AT THE HOMESTEAD.
Miss Grant’s arrival at Kuryong homestead caused great excitement among
the inhabitants. Mrs. Gordon received her in a motherly way, trying
hard not to feel that a new mistress had come into the house; she was
anxious to see whether the girl exhibited any signs of her father’s
fiery temper and imperious disposition. The two servant-girls at the
homestead—great herculean, good-natured bush-girls, daughters of a
boundary-rider, whose highest ideal of style and refinement was Kuryong
drawing-room—breathed hard and stared round-eyed, like wild fillies, at
the unconscious intruder. The station-hands—Joe, the wood-and-water
boy, old Alfred the groom, Bill the horse-team driver, and Harry Warden
the married man, who helped with sheep, mended fences, and did
station-work in general—all watched for a sight of her. They exchanged
opinions about her over their smoke at night by the huge open fireplace
in the men’s hut, where they sat in a semicircle, toasting their shins
at the blaze till their trousers smoked again, each man with a pipe of
black tobacco going full swing from tea till bedtime. But the person
who felt the most intense excitement over the arrival of the heiress
was Miss Harriott.
For all her nurse’s experience, Ellen Harriott was not a woman of the
world. Except for the period of her hospital training, she had passed
all her life shut up among the mountains. Her dream-world was mostly
constructed out of high-class novels, and she united a shrewd wit and a
clever brain to a dense ignorance of the real world, that left her like
a ship without a rudder. She was, like most bush-reared girls, a great
visionary—many a castle-in-the-air had she built while taking her daily
walk by the river under the drooping willows. The visions, curiously
enough, always took the direction of magnificence. She pictured herself
as a leader of society, covered with diamonds, standing at the head of
a broad marble staircase and receiving Counts by the dozen (_vide_
Ouida’s novels, read by stealth); or else as a rich man’s wife who
dispensed hospitality regally, and was presented at Court, and set the
fashion in dress and jewels. At the back of all her dreams there was
always a man—a girl’s picture is never complete without a man—a strong,
masterful man, whose will should crush down opposition, and whose
abilities should make his name—and incidentally her name—famous all
over the world. She herself, of course, was always the foremost figure,
the handsomest woman, the best-dressed, the most admired; for Ellen
Harriott, though only a girl, and a friendless governess at Kuryong,
was not inclined to put herself second to anyone. Having learnt from
her father’s papers that he was of an old family, she considered
herself anybody’s equal. Her brain held a crazy enough jumble of ideas,
no doubt; but given a strong imagination, no experience, and omnivorous
reading, a young girl’s mind is exactly the place where fantastic ideas
will breed and multiply. She went about with Mrs. Gordon to the small
festivities of the district, and was welcomed everywhere, and deferred
to by the local settlers; she had yet to know what a snub meant; so the
world to her seemed a very easy sort of place to get along in. The
coming of the heiress was as light over a trackless ocean. Here was
someone who had seen, known, and done all the things which she herself
wished to see, know, and do; someone who had travelled on the
Continent, tobogganed in Switzerland, ridden in Rotten Row, voyaged in
private yachts, hunted in the shires; here was the world at last come
to her door—the world of which she had read so much and knew so little.
On the second morning after Miss Grant’s arrival, that young lady
turned up at breakfast in a tailor-made suit with short skirt and heavy
boots, and announced her intention of “walking round the estate;” but
as Kuryong—though only a small station, as stations go—was, roughly,
ten miles square, this project had to be abandoned. Then she asked Hugh
if he would have the servants mustered. He told her that the two
servants were in the kitchen, but it turned out that she wanted to
interview all the station hands, and it had to be explained that the
horse-driver was six miles out on the run with his team, drawing in a
load of bark to roof the hay shed, and that Harry Warden was down at
the drafting yards, putting in a new trough to hold an arsenical
solution, through which the sheep had to tramp to cure their feet; and
that everybody else was away out on some business or other. But the
young lady stuck to her point, and had the groom and the wood-and-water
boy paraded, they being the only two available. The groom was an
English importation, and earned her approval by standing in a rigid and
deferential attitude, and saying “Yes, Miss,” and “No, Miss,” when
spoken to; but the wood-and-water boy stood with his arms akimbo and
his mouth open, and when she asked him how he liked being on the
station he said, “Oh, it’s not too bad,” accompanying his remark with a
sickly grin that nearly earned him summary dismissal.
The young lady returned to the house in rather a sharp temper, and
found Hugh standing by a cart, which had just got back with her
shipwrecked luggage.
“Well, Miss Grant,” he said, “the things are pretty right. The water
went down in an hour or so, and the luggage on the top only got a
little wetting—just a wave now and again. How have you been getting
on?”
“Not at all well,” she laughed. “I don’t understand the people here. I
will get you to take me round before I do another thing. It is so
different from England. Are you sure my clothes are all right?”
“I can’t be sure, of course, but you can unpack them as soon as you
like.”
It was not long before the various boxes were opened. Ellen Harriott
was called in to assist, and the two girls had a real good afternoon,
looking at and talking over clothes and jewellery. The things had come
fairly well out of the coach disaster. When an English firm makes a
water-tight cover for a bag or box, it _is_ water-tight; even the
waters of Kiley’s River had swept over the canvas of Miss Grant’s
luggage in vain. And when the sacred boxes were opened, what a
treasure-trove was unveiled!
The noblest study of mankind is man, but the most fascinating study of
womankind is another woman’s wardrobe, and the Australian girl found
something to marvel at in the quality of the visitor’s apparel. Dainty
shoes, tailor-made jackets, fashionable short riding-habits,
mannish-looking riding-boots, silk undergarments, beautiful jewellery,
all were taken out of their packages and duly admired. As each
successive treasure was produced, Ellen Harriott’s eyes grew rounder
with astonishment; and when, out of a travelling bag, there appeared a
complete dressing-table outfit of silverware—silver-backed
hair-brushes, silver manicure set, silver handglass, and so forth—she
drew a long breath of wonder and admiration.
It was her first sight of the vanities of the world, the things that
she had only dreamed of. The outfit was not anything extraordinary from
an English point of view, but to the bush-bred girl it was a
revelation.
“What beautiful things!” she said. “Now, when you go visiting to a
country-house in England, do you always take things like these, all
these riding-boots and things?”
“Oh, yes. You wouldn’t ride without them.”
“And do you take a maid to look after them?”
“Well, you must have a maid.”
“And when you travel on the Continent, do you take a maid?”
“I always took one.”
“What is Paris like? Isn’t it just a dream? Did you go to the
opera?—Have you been on the Riviera?—Oh, do tell me about those
places—is it like you read about in books?—all beautiful, well-dressed
women and men with nothing to do—and did you go to Monte Carlo?”
This was all poured out in a rush of words; but in Mary’s experience
the Continent was merely a place where the Continentals got the better
of the English, and she said so.
“Travelling is so mixed up with discomfort, that it loses half its
plumage,” she said. “I’ll tell you all I can about Paris some other
time. Now you tell me,” she went on, folding carefully a silk blouse
and putting it in a drawer, “are there any neighbours here? Will anyone
come to call?”
“I’m afraid you’ll find it very dull here,” said Ellen. “There are no
neighbours at all except Poss and Binjie, two young fellows on the next
station. The people in town are just the publicans and the storekeeper,
and all the selectors around us are a very wild lot. Very few strangers
come that we can have in the house. They are nearly all cattle and
sheep buyers, and they are either too nervous to say a word, or they
talk horses. They always come just after mealtime, too, and we have to
get everything laid on the table again—sometimes we have ten meals a
day in this house. And the swagmen come all day long, and Mrs. Gordon
or I have to go and give them something to eat; there’s plenty to do,
always. So you see, there are plenty of strangers, but no neighbours.”
“What about Mr. Blake?” said Miss Grant. “Isn’t he a neighbour?”
It would have needed a much quicker eye than Mary’s to catch the
half-involuntary movement Ellen Harriott made when Blake’s name was
mentioned. She flashed a look of enquiry at the heiress that seemed to
say, “What interest do you take in Mr. Blake? What is he to you?”
Then the long eyelashes shut down over the dark eyes again, and with an
air of indifference she said—
“Oh Mr. Blake? Of course I know him. I dance with him sometimes at the
show balls, and all that. I have been out for a ride with him, too. I
think he’s nice, but Hugh and Mrs. Gordon won’t ask him here because he
belongs to the selectors, and his mother was a Miss Donohoe. He takes
up their cases—and wins them, too. But he never comes here. He always
stays down at the hotel when he comes out this way.”
“I intend to ask him here,” said Miss Grant. “He saved my life.”
Again the long eyelashes dropped so as to hide the sparkle of the eyes.
“Of course, if you like to ask him—”
“Do you think he’d come?”
“Yes, I’m sure he would. If you like to write and ask him, Peter could
ride down to Donohoe’s to-day with a note.”
From which it would seem that one, at any rate, of the Kuryong
household was not wholly indifferent to Mr. Blake.