AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE.
I had my share in the conversation--and the lion’s share it always
was--until Bridget brought tea out to the verandah. I was wild
with excitement at this mighty change in my fortunes and the novel
experiences in store for me, and I wanted immediately to know all about
everything, from cabin furniture to the Zoological Gardens and Madame
Tussaud’s, wild beasts and waxwork being objects which (grown up though
I was, or thought I was) appealed far more strongly to my imagination
than the museums and operas and picture-galleries that mother tried
to tempt me with. By-and-by, however, I began to see that I bothered
them a little, and that they had higher matters to talk over. So, when
I had taken my cup of tea, I left them to enjoy theirs in peace, and,
wrapping myself in a light scarf that hung in the hall, went down into
the garden for a stroll.
It was a lovely, soft, cool night, raging hot and nasty though all the
day had been. The north wind blew no longer, as if from the mouths of a
million red-hot ovens: it had gone almost round to the south, and came
rustling, fresh and sweet, through the trees and shrubs, with a dewy
smell of flowers (from the few the drought had left) mingling with the
faint hay scent of the burnt-up paddocks. There was a little crescent
moon shining above the many roofs of the low house and outbuildings,
showing the delicate transparency of the atmosphere, even on a cloudy
night, as never moon could show me in England afterwards. Some great
oleander trees (it would have been an insult to call them bushes)
blushed rosily out from the half-darkness, nodding their pink bunches
over the verandah roofs, as if proud to remind me that they were nearly
all I had to depend upon in this scorching weather for the innumerable
flower-vases that I loved to scatter all over the house.
It was such a sweet night, that it made me (even me) feel, all at once,
a little melancholy. I began to think of some things I had forgotten
in my first burst of excitement at the prospect of going home. It
occurred to me, for the first time, to wonder whether I should really
like England as well as my own dear Narraporwidgee? And could I part
with Spring, my canine familiar, who was as much my shadow as any
witch’s black cat? He was sniffing round my petticoats now, poking his
wet black nose under my arm and into my face, as I leaned on the garden
gate, in an attitude of contemplation that he was not used to, and
could not understand.
The dear old dog! He seldom took a night’s rest anywhere but on the
verandah outside my door--the glass door that was also the window of my
bedroom; and if I did let him lie under my bed in the daytime when it
was blinding hot outside, he was _my_ dog, and it was nobody’s business
but my own. Who would understand his ways and wants as I did? Who
would take him down to the dam and the river for his swims, and see
that he got the bits of mutton he liked best? And how could he bear his
life without me?
At this stage of my meditations, when my eyes were filling with tears,
and I was wildly resolving to pay his passage and smuggle him along
with me somehow, if I had to sell my new watch and chain to do it,
Spring jumped out of my embraces with a sudden energy that nearly
knocked me over, and darted in pursuit of a wretched little opossum
that was just scuttling up the trunk of my favourite plum tree. He
scratched my arm with his iron claws, and I did not cry over him any
more.
I began to think of the plums, which would be ripe enough for jam in
another week or two. Oh, who would make the jam? And who would eat it?
I had visions of strange people rudely criticizing our pretty house,
rummaging about mother’s dainty store-rooms, and tramping over our
sacred Persian carpet with muddy boots; and they made me very sad.
Then, by the vague moonlight, I saw the horses in the home paddock
quietly sauntering about and enjoying the night air, and amongst them
I easily recognized my own lovely Bronzewing--the most perfect lady’s
horse, many people said, in the whole of the Western district. The
pretty creature! I should know him from a thousand in any scrap of
moonlight--the graceful droop and lift of his strong, supple neck, and
the way he raised his feet as he trod the earth, that hardly seemed
good enough for him to walk on. He whisked his silky tail from side to
side, and nibbled, and glided from shadow to shadow, little thinking,
poor dear Bronzewing, what was in store for him and me!
I wondered would daddy let me take my horse to England? Perhaps he
would, if I made a great point of it; he never liked to refuse me
anything if he could help it. Bronzewing was not like poor Spring;
he really _was_ valuable, in whatever part of the world he might be.
His father and mother both came from England, to begin with. If daddy
did not mind paying all that for the parents, he surely wouldn’t mind
paying a little for the son, who had, as he always said, all the good
points of both of them. It was hardly a month ago that the Indian buyer
offered a hundred pounds for him, and father would not entertain the
offer for a moment. So, feeling pretty comfortable about Bronzewing, I
began to think of somebody else--Tom.
Tom was the only son of our next-door neighbour, and lived only five
miles off, and he was my great friend. That is to say, he had been
my great friend for years when we were children, until his father
sent him home to Oxford, and then I did not see him for nearly four
years. He had only been back about six months, and we had renewed
our acquaintance on rather a different footing, for now we were both
grown up. He was nearly twenty-three, and I was just over eighteen.
But I could not say that we were not great friends still. He brought
me some presents from Oxford when he came back--a pretty box for my
handkerchiefs, and a book of photographs of the colleges, with a
cardinal’s hat on the cover (he was a Christ Church man), and a set of
Egyptian jewellery that he said was the fashion in England--and these
were the greatest treasures I had in the world.
I had no girl friends that I cared for. A few young ladies lived around
us, but mother did not consider them what she called “her sort,” and
did not encourage any intimacy between them and me. (She was considered
“stuck up” in consequence, which did not affect her in the slightest
degree.) I seldom felt myself tempted to disregard her prejudices, for
I don’t think they were my sort either. I did not like girls.
But Tom’s father was my father’s old friend, and his mother my mother’s
“sort” exactly, the very image of her ideal gentlewoman, Mrs. Delany,
as if she had stepped out of Lady Llanover’s book. And so, considering
what near neighbours we were, Tom and I were intimate by the mere force
of circumstances.
Did I say that his name was Smith--Tom Smith? I am very sorry, but so
it was. He ought to have had a nobler name to match his noble height of
six feet two and a half, and his noble, honest, handsome face, and the
noble old blood that mother said he inherited on both sides; but--well,
he hadn’t. And, after all, what does it matter? It is only in novels
that names are always appropriate to the people who own them; it very
seldom is so in real life.
When I began to think of Tom, I became far more melancholy than any
thought of Spring or Bronzewing had made me. How Tom would miss me!
And where should I find another like him, whatever part of the world I
might go to?
Mother was fond of contrasting the manners of society in “her time”
and in her country with the disrespect for _les convenances_ which
characterized some of her acquaintances of later years, particularly
the young men; but I had seen plenty of emigrant Englishmen, and not
one of them the gentleman Tom was in all his ways, not only after he
left Oxford, but before he went there, though certainly Oxford life did
develop and polish him wonderfully.
Sighing heavily, and caring no more for the Zoological Gardens and
Madame Tussaud’s, I opened the garden gate and went out into the
paddock. Spring, having barked himself hoarse at the opossum, which
sat serenely on an exposed bough above him, with pointed ears pricked
up and bushy tail hanging down, uttering a nervous little accompaniment
of growls, discharged a final volley, and trotted after me; and, not
consciously following any route in particular, we went towards the
river, nearly a mile away, which was threatening to dry up into a
chain of stagnant water-holes. Across the moonlit paddock, scorched to
a sandy white; over the slip-panels in the fence, which, of course,
I never dreamed of taking down; through a larger extent of burnt-up
meadow, where white-faced Herefords came up to us and stared at us,
munching audibly in the still night air; over another fence--a brush
fence this time, instead of posts and rails--through which I scrambled
where I saw a likely place, irrespective of gates, and in which my
muslin train came to most dreadful grief; through more paddocks, this
time sprinkled with shorn white sheep, who scampered away from Spring
in the most abject terror, though he would have scorned to look at
them; and finally into the shadow of the belt of gum and wattle trees
that fringed the windings of the little river.
Any one who had watched me taking such a walk at that time of night,
and especially if he or she had seen what came of it, would certainly
have accused me of keeping clandestine appointments with young
men--a thing I would no more dream of doing than mother herself,
notwithstanding my unfortunate ignorance of Mrs. Grundy’s prejudices.
I was used to these wild rambles at all hours, considering my dog
a sufficient escort. I was a thorough bush girl, as mother sadly
acknowledged, and had no fear of strange men, or horned cattle, or
snakes, or darkness, or rain, or anything else that I know of. And
when, from under the bank of the river, a great curly sheep dog rushed
up at us, and began to growl at Spring, the two wagging their tails
and putting their black noses together, I was as much surprised and
dismayed as ever I was in my life. It was Tom’s dog, as I knew in a
moment; and of course Tom followed him up the bank to see what he was
after. He must have been pretty much astonished too, when he saw me
standing above him, in my white dress, without a scrap of hat on.
“Oh, Tom, what _are_ you doing here?” I cried nervously, feeling my
face and neck on fire--the first time I had ever been affected that way
by a meeting with him.
“Why, Kitty, is it you?” he responded incredulously. “What are _you_
doing so far away from home? You have nobody with you?”
“No--only Spring. We were just having a walk, and I thought, when we
were so far, I’d see if there were any ducks in that corner where the
moon shines. Father and mother were busy talking, and did not want me.
I didn’t notice how the time was going. I’m afraid it’s getting very
late, Tom?”
“Nearly nine o’clock, I should think. Never mind; it’s a lovely night.
Come and sit on this stump a few minutes while I set my trap, and
then I’ll walk home with you. Do you know what I am doing? Trying to
catch some more water-rats for you. I’ve got two hung up in that tree.
I’ve dressed thirteen skins already--wattle-bark, and pumice-stone,
and all the proper things. You’d never know they had not been done by
a furrier; they are as soft as wash-leather, and the fur like silk.
If you cut off the yellowish part at the edges, and leave only the
brown, they will be plenty wide enough, and you will have the swellest
imaginable jacket by next winter.”
I took his hand and scrambled down the bank, in a happy flutter of
shame and pleasure, renewing my assurances that I no more dreamt of
seeing him there than of seeing the bunyip itself.
“Of course you didn’t,” he replied cheerfully. “But, you see, this is
how it was: the moon got up, and as I had been too busy all day to see
after them, it occurred to me that I might as well take a stroll down
the river and look at my traps. And I’m very glad I did, Kitty. I’ll
never spoil a good mind again, for fear of what I might lose by it.”
I sat down contentedly on my stump, and watched him tilting up a wooden
candle-box with some sticks and a mutton bone and a piece of string,
and arranging the primitive apparatus safely on a platform he had
prepared for it; the while he threatened his dog, who stood over him,
with the direst penalties if he ventured to interfere. And when I saw
that he had quite done, I got up and turned to ascend the bank again.
“Stay a few minutes, Kitty,” he called out hastily. “Now you are here
you may as well take breath before you start all that way home.”
I scouted the idea of being tired and wanting rest; but, while I
hesitated, he held out his hand, and I turned back again and allowed
him to reseat me on my stump. What would mother have thought? But I
could not help it.
“We’ll give ourselves five minutes,” he said, turning the face of his
watch to the moonlight. “It’s just a quarter to nine, and we’ll start
at the ten minutes. Come here, you good-for-nothing brute! Didn’t I
tell you to leave that alone?” This was addressed to his dog. “Now
then, Kitty, what’s the news? I haven’t seen you for more than a week,
you know.”
He stretched himself on the bank beside me, and took off his hat to the
cool breeze. Did he know, I wonder, how he looked, with the moonlight
on his wide brows and his strong, straight nose, and his close-cropped
shapely brown head? Not he. But I did; and I wondered if I should ever
see his like again, in England or any other land.
“Oh, Tom, news!” I cried out piteously. “There is dreadful news! Father
has really made up his mind at last to go home.”
“The dickens he has!” responded Tom under his breath, suddenly raising
himself on his elbow, and looking at me. “But I thought that was what
you had been wishing for, Kitty, these years and years?”
“So I did--so I do,” said I; “but now it seems so near, somehow I feel
it will be a great wrench.”
“It will be an awful wrench to those you will leave behind,” said Tom;
“I know that well enough. How soon will you go, do you think?”
“As soon as ever father hears that his wool has got home safely.”
“Not much fear of that, I should think.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The ship might be wrecked, or be too late for the
good market. And sometimes wool, when it has been packed damp, takes
fire like haystacks--spontaneous combustion, you know.”
“I believe that is known to happen, about once in a thousand years,”
said Tom, gravely; “but it couldn’t happen very well in this case. Why,
there wasn’t a drop of rain all shearing, nor for ever so long after.”
“Well, at any rate, that’s all I know. As soon as father is satisfied
that this last clip of wool is all right, we are to start.”
Tom was silent after this, and I began to think it was time to be going
home.
“Wait a moment, Kitty. I can’t take it all in at once. How long are you
going for? When will you be back?”
“I don’t think we shall _ever_ be back,” I answered in a despairing
tone. “Father is going to sell everything; and I believe, if mother
once finds herself in England again, a team of bullocks wouldn’t drag
her back.”
“No; a team of bullocks wouldn’t be much good, certainly. Oh, dear me!
why didn’t you all go four or five years ago? We could have had some
fun then.”
“I wish we had, with all my heart,” said I.
“And, I suppose,” continued Tom, in a very grumbling tone, “as you
haven’t made your _début_ in Melbourne, you’ll come out at home; be
presented at Court, perhaps.”
“No, we don’t go to Court,” I replied, with a complacent sense of
dignity and grandeur, as that mythical officer, with whom we are all
acquainted, might have remarked of his regiment that they didn’t dance.
“Grandmamma was the last of the family who was presented. But I dare
say I shall see a great deal of company in my aunts’ houses.”
“I expect you will. I know what your aunt Alice’s house is, for I was
there when Regy came of age. Don’t you have anything to do with Regy,
Kitty; he is not a nice fellow.”
“Isn’t he? I’ve always heard he was very nice.”
“No, he isn’t. A good many fellows aren’t, in the set he belongs to.
Do you know, Kitty, I’ve a good mind to sell out too, and come home to
help look after you. You’ve got no brothers.”
“I’m sure you’re very kind,” I retorted, a little nettled by his
disparagement of my relations; “but I _have_ a father and mother, and
they have managed to take care of me pretty well so far. Besides, how
can you sell out? You have nothing to sell.”
“I beg your pardon. Since I came to man’s estate the governor has made
me his partner. Half Booloomooroo belongs to me.”
“But you couldn’t leave the poor old man, and your mother. You don’t
know how she pined and moped all the time you were at Oxford.”
“Poor old mother! no, of course not. I must just grin and bear it,
Kitty. I must trust you not to forget your old friends when you are
amongst so many new ones.”
“You may,” I said earnestly, touched by something in his voice, and
recovering from my little huff in a moment. “I shall never forget my
old friends, wherever I am. If I never see you again, Tom, nobody in
all the world”--here I stopped, overwhelmed with horror at what I was
going to say.
“Finish it,” he urged, drawing himself up to my knee, and looking
eagerly in my face--an eagerness I felt rather than saw. “Nobody in all
the world--what?”
“Nobody will make me forget my old friends in Australia,” I replied
hastily. “Isn’t it going to rain, Tom? How dark it is getting! And we
must have exceeded our five minutes long ago.”
“I wish you had finished that sentence,” he remarked quietly, getting
up from the grass as I rose. “However, thank you for the beginning,
Kitty. Yes; we’d better get back as quick as we can. I did not notice
how it was clouding over. What a blessing rain would be!--but not to
you in that thin frock. If it comes on, you must have my coat.”
We never, during all our intercourse, said so little to one another in
a given time as during our walk home that night. I _could_ not think of
anything to talk about, and I suppose he would not; and yet the silence
seemed to shout to us. It was so dark now, with heavy rain-clouds
gathering up, that I was glad to take his offered hand, and be guided
through the paddocks and fences that I knew so well. In old days we
used to scramble over these latter together, and tear our clothes in
company; but now he opened the gates and took down the slip panel, as
if he had been escorting mother. When we approached the high hedges of
the garden, he made a little pause; and our dogs came and sniffed at
us, full of curiosity to know what was going to happen next.
“Kitty,” said he, “shall I come in and speak to them? Or would you
rather say good night here?”
“Couldn’t you stay all night, Tom? It is going to be wet, and you have
so far to walk.”
“Oh no, Kitty, certainly not; my people don’t know where I am. And a
drop of rain would do one good this weather.”
“Then, perhaps--they are very much occupied to-night--perhaps we had
better say good night now; and I shall go in the back way. Good night,
Tom.”
My hand had lain all this time in the warm clasp of his; now I drew
it away, without daring to wait for any more farewells. I ran in by
the back door without looking behind me, and along the passages to
the drawing-room. Here, or rather on the verandah outside, mother and
father were talking still; and I went to bid them good night too, for I
did not want to sit up any longer.
“It’s going to rain at last, daddy,” said I, by way of saying something.
“Yes, Kitty, thank God; it won’t hold off above five minutes longer. We
shall get the tanks filled to-night, and you’ll see the grass beginning
to grow before to-morrow night.”
And while I was undressing it came down in sheets--a way it has in this
part of the world when it means to rain at all--beating straight into
the verandah, through the veil of vine leaves, so that even poor Spring
was driven from his door-mat, and I had to let him in and give him the
hearthrug instead.
Oh, my dear love, how wet you must have got that night!