“I CAN NEVER DO IT NOW!”
“Then, darling, wait;
Nothing is late,
In the light that shines for ever!”
That is a long, long day to Ruby. From Glengarry they can watch far
away the flames, like so many forked and lurid tongues of fire, leaping
up into the still air and looking strangely out of place against
the hazy blue of the summer sky. The little girl leaves her almost
untouched dinner, and steals out to the verandah, where she sits, a
forlorn-looking little figure, in the glare of the afternoon sunshine,
with her knees drawn up to her chin, and her brown eyes following
eagerly the pathway by the river where she has ridden with Dick no
later than this morning. This morning!--to waiting Ruby it seems more
like a century ago.
Jenny finds her there when she has washed up the dinner dishes, tidied
all for the afternoon, and come out to get what she expresses as a
“breath o’ caller air,” after her exertions of the day. The “breath
o’ air” Jenny may get; but it will never be “caller” nor anything
approaching “caller” at this season of the year. Poor Jenny, she may
well sigh for the fresh moorland breezes of bonnie Scotland with its
shady glens, where the bracken and wild hyacinth grow, and where the
very plash of the mountain torrent or “sough” of the wind among the
trees, makes one feel cool, however hot and sultry it may be.
“Ye’re no cryin’, Miss Ruby?” ejaculates Jenny. “No but that the heat
o’ this outlandish place would gar anybody cry. What’s wrong wi’ ye, ma
lambie?” Jenny can be very gentle upon occasion. “Are ye no weel?” For
all her six years of residence in the bush, Jenny’s Scotch tongue is
still aggressively Scotch.
Ruby raises a face in which tears and smiles struggle hard for mastery.
“I’m not crying, _really_, Jenny,” she answers. “Only,” with a
suspicious droop of the dark-fringed eye-lids and at the corners of the
rosy mouth, “I was pretty near it. It’s dad. I _do_ wish he was home.
I can’t help watching the flames, and thinking that something might
perhaps be happening to him, and me not there to know. And then I began
to feel glad to think how nice it would be to see him and Dick come
riding home. Oh! Jenny, how _do_ little girls get along who have no
father?”
It is strange that Ruby never reflects that her own mother has gone
from her. All her love is centred in dad.
“The Lord A’mighty tak’s care o’ such,” Jenny responds solemnly.
“Ye’ll just weary your eyes glowerin’ awa’ at the fire like that, Miss
Ruby. They say that ‘a watched pot never boils,’ an’ I’m thinkin’ your
papa’ll no come a meenit suner for a’ your watchin’. Gae in an’ rest
yersel’ like the mistress. She’s sleepin’ finely on the sofa.”
Ruby gives a little impatient wriggle. “How can I, Jenny,” she exclaims
piteously, “when dad’s out there? Oh! I don’t know whatever I would do
if anything was to happen to dad.”
“Pit yer trust in the Lord, ma dearie,” the Scotchwoman says
reverently. “Ye’ll be in richt gude keepin’ then, an’ them ye love as
weel.”
But Ruby only wriggles again. She does not want Jenny’s solemn talk.
It is dad she desires. Dad, whom she loves so dearly, and whose little
daughter’s heart would surely break if aught of ill befell him.
So the long, long afternoon wears away, and when is an afternoon so
tedious as when one is eagerly waiting for something or some one?
Jenny goes indoors again, and Ruby can hear the clatter of plates and
cups echoing across the quadrangle as she makes ready the early tea.
The child’s eyes are dim with the glare at which she has so long been
gazing, and her limbs, in their cramped position, are aching; but Ruby
hardly seems to feel the discomfort from which those useful members
suffer. She goes in to tea with a grudge, listens to her stepmother’s
fretful little complaints with an absent air which shows how far away
her heart is, and returns as soon as she may to her point of vantage.
“Oh, me!” sighs the poor little girl. “Will he never come?”
Out in the west the red sun is dying grandly in an amber sky, tinged
with the glory of his life-blood, when dad at length comes riding home.
Ruby has seen him far in the distance, and runs out past the gate to
meet him.
“Oh, dad darling!” she cries. “I did think you were never coming. Oh,
dad, are you hurt?” her quick eyes catching sight of his hand in a
sling.
Her father laughs. “Only a scratch, little girl,” he says. “Don’t
frighten the mother about it. Poor little Ruby red, were you
frightened? Did you think your old father was to be killed outright?”
“I didn’t know,” Ruby says. Her eyes are shining now. “And mamma was
frightened too. And when even Dick didn’t come back. Oh, dad, wasn’t it
just dreadful--the fire, I mean?”
Black Prince has been put into the paddock, and Ruby goes into the
house, hanging on her father’s uninjured arm. The child’s heart has
grown suddenly light. The terrible fear which has been weighing her
down for the last few hours has been lifted, and Ruby is her old joyous
self again.
“Dad,” the little girl says later on. They are sitting out on the
verandah, enjoying the comparative cool of the evening. “What will
he do, old Davis, I mean, now that his house is burnt down? It won’t
hardly be worth while his building another, now that he’s so old.”
Dad does not answer just for a moment, and Ruby, glancing quickly
upwards, almost fancies that her father must be angry with her; his
face is so very grave. Perhaps he does not even wish her to mention the
name of the old man, who, but that he is “so old,” should now have been
in prison.
“Old Davis will never need another house now, Ruby,” Dad answers,
looking down into the eager little upturned face. “He has gone away.
God has taken him away, dear.”
“He’s dead?” Ruby questions with wide-open, horror-stricken eyes.
The little girl hardly hears her father as he goes on to tell her how
the old man’s end came, suddenly and without warning, crushing him in
the ruins of his burning cottage, where the desolate creature died
as he had lived, uncared for and alone. Into Ruby’s heart a great,
sorrowful regret has come, regret for a kind act left for ever undone,
a kind word for ever unspoken.
“And I can never do it now!” the child sobs. “He’ll never even know I
wanted to be kind to him!”
“Kind to whom, little girl?” her father asks wonderingly.
And it is in those kind arms that Ruby sobs out her story. “I can never
do it now!” that is the burden of her sorrow.
The late Australian twilight gathers round them, and the stars twinkle
out one by one. But, far away in the heaven which is beyond the stars
and the dim twilight of this world, I think that God knows how one
little girl, whose eyes are now dim with tears, tried to be “kind,”
and it may be that in His own good time--and God’s time is always the
best--He will let old Davis “know” also.
[Illustration]