestering you again. Now, my dear, let us have a proper talk over this. Sit down here; we may as well be comfortable, and not stand staring at each other like two strange cats on the roof. I believe there were tears in Ted's eyes when he took me into his confidence. "What do you think I'd better do, Larry?" said he. "Do?" said I. "Why, nothing." "But I am afraid she's very angry," said he. "She hasn't even ridden out with me since, and now she's away for the whole day. It feels as long as a month of Sundays. I shouldn't wonder if she sent me back that dashed horseshoe"—indeed, I am afraid he used a stronger word. Poor old Ted! you know he is a little rough sometimes. But how good and generous he is!—though I sometimes call him stingy in fun. There he was yesterday, trying to make me take a cheque for I don't know how much. But, of course, when a woman is married, there is a limit to what she can accept, even from a brother. Besides, I had a sort of feeling that it was more for your sake than my own—a sort of testimonial because I am nice enough for you to visit me.'
Laurette, when it suited her purpose, was a finished mistress of that adroit flattery which seema inseparable from radical insincerity of nature.
'I must say that was very humble of you,' said Stella, laughing outright.
It is foolish to flatter people with a strong sense of humour; even if they like it, they must see through it.
'Well, but to return to this storm in a teacup. I couldn't help laughing about the horseshoe; and I said, "If Stella wants to get rid of that in a huff, why, I'll take charge of it."'
'I wish you would, Laurette. I'll leave it in your hands,' said Stella.
'Oh, certainly,' returned Laurette, with an indulgent smile; and she mentally ticked this off as one point gained. But she had not finished yet. 'Then Ted said to me, "Now, Larry, tell me—do you think I'm any nearer the end of this long courtship, one way or the other? Is it more likely or unlikely that Stella will have me?" "Ted," said I, "don't ask me what Stella will do or will not do. I've long ago felt about this affair as if I were looking at a play—one of the sort that nearly makes you fall in pieces with yawning, don't you know. It's so long, and people come on and off, and you sit through one act after another, thinking that surely something will happen soon; but it doesn't, and there you gape till the curtain is rung down, and you feel like a perfect fool." At that Ted got rather angry, as if I were prophesying evil. Of course, I didn't mean to do that; so I simply said, "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years——"'
'You had no right to say——' said Stella, colouring hotly.
'Well, please remember this was a confidential chat with my only brother. "When a girl lets a man dangle after her for years, and prevents him from thinking of anyone else, and in the end doesn't know whether she'll have him or leave him—why, then I think it is time for him to take his fortune into his own hands."'
'Well, that, at least, was good advice,' said Stella, 'and I hope Ted will act on it.'
'Will you believe it?' said Laurette, laughing—'he has solemnly made up his mind that unless you write to him about something, or give him some direct encouragement, he will from this time forth try to think of you only as a friend. I believe that is partly why he has gone to Flemington.'
'I am glad that he is reasonable at fast,' answered Stella; but, notwithstanding the words, Laurette felt sure there was some pique in the flush that settled in the girl's cheeks.
CHAPTER XXV.
When Ritchie returned, and found that during his absence Stella had taken her departure for Lullaboolagana, his chagrin was extreme.
'She asked me to say good-bye to you for herself and Dustiefoot, and gave her kind regards to Shah,' said Laurette, as she sat skimming a budget of letters and notes that had just been delivered.
Ted felt like one who has suddenly been dragged out of the sunlight, and has had the key turned on him in a cheerless dungeon.
'She is to finish her visit in September,' said Laurette, when she found that Ted made no response.
He stared at theAgefor some time in gloomy silence, glancing from one column to another as if he were reading, but not seeing a line.
'Well, I don't suppose it's to make much difference to me whether she comes here or anywhere else,' he answered.
Laurette made no reply.
'Was that all Stella said?' asked Ritchie after a pause; 'just to say good-bye? Was she at all put out that Louise wanted her at once, or was the thing a plant, do you think—just an excuse to be off?'
'Ted, don't ask so many questions, or I shall betray confidence,' said Laurette.
'Betray confidence? Bosh!' retorted Ritchie in a disdainful tone. 'You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. At Christmas-time you thought you were going to do great shakes by getting Stella here, and showing her what a dash you cut; and now she's gone off in less than two weeks without even saying good-bye to me. And then there's something that you know in confidence. I should think I am the proper person to be taken into confidence, if there's anything to confide.'
'You asked if Stella only said good-bye,' said Laurette, in an impressive tone. 'Well, we had a long, private talk.'
Ted leant forward, no longer pretending to read the newspaper.
'Yes; and what was the talk about?'
'Before telling you that, I must get your promise that you will not let Stella know I told you.'
'I'm not such a confounded blab as to carry yarns between people.'
'Then tell me, has Stella, since she came here, said anything that led you to think she had been debating in her own mind whether or not she would accept you?'
'Yes; she told me that since I last saw her she had sometimes thought she would come to the scratch.'
'Ah! Well, after all, you understood her better than I do. They say that women have so much penetration; but I think some men have. You asked me one day if I thought Stella had heard anything.'
'Well?'
'She has.'
'Ah, I suppose Cuth, the parson, has fossicked?'
'I don't think so. I believe it is a slight rumour, but enough to disquiet her—to make her uncertain.'
'I shall write and make a clean breast of it; tell her all.'
'Not for your life. At least, not if you don't mean to lose her.'
'Lose her? I haven't got her, and not likely to now!'
'Ah, there you are mistaken. Stella loves you, Ted,' and Laurette, without a quiver of her eyelid, gazed into the young man's face. He flushed deeply, and walked about the room with signs of evident emotion.
'If I could believe that——' he said, and stopped.
'You may believe it,' she said, in a tone of quiet confidence which thrilled him with joy.
'And in spite of—what she has heard?'
'Yes; and when she returns here in September—well, I can only judge by what she said, and by what she did not say, which is often quite as important, and by what I observed—I believe you will get a speedy answer. But, whatever you do, don't write to her till you do see her, for she would instantly think I told you all that passed between us, and I have not done that, and don't mean to.'
'Well, Larry, this is very good news you have given me,' said Ted, and he was so much moved that his voice trembled.
Some visitors were announced, and Ted took himself off, and went for a long spin on Shah, trying to realize that his tedious years of waiting were after all to be crowned with the one great joy that had so long seemed a vision beyond his reach.
The next little scene in Laurette's coup took place three days later, in the evening. Ted was to return to Strathhaye on the following day. A servant brought in some letters on a salver. Among them was one which Laurette had posted to herself, containing a long letter that Tareling had written to her a year or two previously. Latterly he never wrote long letters, even on business. Laurette crushed the envelope into her pocket, and began to read this letter with an air of absorbed attention. Presently she gave a little sharp cry.
'What's the row?' said Ted, looking up. 'A letter from Tareling?' he said, glancing at the sheet, which Laurette re-perused with a most dejected countenance. But she said nothing. She read one or two more notes; one of them a delightfully intimate one from the Hon. Miss Brendover, Lady Weavelow's sister, asking Laurette and Miss Courtland to spend an afternoon at Government House in an informal way two days hence.
'Tell me, Ted,' said Laurette suddenly, 'how much is father really affected by the rabbits?'
'How much? Well, there, you ask a question that neither he nor I can answer at present. Within the last twelve months he has spent £9,000 on sending the bunnies to kingdom-come; and how much he'll spend during the current twelve months, the Lord only knows!'
'But I thought this rabbit extermination was partly at the expense of Government?'
'Exactly; and that's why the vermin have been increasing head over heels. Why, the governor himself has had forty-three rabbits trapped, with the scalp taken off, and let run again that they may go on breeding. You see, these scoundrels in Government pay mean to make a permanent job of it. They get so much for every scalp, so, instead of killing the little brutes, they sometimes carefully take the skin off the top of the head, and in the course of a few months there are thousands more bred by the animals they have been paid for killing. When the governor saw what was going on he jacked up at once—gave the Government notice he would see to doing away with the rabbits on his own account. So there he is paying at the rate of £30 a day, and putting up a rabbit-proof fence between his land and the land in Government possession.'
'But, then, of course, father has been saving a lot of money all these years. It doesn't take more than eight or nine thousand a year to keep Godolphin House going.'
'Yes, he has unfortunately put four or five hundred thousand pounds into good investments in South Australia,' said Ted grimly. 'He had £150,000 in Commercial Bank Shares, which at the present moment may be had wall-high for an old song; he has £100,000 in the Town and Country Bank, which is more shaky than a poplar leaf; he has a pot of money in tram lines that will yet be sold for old iron; and he has heaps of tin in houses that cost him a handsome sum every quarter for broken windows, and advertisements for tenants that don't turn up. Perhaps you thought the governor cut up rather rough when he had to shell-out a thousand pounds over that shady concern of Tareling's six months ago; but, by Jove! if you knew how much money the old man has dropped lately in one way or another——'
'Well, I suppose we'll have to take up our abode permanently at Cannawijera,' said Laurette in a resigned tone.
'Yes. It licks me why you don't make more of a home of that place,' said the unsuspecting Ted—'make a garden—you've only got to irrigate, you know: it's ridiculous to pay a manager on a little station like that—and make the place trim and comfortable. In fact, Stella told me she liked Coonjooree so much the last time she was there, she means to go again before long. Jove, I hope I may be there if she does!'
'Well, you see, I am not one of the gifted souls that love a worm-eaten old poet so much better than my fellow-creatures,' said Laurette a little viciously, and the next moment regretted giving any indication of the loathing that the place excited in her mind; but she had the faculty of saying sharp things, and found it hard to resist the temptation. 'But now that nothing else is left to us,' she said with a pensive resignation—'well, I dare say we shall make the best of it. Perhaps, if you come to see us next month, Ted, you will find Talbot planting a grass-tree against the wash-house wall.'
'You must bet him it won't grow, Larry, or he'll never finish the job,' said Ted, laughing. 'You mean next year, though; not next month?'
By way of answer Laurette unfolded her husband's letter, and read aloud:
'"It is only fair to let you know at as early a date as possible that I have lost every stiver of the money I brought with me, and am probably liable for as much more. This comes of trying to earn money by downright honest work——"'
'Baccarat!' interjected Ted; but Laurette did not heed this.
'"If I had been content, as so many are, to take the words of thieving brokers, instead of coming here to see for myself, we would probably have trebled our little haul from the Celestial Hills. But it's no use crying over spilt milk. And I am determined that neither you nor I will ask a loan or an advance from your father or——"'
Laurette stopped short.
'That close-fisted hunks of a brother of yours, that's about it, isn't it?' said Ted, without asoupçonof malice. 'Don't mind me, Larry; Tareling and I understand each other. Well, what then?'
'"But we must at once leave Melbourne. So please put the house immediately in Sibworth's hands, and make all your preparations for leaving on or before the 24th of this month."'
Ted gave a low whistle, and Laurette folded up the letter with an inimitable air of resignation.
'But if you go, then, what of Stella's visit?' said Ted, with folds in his brow.
'Stella's visit?' repeated Laurette absently. 'Oh, to be sure! To tell you the truth, my dear Ted, I am too much taken aback by the position to think much of anything beyond the domestic horizon. It is so sudden—yes, and unexpected—for if Talbot had had a little luck we should have paid off nearly all our little arrears; and then, of course, there would be the shearing in October.'
Laurette avoided allusion to the fact that this had been long ago discounted and the advance used up, and creditors appeased only with fictitious promises of payment after the shearing already disposed of.
'Of course you will see Stella at her own home, though I think there is something in the wind about her going abroad with Mrs. Raymond. It is to her I trace the rumour that has set Stella—— But there, I must not mix up things and other people's secrets!'
'Larry, you mustn't leave—you mustn't give up Monico Lodge till after September.'
'Ah, my dear boy, I would be only too happy, but it's beyond my power. It did flash across my mind that I would write and ask father; but now that you've explained about the rabbits and things——'
'But there are no rabbits at Strathhaye!'
Laurette looked wonderingly at her brother, and then a sudden light seemed to dawn on her.
'Oh, Ted, don't tempt me. I'll be honest. It isn't what would keep Monico Lodge going; but being so nearly connected with the Weavelows, we are in the swim of everything. I wouldn't undertake to stay for the rest of the season—not unless Talbot's aunt was kind enough to die, and he got the few thousand pounds for which he is down in her will. But she was always a cantankerous old cat. I dare say she'll live for fifteen years to come. And lately she has taken quite a passion for the Burmese. She helped to scud two missionaries among the Chins there, but they were eaten or something. I don't know whether they do eat them in Burmah; but at any rate she's going to send more. How old ladies of the aristocracy of England should send missionaries anywhere while the young men of their own class are what they are—and the old ones, too, for the matter of that!—but I dare say they know how hopeless it would be; whereas people that you never see, you can believe all sorts of romantic things about them, their conversions and things; and then, I suppose, wild creatures, who haven't got a stick of furniture or a shirt to their backs, can afford to be really Christianized.'
Laurette had taken up a seam from a work-basket near, and was sewing away most industriously, while she rambled on in this artless fashion. Ted rose abruptly, and, without saying a word, went to his own room. He returned presently, and Laurette noticed, with a beating heart, that he had a cheque-book in his hand.
He sat down at a davenport in the corner of the room, and wrote for a few minutes rapidly, blotted the cheque, and stood near his sister.
'Don't talk in that cold-blooded way about the old woman, Larry. I think you may always reckon that the Australian side of your clan will do more for you than the "English-nobility" side. Keep this as much as you can in your own hands; and, if you want it, you can have as much again at the end of September.'
With that, Ted put down the cheque before Laurette, and hastened to leave the room. It was for fifteen hundred pounds. It seemed to Ted that Larry didn't look at the amount at all, when she rose with a little exclamation of joy, intercepted him, and threw her arms round him.
'There, Larry, don't slobber! I think you ought to say your prayers for that old woman. It sticks in my gizzard entirely to hear people talk in that way of old people—grudging them their bit of tucker and their own fireside. Why, even the niggers never knocked the old ones on the head unless there was a big famine.'
With this little homily, Ted went out; and Laurette, hardly able to believe her senses, stared at the cheque with beaming eyes. She had hardly dared to hope for such complete success.
'As much again at the end of September!' But of course that was spoken in the elation of believing his suit was to prosper. Like a wary general, Laurette began to sum up the situation. She was secure against detection as to those excursions of the imagination she had dealt in till her brother and Stella met; and as far as Ted was concerned, probably altogether secure; for if that idiotic girl finally rejected him, that was the ultimate misfortune to him, and everything else would sink into insignificance. Stella would be the first to let the cat out of the bag; for if she were still obdurate, the first thing she would say, no doubt, would be: 'Now, Ted, I thought you had made up your mind that we were just to be friends. That is not the sort of thing friends say.' She mimicked her half aloud, and for the first time felt her smouldering dislike to the girl warm up to something like hatred. She was almost sure Stella would cheat her out of the other fifteen hundred pounds. Well, but it was good of Ted—at least good, considering he had never given her more than three or four hundred pounds at a time before. But, after all, a young man with about fifteen thousand a year: 'If we only had a run like Strathhaye instead of that desolate hole! Oh, thank God, we can stay in Melbourne after all!'
It may seem curious that one should thank God for the result of so much devious by-play and deception. But when we consider how a strong nation will attack a weaker one for no better motive than greed or ambition or the lust of tyranny, and then go to churchen masseto chant the praises of the Almighty because tens of thousands of human beings have been slaughtered and tens of thousands of homes have been desolated and impoverished, the wonder of the solitary case diminishes. It is not safe to assume that the individual conscience is invariably less frayed than that of the collective nation.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The home-station of Lullaboolagana was one of those delightful places which at once convey an assurance of welcome, comfort and repose. It was partly of wood, partly stone, with additions that formed an irregular chronology of the past. The snug-looking detached cottage, with a billiard-room and two or three bedrooms, marked the season in which the number of sheep shorn touched fifty thousand. The addition with the gable end dated the year in which the little Courtlands first had a governess, etc., etc. The house had deep verandas round three sides. The roof, washed snow-white, so as to lessen the force of the summer sun, gleamed with a seductive cheerfulness and air of salutation among the encircling foliage. Several outbuildings at varying distances made the home-station look at a little distance like a miniature village. The wool-shed and shearers' house, with two or three huts, formed a second group of houses westward, beyond the confines of what was known as the Home Field. This consisted of over forty acres of land, which had been subjected to an artless form of landscape gardening by a relative of the Courtlands, who had left England under sentence of death from consumption, and had lived at Lullaboolagana for eighteen years, though it had been authoritatively predicted he could not survive the long sea-voyage. Here, then, he had employed his lease of semi-invalid life in testing the capabilities of Australian soil in growing trees and plants from widely-separated countries. Here, like Shenstone, though on a smaller scale, he planted groves and avenues and alleys, diversified his woods, pointed his walks, and entangled his shrubberies. The result was a charming semi-Englishmilieuof the kind that the British race are so skilful in creating in the far regions of the earth, giving their dwelling-places under alien skies a touching resemblance to the old quiet homes in which their forefathers may have lived for many generations.
There were avenues on every side of the Home Field, composed chiefly of Italian pines, which in twenty years had attained a size almost incredible for that period. The Home Field was not closely planted. All over it there were wide open spaces between the groves and woodlets and groups of trees that embraced endless species, from the firs and pines of the north to the palms of the torrid zone, with a liberal proportion of Australian trees. Simplicity was certainly the governing taste, but combined with a blending of effects which, when perceived, added a new attraction. All round the house there were blossoming shrubs, rose-trees, and a great variety of flowers that kept up a procession of blooms year in, year out. The secret of perpetual spring in flowers is well-nigh solved by gardeners in the more favoured portions of Australia. There were several gentle hillocks in the Home Field, which lent themselves to landscape effects in a very agreeable manner. But the most charming natural feature of all was the creek known by its native name, the Oolloolloo. It meandered through the whole length of the Home Field. The orchard, which was half hidden in a deep little valley, lay in two unequal portions, one on each side of the creek. Its course was still marked by the tall eucalyptus-trees, seldom absent from the banks of creeks. Indeed, these trees never attain their finest development except by running water; and yet they have to live through centuries in waterless wastes. Is there not here something of the same curious contradiction that we find between the complex social etiquette of the aborigines and their very primitive stage of savagedom? It is often forced upon the observer of nature in Australia that in the past she has been playing strange pranks; among other trifles, brewing pepper for her children instead of nourishing them with milk.
But the eucalypti were far from being the only trees that grew by the Oolloolloo. Side by side with these natives of the primeval woods were copses of alders, overgrown bushes of sweetbriar, bamboos springing up tall and slender, and falling wide apart, making pictures against denser foliage like Japanese screens; here and there a hazel with its 'artless bower'; wide clumps of pampas grass, with their silky, flax-like blooms softly stirred by every breath of wind. Then one would come on a dense little grove of elms and native cherry-trees, mingled with scrub cypress—a combination which, of all others, makes the most alluring secular cloisters; a place in which to dream with open eyes; to catch phantasies by the wing; to read Shakespeare to one's self aloud; to muse, to brood, to meditate. Over all there was an enchanting air of leisure, of tranquil repose, which was heightened by the woods that lay on every side except to the south, where Minjah-Millowie, a township of seven or eight hundred inhabitants, extended in an irregular fashion within two miles of the Lullaboolagana home-station.
This was the direction the house fronted, and opposite to it there was a bridge across the Oolloolloo of solid masonry. It was the third that spanned the creek in the Home Field, but the only one that could be depended on when the winter rains were heavy, and the sluggish little creek, with its silent pools connected by a slender trickling thread of running water, was transformed into a rushing, turbid fury of a rivulet that filled the adjacent groves with its enchanting sound. The second bridge was an enormous gum-tree, which from time immemorial had lain across the creek as it fell, its great old withered branches extending over a hundred feet beyond the creek on the Home Field side of it. There were marks all along the upper side of this tree made by the stone axe of the aborigine, who had climbed it in quest of opossums, or to place his bark-enclosed dead among the boughs, or perhaps to scan the surrounding country for the little column of pale blue smoke that might proclaim the presence of a tribal foe not far off.
The third bridge, so called, was beneath a tall, slim white gum-tree, close to the orchard, and was a little rustic erection perched high up, completely covered on both sides with trailing creepers, conspicuous among them the wide-leaved passion-flower plant, now loaded with blossoms, scarlet and pale purple and white.
'What a graceful creature it is, garlanded with leaves and flowers,' said Stella, as she approached it with her sister-in-law the morning after her arrival. 'It looks like the beginning of a poem, or some place that should come into a story. Has nothing ever happened there?'
'Let me see. Hector and I often walk to and fro on it in the moonlight, when the nights are very warm.'
'Ah, if you were only lovers—that had to part, you know, Louise——'
'Thank goodness we are not!' laughed Louise.
'Not lovers? Oh, of course not—you are married people.'
'Well, Baby, you are as wicked as ever. I do like to hear Hector call you Baby. You see, though you may be very grown-up, and serious at times, Hector best remembers you as the baby of the household, when he left home twenty-one years ago. What ancient folk we are getting, to be sure!'
They had by this time reached the passion-flower bridge, which was provided with seats on each side, and was, indeed, much resorted to as a sort of outside sitting-room. It was a point of vantage, and commanded a good view of the country round. Eastward there were low ranges. Between those and Lullaboolagana lay one of the tracts of dead trees that in Australian scenery make up so weird a picture of desolation. It was known as the Wicked Wood, from some unknown aboriginal tradition. Looking steadily northward, one became sensible of a break in the distant woods that betokened the beginning of a great plain, which stretched many scores of miles in that direction.
'The Messmate Ranges, where I first saw a lyre-bird; the Wicked Wood, where only grass-trees and scorpions live; the Weeloo Plain, where a buggy seems to glide along like a boat—everything is just as it was over three years ago,' said Stella, looking around with glad recognition.
Here the sisters-in-law indulged in one of those long wandering and delightful chats possible only to people who have had interests in common for many years. This lasted till a servant came to announce that Mrs. and Miss Morton had called.
'My dear, how you have grown since I saw you!' were Mrs. Morton's first words as she kissed Stella. 'This is Julia; you did not see her when you were here—how many years since?'
'Oh, a dreadful long time ago,' said Stella; 'but not long enough for me to have grown, Mrs. Morton.'
'Oh, but positively you have, love,' said Mrs. Morton, surveying the new arrival with fond eyes.
She was a fair, stout woman, long past middle life, but endowed with one of those exuberantly kind natures which seem to defy the worst inroads of age. She certainly never wore a face of joy merely because she had been glad of yore. The annals of daily life almost invariably supplied her with food for wreathed smiles. Not that she was callous to the accidents that marred other people's pleasures, though mishaps of all sorts had hitherto been unfamiliar to her personally. Only, though she knew well how to mourn with the unfortunate, she made an offering to oblivion of all that bordered on sorrow in an incredibly short time. Still, no one unconnected with a local catastrophe took it to heart so thoroughly for a day and a half as Mrs. Morton did. And on this very occasion she gave proof of this.
'Oh, my dear, have you heard of the dreadful accident?' she said to Louise after a few casual remarks had been interchanged.
'No—what accident?' said Louise, a little startled by the concern depicted on Mrs. Morton's face as she spoke. It is curious how the people who feel the most acutely connect any show of deep concern with personal misadventure.
'Well, it was at Dr. Morrison's yesterday evening. We called at one of the Minjah shops on our way, and heard all about it. A man came in from the Bush with a fearful gumboil. Dr. Morrison found the tooth would have to come out. He put the man under chloroform, and extracted the tooth most successfully—but the man never got over it. The chloroform killed him. Oh, my dear, wasn't it dreadful?' and Mrs. Morton took out her handkerchief—not unnecessarily, for the tears were trickling down her cheeks.
'Oh, I am sorry—and poor dear Mrs. Morrison so easily upset, it would give her a dreadful shock,' said Louise.
'That is the best of using ether,' returned Mrs. Morton tearfully. 'If it hurts the patient it does not show till afterwards. But for a man to die under your hands—without getting away from you! Oh, it is so very shocking!'
'But, after all, mamma,' said her daughter, 'he was quite a common man, and very fond of drink.'
'Well, Julia, my dear, if you were his wife, or his mother, or his sister, that isn't the way you would speak,' said Mrs. Morton, wiping her eyes. 'It's of them I think.'
'But he didn't have any, mamma. He was just a knock-about hand on the Tarra-tarra Station.'
'Oh, my dear, not have a mother? how thoughtless you are. If Dr. Langdale had been there, I cannot help thinking he would have seen the man couldn't stand chloroform.'
'But isn't Dr. Langdale there? He was here the day before yesterday, and didn't say a word of leaving for any length of time.'
'He is at Nareen, staying with the Kenleighs. You know, they worship the ground he walks on since he performed that wonderfully successful operation on Mark.'
'Do you think he'll really stay in Australia, Mrs. Courtland?' said Miss Morton.
'I do not know,' answered that lady; 'I am afraid not. You see, it was not to stay he came, but for a year's change and rest.'
'But then he's always writing—he must be writing a book,' said the young lady. 'I asked Mrs. Morrison the other week whether he wasn't, but she only shook her head and smiled. I don't know why some people are so fond of making secrets of things. Either he is or he is not. Why shouldn't she say "Yes" or "No"?'
'Perhaps she doesn't really know,' answered Louise, smiling. She knew that anything in the nature of a secret was abhorrent to Miss Morton, who loved nothing so well as talking of other people's affairs, except talking of her own. She was a tall, good-looking young woman of twenty-five, with large brown eyes, a brilliant complexion, and that stamp of figure which milliners call 'stylish.'
The visitors stayed for many hours in the friendly leisurely fashion of neighbours in the Bush, who are separated by fifteen miles of unpeopled woods. Miss Morton had three weeks previously returned from a visit to her brother, Mr. John Morton, coming back by way of Melbourne, where she had stayed a couple of days with Mrs. Tareling.
'I would have seen you there,' she said to Stella, 'only you were so long in coming. Laurette thought you were going to give her up altogether. What a dear Laurette is, to be sure!'
To this Stella assented, in the facile way in which we all help to swell social fictions.
'I do not feel as if I remembered much of my new sister-in-law. Is Helen like Julia at all?' Stella asked a little hesitatingly, after the Mortons had gone.
'Not much. Helen takes more after her father. Not but what Mrs. Morton is the dearest and kindest of women. You will like Helen, dear,' said Louise, who was essentially one of the peacemakers of life, who not only prophesy smooth things, but help materially to bring them to pass.
'And who is this Dr. Langdale you all conspire to——'
'Now, Stella, I warn you to say nothing disparaging,' said Louise, laughing. 'Dr. Langdale is an immense favourite with us here. You are sure to see him as soon as he returns from Nareen. He strolls across from Dr. Morrison's house in Minjah Millowie most days in the afternoon, when his writing for the day is over. He does write, for Hector told me. You know how slowly Hector makes friends.'
'Does he? You see, I really know very little of Hector and Claude.'
'I always forget that. Of course, you see them only at long intervals, and for a short time. Well, it's about five or six months since Dr. Langdale came. He had been in the other colonies some little time. He and Hector became great cronies almost at once. He is related to the Morrisons. We heard a good deal about him before he arrived. He has inherited a pretty good income, and does not need to work for his living. But he always had a great liking for the medical profession. He is much interested, too, in all sorts of social questions. He had an appointment in a large London hospital; in fact, he has never practised anywhere else. He previously held a merely honorary post there for two or three years. Then an uncle—a great physician in the West End—died, and his son wished Dr. Langdale to enter on a partnership with him. Before deciding on this, he came away for a year's rest and change.'
'How old is he?'
'About thirty-one, only, like most Englishmen, he looks younger, at least as compared with Australians. But he isn't all English; he is German on the mother's side.'
'Indeed! What is he like?'
'Now, Stella, you are interested. You do so love the Germans. I know you will like Dr. Langdale, if only for that reason.'
'Yes; and because you are giving me such a vivid description of him,' said Stella, laughing. The soft flush in her cheeks would have shown one who knew her that she was more interested than she chose to appear.
'Well, I'll do my best, only the moment you see him you'll say——'
'Oh, here you are, both gossiping away nineteen to the dozen! Well, Baby, are you tired from your journey yesterday? After all, you are really quite grown up.'
It was Hector Courtland who made this little speech, standing in the doorway of the drawing-room, where his wife and sister were seated, with Lionel, the eldest boy, just then an invalid, on a couch, buried in the enchanted pages of the 'Arabian Nights.' Courtland was a tall spare man, with that slight stoop which tall men, who are in the saddle often ten hours out of the twenty-four, are apt to acquire. He was bronzed with the sun and constant exposure to all sorts of weather. He was barely forty, but his dark-brown hair, beard, and moustache were plentifully sprinkled with gray. His face, when in repose, was grave almost to sadness, and he would often pass hours without uttering a word. These are some of the characteristics of a life passed in the Bush from early manhood. Courtland had been at Eton three years, when sudden and disastrous reverses, coupled with failing health, led his father to decide on leaving England for Australia. No one who knew Hector Courtland when he left Eton—a lad of seventeen—would have prognosticated that he would become grave, silent, and uumirthful long before he reached the uplands of middle age. But there are probably few natures which are not profoundly modified by a semi-Carthusian existence during the most susceptible years of life.
'You look tired, Hector. Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?' said his wife.
'Yes, a quart potful. Some sheep got boxed up at the seven-mile hut, and we had a high old time of it drafting them. Well, Liny, what are you doing, young man?'
'Reading about Sindbad the Sailor, father. Do you know that Aunt Stella can tell stories just like a book?'
'No; I never heard her. What sort of stories?'
'The one she told me this morning was about strange people who live always in the woods.'
'What kind of people, my boy?'
'Well, when they are in the sunshine they are all light. When they are in the moonshine, it goes through them, so you must step very gently, and follow them till they get into the shadow; and when they are in shadow, you cannot tell them from the darkness.'
'Then it seems you do not see them at all?'
'No, father, never; and all the time they are there doing the strangest things. They catch falling stones and toss them back into the sky, and there they give more light than fever, and don't fall down any more. They take old bits of dead bark and make them into butterfly wings, with gold and purple spots on them. When an old log is burnt up they make the little geraniums, that smell so sweet, out of the ashes. They never go to sleep, and they never stop working, and they are never tired and never seen, and they never let the tiniest scrap of anything go to waste.'
The father listened with smiling seriousness to these wonders of the wood. Later on he pleaded to be among the audience when Stella told twilight stories to the children, and he would listen with profound interest to the mystical events and subtle fancies that rose to 'Baby's' lips with tireless vivacity. She certainly had something of the improvisatrice in her, for never, except when she threw the reins on fancy's neck in speaking, did such winged words, luminous reaches of imagination, and quick touches of pathos come to her. Sometimes, when the grave elder brother listened, he would almost question whether this could be the merry little child with wide open eyes who had been the baby among them all when he left home. She had in a manner remained 'Baby' to him ever since.
There is something pathetic in the way that those who are most closely related may come to be entire strangers. When we are in daily communion we inevitably weave fancies one concerning the other, which stand to us in place of knowledge. But all the time—between not only dumb natures, but those most subtly gifted with utterance—there is that baffling, inexorable wall of division, that unfathomed abyss in which each human soul is shrouded from the cradle to the grave.