CHAPTER 1

Produced by Col Choat. HTML version by Al Haines.

LADY BRIDGET IN THE NEVER-NEVER LAND.

by

Rosa Praed (1851-1935)

(1915)

CONTENTS

BOOK I FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF MRS GILDEA

BOOK II FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF LADY BRIDGET O'HARA

BOOK III FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF COLIN MCKEITH AND OTHERS

BOOK I

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF MRS GILDEA

CHAPTER 1

Mrs Gildea had settled early to her morning's work in what she called

the veranda-study of her cottage in Leichardt's Town. It was a

primitive cottage of the old style, standing in a garden and built on

the cliff--the Emu Point side--overlooking the broad Leichardt River.

The veranda, quite twelve feet wide, ran--Australian fashion--along the

front of the cottage, except for the two closed-in ends forming, one a

bathroom and the other a kind of store closet. Being raised a few feet

above the ground, the veranda was enclosed by a wooden railing, and

this and the supporting posts were twined with creepers that must have

been planted at least thirty years. One of these, a stephanotis, showed

masses of white bloom, which Joan Gildea casually reflected would have

fetched a pretty sum in Covent Garden, and, joining in with a

fine-growing asparagus fern, formed an arch over the entrance steps.

The end of the veranda, where Mrs Gildea had established herself with

her type-writer and paraphernalia of literary work, was screened by a

thick-stemmed grape-vine, which made a dapple of shadow and sunshine

upon the boarded floor. Some bunches of late grapes--it was the very

beginning of March--hung upon the vine, and, at the other end of the

veranda, grew a passion creeper, its great purple fruit looking like

huge plums amidst its vivid green leaves.

The roof of the veranda was low, with projecting eaves, below which a

bunch of yellowing bananas hung to ripen. In fact, the veranda and

garden beyond would have been paradise to a fruitarian. Against the

wall of the store-room, stood a large tin dish piled with melons,

pine-apples and miscellaneous garden produce, while, between the

veranda posts, could be seen a guava-tree, an elderly fig and a loquat

all in full bearing. The garden seemed a tangle of all manner of

vegetation--an oleander in bloom, a poinsettia, a yucca, lifting its

spike of waxen white blossoms, a narrow flower-border in which the

gardenias had become tall shrubs and the scented verbena shrubs almost

trees. As for the blend of perfume, it was dreamily intoxicating. Two

bamboos, guarding the side entrance gate, made a soft whispering that

heightened the dream-sense. The bottom of the garden looked an inchoate

mass of greenery topped by the upper boughs of tall straggling gum

trees, growing outside where the ground fell gradually to the river.

From where Mrs Gildea sat, she had a view of almost the whole reach of

the river where it circles Emu Point. For, as is known to all who know

Leichardt's Town, the river winds in two great loops girdling two low

points, so that, in striking a bee-line across the whole town, business

and residential, one must cross the river three times. Mrs Gildea could

see the plan of the main street in the Middle Point and the roofs of

shops and offices. The busy wharves of the Leichardt's Land Steam

Navigation Company--familiarly, the L.L.S.N. Co.--lay opposite on her

right, while leftward, across the water, she could trace, as far as the

grape-vine would allow, the boundary of the Botanical Gardens and get a

sight of the white stone and grey slate end of the big Parliamentary

Buildings.

The heat-haze over the town and the brilliant sun-sparkles on the river

suggested a cruel glare outside the shady veranda and over-grown old

garden.

A pleasant study, if a bit distracting from its plenitude of

associations to Australian-born Joan Gildea, who, on her marriage, had

been transplanted into English soil, as care-free as a rose cut from

the parent stem, and who now, after nearly twenty years, had returned

to the scene of her youth--a widow, a working journalist and shorn of

most of her early illusions.

Her typewriter stood on a bamboo table before her. A pile of Australian

Hansards for reference sat on a chair at convenient distance. A large

table with a green cloth, at her elbow, had at one end a tray with the

remains of her breakfast of tea, scones and fruit. The end nearest her

was littered with sheaves of manuscript, newspaper-cuttings,

photographs and sepia sketches--obviously for purposes of illustration:

gum-bottle, stylographs and the rest, with, also, several note-books

held open by bananas, recently plucked from the ripening bunch, to

serve as paper-weights.

She had meant to be very busy that morning. There was her weekly letter

for THE IMPERIALIST to send off by to-morrow's mail, and, moreover, she

had to digest the reasons of the eminent journal for returning to her

an article that had not met with the editor's approval--the great

Gibbs: a potent newspaper-factor in the British policy of the day.

It had been an immense honour when Mr Gibbs had chosen Joan Gildea from

amongst his staff for a roving commission to report upon the political,

financial, economic and social aspects of Australia, and upon Imperial

interests generally, as represented in various sideshows on her route.

But it happened that she was now suffering from a change at the last

moment in that route--a substitution of the commplace P. & O. for the

more exciting Canadian Pacific, Mr Gibbs having suddenly decided that

Imperialism in Australia demanded his special correspondent's immediate

attention.

For this story dates back to the time when Mr Joseph Chamberlain was in

office; when Imperialism, Free Trade and Yellow Labour were the catch

words of a party, and before the great Australian Commonwealth had

become an historical fact.

THE IMPERIALIST's Special Correspondent looked worried. She was

wondering whether the English mail expected to-day would bring her

troublesome editorial instructions. She examined some of the

photographs and drawings with a dissatisfied air. A running

inarticulate commentary might have been put into words like this:

'No good ... I can manage the letterpress all right once I get the hang

of things. But when it comes to illustrations, I can't make even a

gum-tree look as if it was growing .... And Gibbs hates having amateur

snapshots to work up .... Hopeless to try for a local artist.... I

wonder if Colin McKeith could give me an idea..... Why to goodness

didn't Biddy join me! .... If she'd only had the decency to let me know

in time WHY she couldn't.... Money, I suppose--or a Man! .... Well,

I'll write and tell her never to expect a literary leg-up from me

again...'

Mrs Gildea pulled the sheet she had been typing out of the machine,

inserted another, altered the notch to single spacing and rattled off

at top speed till the page was covered. The she appended her signature

and wrote this address:

To the Lady Bridget O'Hara,

Care of Eliza Countess of Gaverick,

Upper Brook Street, London, W.

on an envelope, into which she slipped her letter--a letter never to be

sent.

A snap of the gate between the bamboos added a metallic note to the

tree's reedy whimperings, and the postman tramped along the short

garden path and up the veranda steps.

'Morning, Mrs Gildea ... a heavy mail for you!'

He planked down the usual editorial packet--two or three rolls of

proofs, a collection of newspapers, a bulky parcel of private

correspondence sent on by the porter of Mrs Gildea's London flat, some

local letters and, finally, two square envelopes, with the remark, as

he turned away on his round. 'My word! Mrs Gildea, those letters seem

to have done a bit of globe-trotting on their own, don't they!'

For the envelopes were covered with directions, some in Japanese and

Chinese hieroglyphics, some in official red ink from various

postoffices, a few with the distinctive markings of British Legations

and Government Houses where the Special Correspondent should have

stayed, but did not--Only her own name showing through the

obliterations, and a final re-addressing by the Bank of Leichardt's

Land.

Mrs Gildea recognised the impulsive, untidy but characteristic

handwriting of Lady Bridget O'Hara.

'From Biddy at last!' she exclaimed, tore the flap of number one

letter, paused and laid it aside. 'Business first.'

So she went carefully through the editorial communication. Mr Gibbs was

not quite so tiresome as she had feared he would be. After him, the

packet from her London flat was inspected and its contents laid aside

for future perusal. Next, she tackled the local letters. One was

embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a

cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at

Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her--first along the route

originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and

much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at

all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely paragraphed

newspaper correspondent.

The telegram was phrased thus:

SORRY IMPOSSIBLE NO FUNDS OTHER REASONS WRITING BIDDY

Mrs Gildea's illuminative 'H'm!' implied that her two inductions had

been correct. No funds--and other reasons--meaning--a MAN. She scented

instantly another of Biddy's tempestuous love-affairs. Had it been

merely a question of lack of money with inclination goading, she felt

pretty certain that Lady Bridget would have contrived to beg, borrow or

steal--on a hazardous promissory note, after the happy-go-lucky

financial morals of that section of society to which by birth she

belonged. Or, failing these means, that she would have threatened some

mad enterprise and so have frightened her aunt Eliza Countess of

Gaverick into writing a cheque for three figures. Of course, less would

have been of no account.

Mrs Gildea opened the two envelopes and sorted the pages in order of

their dates. The first had the address of a house in South Belgravia,

where lived Sir Luke Tallant of the Colonial Office and Rosamond his

wife--distant connections of the Gavericks.

Lady Bridget's letters were type-written, most carelessly, with the

mistakes corrected down the margin of the flimsy sheets in the manner

of author's proof--the whole appearance of them suggesting literary

'copy'.

Likewise, the slapdash epistolary style of the MS., which had a certain

vividness of its own.

CHAPTER 2

'Dearest Joan,

You'll have got my wire. Vancouver was right, I suppose. I sent it from

Rome. Since then I have been at Montreux with Chris and Molly, and

since I came back to England with them, I've been in too chaotic a

state of mind to write letters. Really, Chris and Molly's atmosphere of

struggling to keep in the swim on next to nothing a year and of eking

out a precarious income by visits to second-rate country houses and

cadging on their London friends gets on my nerves to such an extent

that Luke and Rosamond's established "Colonial Office" sort of

respectability is quite refreshing by contrast.

I should have loved the Australian trip. Your "Bush" sounds perfectly

captivating, and, of course, I could do the illustrations you want.

Besides, I'm stony-broke and, financially, the great god Gibbs appeals

to me. I'd take my passage straight off--one would raise the money

somehow--if it wasn't for--There! It's out. A MAN has come and upset

the apple-cart.'

Mrs Gildea gave a funny little laugh. The letter answered her thought.

'"Oh, of course!" I can hear you sneer. "Just another of Biddy's

emotional interests--bound to fizzle out before very long." But this is

a good deal more than an emotional interest, and I don't think it will

fizzle out so quickly. For one thing, THIS man is quite different from

all the other men I've ever been interested in. The first moment I saw

him, I had the queerest sort of ARRESTED sensation. He's told me since,

that he felt exactly the same about me. Kind of lived before--"WHEN I

WAS A KING IN BABYLON AND YOU WERE A CHRISTIAN SLAVE" idea. Though I'm

quite certain that if I ever was a slave it must have been a Pagan and

not a Christian one. Joan, the experience was thrilling, positively

electrifying--Glamour--personal magnetism.... You couldn't possibly

understand unless you knew HIM. Descriptions are so hopeless. I'll

leave him to your imagination.

By the way, Molly annoyed me horribly the other day. "You know, dear,"

she had the audacity to remark, "he's not of OUR class, and if you

married him, you'd have to give up US! For could you suppose," she went

on to say, "that Chris and Mama--to say nothing of Aunt Eliza--would

tolerate an adventurer who tells tall stories about buried treasure and

native rebellions and expects one to be amused!"

OUR CLASS! Oh, how I detest the label! And that unspeakably dreadful

idea of social sheep and goats--and the unfathomable abyss between

Suburbia and Belgravia! Though I frankly own that to me Suburbia

represents the Absolutely Impossible. After all, one must go right into

the Wilderness to escape the conditions of that state of life to which

you happen to have been born.

Well, that speech of Molly's came out of a fascinating account my

Soldier of Fortune gave us of how he stage-managed a revolution in

South America, and of an expedition he'd made in the Andes on the

strength of a local tradition about the Incas' hidden gold. I call him

my Soldier of Fortune--though he's not in any known Army list, because

it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed.

He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks

the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a

disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely

agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he

was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an

Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a

colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up all the information he can

about such posts.

I answered Molly that one may have a violent attraction to a man

without in the least wanting to marry him, and that relieved her mind a

little.

As for HIM, the attraction on his part seems equally violent. We do the

most shockingly unconventional things together. He tells me that I

carry him off his feet--that I've revolutionised his ideas about the

"nice English Girl" (useless to protest that I'm not an English girl

but a hybrid Celt). He says that I've wiped off his slate the scheme of

life he'd been planning for his latter years. A comfortable existence

in England--his doctor advises him to settle down in a temperate

climate--an appointment on some City Board--rubber shares and that kind

of thing--you know it all--a red brick house in South Kensington and

perhaps a little place in the country. He did not fill in the

picture--but I did for him--with the charmingly domesticated wife--well

connected: the typical "nice English Girl," heiress of a comfortable

fortune to supplement his own, which he candidly admitted needs

supplementing.

Of course he's not a mere vulgar fortune-hunter. He must be genuinely

in love with the nice English Girl. And that's where I upset HIS

apple-cart.

In fact, we are both in an IMPASSE. I'm not eligible for his post and I

shouldn't want it if I were. To my mind marriage is only conceivable

with a barbarian or a millionaire. From the sordid atmosphere of

English conjugality upon an income of anything less than an assured

5,000 pounds a year, good Lord deliver me! And you know my reasons for

adding another clause to my litany. Good Lord deliver me also from

further experience of the exciting vicissitudes of a stock-jobbing

career!

Then again, apart from personal prejudices, I am appalled, quite

simply, at the cold-blooded marriage traffic that I see going on in

London. Any crime committed in the name of Love is forgivable, but to

sell a girl--soul and body to the highest bidder is to my mind, the

unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. Frankly, I'm petrified with

amazement at the way in which mothers hurl their daughters at the head

of any man who will make a good settlement. There's Molly's sister--she

chases the game till she has corralled it, and once inside her walls

the unfortunate prey hasn't swallowed his first cup of tea before she

has wedded him in imagination to one of her girls--"How do you like Mr

CHOSE?" "Like him? What is there to like? He's the same as all the rest

of the men, and they're as like as a box of ninepins..."

"But what do you think of him...?" "But really there's nothing to

think" ... "But don't you think he'd do for Hester?" etcetera, etcetera.

She has just married the one before Hester to what she calls the

perfect type of an English country gentleman--meaning that he owns an

historical castle in Scotland, a coal mine in Wales and a mansion in

Park Lane. Heavens! I'd rather follow the fortunes of a Nihilist and be

sent to Siberia, or drive wild cattle and fight wild blacks with one of

your Bush cowboys, than I'd marry the perfect type of an English

country gentleman! Give me something REAL--anything but the

semi-detached indifference of most of the couples one knows. No. MY man

must be strong enough to carry ME off my feet and to break down all the

conventions of "OUR CLASS." Then, I'd cheerfully tramp through the

forest beside him, if it came to that, or cook his dinner in front of

our wigwam. Now, if my Soldier of Fortune were to ask me to climb the

Andes with him in search of that buried treasure! But he won't: and--I

confess it, Joan--I'm in mortal terror of his insisting upon my

entering the sphere of stock-jobbing respectability instead, and of my

being weak enough to consent. But we haven't got anywhere near that yet.

So far, I'm just--living--trying to make up my mind what it is that I

want most. Do you know, that since my violent attraction to him--or

whatever you like to call it--all sorts of odd bits of revelation have

come to me as to the things that really matter!

For one thing, I'm pretty certain that the ultimate end of Being is

Beauty and that Love means Beauty and Beauty means Love. The immediate

result of this discovery is that I'm buying clothes with a reckless

disregard of the state of my banking account.

I begin to understand and to sympathise with that pathetic striving

after beauty which one sees in the tawdry finery and exaggerated

hairdressing of a kitchenmaid--Rosamond Tallant has one who is

wonderful to behold as she mounts the area steps on her Sundays out.

Formerly I should have been horrified at that kitchenmaid. Now I have

quite a fellow-feeling with her piteous attempts to make herself

attractive to her young man, the grocer's boy or the under-footman I

suppose. Am I not at this very moment sitting with complexion cream

daubed on my face, in order that I may appear more attractive to MY

young man. I know now how Molly's maid--who is keeping company with

Luke's butler--feels when we all dine early for a theatre and Josephine

gets an evening out at the Earl's Court Exhibition with her gentleman.

Sounds beastly vulgar, doesn't it? But that's just what I'm making

myself pretty for--dinner there this evening at the French Restaurant

with MY gentleman. It's quite proper: we are a party of four--the other

two I may add are not in Rosamond's or Molly's set.

I've been interrupted--He has telephoned. The other pair have

disappointed us. Will I defy conventions and dine with HIM alone?

Of course I will.'

CHAPTER 3

The particular sheet ended at this point. Mrs Gildea laid it down upon

the earlier ones and took another from the little pile which she had

spread in sequence for perusal. She smiled to herself in mournful

amusement. For she scarcely questioned the probability that her friend

would in due course become disillusioned of a very ordinary

individual--he certainly sounded a little like an adventurer--who for

some occult reason had been idealised by this great-souled, wayward and

utterly foolish creature. How many shattered idols had not Lady Bridget

picked up from beneath their over-turned pedestals and consigned to

Memory's dust-bin! On how many pyres had not that oft-widowed soul

committed suttee to be resurrected at the next freak of Destiny! And

yet with it all, there was something strangely elusive, curiously

virginal about Lady Bridget.

She had been in love so often: nevertheless, she had never loved. Joan

Gildea perfectly realised the distinction. Biddy had been as much, and

more in love with ideas as with persons. Art, Literature, Higher

Thought, Nature, Philanthrophy, Mysticism--she spelled everything with

a capital letter--Platonic Passion--the last most dangerous and most

recurrent. As soon as one Emotional Interest burned out another rose

from the ashes. And, while they lasted, she never counted the cost of

these emotional interests.

But then she was an O'Hara: and all the O'Haras that had been were

recklessly extravagant, squandering alike their feelings and their

money. There wasn't a member of the house of Gaverick decently well to

do, excepting indeed Eliza, Countess of Gaverick. She had been a

Glasgow heiress and only belonged to the aristocracy by right of

marriage with Bridget's uncle, the late Lord Gaverick, who on the death

of his brother, about the time Bridget was grown up, had succeeded to

the earldom, but not to the estate.

Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the

unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of

O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his

debts. His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional

spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was

able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his

wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the

family. His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her

husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole. Thus

the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and

poor, stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends

and upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death

leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.

As for Bridget's father, the last but one Earl of Gaverick, his career

may be summed up as a series of dramatic episodes, matrimonial, social

and financial.

His first wife had divorced him. His second wife--the mother of Lady

Bridget--had deserted him for an operatic tenor and had died shortly

afterwards. She herself had been an Italian singer.

Lord Gaverick did not marry again, and Mrs Gildea had gathered that the

less said about his social adventures the better. Financially, he had

subsisted precariously as a company promoter. There had come a final

smash: and one morning the Earl of Gaverick had been found dead in his

bed, an empty medicine bottle by his side. As he had been in the habit

of taking chloral the Coroner's jury agreed upon the theory of an

overdose.

Yes, Mrs Gildea could quite understand that apart from general views on

the marriage question, Lady Bridget O'Hara might well shrink from

further connection with City finance.

CHAPTER 4

A naughty little gust--herald of the sub-tropical afternoon breeze that

comes up the Leichardt River from the sea, blew about the typed sheets

on the table, and, among them, those of Lady Bridget's letter, as Mrs

Gildea laid them down.

While she collected the various pages of manuscript that had been

displaced and was bundling them together, with a banana on each sheaf

to keep it safe, there came a second snap of the gate and a man's voice

hailed her.

It was the voice of a man who sang baritone, and his accent was an odd

combination of the Bush drawl grafted on to the mellifluous Gaelic,

from which race he had originated.

'Any admittance, Mrs Gildea, except on business, during working hours?'

'Yes, it is working hours Colin, but you happen to be business because

you're just the person I'm wanting to speak to, so come along.'

'Good for me, Joan,' and the man came along, clearing the rest of the

garden path and the veranda steps in three strides.

He gripped Mrs Gildea's hand.

'You're nice and cool up here, and you get every bit of wind that's

going along the river,' he said. 'It's a good thing you kept this

humpey, Joan--a little nest for the bird to fly home to, eh?'

'Yes, I'm glad, though it seemed a silly piece of sentiment ... and, as

you say, I always FELT the old bird might want to fly home for a bit

some day. Well, YOU look cool enough, Colin.'

'This is temperate zone for me after the Leura.... But it's a hot March

because we haven't had a proper rainy season, and I'll just stand here

and catch the breeze for a minute or two before I sit down.'

He balanced himself on the veranda railing: took off his broad-brimmed

Panama hat and mopped his forehead with a silk handkerchief. Mrs Gildea

surveyed him with interested admiration.

A big man--large-limbed, bony--a typical Scotcher in that--with thin

flanks, a well-set up back and massive shoulders. His face was

browny-red all over except where the skin ran white under the hair and

there was a ruddier ring round the upper part of the throat. His nose

was thin between the eyes, broadening lower, high-bridged and with high

cut nostrils, showing the sensitive red when he was enraged--as not

infrequently happened. He had large honest blue eyes, intensely blue,

of the fiery description with a trick of dropping the lids when he was

in doubt or consideration. They were expressive eyes, as a rule keen

and hard, but they could soften unexpectedly under the influence of

emotion. At other times, according to the quality of the emotion, they

glowed literally like blue flames. He was considered queer-tempered,

rather sulky, and his face often took on a very unyielding expression.

He had thick reddish-yellow eyebrows at the base of a slightly receding

forehead--wanting in benevolence, phrenologists would have said, and

with the bump of self-esteem considerably developed. His hair was

yellow, pure and simple--the color of spun silk, only coarser, and it

would have curled at the ends had he not worn it close-cropped. His

moustache and beard were rather deeper yellow, the beard short,

well-shaped--the cut of Colin McKeith's beard was almost his only

vanity--there was one other, the 'millionare strut' in town--and he had

the masculine habit of stroking and clasping his beard with his large

open-fingered hand--spatulate tips to his digits, the practical

hand--fairly well kept, though brown and hairy.

There were lines in his face and a way of setting his features--that a

man gets when he has to front straight some cruel facts of human

existance--to calculate at a glance the chances of death from a black's

spear, a lost trail, an empty water-bag, the horns of a charging

bullock or even worse things than these.

And such experiences had put a stamp on him, and distinguished him from

the ordinary ruck of men--these and his undeniable manliness, and good

looks.

He smiled as he glanced amusedly from the littered wind-blown papers on

the table to his hostess' rather troubled face.

'Well you seem to have a pretty fair show here of what you call

"copy,"' he said.

Mrs Gildea met his look with one of frank pleasure.

'That's what I want YOU for.'

'What's the job?' he asked. 'You ought to know that literary "copy" is

not much in my line. Now if it had been yarding the fowls or cleaning

up the garden, I'd feel more at home as a lady's help.'

'Colin, you take me back to Bungroopim--when it happened to be a slack

day for you on the run, and when the married couple had levanted and

I'd got an incompetent black-gin in the kitchen--or when the store

wanted tidying and you and I had a good old spree amongst the rubbish.'

He laughed at a time-honoured joke.

'Stick sugar-mats and weevilly four-bins; and a breeding paddock of

tarantulas and centipedes and white lizards to clear out. I WAS a bush

hobbledehoy in those days, Joan. It's close on twenty years ago.'

Joan Gildea gave a little shudder.

'Don't remind me how old I am. There's the difference between a man and

a woman. My life's behind me: yours in front of you.'

'I don't know about that, Joan. I've had my spell of roughing

it--droving, mining, pioneering--humping bluey along the

track--stoney-broke: sold up by the bank and only just beginning now to

find out what Australia's worth.'

'That's what I said--you are just beginning. Roughing it has made a

splendid man of you, Colin: and who would ever believe that you are

four years older than I am. Colin, you ought to get married.'

'The Upper Leura is no place for the sort of wife I want,' he returned

shortly.

'I don't see that. It isn't as if you were going to stop there always.

When you're rich enough you can put on a manager. You've got an

enormous piece of pretty good country, haven't you?'

'One thousand square miles--and a lot more to be got for the

taking--mostly fair cattle pasture--now that we're going in for

Artesian bores. But it means capital, sinking wells three thousand feet

and more. It'll be three or four years at least before I can see a trip

to Europe--doing the thing in the way I mean to do it.'

'Must you go to Europe for a wife? Aren't Australian girls good enough?'

'I've always meant to try for the best. You taught me that, Joan, I

shall follow your example. You were an Australian girl.'

Mrs Gildea's face saddened. 'Well,' was all she said.

'You see,' he went on, and the eyes took their narrow concentrated look

and suddenly blazed out as he straightened himself against the veranda

post, 'I know something of what marriage in the back block means: and

I've studied women--don't laugh--I mean theoretically--from books. I've

read history--always managed a couple of volumes or so in my

swag--nights and nights, by the light of a fat lamp and a camp fire.

I've studied the women of great times--ancient and modern--they're

always the same--and I've remarked the type of woman that's got

grit--capacity for fine things--You understand all that as well as I

do, Joan. Look at the women of the French Revolution for one

instance--the aristocrats, you know--well, I've realised that it takes

blood and breeding and tradition behind to carry a woman to the block

with a sure step and a proud smile ...' Suddenly, he became aware of

Joan's gaze, half surprised, wholly interested.... He reddened and

pulled himself up gruffly.

'Sentimental rot, d'ye call it?'

'No, Colin, I believe in all that and so do you.'

'Blood and breeding and tradition--all the grand stuff that's been

grown in them on the NOBLESSE OBLIGE principle--self-respect, courage,

dignity--the stuff that gives staying power as well as the fire for

making good spunk.... Not that I'd put a pure-blood racer to haul up

logs for an iron-bark fence: any more than I'd set out to plant an

English lady of that sort to rough it on the Leura.'

'Well, why not? Do you want your wife to be like a canary in a cage?'

'You know I don't hold with gilded cages and spoiling a woman who is

there to be your mate. But all the same, I shan't look out for MY wife

until I can afford to give her as good a show as she'd be likely to

have if the stopped at home. You see, a real woman must be a sportsman

in her way of taking life as much as a man, and I maintain as a general

proposition that it's the English lady--even one of your sneered-at

"Lady Clara Vere de Vere" lot who makes the best front against battle,

murder, and sudden death--if it has to come to that.... Just because,'

he went on, 'though she might have been brought up in a castle and

never have done a hand's turn that could be done for her, she's still

got in her veins the blood of fighting ancestors--men who were ready to

lay down their lives for God and King and country and their women's

honour--and of women too who'd maybe held the stronghold that had been

their husband's reward, and kept the flag flying, when to fail or

flinch meant death or worse.... Why, look at your Lady Nithisdales and

your Lady Russells and your Maria Theresas....'

'And your Joan of Arc--who was a peasant girl--and your Charlotte

Corday....'

'Oh, you beat me there.... And I wasn't intending to fire off a speech

anyway.... And anyway, Joan, its awful cheek to think I could ever get

the sort of wife I want, but if I can't, I won't have one at all....

I'll have my money's worth. Romance--Ideals--something more LIFTING

than beef and mutton and cutting a bigger dash than your neighbour....

See?'

He broke off with a laugh, and the wonderfully vivid light that came

into his blue eyes made him look like an ardent youth.

'And you a democrat!' jeered Mrs Gildea. 'You, a champion of the

people's rights; you, an Imperialist in the broadest sense of the term!

Oh, I really must put you into one of my articles as a certain type of

modern Australian. In fact, Colin, that's what I wanted to talk to you

about.'

'All right, fire away. We'll drop the marriage question.'

'To be resumed later.' A quizzical look passed over Mrs Gildea's mouth,

and then, 'Oh, what a pity!' she muttered to herself.

'What's a pity?'

'Never mind! The English mail's in--as you may see. I'll show you what

Mr Gibbs says. He didn't like my last letter. He says he wants bones

and sinews, not an artist's lay figure dressed in stage bushman's

clothes. There, Mr McKeith, among your other cogitations on the subject

of women, you may try to realise that the mission of a lady special

correspondent is not all'--she looked round for a metaphor--'Muscat

grapes and pineapple.'

'Or cooked-up information from heads of departments; or got-up shows of

agricultural, mining and other industries. Or trips to the Bay to see

the model island prison in which our weary criminals rehabilitate their

enfeebled systems by cool sea-breezes and generous diet. Or ministerial

picnics to experimental cotton and sugar plantations the size of your

garden to prove that all tropical products can be raised to perfection

without mentioning the difficulty in a White Australia of finding the

labour to do it.'

'Oh, don't rub it in, Colin. I'm only a special reporter, and even

special reporters can't know everything. Now, do just sit down and let

me ask you questions. And first of all, do you want a whiskey peg or a

cup of tea, or what?--I've had my late breakfast.'

'I'll have a smoke, please. Been swearing off store baccy now I'm down

from the Bush. I'm trying hard to smoke cigarettes like one of your

English toffs.'

He pulled out a copper cigarette case with some hieroglyphical letters

and numbers stamped on it, which he regarded with a humorous smile.

'Only cost a shilling, but now I've my brand across, it looks fine. You

know that by the Brands Act you've got to have a number and two letters

on every head of stock--My brand's the Mark of the Beast 666 C.K. See?'

He fixed his cigarette into a new amber mouthpiece, made a wry face,

and began to smoke.

'I don't think much of your quality of cigarettes,' said Mrs Gildea.

'On the whole, I prefer your tobacco.'

'All right. Give me my pipe any day--' And he pitched away the

cigarette and produced an ancient pipe, which he filled with tobacco

from an india-rubber pouch and lighted. 'Now, fire away.'

'Not for a little bit yet. You must read my rejected article and my

official instructions, and then you'll have some grasp of the subjects

I want information upon. Here they are--Mr Gibbs first.'

She handed him her editor's letters and pushed a small pile of

manuscript towards his elbow.

'There. It will take you about a quarter of an hour to digest all that;

and meanwhile, if you don't mind the noise, I shall go on typing

something I've got to send off by to-morrow's mail.'

She settled herself at the typewriter, her back partially turned to

him. The subject matter of what she was doing took all her attention.

She worked hard for about ten minutes, hearing sub-consciously the

rustle of papers under his hand and one or two faint ejaculations and a

queer little laugh he gave once or twice as he read.

Presently he said:

'I say, there's a mistake here. I've gone through your editor's

letters. He's sound; I think I can help you to get at what he wants.

But these other sheets have got mixed up with something else. I thought

at first it was a story you'd given me, and I went on reading and got

interested; and now I see it must have been written by some young woman

friend of yours'--if it's meant for a letter.'

Mrs Gildea turned with a dismayed exclamation.

'Good gracious! You don't mean to say that I've given you her letter?'

'Is it really a letter? Do women type letters? It reads to me much more

like what the heroine of a novel would be supposed to say than an

ordinary everyday girl. If that's a flesh and blood woman I'd like to

know her.'

Mrs Gildea took from him the three typed pages he had in his hand. They

were certainly part of Lady Bridget's letter--almost the whole of it,

for only the end and the beginning ones were missing. In her hurried

rearrangement of the wind-scattered sheets she had put these into the

wrong bundle. She ran her eye anxiously over the badly-typed slips,

which, with their marginal corrections and smart, allusive jargon of a

world entirely removed from Colin McKeith's experience, might easily

have misled him into the belief that he was reading literary 'copy.' Of

course he knew that Joan Gildea wrote novels as well as journalistic

stuff.

He read her thoughts.

'You needn't worry. There isn't the least clue to her identity--I

suppose that's what you're afraid of. Not a surname anywhere--I

couldn't have imagined a woman would write like that--give herself

away--as she does. But it's fine all the same. There'd be nothing small

about that woman, Joan. Do you know how it ended?'

'I don't know yet. But I can guess.'

'Eh?' He blew out rings of smoke with less than his usual deliberation.

'D'ye think she'll marry the chap?'

'No--she never does.'

'She's a flirt, then?'

'Bid--' Mrs Gildrea swallowed the rest. 'SHE would scorn such a

commonplace suggestion. Do you remember that novel of Hardy's, THE

WELL-BELOVED? She's like the man there, who was always in love with the

same Ideal--under different forms--until he found that he'd made a

mistake, and then the game began all over again.'

McKeith ruminated. 'SHE'S like that, is she? ... The fellow is what

you'd call a bounder?' he exclaimed suddenly.

'So I imagine.'

'But she's in love with him--she must be, or she wouldn't write like

that?'

'You don't know her. She can't do anything by halves--while she's doing

it.'

'By Jove, that's what I like. There's a woman who'd never hang on the

fence. And her ideas about love and all that: it's splendid.'

He brooded again a few moments, while Mrs Gildea sorted her papers

afresh; then he exclaimed:

'It strikes me, she's one of the sort I was talking about just now.'

'Well, she WAS born in a castle.'

'I guessed it.... You won't tell me her name?'

'How could I--I ask you? After you'd read that!'

'No. All right. You can trust me not to find out.'

'Besides, she would never do for you.'

He laughed quizzically. 'Well, I'm a barbarian, and it's possible I may

some day be a millionaire. But I'm not such a conceited cad as to

imagine a woman like that would ever fall in love with ME!' His voice

sank almost to a reverential tone. 'The only thing I do know is that if

I got the chance, I'd show her I was strong enough to carry her off to

my wigwam and she could do what she pleased afterwards. I'd be her

slave so long as she cared for me--and I'd never live with a woman who

didn't.'

'My dear Colin, you're not likely to get the chance. Please forget that

you ever read that letter.'

'No, I can't do that; but as she's in London and we're over here, it's

not much odds anyway. Well, have you found the right sheets? Give them

to me if you have and then we can come to business.'

CHAPTER 5

Colin McKeith had been gone some time and Mrs Gildea, primed with fresh

ideas, had finished her article on the lines he suggested, before she

again tackled Lady Bridget's love-affair.

The second letter (there is no need to reproduce the page of daring

sentiment that closed the first) was dated from Castle Gaverick in

South Connemara, and plunged straight into the tragic culmination.

'It's all over, Joan--was over soon after my last letter, but I've been

too wretched ever since to write. If you had been in England you might

have read in one of last week's "MORNING POST'S" that a marriage has

been arranged and will shortly take place between Mr Willoughby Maule,

formerly confidential adviser to His Highness the Rajah of

Kasalpore--and Evelyn Mary, only daughter of the late John Bagallay,

Esq, and the late Mrs Bagally of Bagallay Court, Birmingham.

Rosamond tells me that Luke told her that Evelyn Mary has been throwing

herself at Will's head ever since they met last year on a P. & O.

steamer between Singapore and Colombo. She and her chaperon went on a

tour round the world, it seems, just before Evelyn Mary came of age. I

wonder they did not get engaged then, and can only conclude--as there

was no ME then to upset the apple-cart--that he did not know how rich

she was going to be. Anyway, I feel certain that it was Evelyn Mary who

was at the back of his plan for settling down as a respectable

stock-jobber. Molly Gaverick--who is a cat--said she knew for certain

Willoughby Maule came to England with the fixed intention of marrying

for birth and position or for money, and that he fancied, in me, he'd

found both--she says that he took his impressions of us from the

paragraphs in the Society papers and thought us much richer an bigger

than we are, and that now he knows better he thinks it safer to drop

birth and make sure of money.

The Bagallays made theirs in nails. Last year Evelyn Mary came into a

fortune of a quarter of a million. I'm told that it's absolutely at her

own disposal. She was an only child. A quarter of a million would be an

immense temptation to a poor and ambitious man.

And yet, Joan, I CAN'T believe that Will has been actuated by wholly

sordid motives. He may be an adventurer, but he is not a mean one.

Rosamond Tallant thinks it much more likely that because I didn't

introduce him to Aunt Eliza, and Chris and Molly never asked him to

dinner, he got the idea that I considered him good enough to amuse

myself with, but not good enough for serious consideration as a

husband. And it's quite true that I always shirked that point when it

was touched upon. If I must be perfectly honest with myself, I think I

was afraid of his putting me at the cannon's mouth and telling me I

must decide then and there to take him or leave him. Should I ever have

had the strength to give him up? He's so frightfully dear to me, that I

can't think of him now without a shudder at the thought of his

belonging to another woman. I never really believed it would come to

that. He once or twice hinted that there WAS a girl--the "nice English

girl" that I had chaffed him about. I had an idea that it was his way

of putting pressure on me.

The first time was the evening that I dined alone with him at the

Exhibition. Heavens! I grow hot this moment thinking that he may have

supposed I was in the HABIT of dining alone with men in French

restaurants at popular Exhibitions. I don't know why I did for this man

what I'd never done for any other, Partly, I fancy, because it never

dawned upon me that he could misunderstand me. Rosamond says I

idealised him too much, and that he's just the ordinary man and not the

tiniest bit of the Bayard I imagined him. I daresay she's right, and

that he may have laughed in his sleeve at my romantic rhapsodies.

All the same, I never can convince myself that he is a mere

fortune-hunter. Perhaps the very fact that I didn't make the smallest

effort to wrest him from Mademoiselle Croesus when he tried to make me

jealous seemed proof to him that he was no more to me than a caprice.

So, when we made each other an atrocious scene and I told him to go off

to her, he simply took me at my word.

The scene began with my telling him about my sort of engagement to

Aubrey Blaine--whom as you know, I was really nearer to marrying than I

have been to marrying anybody. And yet, as I tried to explain to Will,

I didn't WANT to marry Aubrey. Only the mischief with me is always that

I can't hold back with one hand and give with the other... Will wasn't

able to enter into my feelings about that affair in the very least or

to understand how, when it came to the point, I realised that I

COULDN'T sink to domesticity on seven hundred a year. Fancy taking a

house in Pimlico or West Kensington, or one of those horrible places

with a man to whom you have a violent attraction and consulting with

your adored as to whether you could run to three maids and a Tweeny!

The sordidness of it would be too disenchanting.

When I said something like that to Will, he flared up and we hurled

nasty speeches at each other, and finally he walked off slamming the

door--I used to hear that slam in my dreams sometimes--or it may have

been Luke coming in late--the Tallants' hall door makes a particularly

Kismetish bang. That was our real parting, though it wasn't the last.

He wrote to me--a bitter sort of farewell. And I did a mad thing. I

went to see him in his rooms. But when I got there, his

manner--something he said which offended me--one can't explain the

unexplainable--started the scene all over again. It was as if a mocking

demon came up between us. That time it was I who left him. The next

thing I heard was that he and Mademoiselle Croesus were engaged.

I wrote to him--I know it wasn't the proper sort of letter--I daresay

he saw through my pretended indifference. He sent me back my letters as

I had asked him to do--wrote me in quite the right strain--said he was

not worthy of me--that I'd shewn him I was far above him--that he might

not presume to think I could be happy with a man of his inadequate

means and position--that he could never forget me--and so on--but that

it was best as it is.

And now I've got to get what consolation I can out of my own inner

conviction--that it IS best as it is, and that I ought to be thankful

for being still Bridget O'Hara, mistress of my own fate, and free yet

to sport about--sport!--oh, the irony of it--in what you call the

stormy sea of my emotions.

I make over to you the copyright of my sufferings.'

The letter broke off abruptly. It was resumed on another sheet six

weeks later at Gaverick Castle.

'Rosamond Tallant has just sent me a writing case I left at their house

with these pages in it. I daren't read them over, but they'll give you

an idea of my state of mind during those last dreadful weeks in London.

My nerves are now in a little better condition. Since I came here, I've

set myself resolutely NOT to think of Will--that is, not more than I

can help; there are times when his ghost is extremely active. I'm

putting out brain-feelers, for I know that I should go to pieces

altogether if I didn't throw myself into some new interest. So that I'm

trying a system for the development of one's higher faculties that was

taught me by a queer old German professor I met at Caux last summer,

who was interested in the odd little second-sight experiences I've had

occasionally which I told him about. He made me do exercises in

deep-breathing and meditation--you shut yourself up, darken your room

and concentrate upon a subject--Beauty, Wisdom, Friendship, were some

of the subjects he gave me--and you can't think how thrillingly

absorbing it was. I worked frightfully hard at it for a bit, drinking

only distilled water and living on vegetables--you CAN do that in

Switzerland: you simply CAN'T in civilised society--And then came Rome

and the Willoughby Maule episode.

Episode! Has it come to that!

Ah Joan, I have a horrible suspicion that however much I may try to

persuade myself I'm concentrating upon some abstract theme, I've really

all the time been thinking of him.

Yesterday I took Friendship for my study in concentration. You, dear

thing, came up, naturally, and your image actually kept Will away for a

clear five seconds. I thought what a help it would be to be with you,

and afterwards I made the suggestion of an Australian trip on literary

business to Aunt Eliza, but it was no good. She is deeply engaged just

now in driving batches of stuffy relatives in a stuffy brougham--luckily

there's no room for me in it--to still stuffier garden parties. And,

besides, I don't feel that I can take any desperate step of that kind

until the Irrevocable has been written in Destiny's Book.

Will Maule is not married yet.

Well, anyhow, the meditation on Friendship was comparatively

successful. Wisdom I found beyond me, and Beauty awakened painful

memories. To-day I mean to concentrate on wealth--one of my Professor's

theories is that if you concentrate regularly on a thing you are bound

in the long run to get what you set your mind upon, and I do find my

position of dependence upon Aunt Eliza too unspeakably galling. What a

monstrous injustice it seems that I--who if I had been born a boy, must

have been Earl of Gaverick, should be at the mercy of an ill-tempered,

miserly, old woman who may leave the home of my forefathers to a

crossing-sweeper if she pleases. I suppose it ought to go to Chris, but

one doesn't feel called upon to arraign Fate on behalf of a distant

cousin who by rights has no business to be Lord Gaverick at all.

I'm concentrating on Art too. Every day I do some inspirational

painting by the sea shore. I've made some studies of Wave-fairies for

the Children's Story Book we planned to do together. It's quite

invigorating to sport about with them in imagination, in a grey-green

stormy sea, out of reach of human banalities. I can feel the cold spray

as I paint and the sense of power and rest in the elemental forces--an

almost Wagnerian feeling of great Cosmic Realities.'

Again Mrs Gildea smiled to herself. How like Biddy O'Hara!

She couldn't be so utterly heart-broken if she was able to practise

deep breathing and concentration--Wealth, Friendship, Art--a pretty

comprehensive repertoire--and to prate on Cosmic Realities and the

Wagnerian feeling!

But presently the tragic note shrieked again. Bridget went on:

'I am in a fever of suspense and misery wondering whether Will's

marriage will come off or if, at the last moment, it will be broken. He

has been obsessing me these last days. He too--I am certain of

it--dreads the Irrevocable, and regrets the rupture between us. I dream

of him continually--such restless, tantalising dreams. And yet my mood

is so contradictory. If the marriage WERE broken off and he stood

before me, free, and offered himself!--

Could I bring myself to face our future together with all its

depoeticising influences, its almost certainty of friction? No.

Something deep down inside me says--has always said--"It would be a

mistake; this is not the real thing: we are not suited to each other;

the attraction might even turn to repulsion." Imagine the agony of that!

Life goes on here, all dribble, waste and fret--I cannot concentrate, I

cannot paint--the Wave-fairies won't play--Your Bush gobies appeal more

to my present humour. I feel a sort of nostalgia for the wild--though

my nostalgia is mental, and not from any former association. Do not be

surprised if some day you get a telegram saying that I am coming.'

Another sheet.

'Will was married yesterday. I have just read the account of the

ceremony--I can see it all--the usual semi-smart opulent wedding--palms

lining the aisle, Orange blossom galore. The bride "beautiful in cream

satin and old lace"--Evelyn Mary is simply a LUMP--Pages in white

velvet--The fussy overdressed Bagallay crowd of friends--I hear there

are no "in-laws," And the bridegroom's face--dark, cynical--I know the

sort of miserable smile and the queer glitter in his eyes.--"I

WILLOUGHBY TAKE THEE EVELYN MARY... FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE...TILL

DEATH US DO PART "... There! I'm a blathering idiot to mind...I ought

to be dancing with joy at my escape. Let us end the chapter. The

incident is closed, I'm going for a long tramp by the sea and shall

post this on my way.

Your BIDDY.'

CHAPTER 6

Mrs Gildea was too busy in the next two or three weeks to trouble

herself unduly over Lady Bridget O'Hara's tragic love-affair. She had

to report on the small holders of property in Leichardt's Land and made

a trip for that purpose among the free-selectors in her own old

district. The TWENTY YEARS AFTER letter she wrote about this expedition

for THE IMPERIALIST was one of her best, and for that she was greatly

indebted to Colin McKeith's commentaries.

Old associations with him had been vividly reawakened by this visit to

the home of her youth. She remembered, as if it had been yesterday, how

McKeith, a raw youth of eighteen with a horrible tragedy at the back of

his young life, had been picked up by her father and brought to

Bungroopim to learn the work of a cattle-station.... hitherto his

experience, such as it was, had been with sheep in the, then, unsettled

north. Joan was herself a girl in short frocks, three or four years

younger than Colin McKeith, and with no apparent prospect of ever

crossing the 'big fella Water,' as the Ubi Blacks called it, or of

joining the band of Bohemian scribblers in London.

She remembered how quickly Colin had learned his work--remembered how

the shy self-contained lad, with always that grim memory of his boyhood

shaping a vengeful purpose in his mind and making him old for his

years, had developed the flair of the Bush in his hardy Scotch

constitution. She was compelled to own that he had developed, too, some

of the worst as well as the best of those Scotch qualities inherited

from his parents, expatriated though they had been, and from the

staunch clansmen behind them. He had the Scotch loyalty; likewise, the

Scotch tenacity of character which never forgot and very seldom

forgave; the Scotch obstinacy of purpose and opinion; the Scotch

acquisitiveness; a tendency too to 'nearness' in matters of small

expenditure which combined oddly with a generosity amounting almost to

recklessness in large enterprise. It was on the whole not a bad outfit

for a pioneer who meant to get on in his world.

The beginnings were small, but indicative of the trend of his career.

He contrived, even when he was earning no salary but working only for

his 'tucker,' to get together a horse or two, a cow or two, a specially

good cattle-dog or two, which last he made the nucleus of a profitable

breed. The cows and bullocks he left at Bungroopim when the time came

for him to push out, reclaiming them after they had increased and

multiplied in those pleasant pastures like Jacob's herds in the fields

of Laban.

Not that there was any seven years matrimonial question. There had been

no Leah. Or if Joan Gildea had ever played the part of Rachel in Colin

McKeith's sentimental dreams, those boyish dreams had left no serious

mark upon him. He had gone north to a newly-formed station and had

there out-bushed the bushman in his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of

cattle and sheep and his amazing faculty for spotting country suitable

for either. Here no doubt his descent from generations of herdsmen had

stood him in good stead.

He sold his knowledge to rich squatters in the settled districts who

employed him to take up new country for them and to manage the hundreds

of square miles and the thousands of stock from which they derived the

best part of their wealth. But he only managed for other men until he

had made enough money of his own to take up and stock new country for

himself.

In a few years he had acquired a moderate-sized herd and established

himself with it on the almost unexplored reaches of the Upper Leura.

Life on that river never lacked dangerous adventure. McKeith's father

had owned a station on the Lower Leura--the bank took it in payment of

their mortgage after the catastrophe occurred. That station had been

the scene of one of the most horrible native outrages in the history of

Australia. The tragedy had set its mark on Colin McKeith. Left a

penniless boy after having worked his way to independent manhood he had

made it his purpose to pursue the wild black with relentless animosity.

All along the Upper Leura to the fastnesses at the river's head where

his new station stood on the boundaries of civilisation he had gone,

mercilessly punishing native depredations.

He had been put on trial by a humanitarian Government for so-called

manslaughter of natives, and had been acquitted under an administration

immediately succeeding it. Afterwards he had at the peril of his life,

made an exploring trip across the base of the northern peninsula of the

colony with the intention, as he phrased it, of 'shaking round a bit.'

He 'shook round' to some purpose, penetrated to the Big Bight, and got

on the tracks of a famous lost explorer. Colin McKeith solved the

mystery of that explorer's fate and had his revenge on the Government

which had impeached him by pocketing the reward which it had offered

any adventurous pioneer following on the lost explorer's steps.

Later, McKeith was given a mission to explore and develop a certain

tract of fertile country between the heads of the Leura and the Big

Bight--the particular Premier instigating the mission being a

far-sighted politician who realised that a Japanese invasion of the

northern coast might eventually interfere very radically with the plan

for a White Australia.

Colin McKeith threw into his own scheme of life a trip to Japan, by way

of India and China. He volunteered, too, for the Boer War, and did a

short term of service with the Australian Contingent in South Africa.

He dreamed more and more of becoming an Empire-maker--a sort of

Australian Cecil Rhodes. But he was wise enough to realise that all

Empire-making cannot be on the Rhodesian scale.

He realised that his personal fortune must first be secured. Without

money one can do nothing. Cecil Rhodes had had the natural wealth of

Rhodesia at his back. McKeith had set himself the task of opening up

the fine country out West, which he knew only needed a system of

irrigation by Artesian Bores to defy drought, the squatters curse. That

object once accomplished--he gave himself with luck and good seasons

five or six years--there would be nothing to stop his becoming a

patriot and a millionaire.

But Colin went slowly and cannily--and that was why the Leichardt's

Land Government believed in him. He had the reputation of never

spending a penny on his private or public ambitions where a halfpenny

would serve his purpose, and he was known to be a man of deep counsels

and sparing of speech. Thus, no one knew exactly what was his business

down south at this time. Only the general remark was that Colin McKeith

had his head screwed on the right way and that some day he would come

out on top.

But that there was deep down a spring of romance beneath that hard

Bushman's exterior, Joan Gildea, herself a romance writer, guessed

easily. And her intuition told her that a little thin bore had been

made in the direction of that vital spring of romance by his

inadvertent reading of Lady Bridget O'Hara's letter.

CHAPTER 7

Joan saw that McKeith was extremely anxious to know more about the

writer of that letter and the progress of that love-affair, though he

had given his word of honour that he would not try to find out her

identity. But he put subtle questions to Joan about her friends in

England and her acquaintance with the higher circles of society in

London. Once, he asked her straight out whether she had heard again

from her typewriting correspondent, and if the Soldier of Fortune had

proved himself a Bounder, as they had suspected?

'Yes,' Joan answered unguardedly. 'I'm thankful to say that he is

married to his heiress.'

The eager light which suddenly shone in McKeith's eyes startled Mrs

Gildea.

'You don't mean to say that you're thinking of her like that?' she

exclaimed. 'It's no use, Colin.'

'Probably not,' he answered composedly. 'Tell me, how does she take it?'

'Deadly seriously. She's practising Deep-breathing and Concentration to

try and drive the man from her thoughts.'

'What! Oh, you mean Theosophy and that kind of thing. I went to hear

Mrs Annie Besant lecture once, and I couldn't make head or tail of it.'

'No. You wouldn't. But it was a German Professor who taught B---- No. I

will NOT tell you her name.'

'Anyway, I know that it begins with a "B." And I know that she's got

one relation called Molly, and another called Chris, and a friend whose

name is Rosamond--likewise that Rosamond is the wife of Luke.... By

Jove!' He stopped short and looked at Mrs Gildea with sharp

enlightenment.

They were in the veranda of her cottage, and he was seated on the steps

smoking, his long legs stretched out against one veranda post, his

broad back against another. 'Seen the paper this morning?' he asked.

'No. If you pass the CHRONICLE Office, I wish you'd lodge a complaint

for me against the vagaries of their distribution department. Twice

lately I haven't had the paper till the afternoon.'

He pulled it from his pocket, and, leaning across, handed it to her.

'Read the English Telegrams,' he said.

Joan stopped cleaning her typewriter and examined the column of latest

intelligence.

'Good gracious! So they've appointed Sir Luke Tallant new Governor of

Leichardt's Land!'

'Luke!--A coincidence you'll say. No good telling me that. SHE wrote

that "Luke" was hankering after a colonial governorship.'

'Well, he's got it,' replied Mrs Gildea noncommittally.

'And if you read the leading article you'll see that the CHRONICLE is

justly outraged at so important a post as that of Governor of

Leichardt's Land being given to an unknown man who has never served

outside the Colonial Office in London and who doesn't even belong to

the noble army of Peers.'

'That's all nonsense. Luke Tallant's a friend of Chamberlain's, a

thorough Imperialist and a very good man for the post.'

'You know him then?'

'I know OF him.'

'From HER?'

'HER! Has it come to HER! Colin, if anyone had told me that you would

ever be fool enough to fall in love with a woman you've never seen, I

should have laughed outright. You don't even know what she's like.'

'I can see her in my mind's eye, as I used to see the women I read

about by my camp fire. You'd never believe either what a queer

idealistic chap I can be when I'm mooning about the Bush. Don't you

know, Joan'--and his voice got suddenly grave and deep-toned--'you

ought to, for you were a bush girl and you've had men-kind out in the

Back Blocks--Don't you know that when a man has got to go on day after

day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness

and worse--with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark

staring gum trees and black, smelling GIDGEE* and dead-finish

scrub--and never the glimpse of a woman--not counting black gins--to

remind him he once had a mother and might have a wife. Well, can't you

see that his only chance of not growing into a rotten HATTER* is to

start picturing in his imagination all the beautiful things he's ever

seen or read about--the sort of lady-wife he hopes to have some day and

in making such a companion of her that she seems to him as real as the

stars and far more real than the gum trees. So as he'll keep saying to

her always in his thoughts: "I'll keep myself sound and wholesome for

your sake. I'll never forget that I'm a gentleman, so as YOU won't

shrink away from me in horror if ever I've the luck to come across YOU

down here on this Earth."'

[*Gidgee--Colloquial pronunciation of gidia, an Australian tree.]

[*Hatter--A white man who prefers the society of blacks.]

He stopped, fitted another cigarette from the copper case into the

holder and, before beginning upon it, said without looking at Mrs

Gildea:

'I wouldn't spout like that to anybody but you, Joan. My word! Though I

see by your writing that you've a fair notion of how this cursed, grim,

glorious old Bush can play the deuce with a chap--body and brain and

soul--if he doesn't wear the right kind of talisman to safeguard

himself.'

'Yes--I understand. And your talisman, Colin? What was your picture of

the lady-wife? Describe your Ideal and I'll tell you if SHE is the

least bit like it.'

McKeith smoked ruminatively for a few moments, his eyes narrowed. The

lines in his forehead and round his mouth showed plainly. He was gazing

out into space, far beyond the sun-flecked Leichardt River and the

Botanical Gardens, and the glaring city and the range of distant hills

on the horizon.

'Well,' he said at last, slowly, 'you can laugh at me if you like, but

I'll tell you how I see HER. She is tall--got a presence, so that if

SHE'S there, you'd know it and everybody else would know it, no matter

how many other women there might be in the place. Most big men take to

their opposites. Now, though I'm a big man I've never fancied a snippet

of a girl. Five foot seven of height is my measure of a woman, and a

good ten stone in the saddle--What are you laughing at, Joan? I'm out

there, I suppose?'

Mrs Gildea controlled her muscles.

'No, no, not in the least. In fact, your description fits the Ideal

Wife perfectly. Go on, Colin. Five foot seven and a good ten stone. How

is the rest of HER? Fair or dark--her hair now--and her eyes?'

'Her hair--oh, it isn't fair--not yellow or noticeable in colour--like

those dyed beauties you see about. Her hair is dark, soft and cloudy

looking. And she's got a small head set like--like a lily on its

stem--and her hair is parted in the middle and coiled smoothly each

side and into a sort of Greek knot....'

'In short, she's a cross between the Venus of Milo and the Madonna.'

Mrs Gildea was smiling amusedly.

'Perhaps.... Something of that sort. Dignity and sweetness, you

know--those are what I admire in a woman. But not too much of the

goddess or of the angel either. I shouldn't want always to have to load

up with a pedestal when we shifted camp, and the only shrine I'd keep

going for her would be in my heart. It's a Mate I'm wanting, as well as

an Ideal.... Now you're laughing again.'

'No, I'm not. I agree with you entirely--and so would SHE.'

'There! You needn't tell me. I shouldn't wonder if I'd got the second

sight where SHE'S concerned.'

Again Mrs Gildea smiled enigmatically.

'I shouldn't wonder, Colin. But you haven't finished your personal

description. What about the colour of her eyes?'

'Now I don't believe I could say exactly the colour of her eyes any

more than of her hair. They're the kind, to me, that have no colour.

Soft and melting and sort of mysterious--Deep and clear and with a

light far down in them like starlight reflected in a still lagoon.... I

say, Joan, you remember the old Eight Mile Water-hole on Dingo

Flat--middle of the patch of flooded gum and she-oak--that the Blacks

used to say had no bottom to it? HER eyes seemed to me a bit like that

water-hole--No bottom to her possibilities.'

'That's true enough,' assented Mrs Gildea. 'There's no bottom to HER

possibilities.'

'I could tell it from her letter. She seemed to write flippantly about

things--but that was just because she hates insincerity and flummery,

and the world she lives in doesn't satisfy her. Why, it was as if I

read slick through to her soul. That woman would go through anything

for a man she really loved.'

He had a way of lowering his voice when he spoke of love--as if he felt

it a sacred subject; and this in him surprised Joan. She was

discovering a new Colin McKeith. She answered softly.

'Yes. I think she would--IF she really loved him.'

'What I haven't been able to make out is whether she did care--does

care--for that chap. You see, that would make a difference.'

'A difference! How? What do you mean?'

'I mean that I don't believe I should feel about her as I do if I

wasn't going to meet her. Look here, Joan, you've as good as told

me--and if you hadn't, I'd be pretty thick-headed not to have put two

and two together--that the Luke of her letters is Sir Luke Tallant, our

new Governor. Well, if she was staying with him in London, and his wife

is a friend of hers, why shouldn't she come and stay with them out

here?'

The idea had already presented itself to Mrs Gildea, but she tried not

to show that it had, or that there had ever been any question of the

sort in Bridget's mind. Colin had not read the opening sheet of her

letter.

'I suppose more unlikely things than that have happened,' Joan said

neutrally. 'But really, Colin,' she went on with strenuous emphasis, 'I

can't understand this phase of you. You--a hard-headed Bushman, to be

dreaming romantic dreams and falling all of a sudden over head and ears

in love with--with a figment of your imagination--just because you

happen to have read by mistake some sentimental outpourings of a woman

you know nothing about and who would never forgive me if she knew I'd

let you see her letter.'

'She won't know--You have my word of honour that I'll never give you

away over that letter--not under ANY circumstances, so you can set your

mind at rest on that score, Joan. And as to my falling in love with--a

figment of my own imagination'--he spat the words out savagely--'we'll

see how far your remark is justified when She does come out and I

recognise her--as I am convinced I shall do directly I set eyes on Her.'

Mrs Gildea burst into rather hysterical laughter, which manifestly

offended Colin McKeith.

'We'll drop the subject, please,' he said stiffly. 'And now, Mrs

Gildea, I'm quite at your service for any information you desire about

the Big Bight country and the probability of a Japanese invasion so

soon as our future Commonwealth comes to crucial loggerheads with the

Eastern Powers on the question of a strictly White Australia.'

After that Colin pointedly abstained from allusion to the Ideal Wife

and to Joan Gildea's Typewriting-Correspondent, as he had called her.

He was very busy himself at this time in connection with a threatened

labour strike that was agitating sheep and cattle owners of the Leura

District. Likewise with a report he had been asked to furnish of a

projected telegraph line for the opening of his 'Big Bight Country'.

Colin McKeith appeared to be deep in the confidence of the Leichardt's

Land Executive Council and to have taken up his abode for the winter

session in the Seat of Government, though he seemed to regard his

recent election for a Northern constituency as an unimportant episode

in a career ultimately consecrated to the elucidation of far-reaching

Imperial problems.

Joan Gildea found him excellent 'copy,' and the great Gibbs

cablegrammed, in code, approval of her lately-tapped source of

information.

She almost forgot Bridget O'Hara in her absorption in colonial topics.

But three weeks before the expected arrival of the new Governor of

Leichardt's Land a cablegram was shot at her from Colombo which made

her feel that there was no use in setting oneself against Destiny. This

was the wire:

EXPECT ME WITH TALLANTS BIDDY.

She said nothing to Colin McKeith about the message--partly because his

movements were erratic and he was a good deal away from Leichardt's

town just then. Thus Mrs Gildea did not know whether or not he had read

the flowery description telegraphed by a Melbourne correspondent who

interviewed Sir Luke Tallant and his party at that city and wired an

ecstatic paragraph about the beautiful Lady Bridget O'Hara who was

accompanying her friend and distant relative, the Honourable Lady

Tallant.

Anyway, McKeith made no references to the newspaper correspondent's

rhapsodies when he paid Mrs Gildea a short visit two or three days

before the landing of the new Governor. But his very reticence and

something in his expression made Joan suspect that he was puzzled and

excited, and would have been glad had she volunteered any information

about Lady Tallant's companion. Joan, however, kept perverse silence.

In truth, she felt considerably nervous over the prospect. What was

going to happen when Colin McKeith set eyes on Bridget?

Joan Gildea was a simple woman though circumstances had made her a

shrewd one, and she had all the elementary feminine instincts. She

believed in love and in strange affinities and in hidden threads of

destiny--all of which ideas fitted beautifully on to Bridget O'Hara's

personality, but not at all on to that of Colin McKeith.

CHAPTER 8

The first dinner-party given by Sir Luke and Lady Tallant at Government

House included Mrs Gildea and Colin McKeith.

These two met in the vestibule as they emerged respectively from the

ladies' and gentlemen's cloak-room. Both held back to allow certain

Members of the Ministry to enter the drawing-room before them, which

gave opportunity for an interchange of greetings.

'Well!' both said at once, and the tones in which the monosyllable was

uttered and the glances accompanying it held volumes of hidden meaning.

'I haven't seen you since the Governor arrived,' Joan went on. 'Where

have you been all these three weeks?'

'At Alexandra City, close on the desert, where they bored for water and

struck ready-made gas--the whole place now is lighted with it. If you

like, I'll give you material for a first-rate article upon an uncommon

phenomenon of Nature.'

'Thank you. I shall be grateful. Colin'--hesitatingly, 'I did think

you'd have come and looked after an old friend at the big Show in the

Botanical Gardens when the Governor made his State Entry.'

'State Entry! Good Lord! Sir Luke Tallant has got a bit too much red

tape and too many airs about him to suit the Leichardt'stonians.'

'You WERE there, then?'

'Started for Alexandra City that afternoon.'

'But you saw--Colin did you see--the Tallants and--their party?

His face changed: it looked positively angry, and his jaw under the

neatly trimmed, sandy beard, protruded determinedly. But at that moment

a footman came towards them, and Mrs Gildea was handed on to an

imposing butler and ushered through a wide palm-screened doorway into

the large inner hall which had a gallery round it and the big staircase

at one end. Joan saw that the room, formerly stiffly furnished and used

chiefly as a ballroom, had been transmogrified with comfortable lounge

chairs and sofas, beautiful embroideries, screens, a spinet and many

flowers and books into a delightful general sitting-room. It seemed

quite full--mostly of official Leichardt'stonians. Joan looked for the

new Governor and his wife, or at least for Lady Biddy, but none of them

had yet put in an appearance. A handsome, fair-moustachioed young

aide-de-camp, looking very smart in his evening uniform with white

lapels, was fluttering round, his dinner list in his hand, and

introducing people who already knew each other. He looked distinctly

worried, so did the private secretary--sallow-faced, of a clerkish

type, and obviously without social qualifications--who was also

wandering round and trying ineffectively to do the right thing. The

aide-de-camp rushed forward to shake hands with Joan, exclaiming in a

relieved undertone:

'Oh, Mrs Gildea, do help me. I believe I've made an awful hash of it

all. People out here,' he murmured, 'ain't used to viceregal etiquette

as she is interpreted in Ceylon--that was my last post you know. They

seem to think his Excellency ought to have been standing at the door to

receive THEM, instead of their waiting to receive HIM.'

Clearly, the aide-de-camp had failed to please, though he looked

spruced and his manners were beautiful. The Premier of Leichardt's

Land, a red-faced gentleman of blunt speech, was grumbling audibly to

the Attorney-General. Mrs Gildea caught snatches of discontent as she

passed from one to another.

'Damned impertinence, I call it. A salaried official, no better than

any of us, giving himself royal airs.... May do in India... won't go

down in a free country like this.'

The AIDE finished pairing his couples.

'Mrs Gildea, you're to go in with the Warden of the University. Of

course you know Dr Plumtree? Literature and learning is an obvious

combination, but' (in a confidential aside) 'if you KNEW the job I've

had to find out the right order of precedence. Mr McKeith, the Governor

will be so glad to meet you. Will you take in Lady Bridget O'Hara?

She's not down yet. You see,' he explained again to Mrs Gildea, 'we're

strictly official to-night and Debrett's out of it.'

'So am I,' put in Colin McKeith. 'I guess that Lady Bridget would be

better pleased if she wasn't handed over to a rough bushman.'

'Now, there you ARE quite out of it,' laughed the aide-de-camp. 'Lady

Bridget asked specially to be sent in with you,' and at Mrs Gildea's

enquiring smile, he explained once more: 'Sir Luke was speaking about

Mr McKeith, said his name had been mentioned at a meeting of the

Executive yesterday. Oh! you're top hole, Mr McKeith, I assure you.'

The AIDE broke off suddenly.

There was a rustle of silk on the grand staircase--the slam of a door

above, the sound of a laugh and the patter of little high-heeled shoes

on the parquet floor of the gallery. The AIDE darted to the foot of the

staircase and all eyes turned upward.

The new Governor and his wife came down in slow and stately fashion,

arm-in-arm, Sir Luke looking very impressive with the Ribbon and Order

of St Michael and St George. He was a handsome man, clean-shaven but

for a heavy dark moustache, and carried his dignities with perhaps a

little too conscious an air--'Representative of the Throne' seemed

written all over him and no greater contrast could be imagined than the

new Governor presented to his predecessor, an elderly, impoverished

marquis who had the brain of a diplomatist and the manners of a British

farmer, and who with his homely wife had been immensely popular in

Leichardt's Land.

Nor a greater contrast than the new Governor's wife to the fat, kindly,

old marchioness. Lady Tallant was a London woman, of about forty-five.

She had been excessively pretty, but had rather lost her looks after a

bad illness, and her worst affliction was now a tendency to

scragginess, cleverly concealed where the chest was no longer visible.

Obviously artificial outside, at any rate Lady Tallant was, as Mrs

Gildea had reason to believe, a genuine sort underneath. She had a

thin, high-nosed face of the conventional English aristocratic type, a

good deal rouged to-night, but with natural shadows under the eyes and

below the arch of the brows which were toned to correspond with the

evidently dyed hair. Her dress, a Paris creation of pale satin and

glistening embroidery, was draped to hide her thinness, and her neck

and throat were almost covered with strings of pearls and clusters of

clear-set diamonds. Judging from the way in which the

Leichardt'stonians stared at her as she came down the stairs, it seemed

probable that none of them had ever before seen anyone quite like Lady

Tallant.

Joan Gildea's eyes passed quickly from Sir Luke and Lady Tallant to a

third figure behind them, on the half-landing, but first she realised

in a flashing glance that Colin McKeith's gaze had been all the while

riveted upon that figure. Not in astonishment--a proof to Joan that he

had seen it before--but in a kind of unwilling fascination, most

upsetting to Mrs Gildea's sense of responsibility in the matter.

The Visionary Woman of the camp-fire! And she had let Colin McKeith

believe that Bridget O'Hara was the embodiment of his Ideal--height

five foot seven at the least: weight ten stone or more: smooth-parted,

Greek-coiled hair: a cross between a goddess and a Madonna--that was

Colin's Ideal--Good Heavens! What did he now behold? A very little

woman. One of the snippets he despised. Not an ounce of the traditional

dignity about her. Lady Bridget gave the impression of an

old-fashioned, precocious child, dressed up in a picture frock of soft

shining white stuff, hanging on a straight slender form and gathered

into a girdle at the waist, with a wisp of old lace flung carelessly

over the slight shoulders. She stood for a moment or two on the half

landing, then, as the aide-de-camp murmured in the Governor's ear at

the foot of the stairs, she came close to the bannisters and looked

down amusedly at the party in the hall. Her face was a little poked

forward--a small oval face, pale except for the redness of a rather

thin-lipped mouth--the upper lip like a scarlet bow--and the brilliance

of the eyes, deep-set under finely-drawn brows and with thick lashes,

golden-brown, and curling up at the tips. Peculiar eyes: Mrs Gildea,

who knew them well, never could decide their exact colour. The nose was

a delicate aquiline, the chin pointed. An untidy mass of wavy chestnut

hair stuck out in uneven puffs and insubordinate curls, all round the

small head. At this moment Mrs Gildea remembered a suggestive charm

sent to Lady Bridget by her cousin, Chris Gaverick, one Christmas, of a

miniature gold curry-comb.

It was a vivid brief impression, for the girl moved on immediately, but

Joan noticed that Colin McKeith had arrested Lady Bridget's wandering

gaze. That was not surprising, for his great height and the

distinctiveness of his appearance, made him more likely than anyone

else present to attract her attention. Then, as she caught sight of

Joan, the interested, startled look changed to one of bright

recognition, the red lips smiled, showing dimples at their sensitive

corners.

'His Excellency and Lady Tallant,' said the aide-de-camp, and Bridget

seemed hardly able to keep herself in the background while Sir Luke and

his wife advanced to greet the assembled guests. This, Lady Tallant did

with quite enchanting courtesy, making an apt apology for having kept

them waiting, which almost mollified the irate Premier. Bridget came

with a swift gliding movement to the side of her friend, squeezed her

hand and held it, while she talked in a soft rapid monotone.

'How cool you look. I've never been so hot in my life. And the

mosquitoes! Rosamond is in despair. She says she really can't afford to

lose more flesh. Do you see how she has had to make herself up to hide

the mosquito bites? Luckily, I've got a skin that insects don't find

palatable....'

They had of course met since the Landing. Joan had paid her formal

visit, had lunched at Government House, and was now on intimate terms

with the new people. Also, Lady Bridget had found her way to the

cottage on Emu Point.

She looked round at the different groups and gave a cynical little

shrug.

'Why! it's like everything one had left behind! I might be at a party

to the Colonial Delegates in London for all the difference there is.

Where's your barbarism, Joan? ... I'm pining for a savage existence....

That's an excessively good-looking man'--her eyebrows indicated Colin

McKeith--'I do hope he is the man I asked for to take me in to

dinner--I told Vereker Wells that I wanted a new sensation--that man

looks as if he might give it to me--No, don't tell me: there's

excitement in uncertainty.'

She went on in eager monologue, giving no time for replies.

'It seems we've put the official backs up. Vereker Wells was determined

to follow Indian vice-regal precedents--so ridiculous--as I told him:

and as for Luke, he's got it on the brain that his mission is to uphold

the dignity of the British Throne. Like a NOUVEAU RICHE--terribly

afraid of doing the wrong thing and showing every moment that he's new

to the great Panjandrum part.... Ah so!' ... an ejaculatory trick of

Bridget's. 'He IS my fate!'

Captain Vereker Wells brought up Colin who was holding himself stiffly,

limping just a little, as he did when he was nervous, and looking very

big and strong and masterful--likewise extraordinarily well-groomed and

tailored.

'Lady Bridget O'Hara, let me present Mr Colin McKeith.'

Lady Biddy looked up at Colin and he looked down at her.

'Do you think I can POSSIBLY reach your arm?' as he held his elbow

crooked to about the level of her shoulder. 'You know I asked to be

sent in with you--it was rather bold of me, wasn't it? But if I had

known how VERY tall you are!'

Mr McKeith lowered his arm, stooping over her, and Mrs Gildea heard him

say in a voice that sounded different somehow from his ordinary deep

drawl:

'I wonder why I was chosen for this honour?'

And Bridget's reply:

'I'd been told that you were an explorer--that you're a kind of Bush

Cecil Rhodes--I don't know Mr Cecil Rhodes, but I have an adoration for

him--I wanted to talk to a real Bushman--I always felt that I should

like Australian Bushmen from Joan Gildea's description of them.... And

you....'

The rest was lost, as the groups converged and the long line of couples

went forward.

CHAPTER 9

It was not an altogether successful party. The dinner had portentous

suggestiveness; the Leidchardt'stonians were at first rather difficult.

Sir Luke a little too conscious of his responsibilities towards the

British Throne: Lady Tallant so brilliant as to be bewildering. But

except as it concerns Lady Bridget and McKeith, the Tallant's first

dinner-party at Government House is not of special importance in this

story. Mrs Gildea, very well occupied with Dr Plumtree, only caught

diagonal glimpses of her two friends a little lower down on the

opposite side of the table, and, in occasional lulls of conversation,

the musical ring of Lady Bridget's rapid chatter. Colin did not seem to

be talking much, but every time Mrs Gildea glanced at him, he appeared

absorbed in contemplation of the small pointed face and the farouche,

golden-brown eyes turned up to him from under the top heavy mass of

chestnut hair. Lady Bridget, at any rate, had a great deal to say for

herself, and Mrs Gildea wondered what was going to come of it all.

Conversation became more general as champagne flowed and the courses

proceeded.

Sir Luke, discreetly on the prowl for information, attacked Antipodean

questions--the Blacks for instance. He had observed the small company

of natives theatrically got up in the war-paint of former times, which,

grouped round the dais on which he had been received at the State

Landing, had furnished an effective bit of local colour to the pageant.

Up to what degree of latitude might these semi-civilised, and he feared

demoralised beings, be taken as a survival of the indigenous population

of Leichardt's Land? Did wild and dangerous Blacks still exist up north

and in the interior of the Colony?

'You'd better ask McKeith about that, your Excellency,' said the

Premier. 'He knows more about the Blacks up north than any of us.'

The Governor enquired as to the amenability of the Australian native to

missionary methods of civilisation, and one of the other Ministers

broke in with a laugh.

'Bible in one hand and baccy in the other! No, Sir, the Exeter Hall and

General Gordon principles aren't workable with our Blacks. Kindness

doesn't do. The early pioneers soon found that out.'

Lady Bridget had stopped suddenly in her talk with Colin, and was

listening, her eyes glowering at her companion.

'Why didn't kindness do?' she asked sharply.

'Yes; Mr McKeith, tell us why the early pioneers abandoned the gentle

method,' said the Governor.

McKeith's face changed: it became dark and a dangerous fire blazed in

his blue eyes.

'Because they found that the Blacks repaid kindness with

ingratitude--treachery--foul murder--' He pulled himself up as though

afraid of losing command of himself if he pursued the subject: his

voice thrilled with some deep-seated feeling. Mrs Gildea, who

understood the personal application, broke in across the table with an

apposite remark about her own early experiences of the Blacks. Lady

Bridget impatiently addressed McKeith.

'Go on. What do the Blacks do now to you people to make you treat them

unkindly?'

'What do they do now--to us squatters you mean?' Colin had recovered

himself. 'Why they begin by spearing our cattle and then they take to

spearing ourselves.'

'Did they ever spear you?' she asked.

Colin smiled at her grimly.

'Well, you wouldn't have noticed, of course, that I've got just a touch

of a limp--it's only if I'm not in my best form that it shows. I owe

that to a spear through my thigh one night that the Blacks rushed my

camp when I was asleep. And I'd given their gins rations that very

morning.'

'And then?' Lady Bridget's voice was tense.

'Oh then--after they'd murdered a white man or two, the rest of us

whites--there wasn't more than a handful of us at that time up on the

Leura--banded together and drove them off into the back country. We had

a dangerous job with those Blacks until King Mograbar was shot down.'

'King Mograbar! How cruelly unjust. It was his country you were

STEALING.' She accentuated the last word with bitter scorn.

'Well! If you come to that, I suppose Captain Cook was stealing when he

hoisted the British flag in Botany Bay,' said McKeith.

'And if he hadn't, what about the glorious British record, and the

March of Civilisation?' put in Vereker Wells.

Bridget shot a scathing glance at the aide-de-camp.

'I don't admire your glorious British record, I think it's nothing but

a record of robbery, murder, and cruelty, beginning with Ireland and

ending with South Africa.'

'Oh! my dear!--I warn you,' said Lady Tallant, bending from her end of

the table and addressing the Leichardt'stonians generally. 'Lady

Bridget is a little Englander, a pro-Boer, a champion of the poor

oppressed native. If she had been alive then she'd have wanted to hand

India back to the Indians after the Mutiny, and now when she has made

Cecil Rhodes Emperor of Rhodesia, she'll give over all the rest again

to the Dutch.'

Bridget responded calmly to the indictment.

'Yes, I would--if Cecil Rhodes were to decline the Emperorship of all

South Africa--which I should make his job.... But you'd better add on

that I'm a Socialist too, Rosamond, because I've become one, as you

know. I think the working man is in a shamefully unjust position, and

that the capitalists are no better than slave-drivers.'

'Oh, not out here, my word!' exclaimed a Leichardt'stonian who happened

to be one of the old squattocracy. 'The landowners and the capitalists

are not slave-drivers, they are slave-driven. We've got to pay what the

Trades' Union organisers tell us--or else go without stockmen or

shearers. Fact is, our Labour War is only just beginning; and I can

tell you, Sir, that before a year is out the so-called bloated

capitalist and the sheep and cattle station owner will sing either

pretty big or very small.'

'I don't think it will be very small--on MY station,' murmured McKeith.

'But it's quite true about the Labour War. They're organising, as they

call it, already all along the Leura.'

The Governor asked to have the Labour situation explained from the

squatters' point of view; and for a few minutes McKeith forgot to look

at Lady Bridget. He was on his own ground and knew what he was talking

about.

'It's this way,' he began. 'You see, though, I'm cattle--and I'm the

furthest squatter out my way. But there are a few sheep stations down

the river, and there isn't an unlimited supply of either cattle-hands

or shearers, so we've got to look sharp about hiring them. Now, last

year, we--of course I'm classing myself with the sheep-owners, for we

all stand together--hired our shearers for seventeen shillings and

sixpence a day. Then, up come the Union organisers, form a Union of the

men and say to them: "You've got to pay ten shillings down to the Union

and sign a contract that you won't shear under twenty shillings a day."

The Organiser pockets the ten shillings, and makes three pounds a week

and his expenses besides, so it pays HIM pretty well. Well then, the

shearers go to the squatters. "All right," say they, "we'll shear your

sheep, but it's going to be twenty shillings instead of seventeen and

six." The squatters grumble, but they've got to have their sheep shorn,

and they pay the twenty shillings. Next year, I'm told, the word is to

go round that it's to be twenty-two and sixpence. Well sir, we're to

see what's to happen then!'

The Labour talk lacked local picturesqueness. Sir Luke preferred the

Blacks, and started the question of danger to white men in the

out-districts. How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks?

He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a

telegraph-line to the Big Bight. Could Mr McKeith give him any

information about all that?

McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last

outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there

lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles

twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it

was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard--there were

four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by

the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.

Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at

McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they

had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had

noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.

CHAPTER 10

In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan

Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular

outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on

Bridget's side.

'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something

new, isn't it?'

Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what

could be seen of them under her towzle of hair--all seemed to light up

together.

'Why, I've always been a Socialist--in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS

rebelled against the established order of things.'

'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your

doings--not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after--after Mr

Willoughby Maule's marriage?'

The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you--Do you know,

Rosamond saw them--the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met

them at Shoolbred's--buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging

after him looking--a bundle--and cross and ill; and that he seemed

intensely bored. Poor Will!'

There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.

'But about the Socialism?' prompted Mrs Gildea.

'Oh well, Aunt Eliza made up her mind suddenly to consult her new

doctor--Aunt Eliza's chief excitement is changing her doctors, and she

grows quite youthful in the process. They say that love and religion

are the chief emotional interests of unattached women. I should add on

doctors when a woman is growing old. Don't you think, Joan, that in

that case, all three come invariably to the same thing?'

'Love, religion and doctors! As emotional interests, do they come to

the same thing for elderly women?' repeated Mrs Gildea, as if she were

propounding a syllogism. 'No, certainly not, when the elderly woman

happens to be a hard-working journalist.'

'Oh, there you have the pull--I suggested the idea to Rosamond the

other day and she gave a true Rosamondian answer. "They don't come at

all to the same thing," she said, "because usually you have to pay your

doctor and SOMETIMES your lover pays you." Rather smart, wasn't it?'

'Yes, but I think you'd better warn Lady Tallant that the

Leichardt'stonian ladies are a bit Puritanical in their ideas of

repartee.'

'Oh, Rosamond is clever enough to have found that out already for

herself;' and the two glanced at Lady Tallant, who seemed to be playing

up quite satisfactorily to the female representatives of the

Ministerial circle.

'I suppose you made friends with some Socialists when you were in

London?' went on Mrs Gildea.

'My dear, I would have made friends with Beelzebub just them, if he

would have helped me to escape from myself.'

Bridget sighed and paused.

'But you ARE getting over it, Biddy--the disappointment about Mr Maule?

You ARE growing not to care?'

'I don't want to grow not to care--though, of course, now I should

prefer to care about someone or something that isn't Willoughby Maule,

I feel inside me that my salvation lies in caring--in caring

intensely.... But you wouldn't understand, Joan. You weren't built that

way.'

'No,' assented Mrs Gildea doubtfully.

'But,' went on Biddy brightly, 'I think sometimes that if one could get

to the pitch of feeling nothing matters, it would be a way of reaching

the "letting go" stage which one MUST arrive at before one can even

BEGIN to live in the Eternal.'

There seemed something a little comic in the notion of Bridget O'Hara

living in the Eternal, and yet Mrs Gildea realised that there really

was a certain stable quality underneath the flashing, ever changing

temperamental sheath, which might perhaps form a base for the Verities

to rest upon.

'Beelzebub didn't teach you that,' she said.

'No, quite the contrary. It all came out of my concentration studies

and the Higher Thought Centre where I met some most original

dears--Christian Scientists and Spiritualists--and then these

Socialists--not a bit on the lines of the old Fabians and Bernard

Shavians and the rest who used to believe only in Matter--specially

landed property matter--and in parcelling that out among themselves. My

friends are for parcelling out what they call the Divine Intelligence,

which they say will bring them everything they need for the good of

others and, incidentally, themselves. Of course none of them have a

penny. But they do contrive to get what they want for other people--it

was a soup kitchen this winter where they fed 11,000 starving poor.

Only, when they begin, they never have the smallest idea of HOW it's

going to be done.'

Lady Bridget was so absorbed in her subject matter that she did not

notice the entrance of the men; but Mrs Gildea saw that Colin McKeith

was making straight towards them. He halted behind Bridget's chair.

Biddy went on in reply to a question from her friend.

'You see, they argue this way, "We don't know," they say, "the HOW of

the simplest things in life, we don't know the HOW of our actual

existence--how we move or think--not even the HOW of the most ordinary

fact in science. We only know that there must be an Intelligence who

does know and who has forces at command and the power to set them in

motion."'

'And how do we know that?' asked Colin McKeith.

Bridget turned with a start and looked at him solemnly for a second or

two.

'You paralyse me: you are too big. I can't speak to you when you are

standing up. Please sit down.'

He went to fetch a chair. At the moment, Lady Tallant came up.

'Biddy, will you sing. Do for Heaven's sake make a sensation. Help me

out! You know how!'

Lady Bridget had a funny inscrutable little smile and a gleam in her

eyes which crinkled up when she was going to say or do something rather

naughty.

'I'll do my best, Rosamond. But you don't think it would be a dangerous

experiment, do you?'

Lady Tallant laughed, and told Captain Vereker Wells to take her to the

piano.

'YOU know that Biddy does a lot of mischief when she sings,' said the

Governor's wife, sitting down in Lady Bridget's vacant place beside Mrs

Gildea. Colin McKeith, still on the outskirts with his chair, stood

leaning upon it, watching the performer.

The piano was in such a position that Lady Bridget faced him.

A vain man might have fancied that she was singing at him, and that the

by-play of her song--the sudden eye-brightenings, the little twists of

her mouth, the head gestures, were for his particular benefit.

She was singing one of the Neapolitan folk-songs which one hears along

the shores of the Mediterranean beyond Marseilles--a love song.

Most people know that particular love-song. Lady Bridget gave it with

all the tricks and all the verve and whimsical audacity of a born

Italian singer. Well, she was Italian--on one side at least, and had

inherited the tricks and a certain quality of voice, irresistibly

catching. And she looked captivating as she sang--the small pointed

face within its frame of reddish-brown hair, the strange eyes, the

expressive red lips, alive with coquetry. The men--even the old

politicians, listened and stared, quite fascinated.

Some of the Leichardt's Town ladies--good, homely wives and mothers

who, in their early married days of struggle, had toiled and cooked and

sewed, with no time to imagine an aspect of the Eternal Feminine of

which they had never had any experience, were perhaps a little shocked,

perhaps a little regretful. One or two others, younger, with budding

aspirations, but provincial in their ideals, were filled with wonder

and vague envy.

A few of them had made the usual trip 'Home,' landing at Naples and

journeying to London, via Monte Carlo and Paris, and these felt they

had missed something in that journey which Lady Bridget was now

revealing to them. Joan Gildea, whose profession it was to realise

vividly such modes of life as came within her purview, felt herself

once more in the blue lands girdling the Sea of Story--It all came back

upon her--moonlight nights in Naples; on the Chiaja; looking down from

her windows on sunny gardens on the Riviera, and the strolling

minstrels in front of the hotel....

As for Colin McKeith who had never been in the Blue Land and knew

little even of the British Isles except for London--chiefly around St

Paul's School, Hammersmith--and the Scotch Manse where he had

occasionally spent his holidays--even he was transported from the

Government House drawing-room. Where? .... Not to the realm of visions

such as he had seen in the smoke of his camp fire. Oh no. He had never

dreamed of this kind of enchantment.

A fresh impulse seized the singer. She struck a few chords. A familiar

lilt sounded. Her face and manner changed. She burst into the famous

song of CARMEN. She WAS CARMEN. One could almost see the swaying form,

the seductive flirt of fan. There could be no doubt that had the voice

been more powerful, Lady Bridget might have done well on the operatic

stage.

Yet it had a TIMBRE, a peculiar, devil-may-care passion which produced

a very thrilling effect upon her audience. She got up when she had

finished in a dead silence and was half-way across the room before the

applause burst out. There was a little rush of men towards her.

'Beats Zelie de Lussan and runs Calve hard,' said the Premier who had

made more than one trip to England and considered himself an authority

in the matter.

Bridget skimmed through the groups of admirers, stopping to murmur

something to Lady Tallant who had met her half way; then stopped with

hands before her like a meek schoolgirl, in front of Mrs Gildea and

Colin McKeith--he almost the only man who had made no movement towards

her. Bridget sank into her former seat.

'The last time I sang that was at a Factory Girls' entertainment at

Poplar,' she said... 'You should have seen them, Joan: they stood up

and tried to sing in chorus and some of them came on to the platform

and danced.... Mr McKeith you look at me as if I had been doing

something desperately improper. Don't you like the music of CARMEN?'

Colin was staring at her dazedly.

'It seemed to me a kind of witchcraft,' he said.... 'I should think you

might go on the stage and make a fortune like Melba.'

She laughed. 'Why my voice is a very poor thing. And besides, I could

never depend upon it.'

'Everything just how you feel at the time, eh?' he said. 'You wouldn't

care what you did if you had a mind to do it.'

'No,' she answered. 'I shouldn't care in the least what I did if I had

a mind to do it.'

There was the faintest mimicry of his half Scotch, half Australian

accent in her voice--a little husky, with now and then unsuspected

modulations. She looked at him and the gleam in her eyes and her

strange smile made him stare at her in a sort of fascination. Joan knew

those tricks of hers and knew that they boded mischief. She got up at

the moment saying that people were going and that she must bid Lady

Tallant good-night.

Then the Premier's wife came up shyly; she wanted to thank Lady Bridget

for her singing. It had been as good as the Opera--They sometimes had

good opera companies in Leichardt's Town, etcetera, etcetera.

Lady Bridget made the prettiest curtsey, which bewildered the Premier's

wife and gave her food for speculation as to the manners and customs of

the British aristocracy. She had always understood you only curtsied to

Royalty. But she took it as a great compliment and never said anything

but kind words about Bridget ever after.

Colin McKeith escorted Mrs Gildea to her cab and as they waited in the

vestibule, obtained from her a few more particulars of Lady Bridget

O'Hara's parentage and conditions. But he said not a word implying that

he had discovered her identity with the author of the typed letter.

'I'll come along to-morrow morning if I can manage it, and tell you

about Alexandra City and the Gas-Bore,' he said carelessly as she shut

the fly door. Joan wondered whether he had caught Lady Biddy's parting

words in the drawing room.

'If Rosamond doesn't insist on my doing some stuffy exploration with

her, I'll bring my sketches some time in the morning, Joan, and you can

see whether any of them would do for the great god Gibbs.'

CHAPTER 11

'And what are you going to do, Biddy? How long are you going to stay

with the Tallants?'

'Until Rosamond gets tired of me--or I feel no further need of the

moral support of the British Throne,' answered Lady Bridget lightly.

'I'm not sure whether I shall be able to stand Luke's Jingo attitude in

regard to Labour and the Indigenous Population--all the Colonial

problems in capitals, observe. He does take his position so

strenuously; it's no good my reminding him that even the Queen is

obliged to respect a Constitutional government.'

Bridget took a cigarette from a gold case with her initials in tiny

precious stones across it, and handed the case to Mrs Gildea who shook

her head.

'Still too old-fashioned to smoke! I should have thought you'd have

been driven to it here to keep the mosquitoes at a distance....

'Do you like my case, Joan? Willoughby Maule gave it to me,' she asked.

'You didn't return it then?'

'Why should I have hurt his feelings? We weren't engaged.' A meditative

pause and then suddenly, 'Evelyn Mary doesn't smoke. Nice girls don't!'

'Biddy, I shall be sorry for Evelyn Mary if the Maules are to live in

London and you go back there again--which I suppose you will do.'

'You needn't suppose for certain that I shall go back.' She savoured

her cigarette slowly. 'I can't go on with that old life, the sort of

life one has to lead with Aunt Eliza and the Gavericks and their set. I

can't go on pushing and striving and rushing here and there in order to

be seen at the right houses and join the hunt after fleeing eligibles.'

She gave a bitter little laugh, and then her tone changed to that

ripple of frivolity in which nevertheless Mrs Gildea discerned the

under-beat of tragedy.

'Besides, even so, it's incongruous--impossible. I've come to the

conclusion that the only things which make London--as I've known

it--endurable are unlimited credit at a good dressmaker--Oh, and one of

the beautiful new motor-cars. You don't mind travelling from Dan to

Beersheba if you can do it in five minutes. But when you've got to

catch omnibuses or take the Tube, dressed in garden-party finery--well

it's all too disproportionate and tiresome.'

Mrs Gildea laughed. 'You must remember that I am out of all your fine

social business--except when I go as a reporter or look on from the

upper boxes.'

'It's abominable: it's stifling,' exclaimed Lady Biddy, 'it kills all

the best part of one. You know I've tried time after time to strike out

on my own individual self, but I've always been brought back again by

my hopeless, hopeless lack of practical knowledge of how to earn a

livelihood. The one gift I'd inherited wasn't good enough to be of any

use--If my mother had only left me the whole of her voice, I'd have

been an opera-singer. But I don't think I could have stood the

drudgery--and I should have hated the publicity of it all.... Joan, how

did you ever manage to make yourself independent?'

'By drudging,' said Mrs Gildea dryly. 'Besides, I was born differently.

And I was brought up with practical people.'

'Mr McKeith, for instance. He told me about his having been what he

called a "cattle new-chum" on your father's station.'

'He wasn't exactly a "new-chum." His father had owned a sheep-station

up in the unsettled districts. There was a tragedy--the place was sold

up when Colin was a boy. He wanted to learn how we did things further

south--and besides, he was left without a penny--that's how he came to

be with us.'

'Oh! ... anyway, he's practical. But it isn't that side of him that

appeals to me. He believes in Missions--in a sort of way.'

Mrs Gildea laughed uneasily. 'So you have discovered the streak of

idealism in Colin. But'--she veered off hastily, 'I didn't want to talk

about Colin McKeith. What I want is to hear about your own state of

mind.'

'My state of mind! That's chaotic. The fact is, I feel in a horrible

sort of transition state.... It's just as if one were trying to wind a

skein backwards--taking up one end and finding a confusion of knots;

then, taking up another and after forcing a few of the knots, giving

the thing up in despair. One knows the right end is there, but how to

find it through all that hopeless, woolly tangle!'

'Still, you must have learned something about how to wind your skein

while you've been working through your various enterprises,' said Mrs

Gildea. She took up one of Bridget's sketches which were on the table

and looked at it thoughtfully.

'This is quite charming, Biddy--if only it wasn't too fine for

reproduction. The block would cost more than the thing is worth.'

Biddy made a MOUE. 'Oh, I know. Like me isn't it? Impracticable. But I

COULD do you some illustrations. I drew Rosamond entertaining the

Ministerial Circle last night and showed it to Vereker Wells while we

were waiting for breakfast. He nearly died with laughing. I couldn't

have dared to let Luke see it.'

'That I can believe. And I should be murdered by the Leichardt'stonians

if I allowed it to be published. But if you'd come with me through the

Blue Mountains and caricature yourself exploring the Jenolan

Caves--like the "Lady of Quality" in the Dolomite Country I could do

something with that.'

Mrs Gildea alluded to their first and only collaboration as author and

artist.

'Yes, I might. We'll think about it. And if I did perhaps I could make

money enough to keep me out here for a year or two travelling about.'

Joan Gildea looked up in a startled way from the drawing she had been

studying, and asked with some eagerness:

'Biddy, do you really mean that you are thinking of stopping out here

for a year or two?'

'I do. I want to shake myself free from the old clogs. I want to be

honest with myself and with--with the people who ARE honest with

themselves. I've always envied you, Joan. Your life is real at least.

You can put your finger on vital pulse beats. I should like to do as

you are doing, study and learn from a country that has no traditions,

but is making itself. I want to breathe Nature unadulterated--if I

could only reach the reality of her. Joan, I have the feeling that if

one could go right up to the Bush--far away from the Government House

atmosphere and Luke Tallant's red-tapism and the stupid imitation of

our English social shams--well, I think one might touch a more vital

set of heart-beats than the heart-beats of civilization.'

'You are off civilization, Biddy?'

'Yes I am, I've had a horrible time. I was quite reckless and spent far

too much on clothes and things--but that's not what matters--it's the

effect on one's inner self that matters. And now I'm going through the

pangs of revulsion, and just wondering where I can find anything that's

true and satisfying. I believe it may be a kind of birth into a new

life--coming out here you know and all the rest.'

She stopped, her long golden brown eyes fixed Sphinx-like on Joan, who

returned the gaze, but did not answer in words. Biddy went on: 'YOUR

work is practical--not idealistic. I believe the truth of it all is

that the idealists haven't built up on a practical basis. There's too

much POSE. Joan, I do think it's only the pinch of starvation that

knocks down the ridiculous POSE of people.'

'True enough. Your cranks don't get much beyond POSE.--They think they

do, but they don't.'

'Even the ones who believe in themselves--and who are in their way

truly sincere. Joan, do you know, there were moments at the meetings I

went to of those people--Christian Scientists, and my Spiritual

Socialists, and all those philo-factory-girls and tramps, and

philo-beasts, and philo-blacks and the rest of it--Moments when a

ghastly wonder would come over me whether, if we were all stranded on a

desert island with a shortage of food and water, it wouldn't be a case

of fighting for bare existence and of Nature red of tooth and claw.'

'True for you, Lady Bridget. I like the way that's put,' broke in a

voice from the other side of the veranda railing.

Lady Bridget started and looked round, a sudden flush rushing upon the

ivory paleness of her face. If she had not had her back turned to the

garden; if she had not left the gate open behind her, and if the wind

in the bamboos had not then made a noisy rustling, she would have seen

the visitor or heard his steps on the gravel path. Or if she had not

been so absorbed in her subject and her cigarette she might have

noticed that Mrs Gildea had looked up quickly a minute before and given

a mute signal to the intruder not to interrupt the conversation

untowardly.

CHAPTER 12

Lady Bridget recovered herself as Colin McKeith mounted the steps and

made the two ladies a rather self-conscious salute.

'I suppose you know that's a quotation,' she said.

'Weren't you a bit out?' he answered, and repeated the phrase. 'Excuse

my correcting you.'

Bridget shrugged.

'Thank you. But I always thought men of action weren't great readers.

How did you do your reading?'

'Some day--if you care to hear--I'll tell you.'

She looked at him interestedly. 'Yes, I should care to hear.'

'Not now,' put in Mrs Gildea. 'You've come this morning to tell us

about the Gas-Bore at Alexandra City, and, as it's got to go into my

next letter, I shall take some notes. Do look for a comfortable chair,

Colin, and you may smoke if you want to.'

'This is good enough,' and he settled himself after his own fashion at

Lady Bridget's feet with his back against the veranda post and his long

legs sprawling over the steps.

Lady Bridget leaned out of the depths of her deep canvas chair and

offered him her cigarette case.

He eyed it in amused criticism--the dull gold of the case, and the

initials in diamonds, sapphires and rubies set diagonally across it.

'YOUR writing?'

Again the faint pink rose in her paleness.

'No, it's the writing of the person who gave it to me.'

'Was it a man?' he asked bluntly.

Bridget looked at him with slight haughtiness.

'Really, Mr McKeith, I think you are--inquisitive.'

'Yes, I am. And I've Bush manners--not up to your form. Please excuse

my impertinence.'

'I don't mind Bush manners. They're--rather refreshing sometimes....

But'--again extending and then half-withdrawing her offering hand.

'You'd despise my cigarettes?'

He made an eager movement.

'No I shouldn't. Choose me one, won't you--two--if I may have one to

keep.'

'Why to keep?' She selected two of the dainty gold-tipped cigarettes,

and he received them almost as if they had been sacred symbols. One he

placed carefully, notwithstanding her laughing protest, in a

letter-case which he carried in an inner pocket. She tilted her face

forward for him to light the other cigarette at hers, and he did so,

always with that suggestion of reverence which sat so oddly upon him.

Mrs Gildea watching the pair was immensely struck by it.

He smoked in silence for a few moments, his eyes still apparently

fascinated by the glittering initials on the case which now Bridget

attached to her chatelaine chain. She threw away the end of her

cigarette.

'Well, so you've become the Governor's unconstitutional adviser?' she

said. 'Joan, do you know that Luke Tallant kept Mr McKeith talking and

smoking in the loggia just below my bedroom for hours last night after

every one had gone--I know, because I couldn't get to sleep.'

McKeith had all compunction, 'I'm downright sorry for that, Lady

Bridget. I'd have gone away if I'd only guessed your room was up above.'

'Oh, it didn't matter. I'd lots to think about--my own shortcomings and

Luke's responsibilities.'

'He takes them--hard,' hazarded McKeith.

'I hope you gave him good advice,' put in Mrs Gildea.

McKeith's lips twisted into a humorous smile.

'Well, I told Sir Luke that I didn't think he need bother himself just

yet awhile over that northern tour of inspection he's talking about.'

'He wants to make a kind of royal progress, Joan, through the

Back-Blocks,' said Lady Biddy.

'It'll mean a bit of stiff riding,' said McKeith, 'but I've offered to

show him round the Upper Leura anyway, and to find him a quiet hack.'

'Rosamond flatly declines the Royal Progress,' said Bridget. 'I'm

coming instead of her.'

'Can you ride?' he asked.

'CAN I ride--Can any O'Hara ride! You needn't find ME a quiet hack.'

'All right,' said McKeith. 'But I wouldn't make sure of that by putting

you on a buckjumper. It's a bargain then, Lady Bridget.'

'A bargain--what?'

'You promise to pay me a visit when the Governor makes his trip

north--when he carries out his notion of establishing military patrols

and a Maxim gun or two to put down Trades-Unionism and native outrages

in the Back-Blocks?'

Lady Bridget looked at him thoughtfully. He had pulled out his tobacco

pouch and was filling a well-worn pipe. 'You won't mind my pipe, will

you--as you're a smoker yourself. Mrs Gildea likes it best--And so do

I.'

Lady Bridget sniffed his raw tobacco and made a tiny moue. 'Well, if

you prefer that--No, of course I don't mind. I see,' she went on, 'that

you favour the Maxim gun idea, Mr McKeith. I understand that you're one

of the Oppressors; and you and I wouldn't agree on that point.'

Mr McKeith returned her look, all the hardness in his face softening to

an expression of almost tender indulgence.

'We'd see about that. I might convert you--but in the Back-Blocks.'

'Or I might convert YOU.'

He shook his head, and then laughed in a shy, boyish way.

'There's no knowing what might happen--but in the Back-Blocks.'

Lady Bridget leaned forward. 'Tell me about them--Tell me about your

life in the Bush and what makes you hate the Blacks.'

'What makes me hate the Blacks?' he repeated slowly and the soft look

on his face changed now to one very dour and grim.

'You do hate them, don't you? Mr McKeith, the Premier told me something

about you last night, which simply filled me with horror. If I believed

it--or unless I knew that what you did had been in honourable warfare,

I don't think I could bear to speak to you again. Now, I'm going to ask

you if it's true.'

'If what is true? Lady Bridget, I'll tell you the truth if you ask me

for it, about anything I've done. But--I warn you--ugly things

happen--in the Back-Blocks.'

'The Premier said that you were the terror of the natives. He told me

about a gun you have with a great many notches on the barrel of it, and

he said that each notch represented a black-fellow that you had killed.'

'I never killed a black-fellow except in fair fight, or under lawful

provocation. Many a time one of them has sneaked a spear at me from

behind a gum tree; and I'd have been done for if I hadn't been keeping

a sharp look-out.'

'But you were taking their land,' Lady Bridget exclaimed impetuously,

'you had come, an invader, into their territory. What right had you to

do that? You were the aggressor. And you can't judge them by the moral

laws of civilised humanity. They fought in the only way they

understood.'

'Lady Bridget, there are moral laws, which all humanity--civilised or

savage understands. I'm not saying that no white man in the Bush has

ever violated these laws, I'm not saying that the Blacks hadn't

something on their side. I'm only saying that in my experience--it was

the black man and not the white man who was the aggressor. And when you

ask me what made me hate the Blacks--well--it isn't a pretty

story--but, if you like, I'll tell it to you some time.'

'Tell me now,' she exclaimed, 'Oh, Joan ... Won't your notes keep?'

Mrs Gildea had got up, a sheaf of pencils and a reporter's note book in

her hand.

'Yes, for a few minutes. But I've just remembered something I've got to

refer to in one of Mr Gibbs' letters. Don't mind me; I'll be back

presently.'

McKeith seemed to take no heed of her departure; his eyes were fixed on

Lady Bridget; there was in them a light of inward excitement.

'Please go on,' she said, 'I want so much to hear.'

He thought for a few moments, shook the ashes from his pipe and then

plunged into his story.

'I've got to go back to when I was quite a youngster--taken from

school--I went to St Paul's in the Hammersmith Road--just before I was

seventeen. You see before that my father had scraped together his

little bit of money and we'd been living in West Kensington waiting

while he made out what we were all going to do. He wasn't any great

shakes, my father, in the way of birth, and fortune. I daresay, you

guessed that, Lady Bridget?'

She tossed her head back impatiently. 'Oh what DOES that matter! Go on,

please.'

'He'd been a farmer, Glasgow way'--McKeith still pronounced it

'Glesca,' 'and my mother was a minister's daughter, as good a woman and

as true a lady as ever breathed. But that's neither here nor there in

what turned out a bad business. Well, we all emigrated out here, and,

after a while, my old dad bought a station on the Lower Leura--taken in

he was, of course, over the deal, and not realising that it was

unsettled country in those days. So the whole family of us started up

from the coast to it.... He drove my mother and my two sisters just

grown up, and a woman servant--Marty--in a double buggy, and Jerry the

bullock driver and me in the dray with him and taught me to drive

bullocks. There were stock-boys, two of them riding along side.

'It took us three and a half weeks, to reach the station, averaging

about thirty miles a day and camping out each night.

'I'd like you to camp out in the Bush sometime, Lady Bridget, right

away from everything--it'ud be an experience that 'ud live with you all

your life--My word! It's like nothing else--lying straight under the

Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the stars

coming up above the gum trees--and the queer wild smell of the gums and

the loneliness of it all--not a sound until the birds begin at dawn but

the HOP-HOP of the Wallabies, and the funny noises of opossums, and the

crying of the curlews and native dogs--dingoes we call 'em.... Well,

there! I won't bother you with all that--though, truly, I tell you,

it's the nearest touch with the Infinite I'VE ever known.... Lord! I

remember the first night I camped right in the Bush--me rolled in my

blanket on one side of the fire, and Leura-Jim the black-boy on the

other. And the wonder of it all coming over me as I lay broad awake

thinking of the contrast between London and its teeming millions--and

the awful solitude of the Bush.... I wonder if your blood would have

run cold as mine did when the grass rustled under stealthy footsteps

and me thinking it was the blacks sneaking us--and the relief of

hearing three dismal howls and knowing it was dingoes and not blacks.'

'I'd have loved it' murmured Bridget tensely. 'Go on, please.'

'Well, I've got to come to the tragedy. It began this way through an

act of kindness on our journey up. We were going through the

bunya-bunya country not far from our station, when out of the Bush

there came a black gin with two half-caste girls, she ran up and

stopped the buggy and implored my mother's protection for her girls

because the Blacks wanted to kill and eat them.'

'O ... oh!' Biddy made a shuddering exclamation.

'Didn't I say the Blacks hadn't everything on their side--I ought to

explain though that in our district were large forests of a kind of

pine--there's one in this garden,' and he pointed to a pyramidal fir

tree with spreading branches of small pointed leaves spiked at the

ends, and with a cone of nuts about the size of a big man's head,

hanging from one of the branches.

'That's the bunya-bunya, and the nuts are splendid roasted in the

ashes--if ever that one gets properly ripe--it has to be yellow, you

know--I'll ask Joan Gildea to let me roast it for you. Only it wouldn't

be the same thing at all as when it's done in a fire of gum logs, the

nuts covered with red ashes, and then peeled and washed down with

quartpot tea....'

'Quartpot tea! What a lot you'll have to show me if--if I ever come to

your station in the Back-Blocks.'

'Different from your London Life, eh? ... Your balls and dinners and

big shows and coaching meets in Hyde Park, and all the rest of the

flummery! Different, too, from your kid-glove fox-hunts over grass

fields and trimmed hedges and puddles of ditches--the sort of thing

you've been accustomed to, Lady Bridget, when you've gone out from your

castle for a sporting spree!'

'A sporting spree!' She laughed with a child's merriment, and he joined

in the laugh, 'It's clear to me, Mr McKeith, that you've never hunted

in Ireland. And how did you know, by the way, that I'd lived in a

castle?'

'I was led to believe that a good many of your kind owned historic

castles which your forefathers had won and defended with the sword,' he

answered, a little embarrassed.

'That's true enough.... But if you could see Castle Gaverick! My old

Aunt is always talking of restoring it, but she never will, and if my

cousin Chris Gaverick ever does come into it, he'd rather spend his

money in doing something else.... But never mind that.... I want to

hear about the black gin and the half-caste girls, and if your mother

saved them from the cannibals ... and why the blacks wanted to eat

their own kind. Dog doesn't eat dog--at least, so they tell one.'

'It's this way. Our blacks weren't regular cannibals, but in the bunya

season they'd all collect in the scrubs and feed on the nuts and

nothing else for months. Then after a bit they'd get meat-hungry, and

there not being many wild animals in Australia and only a few cattle in

those outlying districts, they'd satisfy their cravings by killing and

eating some of themselves--lubras--young girls--by preference, and,

naturally, half-castes, as having no particular tribal status, for

choice.'

'Half-castes!' She repeated, a little puzzled.

'These ones had Chinky blood in them--daughters of a Chinaman

fossicker.... We're not partial to the Chinese in Australia--only we

don't eat them, we expel them--methods just a bit dissimilar, but the

principle the same, you see.... Anyway, of course we took on the gin

and her girls, and for about a year didn't have any particular trouble

at the station with the blacks--though there was a shepherd speared in

one of the out-huts.... That was his fault, however, poor devil--the

old story--but it don't matter. The trouble came to a head with a black

boy, called Leura-Jimmy, that Jerry the bullock-driver brought up with

him and left at the station where he went down to the township for

store supplies--He took me with him--I told you I was learning

bullock-driving....'

McKeith paused, and the dark look came upon his face.

'And Leura-Jimmy?' put in Bridget.

'Oh, he was a fine, big fellow--plausible, too, and could speak pidgin

English--he was never weaned from his tribe, and he was a treacherous

scoundrel at heart.... As a precautionary measure, my father forbade

the blacks to come up to the head-station. But Jimmy fell in love with

the eldest of the half-caste girls. She encouraged him at first, then

took up with one of the stock-boys....

'It was the bunya season again, and the girls' old tribe, under their

King Mograbar--a devil incarnate in a brute--I sent him to Hell

afterwards with my own hand and never did a better deed'--McKeith's

brown fists clenched and the fury in his eyes blazed so that he himself

looked almost devilish for a moment. His face remained very grim and

dour as he proceeded.

'Jimmy had got to know through the half-caste girl about our ways and

doings, and he made a diabolic plot with King Mograbar to get the

blacks into the house.... Every living soul was murdered ...surprised

in their sleep ... My father ... my mother ... my sisters ... God! ...

I can't speak of it....'

He got up abruptly, jerking his long legs, and went to the further end

of the veranda, where he stood with set features and brows like a red

bar, below which staring eyes were fixed vacantly upon the avenue of

bunya trees in the long walk of the Botanical Gardens across the river.

But they did not see those bunya trees. What they saw was a row of

mutilated bodies, lying stark along the veranda of that head-station on

the Leura.

Bridget was leaning forward in her squatter's chair, her fingers

grasping the arms of it, her face very white and her eyes staring too,

as though they also beheld the scene of horror.

Presently McKeith came back, pale too, but quite composed.

'I beg your pardon,' he said stiffly. 'Perhaps I should not have told

you.'

'It's--horrible. But I'm glad to know. Thank you for telling me.'

He looked at her wistfully. There was silence for a moment or two.

'And you ... you ... where were you?' she stammered.

'Me! I was with the drays, you know. We got back about noon that

day.... If we'd been twelve hours sooner! Well, I suppose I should have

been murdered with the rest.... The blacks had gone off with their

loot.... We ... we buried our dead.... And then we ran up our best

horses and never drew rein for forty miles till we'd got to where a

band of the Native Police were camped.... And then ... we took what

vengeance we could.... It wasn't complete till a long time afterwards.'

He was standing behind Bridget's chair, his eyes still gazing beyond

the river. He did not notice that she leaned back suddenly, and her

hands fell nervelessly to her lap. He felt a touch on his arm. It was

Mrs Gildea, who had come out to the veranda again. 'Colin,' she said,

'I want you to go and bring me my typewriter from the parlour. And then

you've got to dictate "copy," about the Alexandra City Gas-Bore. Please

go at once.'

He obeyed. Mrs Gildea bent over Lady Bridget.

'Biddy! ... You're not faint, are you?'

Lady Bridget roused herself and looked up at her friend rather

wildly.... 'No.... What do you take me for? ... I said I wanted real

things, Joan ... And I've got them.'

She laughed a little hysterically.

'All right! But we shall give you a taste of real Australia that isn't

quite so gruesome. That some of the tragedy belongs to the pioneer

days.... I could tell you things myself that my father has told me. ...

But I won't.... Mind, Colin McKeith is no more of a hero than a dozen

bush boys I knew when I first knew him. Yes, put it there, Colin,

please.... And now, if Biddy doesn't mind, we'll proceed to business,

which is my IMPERIALIST Letter. I suppose you haven't brought back any

snapshots of Alexandra City and your wonderful Gas-Bore that Mr Gibbs

could get worked up for his paper?'

CHAPTER 13

That was not the only time Lady Bridget and McKeith met on Mrs Gildea's

veranda. In fact, Biddy, reminiscent of wild sea-excursions along the

shore by Castle Gaverick, developed a passion for what she called tame

boating on the Leichardt River. She found a suitable skiff in the

boat-house--the Government House grounds sloped to the water's edge,

and would row herself up and down the river reaches. It was easy to

round the point, skirt the Botanical Gardens, and, crossing above the

ferry, land below Mrs Gildea's cottage, then climb up the bank and

enter by a lower gate to the garden. Thus she would often turn up

unexpectedly of mornings for a chat with her friend in the veranda

study.

At this time, Colin McKeith contracted a similar habit. He showed a

still greater interest in Mrs Gildea's journalistic work and professed

a strong desire to enlighten British statesmen, through the medium of

Mr Gibbs' admirable paper, on certain Imperial questions affecting

Australia--the danger of a Japanese invasion in the northern

waters--the establishment of a naval base by Germany in New Guinea--the

Yellow Labour Problem and so forth. He would intersperse his political

dissertation with racy bits of description of life in the Bush, and

would give the points of view of pearl fishers, miners, loafers,

officials in out-of-the-way townships, Labour reformers, sheep and

cattle owners--all of which vastly amused Lady Bridget, and was

valuable 'copy,' typed unscrupulously by Mrs Gildea. In fact, she owed

to it much of the success which, later, attended her journalistic

venture. Mrs Gildea thought at first that the 'copy' would be more

easily obtainable in the intervals before and after Lady Bridget's

arrival, or on the days when she failed to come. But, finding that

Colin was distinctly at his best as a narrator with Biddy for an

audience, she artfully arranged to take her notes under those

conditions. This lasted two or three weeks, during which period Sir

Luke and Lady Tallant conscientiously improved their acquaintance with

the new sphere of their labours. They visited hospitals, inspected

public buildings, inaugurated social schemes, and, to the strains of

'God Save the Queen,' performed many other insignificant public

functions, from which, as often as not, their guest, Lady Bridget,

basely cried off.

On one such occasion, Joan, arrayed in her best, had patriotically gone

forth on a steaming March day to support their Excellencies, fondly

expecting that, as arranged, Lady Bridget and Colin would meet her. But

Lady Tallant, looking distinctly cross, accompanied the Governor alone.

Bridget, it appeared, had come down, just as the carriage drove up, in

her morning frock and garden hat, saying that she had a bad headache

and meant to spend the afternoon in a hammock by the river bank. As for

Colin, there was no sign of him.

But when Mrs Gildea got home very tired, and hot she was made extremely

angry by hearing the voices of Lady Bridget and McKeith in the veranda

where they were drinking tea and, it seemed, holding a confidential

conversation. Mrs Gildea's gorge rose higher. She had to stop a minute

to try and recover her temper. Here was Biddy disburdening herself to

Colin of her family troubles and short-comings, showing herself and

them in the worst light, singing small to a man with whom it was highly

desirable she should maintain her dignity. Instead of that, she was

deliberately pulling down the barrier of rank and social position which

should exist between Lady Bridget O'Hara and the Factor's son, the

Out-Back squatter--Colin McKeith.

Biddy was saying: 'Oh, but you're as bad as that sort of person who

can't be made to realise that the oldest peerage in Ireland counts for

nothing in comparison with an oil-king's millions and being able to

entertain the right set.... And besides, really Mr McKeith, there's no

difference at all between us. You talk such a lot about YOUR

grandfather having been a Scotch peasant. Why! MY mother's father was

an Italian beggar--Ugh! haven't you seen them with their crutches and

things on the steps of the churches?--And my mother sang in the streets

of Naples until a kind musician heard her and had her trained to be a

opera singer.'

'Your mother?'

'My mother! That's where my CARMEN comes from--only that my voice, I'm

told, isn't to be compared with what hers was.... But that's not the

worst about my mother. Not that I blame her. I think that a woman has a

perfect right to leave her husband if she has ceased to care for him,

and that it's far more moral to live with a man you love and can't

marry, than with a husband you hate.'

Mrs Gildea cut short Lady Bridget's exposition of her views on morality

before McKeith had time to answer. Her voice was sharp as she went up

the steps and arraigned the pair.

'Really, Biddy, I do call this too bad of you. May I ask how you and Mr

McKeith come to be drinking tea together in my veranda?'

'Sure, and it's by accident intoirely,' answered Biddy, with a

whimsical look and the touch of the brogue she sometimes put on when a

situation became embarrassing.

'A prearranged accident!'

'No it wasn't, Joan. As a matter-of-fact, we were the last persons

either of us expected to meet.'

'Honour bright,' put in McKeith. 'I'd forgotten all about the Pineapple

Products Exhibition, and I just dropped in at Government House to pay

my respects after a pleasant dinner two nights ago--What you'd call a

visit of digestion.'

'And since when, Colin, have you become an observer of social

obligations?' jeered Mrs Gildea.

He grinned, 'Ah! you have me there. Anyway, I asked for Lady Bridget,

and found her down by the boat-shed.'

'And we thought it would be cooler on the water, so he rowed me round

the point. It was the most natural thing in the world that we should

discover we were thirsty, and that we should come up the garden and ask

your old woman to give us some tea. Don't be a cat, Joan. You never

used to be grudging of your hospitality.'

Mrs Gildea quickly recovered her usual genial demeanour. She poured

herself out a cup of tea, and remarked that it was refreshing after the

pine-apple syrups and other concoctions she had, as in duty bound,

sampled at the Show. Lady Bridget rattled along with questions about

the Function and the behaviour of the Government House party. Had Sir

Luke been too over-poweringly pompous? Was Lady Tallant really cross?

and had Vereker Wells made any more blunders? and so forth. But she did

not enlighten Mrs Gildea much about her doings with Colin McKeith, and

presently said she must go and make her peace with Rosamond. McKeith

accompanied her--naturally, since he had to row her back to the

Government House landing. There was something in the manner of the pair

that Mrs Gildea could not understand. Of course, Colin was in

love--that she knew already. But was Biddy merely playing with the big

primitive-souled bushman--or was it possible that she, too, could be in

love?

CHAPTER 14

The next time Biddy came, Joan tackled matters boldly.

'Biddy, I've had my marching orders. Mr Gibbs finds Leichardt's Land a

bit stale. I take train to Sydney next week and tour the Riverina, the

Blue Mountains and the country along the railway line to Melbourne. Are

you coming with me?'

Bridget gave a deprecatory laugh. 'I don't know what Rosamond would

say.'

'She'd recognise the necessities of the situation. Besides, you could

come back again.'

'I haven't been here a month. And I don't find Leichardt's Land stale.

On the contrary, I find it extremely stimulating. No, I think the

Riverina and the Blue Mountains will keep, as far as I'm concerned.'

'But I won't keep. Mr Gibb and the drawings for THE IMPERIALIST won't

keep. The question is whether you want to make some money or not?'

'It's the one thing I've WANTED to do all my life, and have never yet

succeeded in doing except when we collaborated in "The Lady of Quality."

'Here's your chance for a continuation series, "The Lady of Quality in

the Bush." How does that sound?'

'Rather clumsy and long, don't you think? "Lady Bridget in the Bush"

would be more alliterative and catching. Only I should be giving myself

away.'

'I think you're doing that already,' said Mrs. Gildea.

'How do you mean, Joan? I don't see it.'

'Yes, you do. Look here, Biddy. Colin McKeith isn't Mr Willoughby

Maule.'

'He's a hundred times better man, Joan.'

'That you needn't tell me; and I'm glad you recognise the fact. But

from the point of view of "The Lady of Quality," would he be a better

husband?'

'You forget, my dear, that I'm not the genuine article. I'm nothing but

a pinchbeck imitation of the real "Lady of Quality." If HIS grandfather

was a peasant, remember that my maternal grandparents were peasants

too. I told him so yesterday.'

'Has it come to that? You go fast, Biddy. But I warn you--Colin McKeith

isn't the man to be trifled with. He knows his own mind. The question

is whether you know yours.'

Biddy nodded her head like a Chinese Mandarin.

'Two months ago you were wildly in love--or, at least, from your

letters one might have judged so--with another man,' said Mrs Gildea.

'No--no--don't call that love.'

'Call it a violent attraction, then. I suspect the man could have made

you marry him if he had chosen. So far as I can understand, you

quarrelled because neither of you would face matrimony on what you

considered an inadequate income.'

'Middle-class respectability--living in Pimlico or further Kensington,'

scoffed Biddy. 'Ordering sprats and plaice for dinner and pretending

they're soles and whitebait. Perambulators stuffing up the hall; paying

your own books and having your gown made at home! No, thank you.

'Possum skins and a black's gunya--that's Australese for a wigwam,

isn't it?--appeal to me infinitely more.'

Mrs Gildea threw up her hands.

'Biddy, you haven't the faintest notion how dull and uncomfortable--how

utterly unpoetic--how sordid the life of a struggling bushman can be.'

'No! You know, Joan, I think that it might be perfectly fascinating--if

one really cared for the bushman.'

'Really cared! Have you EVER really cared for any man? COULD you ever

really care?'

'That's what I've been asking myself. It would have to be someone quite

different from all the other men I've liked--something altogether above

the ordinary man, to make me REALLY care.'

'You said that Mr Willoughby Maule was different from any man you'd

ever met. Each man you've ever fancied yourself in love with has been

different from all the rest.'

Lady Bridget laughed rather uneasily.

'How tiresomely exact you are, Joan! Of course, they were different.

Everybody is different from everybody else. And I attract marked types.

Will was more marked and more attractive--as well as attracted--that's

all.'

'His attraction doesn't seem to have been as strong as self-interest,

any way,' said Joan, with deliberate terseness.

The girl's small, pale face flushed to deep crimson for a moment.

'Joan, you are cruel! You know that was the sting! And it wouldn't have

stung so if I hadn't cared. Sometimes I feel the maddest desire to hurt

him--to pay him out. I never felt like that about any of the

others--the ones I really did ALMOST want to marry. And then--at other

times I'd give ANYTHING just to have him again as he used to be.'

'I'm certain you weren't really in love with him,' exclaimed Mrs Gildea.

Bridget seemed to be considering. 'Wasn't I?--I'm not so sure of that.

No--' she went on impetuously, 'I was not REALLY in love with him. He

had a magnetic influence over me as I told you. Perhaps I might get a

little under it again if he were to appear suddenly without his

wife--it turns me sick to think of a married man having a magnetic

influence over me.... Even if there was no wife--now. So, when you've

idealised a person and can't idealise him any more: C'EST FINI. There's

nothing but a ghost to come and make you uncomfortable sometimes--and

that CAN'T last.... Besides, I've been breathing the strong clear air

of your gum trees lately. It's a case of pull devil--pull bushman. Do

you see?'

'I see, my dear, that you're idealising Colin McKeith, and let me tell

you that a bushman is very far removed from the super-man. Oh, Colin is

a fine enough specimen of a pioneer in a rough country. But his rough

life, his bush surroundings, and all the rest--why, he'd jar upon you

in a hundred ways if you were alone with him in them. Then--he's not of

your order--though I hate the phrase and I hate the kind of man. All

the same, Biddy, you may pretend to despise the men of your own class,

but I fancy that, after a spell of roughing it with Colin on the Upper

Leura, you'd hanker after something in them that Colin hasn't and never

will have.... And then,' Joan's swift imagination carried her on with a

rush, 'you don't know in the least the type of man he is. You'd have to

give in to him: he'd never give in to you. He's domineering, jealous,

vindictive and reserved. Before a month was out you'd quarrel, and

there would be no chance of your ever making it up again.'

'I must say, Joan, that for a friend of his you're not an enthusiastic

advocate.'

'It's because I'm so fond of Colin that I hate the thought of your

making him miserable. Anyway, however, you're bound to do that.'

'I don't see why.'

'If you flirt with him and then drop him, he'll suffer, though he'll be

too proud to show it. And as for the alternative, it's out of the

question. You must see that it would be sheer folly.'

'I've committed a great many follies,' said Bridget wistfully.

'But, so far, none that are quite irrevocable.'

'Well, he hasn't asked me yet to commit this one.'

'You're leading him on to it. Biddy, it is abominable of you to

encourage him as you do--coming here with him that day.... And you let

him take you riding....'

'Yes, he knows now that I CAN ride.'

'And he's at Government House nearly every day--I can't think what Lady

Tallant is about to ask him so often to dinner.'

'She likes him because he takes Luke off her hands. You know we've

nick-named him the Unconstitutional Adviser.'

'That's rubbish. You sing to him.'

'What harm is there in my singing to Colin McKeith?'

'As if you didn't know well enough that you're perfectly irresistible

when you look at a man while you're singing those Neapolitan things.

Biddy, it won't do. Give it up.'

'I can't do that, Joan.' She spoke with a strange earnestness. 'Don't

you see that it's giving me a chance.'

'Of forgetting Mr Willoughby Maule!'

'Yes.... But it's more than that.'

'More than that.... Do you mean ... can you mean that you could love

Colin McKeith--for himself?'

'Love is a big word, Joan. I've never said to any man--"I love you."'

She spoke the words now as if she were uttering a sacred formula. Her

voice reminded Mrs Gildea of something--the same note in the voice of

Colin McKeith when he, too, had spoken of love. Yet what she had said

was true. Bridget had talked often enough of falling 'in love'--which

she had always been at pains to define as a mere transitory

condition--not by any means the 'real thing,' and she had freely

confessed to violent attractions and even adorations. But, as she had

sometimes solemnly stated, she had never 'loved.'

'I can't explain,' she went on. 'I know you think me a heartless,

emotional flirt. Yes, I am. I admit it. But there's a locked door in

the inner chamber--a shrine that no one has desecrated. The Goddess is

there, waiting--waiting to reveal herself.'

'And so--all the rest have been--experiments?'

'No, The Quest of the Ideal through the Forest of Illusion. I've often

thought, Joan, there was a lot in the motive of that novel of Thomas

Hardy's THE WELL BELOVED. But I seem to be mixing up my metaphor, and

it's time I went back to Government House.' She got up and began

putting on her gloves.

Mrs Gildea laughed hysterically. Somehow, she could not imagine Colin

McKeith producing the golden key and masterfully taking possession of

Lady Bridget's locked shrine. She could only think of him as tricked,

deceived and suffering hideously at the end. She stammered out her

fear, beseeching Biddy to be merciful, but Biddy's mood had changed,

and she only smiled her Sphinx smile.

'I think he's quite able to look after himself,' she said. 'And if he

isn't, sure, he must take the consequences.'

CHAPTER 15

Mrs Gildea could get nothing more out of Lady Bridget. She attacked

McKeith in a more tentative manner, but Colin was doggedly reticent. He

was taking the thing hardly. His way of facing a serious situation was

by setting his teeth and saying nothing. After these unsuccessful

attempts, Joan made opportunity, before leaving, for a private word on

the subject with Lady Tallant. But Rosamond Tallant treated the matter,

at first, very lightly.

'Dear Mrs Gildea, you needn't worry, it's only Biddy's way. She must

have some excitement to keep her going. If it isn't one thing, it's

another. In London, I tried to interest her in Society, or Politics,

and the Opera--and now Luke is trying to interest her in Colonial

questions--but she always drifts back to--Men. She can't help it. And

the funny thing is, I don't believe that in her heart she is capable of

a serious attachment.'

'I'm not so sure of that,' answered Mrs Gildea.

'If so, she has had plenty of opportunities of proving it. But I wasn't

ever afraid even of Willoughby Maule. I was certain that would fizzle

out before real harm could come of it. And mercifully it did. He's

married a woman with a quarter of a million and the right to dispose of

it absolutely as she pleases. I heard that she signed a will on her

wedding day, leaving it all to him in the event of her death. Too great

a temptation, wasn't it? Though I do think if Biddy had chosen she

might have kept him in spite of Miss Bagalay and her money. As it is,

Colin McKeith, or else the novelty of it all out here--has driven him

out of her head. I felt sure of that when I asked her to come. You

needn't worry about her.'

'It's not so much about Biddy that I'm worrying as about my old friend,

Colin McKeith,' said Mrs Gildea. 'It isn't fair that he should be made

a victim.'

'Oh, well, it isn't altogether Biddy's fault that she attracts all

types of men.' And then Lady Tallant made exactly the same remark as

Lady Bridget. 'I think Mr McKeith is quite able to look after himself.

I don't pity him in the least. Didn't somebody say of Lady Something or

Other that to love her was a liberal education?'

'Steele said it of Lady Elizabeth Hastings.'

'I call it a liberal education for Colin McKeith to love Lady Bridget

O'Hara,' laughed Lady Tallant.

Mrs Gildea changed her tactics and voiced her other fear--a more

insistent fear.

'Has it ever occurred to you that Lady Bridget O'Hara might fall in

love with Colin McKeith?'

'Why, my dear, she's wildly in love with him already,' rejoined Lady

Tallant, to Joan Gildea's surprise.

'You've seen it?'

'I'm not blind, and I know Biddy. But I've seen that she's taking this

affair differently from the others, and that's what makes me think it

has gone deeper. A very good thing for Biddy.'

'You can't mean that it would be a good thing for Biddy to marry Colin

McKeith?'

Lady Tallant's social manner was rather full of affectations.

Underneath it, however, lay commonsense and sympathy. She became

suddenly simple and direct.

'Well, now, Mrs Gildea, let us look at the matter without prejudice.

You are fond of Biddy and so am I, but we know her drawbacks.

Naturally, it wouldn't be a good thing under ordinary conditions, but

is she likely to do much better?'

'She has had plenty of chances.'

'And thrown them all away. And though she looks so young, she is close

on thirty. Of course, with her looks and her fascination she ought to

have married well. I'm sure her friends have tried hard enough for her.

But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of

ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does

one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the

whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady Tallant

enumerted names.

Mrs Gildea acquiesced mournfully. Lady Tallant continued:

'The truth is, Biddy has tired out the patience of her relatives and

friends. Molly and Chris Gaverick got the hump over Willoughby

Maule--who would have done well enough if he had only had more money.

Old Eliza'--so Lady Tallant irreverently styled the Dowager Countess of

Gaverick--'told me herself that she was going to wash her hands of

Biddy. I shouldn't wonder if she didn't leave her a penny. And, after

all, it was her own fortune, and she has a horde of needy relatives.

She will consider that she has done her duty to the Gavericks if she

lets Chris have the Castle. When all's said and done, I don't see that

it would be such a bad thing for Biddy to marry a rich Australian

squatter.'

'Colin McKeith is not rich.'

'Oh, he will be. Sir Luke has been hearing all about him.'

'He's not her equal. His father was just a land bailiff, and his

grandfather a crofter.'

'Oh, what DOES that matter! In these days any of us would marry the

roughest of rough diamonds, provided he was decently well off. Biddy

has always been mad after adventure and an open-air life. She's an

original, and everything would be in keeping.' Lady Tallant went on

briskly. 'She would enjoy living among the blacks, provided they did

not murder her, and I suppose one could trust Mr McKeith for that.'

'Oh, there's no danger from the blacks now,' put in Mrs Gildea.

'And then she needn't be buried for ever in the Bush. Luke tells me

that Colin McKeith is certain to come to the fore in politics--I

daresay he will be Premier of Leichardt's Land before long. Biddy would

like bossing the show and airing her philanthropic crazes.'

Mrs Gildea shook her head doubtfully.

'Colin wouldn't agree with them. Besides, she would be expatriated.'

'Oh no. The big men over here are always taking trips to England, being

feted and made much of in Downing Street--Imperialist Policy and that

sort of thing--I can see Biddy at it.'

Mrs Gildea was silent. She scarcely knew Lady Tallant in this downright

mood.

'There's no use blinking matters,' said that lady. 'At home, Biddy has

been a failure. That was why I persuaded her to come out with us. I

knew she wanted a fresh start badly.'

It was quite true. Mrs Gildea remembered Bridget's confidences to

herself. She could not help feeling that Lady Tallant was right in the

main, and put forward no more objections. But she explained her own

plans and the necessity for her immediate departure from Leichardt's

Land--how she had hoped, too, to take Biddy with her and interest her

once more in literary and artistic work.

'Biddy won't go, she told me so, and I don't mean to let her,' said

Lady Tallant decidedly. 'We're short-handed till the new Private

Secretary gets here, and she helps me with my notes and things

generally. And if it wasn't for Biddy's singing, our dinners would be

too deadly dull for words.'

Joan gave up in despair. She suspected that Lady Tallant's affectionate

candour was not unadulterated with selfishness. Finally, Rosamond

promised that she would interest and amuse Lady Bridget to such an

extent as would deter her from rash love-making for want of counter

excitement. Then, Joan reflected, Colin was pre-eminently a prudent

business man, and, as he had told her some time before, would have to

go back to the Upper Leura before the strenuous work of the Session

came on. This was always supposing that the present Ministry kept in

without going to the country upon certain Labour measures unacceptable

to the large land-owners, in which case it was just possible McKeith

might be thrown out of his seat.

Events lay in the lap of the gods. Mrs Gildea wound up matters at the

Cottage and took train south, where she was soon wholly occupied in

describing the wonder of the Jenolan Caves and the wild gorges and

primaeval gum forests in the Blue Mountains. She was really too busy in

the interests of the IMPERIALIST to worry over her friend's love

affairs. In fact, she gleaned most of her information as to the

Leichardt's Town Government House Party from the newspapers she

happened upon at bush hotels. For Lady Bridget was evidently in a

reactionary mood as regards letter-writing and Colin McKeith never put

pen to paper, if he could avoid doing so, except on business.

It was at Mossvale that she read a florid paragraph in the Ladies' Page

of a Sydney Journal, telling of the engagement of 'that intrepid

Pioneer and future Empire-builder, Mr Colin McKeith, to the Lady

Bridget O'Hara, niece of the late, and cousin of the present, Earl of

Gaverick'.

Next post brought her three brief and characteristic letters. She

opened Lady Tallant's first:

'Government House,

Leichardt's Town.

'DEAR MRS GILDEA,

I do hope this may catch you before the newspapers, which I find

announced the engagement rather prematurely last week. I am still of

opinion that Biddy might do much worse than marry Colin McKeith,

though, ENTRE NOUS, the settlements--or rather want of them--for Mr

McKeith tells us that he needs all his capital for making wells and

buying cattle, and he won't injure his prospects and Biddy's by tying

it up--does not at all please Sir Luke, who, before he would

countenance the marriage, insisted upon a cablegram being sent to the

Dowager Lady Gaverick. Her answer: "Not my business, must do as she

pleases," only confirms what I said to you, and I am afraid Biddy's

chances are worth nothing in that quarter.

The wedding is to be early in May, from Government House, of course,

and I need scarcely say how much we all hope you will come back for it.

Always sincerely,

ROSAMOND TALLANT.

P.S.--No doubt, Biddy is giving you full details.'

But Biddy did not indulge either in details or rhapsodies. She began:

'They say hanging and wiving go by destiny, and clearly my destiny is

to become the wife of Collin McKeith. I've always felt that the only

thing which could reconcile me to marriage would be marrying a MAN; and

at last I've found one. I want to tell you, Joan, that we've made an

agreement to ask each other no questions about respective Pasts. The

black-fellows he has slain--the one jarring note between us--are never

to be resuscitated. The men whose hearts I have broken and VICE VERSA

are dead and buried on the other side of the Equator, under a monument

of inviolable silence. Such are the terms of the marriage contract: and

you in especial must respect them. I need say no more, except this:

Have no fears for the happiness of

Your BIDDY.'

From Colin in telegraphic conciseness:

'Tremendously happy. She's absolutely my Ideal--in everything but size.'

All very satisfactory and conclusive. But--Mrs Gildea could not escape

from a vague misgiving. She was not afraid of the ghost of Mr

Willoughby Maule: indeed, she argued favourably from the baldness of

Bridget's letter in comparison with the reams of sentiment she had

written upon the previous occasion. Nor did she feel uneasy on the

score of any others of Lady Bridget's bygone passions. But had this

complex, fastidious, physically-refined creature the least

comprehension of what life on the Upper Leura might mean? And how about

an Ideal dethroned from her pedestal and plumped down amid the crude

realities of the nethermost Bush?

Mrs Gildea did not get to the wedding. She was ordered to report on the

mines of Western Australia, and was on the other side of the continent

when the marriage took place. In fact, it seemed doubtful whether she

would again meet Lady Bridget before her mission as Special

Correspondent ended. But the McKeiths were to spend their honeymoon in

travelling to his station on the Upper Leura, a distance of some

hundreds of miles from the nearest port, and quite out of THE

IMPERIALIST programme.

She read, however, circumstantial accounts of the wedding, and there

were portraits of the pair--in which Colin looked grumpy and Lady

Bridget whimsically amused--snap shots, too, of the wedding cortege, in

which Sir Luke Tallant, fathering the Bride, appeared a pompous figure

in full uniform; and Lady Tallant in splendid panoply, most stately and

gracious. A long account followed of the bride's family connections, in

which the biographer touched upon the accident of sex that had deprived

her of the hereditary honours; the ancient descent of the Gavericks,

with a picture of the old Irish castle where Lady Bridget had been

brought up--and so forth, and so forth. Mrs Gildea sighed as she read,

and pictured in her imagination the wild wastes of the Never-Never Land

and the rough head-station which was to be Lady Bridget's home.

BOOK II

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF LADY BRIDGET O'HARA

CHAPTER 1

It was the way of the O'Haras to do things first and to consider

afterwards whether it were well or ill that they should be done. Many a

ruined O'Hara might have fared differently in life's battle had he

thought before he acted.

Lady Bridget was no exception to the rule of her family. She had

accepted Colin McKeith in a blind impulse of escape from the old

hedged-in existence of her order, of which she was quite tired and

where-in she had proved herself a failure. She had been attracted by

the idea that he represented, of wide spaces and primitive adventures.

She had always longed to travel in untrodden ways, and had loved

stories of romantic barbarism. And then, too, some queer glamour of the

man had got hold of her. She was intensely susceptible to personal

influence--his bigness, his simplicity, his strength and daring, and

the feeling that he was quite capable of mastering her, not only by

brute force--which always appeals to a certain type of woman--but by

power of will, by a tenacity of passion which she recognised even

through the shy reserve with which McKeith tried to cloak his

adoration. For she was goddess to him, as well as lady-love--and that

she realised plainly. A look from her would make him go white and his

large hands tremble; an unexpected grace from her would fill him with

reverent ecstasy.

The thing happened one soft moonlit evening after dinner at Government

House, when she had strolled out alone to a secluded part of the

terrace, and he had followed her after the men left the dining-room.

She was in a mood of tempestuous raging against her ordained lot.

Letters had come from England that day which had irritated her and made

her wonder how she could endure any longer her galling state of

dependence. Eliza Countess of Gaverick had sent her a meagre cheque,

accompanied by a scathing rebuke of her extravagance. Some cutting

little sarcasms of Molly Gaverick's had likewise annoyed her, and she

fretted under the miserable sense of her inadequacy to the demands of a

world she despised and yet hankered after. Then Sir Luke had been

tiresomely pertinacious over some small dereliction on Bridget's part

from the canons of Government House etiquette, which he had requested

should not be repeated. Rosamond Tallant had been tiresome also and had

made her feel that even here she was no more than a dependent who must

conform to the wills of her official superiors. Joan Gildea might have

served as a safety-valve, but Joan was away in or near the Jenolan

Caves, and could not be got at unless Bridget chose to throw up other

things and go to her, which Bridget was not inclined to do.

The whole thing was a tangle. If only it were possible to find a way

out that would not prove still more painfully complicated.

At the moment the ting-tang of a steamer bell bound outward to the

northern coast, borne to her on the river-breeze, intensified her

desire for escape from conventional limitations. Oh! to find herself

under totally new conditions! The heavy fragrance of magnolia and

gardenia blossoms seemed freighted with exotic suggestion. The tropical

odours blended with the perfume of autumn roses, which made a trellis

over her head and overran the balustrades. The subtle mingling of

perfumes that float in the clear air of an Australian garden, when the

fierce heats of summer are gone, gave her a sense of almost

intoxication.

In fact, Bridget was in the mood for any desperate leap into the

Unknown. Such was her unconscious thought as she crunched a spray of

verbena in her fingers and inhaled the scent which had always a faintly

heady effect upon her imagination. She was leaning on the stone kerb of

the balustrade, vague emotions stirring her, when she heard McKeith's

step on the gravel. Presently he stood beside her, his tall form, in

the well-cut evening suit which always became him best, towering head

and shoulders above her small stature. It was always a satisfaction to

Lady Bridget, fastidious in such masculine details, that he was

particular about his tailoring, and tonight he exhaled the scent of one

of Sir Luke Tallant's excellent cigars. There used to be a good deal of

chaff between them about one of his personal predilections which jarred

a little upon Bridget--his pipe and, particularly, the quality of his

tobacco. But he did not change it in spite of her chaff. She was

beginning to find a certain mule-like obstinacy about him in

unimportant details.

'If you object to this, what WOULD you say to the store tobacco smoke

when I'm in the Bush?' he said. And then he had explained that, when

camping out with the stockmen on their expeditions after cattle, he

always smoked the same tobacco that he supplied to his hands. That was

according to HIS rule of social equality by the camp fire, he said....

And where was all Lady Bridget's vaunted socialism if she jibbed at

such a simple illustration of the first principles of socialism? Of

course, Bridget had taken his banter in good part, and with a pretty

grimace had told him she would get out a consignment of the stuff her

Aunt Eliza gave at Christmas to the old men in their Irish village and

present him with it.

He threw away the butt end of Sir Luke's cigar when he joined her. For

several moments he stood watching her--the picturesque little figure in

its dainty frock, the grace of the small head with its crop of untidy

hair, the pale pointed face--chin resting in the cup of one flower-like

hand, red lips--the upper one like Cupid's bow--slightly parted,

strange deep eyes gazing across the dark expanse of river to the

scattered lights on the high land opposite. Above, the Southern Cross,

set diagonally, in the dark clear sky gemmed with its myriad stars.

There could be no doubt that Colin McKeith was in the grip of an

infatuation such as he had never known before in his life. It staggered

him. His breath caught in his throat and ended in an uncertain laugh.

He stuttered in sheer awkwardness.

'I--I say ... you seem to be up in the clouds. You've been awfully down

in the mouth--all through dinner. Won't you tell me? Is anything the

matter?'

Bridget turned and looked at him. Her eyes were softly glistening, her

lips trembled. He thought of her as of a child seeking sympathy in a

strange land, where nobody understood her and somebody had been unkind.

He was intensely stirred by her impulsive appeal.

'Oh! I'm worried. I'm so alone in the world. Nobody wants me--here or

in England either. I was just wondering if I couldn't go off and join

Joan Gildea.... But she wouldn't want me either, perhaps.'

He went closer, stooping over the balustrade. Magnetic threads seemed

to be drawing them to each other. He wanted to say, 'I want you,' but

dared not. He blurted forth instead?

'What is it? I'd cut off my right hand if that would be of any use to

you. Good Lord! That does sound cheek! Only--you know--I'm big enough

to bully the whole of Leichardt's Land from the Governor down--and I'd

do it if you wanted me to. Just tell me what's worrying you?'

'It's everything--the whole set of conditions from the day I was born

into them.'

'Conditions are easy enough things to break, if you're determined to do

it. Look here--talk it out.... you can trust me.'

Then she recklessly set the flood gates open--laughed with tears in the

laughter; drew a tragically amusing picture of her life--her anomalous

position, her dependence, her hatred of the pretences, the shifts, the

sordid bravado by means of which her impoverished Gaverick relatives

clung on to their social birthright, the toadying of the Dowager, the

worldly admonitions of Rosamond Tallant and her set--she used some of

the phrases he had himself read in that letter. Had he been in any

doubt as to its authorship that doubt must now be at rest. But he would

never tell her of that episode. For one thing, his promise to Joan

bound him. Like a stab came the remembrance of that man of whom Biddy

had written--the man towards whom she had confessed a violent

attraction--and who had behaved as a cad and a fortune-hunter would

naturally behave. That he could have weighed money in the balance with

THIS! She could not have cared for the fellow, or he MUST have thrown

over everything else for her. Was it possible that she had cared--that

she still cared?

'Tell me,' he asked hoarsely. 'Is it that you are fretting after

somebody over there who--someone you can't marry? There must have been

a lot of men in your life. Perhaps there was one who--whom you--loved.'

His voice dropped, as it had a way of doing when he touched the sacred

subject.

'There have been a lot of men,' she admitted frankly. 'But there has

never been one true Man among them. I've never really in my heart

wanted to marry any of them, if that's what you mean--I don't like

marriage--OUR system of marriage--a bargain in the sale shop. So much

at such a price--birth, position, suitability, good looks--to be paid

for at the market value. Or else it's just because the man happens to

have taken a fancy to one, and while the fancy lasts doesn't think

whether or not it's a fair bargain--on either side. I've seen people

fall madly in love and marry like that. Then before very long the love

turns to hate and it's a case for the Divorce Court.'

'Nothing of that is--love--not as I--and you--understand it.'

She gave him one of her inscrutable looks and then turned again to the

stars. There was silence; Colin thought she must hear his heart

thumping, but she seemed lost in her dreams. He put out his big hand

and timidly, reverently, took hers, crushed verbena and all, as it lay

on the balustrade. It rested like a prisoned bird within his; he could

feel the nervous twitch of the little fingers.

'There's another system of marriage--a better one, I think--where the

man doesn't ask for anything but the right to love until--until he has

compelled the woman's love in return.'

'Compelled! I like that word. I could yield to my master. But he would

have to prove himself my master.'

'Will you let me try?' McKeith said boldly. He grasped her hand tightly

as he spoke; she gave a little cry, for he had hurt her. He was all

compunction and gentleness in a moment.

'Oh, you are strong!' she said. 'I almost think you could make me do

anything you chose.'

'No--that isn't what I meant.' He seemed trying to steady himself. 'I'm

damned if I'd ever give up my free-will to anybody, and I wouldn't like

even the woman who was my mate to do it either. But love--that's a

different thing....'

'Your mate!' she repeated.

'You don't know the Bush idea of a real mate--shoulder to shoulder,

back to back--no getting behind one or the other--giving up your life

for your mate, if it came to a pinch.'

'And that's your idea of--love?'

'Something like it, only closer, dearer--a thing you couldn't talk

about even to your mate--unless your mate was your wife--a flower that

blooms once in your life, and that would never--if it were cut

off--come to bloom again. Look here,' he said fiercely, 'have you ever

felt for any one of the lot of men you spoke about just like that?'

'N--no,' she answered slowly.

'If you told me you had, I'd walk away now down those steps--' he

pointed to the flight of stone steps leading from the terrace to the

drive--'and you wouldn't see me any more.... But I'm not going to leave

you now, I mean to stick on for all I'm worth, so long as I see the

faintest chance of your giving me what I've set my heart on.'

'Yes--well?' She stared at him in a fascinated manner.

'Well--Bridget--I can't milady you. We're man and woman and nothing

else to-night....'

She interrupted. 'I like you to say that. I feel now that WE, at least,

are real--not social shams.'

'Bridget--you said you'd never found yet a Real Man to love you. Here's

one.' He patted his broad chest with his open palm. 'I'm a rough Bushy

and there's not a frill about me, but I'm bed-rock if you come to

Reality. I'm a lode you've never struck in your life before. There's

payable gold here, if you choose to work me.'

She laughed nervously, considering him.

'Mr McKeith, I'm sure that you're a perfect Mount Morgan, and you

certainly have a most original way of putting things. Do you happen to

own a gold mine, by the way?'

He drew in his breath slowly, as if he were considering the check, then

he took her cue.

'Oh, well! I have pegged out a good many claims in my time and never

got much more than my tucker out of any of them--though there was a

show I came on once up the Gulf way that I've always been a bit sorry I

didn't stop and look into. But rations were short and the Blacks

bad.... However, that's neither here nor there, now. Gold mine or not,

I'm positive that I shall be a rich man before many years have

passed--all the richer for a true mate to stand by me.'

'Yes, of course,' she said hastily--'I wasn't thinking of that--whether

you were rich or not, I mean.'

'I know you weren't. All the same, I suppose your grand relations would

consider me a presumptuous boor for daring to lift my eyes to you. And

yet, if I could make you love me, it wouldn't count for a blade of

grass that your father was born in a castle and mine in a crofter's

cabin.... Only--you know too--' he became timid and hesitant

again--'you know it isn't that I don't feel you as far above me,

almost, as those stars in the sky....'

'Oh don't, don't, Mr McKeith. It isn't true, you know. I've told you

how I despise all that--all the life I've led.'

'Yes, I know. There's not such a difference between us when we stand as

we are now, right on the bed rock. You're like me in having a strain of

working-folk's blood in you. It's Nature you're hankering after--God's

sweet air and the breath of the gum trees and freedom for your soul.'

'Freedom for my soul! How strange that you should understand.'

'I understand better than you might think. You want more than freedom

to make you content. You want a kind of bondage that is the truest

freedom--Love--a strong man's love, a strong man's worship. And that's

what I'd give you, Bridget. Are you angry with me for saying it?'

'No.' She turned her face straight to him without any shadow of

embarrassment. 'Mr McKeith, I'm too honest to pretend that I didn't

half expect this. I felt you were beginning to care for me, and I was

wondering whether I ought to let you go on.'

'Whether you ought to let me! As if you would be able to hinder it!

Why, you couldn't stop me loving you. You might as well try to dam up

the river Leichardt with this little hand I'm holding.'

She would have withdrawal it, but could not.

'No, no. It isn't strong enough--this tiny, trembling hand, which I

could break to bits in mine if I wanted to. And could you prevent me

from taking you in my arms--you wee great lady--and carrying you right

away--away, out into the Bush where I'm on my own ground and where not

one of your swell men folk would have a chance to find you.'

'I don't think any one of them would want to.' she laughed again

tremulously. 'If it comes to that though, I fancy you'd have some

trouble in disposing of me against my will.'

'Do you think I'd ever want you against your will! No. I'd sooner cut

the whole show, and let you scorn me at a distance as much as you

pleased.'

'I--scorn you! ... I wouldn't scorn you.'

'And even your scorn wouldn't kill my love,' he said, in that moved

voice that was so unlike his ordinary utterance--'because there's

nothing in the Universe, so far as I know it, that would be able to do

that. Why, it seems to me that my feeling for you is as much a part of

myself as the very blood in my heart. I knew you were the only woman in

the world for me the moment I saw you--so slim and small and strange,

the very contrary of what I'd always thought would be the kind of woman

I'd be in love with--that day when you came walking along that gangway

behind Lady Tallant. It was just a revelation, and then I bolted

straight off to Alexandra City.'

'Which seems rather odd, doesn't it, in the circumstances?'

'No, it's this way. I had to take a few days for getting over the

shock--for rubbing in the fact that what I wanted more than anything on

God's earth, now I'd seen it, was utterly beyond my reach.'

'One might think I was an enchanted princess--a sort of Brunhilda

guarded by a fiery dragon.'

'That's a good bit of how I looked on you--though I've never made much

out of Wagner--he isn't human enough for me.... And how could I have

dreamed then that you'd ever let me come as near you as I am this

evening!'

'I must say, Mr McKeith, you haven't shown such extreme diffidence in

approaching me.'

'Ah! Because you soon showed that Brunhilda's dragon was only

pasteboard and blue fire after all--one of the shams you despise. I'm

not afraid of him now.... Oh, it's wonderful.... It's beautiful....'

He took her other hand and held the two covered over by his own as he

said with an odd solemnity:

'Lady Bridget O'Hara will you come away with me to the Bush, leaving

everything else behind you?'

She stood very slender and erect, her eyes shining in the moonlight out

of her small pale face and fixed upon him thoughtfully as if she were

weighing his proposition. After a few minutes, she answered

deliberately.

'Yes, Mr Colin McKeith, I will go away with you into the Bush, leaving

everything else behind me--the old "Lady Bridget O'Hara" included.'

He gave an indescribable ejaculation--joy, surprise, triumph--all were

in the utterance. Dropping her hands, he stooped to her and his arm

went round her.

'Oh! Biddy ... darling.'

She knew he wanted to kiss her, and that he scarcely dared so

greatly.... As his beard brushed her cheek, she shrank and moved a step

from him. He, too, shrank, hurt by her rebuff.

'You mustn't be--ardent,' she said. 'You must give me time to get

accustomed to--the fate I've chosen. You know the dragon isn't

altogether a sham. He's got a few kicks in him--yet.'