salmon fisheries is the circumstance that certain landed proprietors
near the mouths of some rivers possess a right to establish nets for
the purpose of catching all the salmon that attempt to go up the
stream. We do not contest the legality of their arrangements. We only
speak of the cruel way it acts on the rights of all who live in the
upper parts of the river, and on whose waters the salmon have bred.
While the lower proprietors catch the great bulk of the fish, those
higher up get but a miserable remnant. During the whole of the time
that the nets are on, the lower proprietors have a practical monopoly
of the fishings. Is that at all reasonable? As a consequence, first of
the weirs, and second of the netting system of the lower proprietors,
there is evoked throughout the upper part of rivers in Scotland, a
gloomy and almost vengeful hatred of the existing salmon-fishing
system. Of course the higher and middle classes take no part in
demonstrating their sense of the injustice that is committed. The
lower classes, less scrupulous, and indignant at the rapacity of
the weir-owners and lower proprietors, take such salmon as they can
get hold of in spawning-time, thus destroying by myriads in embryo
what should have been a vast national advantage. Detesting as we
do all sorts of poaching and irregularities, we are glad that the
Commissioners appointed to investigate the condition of the Scottish
salmon fisheries, have laid stress upon the miserable imperfections to
which we have ventured to draw attention.
Mr Young informs us that in 1874, as many as 32,180 boxes of Scotch
salmon were sent to the London market alone, the estimated value of
which might possibly be L.321,800. It seems to us, however, a hard
case that the great bulk of such valuable property should be secured
by proprietors at or near the mouths of the several rivers, to the
exclusion of those in the upper reaches of the streams, who ought
to have an equal right to participate in the annual fish-harvest.
Free-trade in salmon-fishing, so much as lies within the limits of
strict justice, is still in expectation. We commend the subject to the
further consideration of Frank Buckland, Mr Young, and brother-anglers.
RACHEL LINDSAY.
A SOUTH-AUSTRALIAN STORY.
Towards the end of November, about two years ago, I received the
following curt note from my brother Donald, who like myself is a
sheep-farmer in South Australia. ‘MY DEAR JERRY, Lizzie sends her love,
and hopes to see you when your shearing is over, as usual. If you’ll
say what day, I’ll fetch you from Ballarat.—Yours affectionately,
DON GARDINER.’
‘_N.B._—Just begun to wash the wool. Lizzie’s sister says she has seen
my apparatus at Conolly’s, but I don’t think it. Ask Conolly.’
Conolly was a neighbour of mine, and he chanced to have brought me
Don’s letter, and to be lighting his pipe at my elbow while I read it.
‘Conolly,’ said I, ‘do you know any of Mrs Gardiner’s sisters? She has
an unlimited number, I believe, for I have met a fresh one—sometimes
two fresh ones—every Christmas for about half-a-dozen years, and here
is still another I never heard of. She appears to be acquainted with
you and this neighbourhood’——
‘O yes; that’s Cinderella,’ interrupted Conolly, as he abstracted a
bundle of newspapers from our joint post-bag and began to rip the
wrapping from them. ‘Haven’t you seen Cinderella? She was never out of
Tasmania, I suppose, until last spring, when she was staying up here
with the Macdonalds. The Macdonald girls called her Cinderella because
she had always been the one to stay at home and keep house while the
others went about. Her proper name is Rachel. O Jerry, Jerry!’ he broke
out suddenly, laughing in what seemed to me a very offensive manner (my
proper name I may mention being Gerald), ‘your sister-in-law Lizzie
will be too many for you. She won’t let you escape this time. She has
kept Rachel as her last card.’
‘If ever I marry a woman with such a name as that, I hope I shall be a
henpecked husband for the rest of my life!’ I retorted angrily, seizing
a paper-knife and beginning to tear away at the _Australasian_, so as
to drown further conversation upon what was a very sore subject.
My brother Donald’s wife Lizzie was as good and kind a little woman as
ever breathed, but like many young wives in happy circumstances, she
was a matchmaker. And being impulsive, effusive, and not quite—what
shall I call it? I don’t like to say she was not quite a lady, but that
would suggest my meaning—she did not pursue her calling with that
tact and judgment which its delicate nature required. I need not say
more, except that she had a number of spinster sisters, and one only
bachelor relative, who lived all by himself in single-blessedness on
his own fine and thriving property, and that I was that male victim.
I beg pardon of all the Misses Lindsay for using such a term; I was
not a victim as far as _they_ were concerned. But I did feel it hard
that I should be laughed at wherever I went as the captive knight of
half-a-dozen fair ones, when I had never had the choosing of one of
them.
When I received the above letter I had just seen my last wool-bale
packed on the last bullock-dray and started on its slow journey to
Melbourne; and the day after I set off myself on my yearly visit to
Don. He was less fortunate in respect of sheep-shearing than I, for
living in an exceptionally cool district, where an exceptionally wet
and wintry spring had kept everything behindhand, he had still all
his troubles to come. I thought of that as I buttoned myself into my
Ulster, which I was glad of that cold morning, though Christmas was
only a month off; and I reflected that I should be the only unemployed
man at the disposal of the household until the shearing was over, and
foresaw (as I thought) the consequences. I made up my mind, however,
that I would defy Lizzie’s machinations in a more systematic manner
than heretofore. May I be forgiven for so priggish a determination.
It was midnight before I reached Ballarat, where Don usually met me;
but upon this occasion I found a telegram stating that he was too
busy to leave his farm, and would send for me next day. So I had one
game of pool at the club and went to bed; and next morning enjoyed an
hour or two over newly arrived English papers and periodicals, and a
solitary lunch; and then the familiar old ramshackle buggy and the
beautiful horses Don was famed for made their appearance, and I set off
on the last stage of my journey. When I arrived at my destination it
was dark and raining heavily; and the groom who opened the stable-gate
told me that my brother had not long come up from the wash-place and
was interviewing shearers at the hut. I was wet and muddy, so I went
straight to my room without even asking for my sister-in-law, who was
usually in her nursery at that hour, and proceeded to make myself
respectable for dinner. Presently I heard Don about the passages (the
house was ‘weather-board’ and the partitions extremely thin) asking the
servants where I was; and then his head and a half-bared neck appeared
in the narrow aperture between my door and the door-post.
‘Glad to see you, old boy; but I’m too dirty to come in,’ said he.
‘Seen Lizzie?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Seen Rachel?’
‘Not yet. But I say, old man, would you mind telling me how many _more_
sisters you’ve got?’
‘No more,’ said Don with a grin. ‘She’s the last one, and she’s the
best of them all.’
‘Then I hope I may be allowed for once to enjoy the society of one of
Lizzie’s sisters, in a friendly way,’ I grumblingly responded (for I
may as well admit that Don and I had had confidences of old on this
subject). ‘Don’t you think you could give Lizzie a notion that I don’t
mean to get married, or that I’ve a sweetheart up the country, or
something of that sort?’
‘Not I,’ rejoined my brother, laughing. ‘I’m not going to spoil her
fun, poor little soul; you’re old enough to take care of yourself.’
And with that he went off, whistling cheerfully, to his dressing-room.
When I had completed my toilet, I gathered up some boxes of choice
cigars that I had been purchasing in town, and carried them to the
door of the adjoining apartment, which had been Don’s smoking-room
ever since I had known it. To my surprise, the bolt shot sharply as I
touched the handle, and I heard a rustle of drapery inside. A housemaid
coming along with lamps for the dinner-table called out hastily: ‘O
sir, that is Miss Rachel’s room now. The smoking-room is at the end of
the verandah, where Miss Carry slept last year. Mrs Gardiner wished it
to be changed because she didn’t like the smell of tobacco so near the
bedrooms.’
I took back my boxes, thinking no more about it, and went on to the
drawing-room, which was full of light and warmth and comfort, as
usual, and where I found two of my little nieces sitting demurely on
a sofa in their best frocks, ready to rush into my arms. Lizzie came
hurrying in after me, rosy and radiant, and with plenty of flounces
and colours about her, and gave me her own enthusiastic welcome; and
then Don, spruce and perfumed, joined us. Don in his early years had
been a dandy, and a little youthful weakness remained in him still. He
never came to dinner without rings on his fingers and subtle odours
in his clothes; and he was at great pains to keep a pair of Dundreary
whiskers accurately adjusted on each side of a closely shaven chin. He
had been ten years in the Bush, and had never objected to ‘roughing it’
in a general way; but he persisted in shaving himself every morning,
let what would, happen; which singular habit in an Australian country
gentleman very much puzzled his bearded friends. I for one, used to
quiz him as well as I knew how, when I saw him swathe his neck in
a handkerchief, before going out to his work, if the sun shone too
strongly; but I respect his little vanities nowadays, and hope he will
keep his white throat and his Dundreary whiskers as long as he lives,
bless him. He took one of his little girls on his knee, and questioned
me about my station matters and about Conolly’s sheep-wash (which was
_not_ so well furnished with improvements as his own, much to his
satisfaction); and Lizzie gave me an account of the development of her
respective children since I had seen them last, including the cutting
of the baby’s teeth; and then the dinner-bell rang.
‘Where’s Rachel?’ inquired Don.
I turned a languid eye upon the door when we heard the sound of a
distant rustle, expecting to see one of the smart and smiling damsels
I was so used to, and wondering whether this one would be dark or
fair. With a slow and quiet step she came along the hall and entered
the room, and my heart began suddenly to beat in a very unpleasant
manner. She had a delicate, thoughtful, but piquant face, wavy brown
hair modestly and becomingly set, and a slight figure daintily dressed
in pale blue silk, with a little white lace about throat and arms; and
yet she was the image of Marie Antoinette in Delaroche’s picture, only
with a more majestic dignity of carriage, if that could be, and a more
cold and calm disdain upon her face. As soon as I saw her, and felt the
exceedingly faint acknowledgment she vouchsafed when we were formally
introduced, I intuitively guessed—with a horrible sense of shame and
mortification—that she had overheard what I said to Don in my bedroom
through those card-paper walls!
I never thought I should feel so concerned at standing ill with one
of Lizzie’s sisters as I felt before that evening came to an end. All
through dinner I saw, without looking, offended dignity in the poise of
her head and the studied repose of her manner, and heard the ring of it
in every inflection of her voice, though it was so subtle and delicate
that only a guilty conscience could detect it. It was a great deal
worse in the evening, when Lizzie began her fussy little contrivances
for throwing us together. The poor little woman never had so
impracticable and aggravating a sister to manage; and I never met one
who attempted to treat me with such open indifference and thinly-veiled
contempt. It is unnecessary for me to state the consequences. I began
to interest myself in this Miss Lindsay as I had never interested
myself in the others. I began to hanker for her good opinion, as I
had never hankered for theirs. I longed to set myself straight with
her, and beg her forgiveness for a thoughtless insult that I would
have given worlds to recall, and to feel that the way was open between
us to meet and associate as friends. This longing grew apace as the
evening wore on, but the prospect of its gratification grew less
and less. Until the little ones were taken away by their nurse she
devoted herself to them, telling them stories most of the time in a
dark corner, whence merry chatter and ripples of subdued laughter came
flowing out to us; but when they were gone, the bright vivacity that
was her true characteristic went too, and she became Marie Antoinette
again.
With an amiable wish to make things pleasant, Lizzie asked her to pour
out the tea; but she merely stood in front of me at the tea-table,
with her little nose in the air, and asked me whether I took sugar and
cream, in a high clear tone that brought a puzzled wonder into her
sister’s face and a slow smile to Don’s. I came and stood beside her,
to take the cups from her hand (her pretty head was about level with
the flower in my button-hole), and she tried to ignore me, but could
not. Her hands shook slightly and a little angry flush came and went
in her face; but I preferred that to having no notice at all. Later on
she went to the piano, and sung song after song for the delectation
of Lizzie and Don, neither of whom had the hearing ear and the
understanding heart to appreciate the pure quality and poetic sweetness
of her voice. By this time I was very low-spirited, and I drew away
from my host, who was growing sleepy after his hard day’s work, and
took a chair near her—which of course was a signal to Lizzie to leave
the room. As she sung on, forgetful of me and of everything but the
poetry awaking in her, and as I studied the pose of her slight figure
and half-bent head, and the now dreamy happiness in her face, and
listened for the first time after many years to the true translation of
a language that I loved, a vague perception dawned in me that there was
some latent fellowship between us. And then I felt that Fate had indeed
been hard.
The silence of the room was presently brought into strong relief by a
deep snore from Don, whereupon she suddenly rose from the piano and
saw that we were virtually alone. ‘Good-night, Mr Gardiner,’ she said
promptly, holding out a somewhat reluctant hand and stiffening back
into her unnatural stateliness.
I took it and held it and looked into her face; and I tried to tell
her, as well as plain ‘good-night’ would do it, that I knew what had
happened and wanted her to forgive me. I think she guessed what my look
meant, by the sudden crimson flame in her face; but she walked out of
the room with as much dignity as she had first walked into it, without
another word.
* * * * *
The early days of December were cold and wet, and the shearing was
a protracted and troublesome affair. Don hovered about restlessly,
whether in or out of the house, always bothered and anxious, and
paying frequent visits to the barometer. The ladies clung to their
fireside as if they had been in England; and I tied myself to Lizzie’s
apron-string with an abject alacrity that puzzled and charmed her.
My opportunities for ‘improving the occasion’ were many, but somehow
I could never turn them to account. The pride of that little maiden
was quite beyond my management. Lizzie threw us together; she left
us alone; she did all that in her lay to further my desires for a
reconciliation and an understanding; but the implacable resentment
of the last of the Lindsays towards me for that wretched slip of the
tongue was a stone wall I could not climb over. The worst of it was,
she did and said nothing tangibly offensive; and I was precluded by all
sorts of considerations from mentioning the subject we were both (and
that we both knew we were) thinking of. So matters went on day after
day. And before a great many days were past I was over head and ears
in love—I may as well say it and have done with it—and began to feel
desperate and dangerous. She walked about the house with her grand air,
my Queen Marie Antoinette, my little tyrant that I could almost have
demolished with a finger and thumb; and I, standing six feet three in
my stockings, had to acknowledge that she was invincible as well as
unmerciful. Unregenerate savage as I was, I had faint longings now and
then to take her by those slender shoulders, and shake her.
There were times when she became her sweet self, and could not help
it though she tried; and these times were born of music. She and I
both loved music with that special love that nature permits to a few
people; but to no one else in the house did the ‘heaven-born maid’
present attractions. Don, hard at work all day, could go to sleep after
dinner in his arm-chair; and Lizzie, after her manner, could go out of
the room in the middle of the most charming song. Then, when we were
singing together, or when she was gentle and gracious with the spirit
of melody in her, then was the oil thrown upon my troubled waters. At
times such as these it flashed across me that she was aware of it.
At length on one of these occasions I made a dash at her guarded
citadel; I will not say in what words, but with the blundering
foolishness that I suppose characterises all implied aspirations;
albeit with sufficient plainness to leave no chance of being
misunderstood; and then I had indeed to bite the dust for once in
my life. She had been singing _Ruth_ with the most touching pathos
and abandonment—‘Where thou goest I will go, and there will I be
buried’—and I could not stand it. Don was in the room, but snoring in
that comfortable undertone which denoted a sound and quiet slumber. She
stood with her back to the piano, and the sheet of music trembling and
rustling in her hands, watching his nodding head in the distance, and
turning her delicate profile to my view.
‘No; I will not,’ she half whispered with haughty rapidity. ‘You should
have known I would not. I do not particularly want to marry anybody,’
she added, flashing round upon me with her crimson face; ‘but I will
never marry _you_. I made up my mind to that long ago.’
Everybody knows how, in the supremely solemn moments of one’s life, one
is apt to be assailed with most incongruously ludicrous ideas. In spite
of my bitter mortification at her reply, an absurd rhyme that I had
heard somewhere, flashed into my head:
Do not be like Nancy Baxter,
Who refused a man before he’d axed her.
I believe she saw the ghost of a smile that might have hovered round my
eyes when I begged to know why she had made up her mind never to marry
me; and that made her savage.
‘Because you think I came here to be made love to,’ she retorted, with
all the concentrated contempt that her sweet face and voice could hold.
‘You think Lizzie and I have been plotting to catch you—you think we
wanted to inveigle you into marrying me! I know what you are going to
say’—as I rose and seized her hands, to stop her—‘but it is not the
truth. I _heard_ you’—lifting her angry eyes, now wet with unshed
tears, to mine—‘I heard you, with my own ears, tell Don to warn Lizzie
beforehand that you did not want to be married.’
‘I know you did,’ I replied, tightening my hold of her hands, while she
made feeble efforts to get away; ‘and I wish my tongue had been cut out
before I could have insulted you and her like that. Forgive me, Rachel;
I have been punished enough.’
‘I cannot,’ she answered, still panting with her excitement. ‘I should
be ashamed of myself if I could take a man who had even _thought_ of me
like that.’
Two tears began to trickle from her eyes, and a little hysterical catch
in her breath betrayed to me that her defiant courage was failing her.
I would not let her go. Love and shame and a resentful disappointment
made me a little savage too.
‘I never _did_ think of you like that,’ I said sternly; ‘and you know
it. I must hold you till I clear myself—I cannot bear it’——
A log tumbled in the grate, and Don woke up. She caught away her hands
and sped out of the room; and I walked through a French window into the
cool summer night, too full of wrath and love to speak to anybody.
This was how we stood when at last (on Saturday, the 18th of December)
the true Christmas weather came, and we found ourselves in the hot
afternoon alone on the croquet-lawn—alone for the first time since my
stormy wooing was interrupted. Don being still busy in the sheep-yards
and shearing-shed, I had been playing singly against Lizzie and her;
and now Lizzie had been called away to the nursery to consult with
a needlewoman who was at work there. We were both anxious (though
for very different reasons) to leave off playing when our chaperon
had departed; but it was not easy to do so in the middle of a game,
especially as she had instructed her partner to play for both of them
until she returned. So we knocked the balls about for a few minutes
in embarrassed silence, and then had an altercation as to which hoop
Lizzie had been through; and then we both got a little huffy, and
played, first with indifference, and then with a malicious energy,
which resulted at last in my sending her partner’s ball into the
thickest Portugal laurels in the shrubbery.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ I exclaimed with compunction, as she solemnly
marched off to look for it. ‘Let me find it for you.’
‘Do not trouble yourself,’ she replied sharply; and immediately dashed
in between the laurel and a very prickly rose-bush, whose long sprays
caught her muslin dress and tore it. I saw her straw-hat amongst the
big dark branches, and her little hand searching under them for a
moment or two; then she started up suddenly with a quick cry, and
bounded into the path again.
‘What is the matter? Have you hurt yourself,’ I asked anxiously.
Her hat fell to the ground, and she stood before me with the blazing
sun on her pretty head, and a wide-eyed horror in her face. ‘Wait a
minute for me!’ she panted breathlessly; ‘I want you to help me—I have
been bitten.’ Before I could collect my senses to understand what she
meant, she had sped like a flash of light into the house; and dashing
into the laurel bush, I saw what had happened. A big black snake was
gliding away from the spot where she had been kneeling.
What was to be done? I stood still for a moment paralysed; then I sent
up a hurried prayer for help, and simultaneously ‘cooeyed’ three or
four times with all the force of a powerful pair of lungs, for Don at
the wool-shed. Then I hurried after her, and met her coming through the
door of my brother’s dressing-room with one of his razors in her hand.
Her face was white and set as she seized my hand and hurried me into
the smoking-room, which was near us, and turned the key in the lock.
I knew what she wanted; and I set my teeth in an agony that no words
could express, and which I can never think of now without a shudder.
‘Look!’ she said piteously, with a little sob in her throat; and I
looked, and saw one of the fingers of her left hand tied round tightly
with a piece of string below the first joint, and the end of it already
livid and swollen and shewing the unmistakable punctures of the snake’s
fangs. She laid her other hand on my arm, and looked up at me with a
beseeching face that nearly unmanned me.
‘Help me!’ she whispered eagerly; ‘now—now; before the others come!’
And she held out the razor, open and shining. ‘It is no use to suck
it—it only wastes time,’ as I seized her finger and put it in my
mouth. ‘Don’t, don’t! I want to be on the safe side. I don’t want to
die! O pray, pray help me!’—now sobbing passionately—’or else I must
try to do it myself. I won’t cry out; I won’t mind it. I will turn my
head away.’ She laid her finger on the edge of the table, and I took
the razor from her, and with all the courage I could muster, excised
the wounded part. She bore the cruel operation without a murmur.
* * * * *
An hour afterwards the commotion in the house was over, but the
shadow of death was on it. Rachel was in her bed, white and faint and
breathing heavily, twitching with weak fingers at the bedclothes,
and staring with dull eyes into the sad faces around her. I knelt in
my room close by with my head on my outspread arms, weeping like a
child as if my heart would break, and listening to the creaking of the
doctor’s boots and the whisking of skirts and whispering of awed voices
on the other side of the thin wall. There was nothing else that I was
privileged to do, now that I had done that dreadful thing which they
told me might be the saving of her precious life.
As the twilight fell, the voices in the sick-room took a louder and
more cheerful tone; and presently one of them called softly: ‘Jerry, I
want you.’ Lizzie met me in the passage with a tremulous tear-stained
smiling face. ‘The doctor says she will be all right now, and that she
has to thank you for it,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t stay here any longer;
go and have a cigar with Don.’