I'd rather die than marry her if she doesn't want me," he would say,
sometimes with haughtiness and more often with anger. "Good gracious!
I don't know why she thinks I'm going to belong to the criminal class.
Goodness knows, if I were to judge her the same way there are plenty
wives would scare even a Hottentot from matrimony, and if I were to
express to Dawn any fears of her being similar, I bet you'd hear of
our engagement coming to a sudden death. You seem to understand her
better than I do, so say a good word for me if you can."
My opinion of him being so high, saying a word in his favour gave me
delight, and I took the first opportunity of saying a good many. At
the end of one day, after Dawn had been subjected to a particularly
gruesome account of what she might expect, I found her face downwards
on her bed, weeping bitterly, and elicited--
"I'm going to tell Ernest to-morrow that I won't marry him. It's too
terrible--they all tell you the same. I'd rather earn my living in
some other way while I'm able. I'd rather throw up the thing now when
most of my trousseau is ready than go on if one quarter of what they
say is true. I'm not one of those fools who think life is going to
turn out something special for me. Before these women were married I
suppose they thought their husbands were going to be kings, but see
how they have panned out, and why should I expect any better?"
Time had arrived to take the subject in both hands, so I gripped it
firmly.
"You must be thankful to gain one point at a time," I said, beginning
with the lightest end of my argument. "A little while since you feared
you were fated for the life of those around--household drudgery, with
an occasional sulky drive in the afternoon; now that you have escaped
that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you
hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws
relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman
in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress,
needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the
most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping
the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in
knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the
laws under which they live, because law is determined by public
opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public behaviour it will
not mould private character. Law is shaped for the masses, but there
is a small percentage of individuals in either sex who are superior to
any workable law, and I think Ernest Breslaw is one of these."
"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without
any fear if you were me?"
"I would--right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a
profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity--
'Holds something sacred, something undefiled,
Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"
The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers
pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I
added--
"I will tell you my history some day, so that you may see that when I
have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have
been an actress, you know."
"Yes; Ernest told me."
"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had
expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was
not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his
inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming passion, had
been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling,
he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an ambassadorial
diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated
husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be
cognisant--the only character to whom I could without misgiving
entrust the hot-headed Dawn.
TWENTY-EIGHT.
LET THERE BE LOVE.
I so nearly "pegged out" with an attack that fell to my lot a little
time after the election, that Dr Smalley considered it advisable to
summon Dr Tinker to a consultation, but sad to say I was too comatose
to have become acquainted with the husband of the famous Mrs Tinker,
whose individuality afforded considerable interest, because it was
very conspicuous when surrounded by the neutrality of life in Noonoon.
However, with the aid of some "powltices" constructed by Grandma Clay
and energetically applied by Mrs Bray, and because my hour had not yet
come, against the time when we slid into a splendid October I was
tottering about once more.
During my time of confinement the old valley had put on its finishing
touches of spring glory. Only a few golden oranges now remained on the
trees, and amid the bright green leaves were thick clusters of waxy
bloom. The perfume from them was heavenly, and sometimes almost too
powerful after the sun had toppled behind the great level-browed range
which, viewed from the plain, guarded the west of the valley of
Noonoon like a mighty wall. Some of the land had been cultivated for a
century without attention to artificial renewal of its fertility, but
still it gave forth a wondrous variety and wealth of vegetation. The
widespreading cedars hung out their scented bloom like heliotrope
flags amid surrounding greenery of pine, plane, poplar, and loquat,
and the peach and apricot orchards contributed banks of their delicate
flowers, which in the glory of their massed bloom could have
out-Japanned Japan. Along the lanes, where their stones had been
thrown, they sprang up and bloomed and bore liberally; roses of many
kinds and colours clambered up verandah posts and peeped over fences;
the garden plots were like compressed bouquets; the brilliant,
graceful, and exquisitely perfumed pink oleanders grew wild in the
fields; and altogether the vale of melons had graduated to a valley of
flowers.
The days had stretched out so that the mail from the far West trundled
down the mountains in time to cross the queer old bridge across the
Noonoon at daybreak, and the first beams of morning turned its windows
to gold as the waking flowers were lifting their dew-drenched heads
and the soft white mists were dispersing themselves betimes from the
plains dotted with ramshackle little homes and cut into squares by
barbed-wire fences. The weather had warmed, so that the fashionables'
week-end exit to the cool Blue Mountains had begun; and the youngsters
near the railway line sometimes left their play and stood agape in the
soft twilight to watch the governor's car, painted in a strikingly
different colour to all the others and emblazoned with the British
coat of arms, go by.
Uncle Jake, a hired man, and Andrew were very busy on the farm, and we
none the less engaged in the house, where every article of furniture
was made a receptacle for drapery and haberdashery, and where the
wedding was the only subject. It so often gave Andrew the "pip" that
his constitution must have been seriously impaired by such frequent
attacks of this complaint.
In those days Dawn was too engrossed to take me for drives, and Ernest
too occupied to pull me on the historic stretch of water running like
the moats of old beside his lady's castle, so that Ada Grosvenor, in
her office of doing good to all with whom she came in contact, stepped
into the breach, and sought to aid my recovery by taking me for gentle
exercise.
It was one day when we had driven east from Noonoon that she
remarked--
"It's a wonder that Mr Breslaw would care for Dawn's style when he
moves in such a smart set. She is a handsome girl, which covers a
multitude of sins in that respect, but still she is very downright,
and--and, well, doesn't quite conform to the rules of refinement."
I only smiled, and waited till the pony's head was turned for home,
when I covered the necessity for reply by admiring the incomparable
panorama before us. From the altitude we had reached on the Sydney
road, we could see above the unbroken line of the horizon west from
Noonoon town, and the Blue Australian Mountains stretched across the
view in an endless succession of round-topped peaks painted in their
matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in
their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the
fringe of the endless plains was reached--peak after peak, gorge on
gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim
shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded
cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled
solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and
gold, rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with
the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and
lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her
forerunners,--twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that
left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness
herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no
coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny
man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little
homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points
between earth and sky.
Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable
inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience
had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and
I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were
disillusioned and she was not.
We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be
found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island,
surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so
much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress
themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every
champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in
England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more
slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their
brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a
beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to
meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good
sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other
fashionable society, where the majority were animated by nothing
higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.
Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and
conspicuous violation of syntax, as she could easily do, for she had
been somewhat educated in a school patronised by the Australian _beau
monde_. Had not her grandma told me of the magnitude of her education
when I had first arrived? and did she not constantly repeat the story
now? For having survived the fear of Ernest being too aristocratic,
she took pride in his worldly possessions and position, and
characterised him as "more likely than most, if he only turns out true
to name, which in the case of husbands is as rare as bought seed
potatoes turnin' out what they're supposed to be; but there ain't any
good of meeting troubles half-way."
As the wedding preparations made so much bother, grandma got in a
woman to clean and another to sew, and determined to admit no summer
boarders until after Christmas.
"I can do without 'em, only I like to see money changin' hands quicker
than happens with a farm," said she; while also, in consideration of
the wedding, the doors, whose opening and shutting had been obstructed
by the ravages of the white ants, were at last satisfactorily
repaired.
Dawn, after the manner of most youthful brides, was desirous of the
full torture of "keeping up" her wedding, while Ernest, as usual with
bridegrooms, so shrunk from display that he would have paid half a
year's income to escape it; but it was only to me he made this
confession, to Dawn he was manfully unselfish, allowing her full rein
and agreeably falling in with her requirements.
I did not think much of fussy weddings, but these were such a
splendid pair of young things that I was pleased to endure the
preparations with a smile instead of a sigh, and contribute some old
silks and laces towards the trousseau; while a few dainty and
expensive trifles, sent to me from a traveller over the sea, found a
place in the furnishing of the bride's boudoir.
Like all strictly reared girls, a certain prudishness at first caused
Dawn to shrink from her love as something that should be resisted, but
as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding
her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting
influence of youth's master passion. The roseate mists it weaves
before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this
girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears
grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the
recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and disillusioning
experiences, looked out towards a future beautified with as many
shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by
her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a
bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and
the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn
considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the
irreverent as "gooseberrying."
Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this
instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial
honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by
one whom the world has all gone by.
I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would
do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where
its deep clear pools lay like basins under the overhanging cliffs,
and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over
the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree,
wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and
shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the
rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so
Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus
do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside
actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer
afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom
idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from
those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were
safely moored again after their jaunts.
I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of
view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their
diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the
young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where
the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my
sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with
no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked
within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were
equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never
progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally
well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the
exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery. Grandma Clay,
however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely
to be greater than the supply, I generously presented her with one,
unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"
with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the
beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of
their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story
to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with
as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in
the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of
Noonoon municipality.
This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and
regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for
reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges
to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks
deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum
leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed
our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy[2] and
provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by
Noonoon's banks.
[Footnote 2: A tin pail.]
Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in
the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds
abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung
their shade.
There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue
wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the
blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spiræa in Clay's drive, and
intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing
against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.
Coming down the little pathway gained by the creaking garden gate, we
shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her
face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in
a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape
from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the
local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were
but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that
held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the
evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the
Canadian champion had lost his laurels to New South Wales; on, on the
strong arms took the craft till a wall of mountain loomed straight
across our way, and the river had every appearance of coming to a
sudden end, but round a sudden surprising elbow we went till a similar
prospect confronted the navigator, and the river came round another of
its many angles. On, on we steered till the warm rich scent from the
flowering vineyards was left behind and the sound of the trains could
not be heard. Far up the ravines beyond the pasture lands and men's
habitations, we found the desired privacy, and the solitude was broken
only by the dip of the oars, the flash of an occasional water-fowl,
the cry of some night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that
Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to snatch some
unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and
lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and
other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the
inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land.
In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the
big hours of the evening frequently found us still on the breast of
the river. I was wont to recline on an impromptu couch of rugs in the
bottom of the well-built craft identified with our excursions, where I
could feign to be asleep. At first Dawn suspected me of only
pretending, but I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and
motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they
grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it
became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the
rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat
drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its
occupants tasted of the elixir--
"That burns beneath the beauty of the rose,
And in the hearts of youth and maiden glows,
And fills and thrills the world with life and light,
And is the soul of all that breathes and grows."
And what did the old moon see in that peaceful valley ere she sank
behind the great primeval gum-tree forests on the mountain crests,
across which zigzagged the noisy trains? There were heavy crops above
ground, vineyards abloom, orchards forming fruit, hundreds of
comfortable homes, and no doubt many pairs of lovers abroad, for
lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted
for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose
limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow
of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a
tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement
on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a space
between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach
and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was intoxicatingly
heavy with the exquisite perfume of these bridal blooms, and the
soft-scented breezes laughed as they too kissed the close-pressed lips
of the fair young pair who--
"Gathered the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank
The magic cup that filled itself anew."
Ah! Love's idyllic hours on the breast of a grandly gliding river,
when the dews were on the flowers, and all was enchantingly sweet and
fair under the sleep-time silver of a southern summer moon!
TWENTY-NINE.
"The savage sells or exchanges his daughter, but in
civilisation the man gives his away, and is thankful for the
opportunity."--_Reflections of a Bachelor Girl._
Dawn took a great deal of her own way, Ernest and I were privileged to
make suggestions so long as we were careful to remember our
insignificance, and grandma saw to it that her lawful rights were not
altogether usurped.
Occasionally it fell to my lot to act in a slightly mediatorial
capacity, owing to the divergence of the swell wishes of the
bridegroom-elect, and the plebeian determination of his
grandmother-in-law to be, regarding the wedding celebrations, but
Ernest was exceptionally unselfish and therefore very long-suffering.
Dawn being under age, her grandmother came forward with a project that
her father should be apprised of what was transpiring, requested to
give his daughter away, and to bring some of his side of the house to
the wedding. Dawn raised vigorous opposition.
"It would be like my father's presumption to interfere in any way,
considering his career with my mother. I hate him for a mean coward.
He's the very style of man I'd be ashamed to acknowledge as an
acquaintance yet alone own as a _father_! I'd like to see him dare to
give me away,--he'd have to own me first!"
"Well, Jake, there, will have to give you away then," said grandma.
"I'd give _him_ away with pleasure," replied Dawn. "If I _must_ be
_given_ away like a slave or animal, you'll give me away grandma, or
I'll stay where I am. 'Who giveth this woman to be married to this
man?' the old parson will ask; why won't he also ask, 'Who giveth this
man?' as if he too were only a chattel belonging to some one?"
That she would be disposed of by no one but her grandmother rather
pleased the old lady than otherwise; so she invested in yet another
black silk gown, over which she was to wear a seldom seen cape of
point lace worked by Dawn's mother; and she also purchased a wonderful
bonnet, and armed herself with a new pair of "lastings." Thus Dawn was
to have her way in this particular, but the old dame adhered to her
original intention in the matter of the Mudeheepes.
"I've kep' 'em at bay long enough now. I'll just acknowledge 'em this
once, or it will seem as if you was a 'illegitimate,'" said she in the
plenitude of her worldly wisdom, and thereupon "writ" a stiff though
not discourteous letter to Dawn's father, inviting any number of the
bride's relatives up to six, to come and spend a week before the
wedding in her home, for the purpose of making Dawn's acquaintance.
"There, I have done me duty, and they can suit theirselves whether
they come or go to Halifax," she remarked as she despatched the
communication.
They came. Dawn's father, his second wife, and his youngest sister,
Miss Mudeheepe, arrived three days before the wedding and remained to
grace the ceremony.