CHAP.

I. TWO WORLDS

II. THE WONDER-CHILD

III. THE SECOND LADY-HELP

IV. THE PAINTING OF THE SHIP

V. DUNKS' SELECTION

VI. THIRTY THOUSAND A YEAR

VII. COME HOME! COME HOME

VIII. AN ATHEIST

IX. MORTIMER STEVENSON

X. 'I LOVE YOU'

XI. A SQUATTER PATRIOT

XII. R.M.S. UTOPIA

XIII. THE BUSH CONTINGENT

XIV. HOME TO THE HARBOUR

XV. HEART TO HEART

XVI. THE ROSERY

XVII. CROSSING THE VELDT

XVIII. A SKIRMISH BY THE WAY

XIX. THE MOOD OF A MAID

XX. MISS BROWNE

XXI. THE MORNING CABLES

XXII. CONCLUSION

*THE WONDER-CHILD*

*CHAPTER I*

*Two Worlds*

'Ah me! while thee the seas and sounding shores

Hold far away.'

They were walking from the school to the paddock where the children's

horses, thirty or forty nondescript animals, grazed all day long.

'Sh' think,' said Peter Small, son of the butcher who fed

Wilgandra,--'Sh' think you could have afforded one sprat at least for

teacher's present!'

'Afforded!' quoth Bartie Cameron. 'I could have afforded a thousand

pounds!'

'Then why d'ye 'ave 'oles in your stockings, and bursted boots?' asked

Peter.

''Cause it's much nicer than having darns and patches,' returned Bartie,

looking disparagingly upon his companion's neater garments.

'My old man's got a mortgage on your sheep,' said Peter, baffled on the

patches.

'We like mortgages,' said Bartie airily; 'they make the sheep grow.'

'We've got a new red carpet comin' for our livin'-room,' shouted Peter.

Bartie looked him over contemptuously.

'I've got a sister in London, and she makes fifty pounds a night by her

playing.'

'You're a lie!' said Peter, who was new to the school, and did not know

the Camerons.

'Take this, then!' said Bartie, and put his strong young fist in the

face of his friend.

A big girl, saddling her horse, came and pulled them apart, after they

had had a round or two.

'Haven't I got a sister who makes fifty pounds a concert?' demanded

Bartie breathlessly.

'Ain't he a lie?' demanded the son of the slaughterer.

The big girl arbitrated instantly. Certainly Bartie had a sister who

made hundreds and hundreds--more shame to her. Peter had better go home

and read the papers, if he did not believe it.

Peter said he did read the papers; he had never seen anything in them

about no sisters.

'What papers?' said the girl.

'_P'lice Budget and War Cry_, of course,' answered the boy.

'That's the sort of paper _your_ sister would be in,' Bartie said; 'mine

is always in the cables.' He turned off from both girl and boy, and

made his way to where a half-clipped horse nibbled at the exhausted

pasturage.

A small girl of eight had, with incredible exertion, put the huge saddle

on its back; Bartie had nothing to do but fasten the girths in place and

put on the bridle. He flung himself up, and moved the animal close to a

stump; Floss, the small girl, climbed to a place behind him, and a

nine-year-old boy, playing marbles near, rose up at the sight of the

moving horse, pocketed his marbles, swung his bag of books round his

neck, and clambered up to the third place on the steed's broad neck.

All the paddock was a-move. There was a general race down to the

sliprails, a gentle thunder of horses' hoofs and boys' shouts, broken by

the shriller cries and 'Good-byes' of the girls.

Then up and down, left and right, away along the branching roads rode

the country school children, tea and home before them, behind, one more

day of the quarter's tedium dropped away for ever.

The Cameron horse jogged along; as a rule she had only Roly and Floss to

carry, Bartie having a rough pony to journey on; but to-day the pony had

wandered too far to be caught before school-time, so Tramby had an extra

burden, and walked sedately.

Floss had a tiny red palm to show.

'Why, that's three times this week you've had the cane! You must be

going it, Floss,' said Roly.

'It was sewing,' sighed Floss; 'how would you like to sew? I know you'd

go and hide behind the shed.'

The front horseman turned his head. 'It's time you did learn, Floss,'

he said; 'look at my stockings, I'm sick of having holes in them. Look

at my trousers.'

'I heard Miss Browne telling you to leave them for her to mend,' said

Floss.

'No, thanks,' said Bart; 'I know her mending too jolly well. She'd

patch it with stuff that 'ud show a mile off.'

'Yes, look at my elbows,' Roly said; and though the positions forbade

this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new

rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.

Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes

and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and

her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock

was exquisite--a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully

embroidered.

'I wish some more of Challis's frocks would come,' she sighed; 'this

one's so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.'

'Why, she'd be shivering,' said Roly.

'Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!'

'Think how hot it is here!' sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming

little face with her disengaged hand.

'I got the mail,' Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his

pocket--a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue

with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the

postmark of Windsor.

'Suppose they're stopping with the Queen again,' he added laconically.

'Wonder what they have for tea at her house?' sighed Flossie, and her

system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in

prospect for her own meal.

Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and

stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out

the sliprail--nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then

she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the

passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.

Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of

miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock

coppery sky, summer and drought time.

[Illustration: HOME FROM SCHOOL.]

Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a

stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not

saying very much, for Wilgandra's vegetation as a rule copied the

neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant

to the eye in country wilds.

There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen

orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow

grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty

things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have

carried, but still in good condition--it seemed as if the mortgage was

fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered

off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.

Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was

rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her

arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about

in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River

Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves

lapped idly.

There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and

a table.

Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah,

and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.

There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely

pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that

Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it

was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the

room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in

her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.

'Have you got the mail?' she asked.

Bartie nodded.

'Go and fetch father,' he said; 'he's down with the roses, I saw his hat

moving.'

He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged

off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her

little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table,

on which was no cloth as yet.

'Miss Browne,' he called, the very tears in his voice, 'Miss Browne,

isn't tea ready?'

A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying

into the room.

'Poor Roly!' she said. 'Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending

your best jacket, and didn't notice the time. But I'll soon have it

ready now.' She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and

at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the

dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged,

and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.

Then she noticed the rent of extraordinary dimensions in Bartie's coat,

the same jagged place that had made even Peter Small exclaim.

'Dear, dear,' she said, 'this will never do. This really must not go a

moment longer. Where is my thimble? Where can I have put my thimble?

Give me that coat, Bartie, this minute, if you please.

Bartie took it off, but sat with jealous eye upon it all the time it was

in her hands. He would have it mended his way.

'Now, look here,' he said, 'please don't go putting any fresh stuff in

it. Just sew it over and over, so the places come together. I'll take

to mending my own clothes. It's just the way you go letting new pieces

in that spoils your mending, Miss Browne.'

'But, Bartie dear,' the gentle lady said, 'see, my love, when a place is

torn right away like this, we have to put fresh stuff underneath. I'll

just get a tiny bit from my work-basket.'

'You just won't,' said Bartie stubbornly. 'You give it to me, and I'll

mend it myself'--and he actually took the needle and cotton and cobbled

it over till there certainly was no hole left.

'Now, my love,' he said, and held it up triumphantly.

'But it will break away again to-morrow,' said Miss Browne, in deep

distress. 'If you would just let me put a little patch, Bartie.'

But Bartie clung to his coat.

Roly had strayed out to look at his kangaroo-rats, but now came back.

The tears came to his voice again at the sight of Miss Browne, sitting

with her thimble on, looking helplessly at Bartie.

'Oh dear,' he said, 'isn't there never going to be any tea?'

'You poor little fellow!' she said. 'Just one minute more, Roly dear.

You can be sitting down.'

Hermie had gone flying across the ground to a place in the eighty acres

where the ground dipped into a little valley. It was all fenced round

with wire, to keep off the fowls and sheep. Within there grew roses in

such beauty and profusion as to astonish one. She saw a very old

cabbage-tree hat bending over a bush, and darted towards it.

'Dad,' she said, 'dad darling, come along in; the mail has come.'

There rose up a man, grey as his own selection, a man not more than

five-and-forty. Eyes blue as Hermie's own looked from under his grey

eyebrows, a grey beard covered his mouth.

'The mail, did you say, little woman?' he said, and stopped to prune

just one more shoot here, and snip off just one more drooping blossom.

'And tea, too, darling; at least I suppose it will be ready some day.

Come along, you are very tired, daddie. Why did you start ploughing a

day like this?'

The man sighed.

'It had to be done, girlie; but see, I gave myself a reward. I have

been down here an hour. Now let us go and read our letters.'

As they reached the living-room they found Miss Browne dusting the piano

and tidying the music; the setting of the table was advanced one stage

further, that is, the knives and forks were now on.

Roly came up again from another visit to his rats.

'Miss Browne,' he said, 'oh dear, oh dear!'--and stalked off to the

kitchen, to demand of Lizzie, the young State girl who scrubbed and

washed for them, where was the corned beef for tea, and wasn't there any

butter?

But the father was tearing open the letters. Hermie and Bartie hung over

his shoulder, reading just as eagerly as he. Floss crouched between his

knees to catch the crumbs. Roly, munching while he waited at a hunch of

ill-coloured bread, kept an eye and an ear for any spoken news, and Miss

Browne moved continually about the room, straightening chairs, altering

the position of the table vases, rearranging the knives and forks.

Mr. Cameron looked up, and drew forward a chair next to his own.

'Do sit down, Miss Browne,' he said; 'I am sure you are very tired. Sit

down, and let us enjoy this all together.'

So Miss Browne, too, joined the circle, Roly watching her with a

brooding eye.

'WINDSOR CASTLE.

'OH, MY DEAR ONES, MY DEAR ONES' ran the white letter,--'Is the earth

shaking beneath me, have my hands ague, that my pen trembles like this?

We are coming home, home, home. No false reports this time, no

heart-sickening disappointment; the papers are actually signed for a

long season, and we leave by the Utopia in six weeks. The news came an

hour ago. I saw an equerry coming in with the letters, saw the letter

that meant so much carried up to my room by a house steward, and had to

pass along the corridor and leave it. Challis was going down to play to

the Queen in her private sitting-room. But after it all was over how we

went to our rooms again! There was only a chambermaid in sight, and for

the last twenty yards of corridor we ran. Home, home, home, to your

arms, my husband, my dear one, my patient old sweetheart! Home to my

little girls, my boys, my little boys! Darlings, my eyes are streaming.

Oh, to hold you all again, to feel you, to touch my Hermie's hair--is it

all sunlight yet?--to be crushed with Bartie's hug, to hold again the

poor little babies I left, my Roly, my little Floss. Ah, dear ones,

dear ones, now it is all over, now we are coming, coming to you, I can

let you know. Oh, these weary, weary years, these great cities where we

have no home, no corner of a home. I have broken my heart for you all

every night since I came away. Six years, my dear ones, six years of

nights to break my heart. Be sorry for mother, and love her, darlings.

Have you forgotten her, Hermie? Bart, Bart, have you kept a little love

warm for her? Ah, dear God, my babies will not know me, little Floss

will turn away her head. My sweetheart, my sweetheart, if the time has

been as long for you, and pleasures as tasteless, and all things as

void, then my heart sickens afresh, for I know what your life has been.

'What has kept me up all this weary time I cannot even think. Whatever

it was, it has snapped now, and I am limp, useless, broken up into

little bits, like nothing so much as a little child stretching out its

arms and crying to its mother. Can you not see my arms stretching,

stretching to you? Does not my cry come to your little town? It is

Challis who is the woman now; she sees my work is done. She had begun

to show me the bracelet the Queen gave her, and to tell me what every

one had said, but I had torn open Warner's letter, and found the home

orders had come. She is packing various little things now, and has

rung, and given orders with the dearest little air of self-possession.

"Sit down and write, and tell daddie," she said; "I will see to

everything now."

'The carriage is to come for us in an hour. We have been here three

days, and every one has been as kind and as enthusiastic as they are

always. We go to Sandringham on Friday; the Princess asked for Challis

to play for her guests that night; the Dowager Empress is to be there,

and others.

'Then at Manchester an immense farewell concert on Monday; Mr. Warner

says two thousand seats are already booked to hear the "Wonder-Child";

another at Plymouth on Friday; a rush up to Edinburgh, just for her to

appear at the Philharmonic. They are only giving her forty pounds for

the night, but Mr. Warner is unwilling for her to lose the Scotch

connection.

'Then peace, perfect peace, and home. I sit and try to fancy the

changes the six years have made in the home. I am glad you have had two

new bedrooms built; that will allow you to have a study again,

sweetheart, and Hermie a drawing-room--sixteen is sure to be hankering

for one. The furniture is looking a little shabby, I know; but of

course that can be easily remedied, and I have always had my boxes

stuffed with art vases and bits of brass and bronze, ready for when the

good time came. You have probably laid down new carpets long ere this

in all the rooms, but I shall bring some rugs and Eastern squares, for I

doubt if your back-block towns have supplied what would satisfy my now

cultured taste.

'I suppose people wonder at you still being stuck to the Civil Service

at a wretched two hundred and fifty pounds a year. Isn't the prevailing

idea that we are rolling in money? There is surprisingly little for all

the enthusiasm there has been--I think Mr. Warner said he had banked

three thousand pounds for her--all the rest goes in expenses, which are

enormous. We are obliged to be at the best hotels, and to be dressed

up-to-date; that runs away with big sums. And the advertising that Mr.

Warner says is so necessary swallows gigantic amounts. This has been

the first year with much profit. Sometimes when I dress my little

girlie in her Paris frocks I think of Hermie, making last season's do

again, perhaps. Did the last box of Challis's frocks do for Flossie?

The lady-help, I am sure, will have been able to cut them down.

'Do not let us think of the future, sweetheart, I cannot bear it yet. I

cannot leave you any more, you must not be left; Challis has had her

meed of her mother now, and it is the turn for the others. Yet Mr.

Warner says it must be kept up, this life of hers, this Wandering Jew

life. It is the price great artists pay. But the child is brave.

'"You shall not have it any more, mamma," she said when I read this out;

"you shall go home to daddie for always now."

'But when I looked at her face it was pale, and there was that wan look

in it that comes sometimes. To think of the little tender thing bearing

all this alone!

'But we must not think of the future, sweetheart; we must not think of

it for an instant. You will come to Sydney to meet us? Perhaps only you.

And we will come straight home to Wilgandra with you. If she ruins her

chances for ever, she shall have one month's quiet home before the

Sydney season begins. Mr. Warner will try to prevent this, but I shall

be very firm. Then you must get leave, and children and all, we will go

to Sydney together, and you shall hear the darling play. To think you

have none of you ever seen great audiences carried away by her little

fingers!

'Ask the lady-help not to do up my bedroom for me. I want to see the

faded pink and white hangings, and the sofa with the green roses on it,

and the knitted counterpane that grandma made--just as they were when I

left them.

'Oh, my little home, not beautiful, not even very comfortable, stuck

away in that hot little town hundreds of miles from Sydney--my heart is

breaking for you!'

Nobody spoke when the letter was finished--nobody, indeed, had spoken

all the way through. Tired little Floss, finding no news forthcoming,

had fallen asleep.

Roly had sat down to the table, and was sawing an end off the corned

beef. Miss Browne, since nothing was read aloud, had gently risen up

and was dusting the piano, to be less in the way. But from time to time

she glanced at the letter, alarm in her eyes. Could it be the little

golden girl was ill?

The father put down the letter, and his hand shook.

'Coming home,' he said, and rose up, looking dazed; 'we--we must stop

her at once, of course. Children, how can we stop her?'

Bart's chest was heaving. For a second he had heard the crying come to

the little town, and seen the stretching of the arms.

But out of the window lay the grey selection that she had never seen;

closer at hand were the rents in his clothes, the broken places on his

boots. He pulled himself together.

'I'll go down to the post and cable to her not to come,' he said; 'you

be writing it down, dad.'

And Hermie's girl-heart was breaking. The letter had shaken the very

centre of her being, and wakened in her a passion of love and longing

for this tender woman. Oh, to be held by her, kissed, caressed--to feel

that hand on the hair she could not help but know was pretty!

But looking up she saw her father's anguished gaze around him--Bart's

manly mastery of himself. She brushed her tears aside.

'I'll get the pen and ink,' she said; 'it--it's late--the cable ought to

go to-night.'

Miss Browne sat down, quivering with the suspense.

'Which,' she whispered, 'which of them is dead, your mother or little

Challis?'

Bartie it was who laughed--a hoarse apology for a laugh.

'Dead!' he said; 'they're coming home, Miss Browne!'

It was Miss Browne's turn to look anguished. She rose up and moved

uncertainly about the room, she began to tidy the music in feverish

haste, she dusted the piano yet again.

Then she turned to Mr. Cameron with one hand fluttering out.

'I--I--must ask you to let me have a s--shilling,' she quavered;

'the--the boys really must have their hair cut before she sees them.'

*CHAPTER II*

*The Wonder-Child*

'Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with His dew

On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and

blue,

Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings.'

Up to the last eight years Mr. Cameron's friends and relatives had

always had their hands full with finding positions for him that would

enable him to support his wife and family.

Once or twice he was in receipt of five hundred a year, but much more

frequently he would be in a bank or an insurance company, starting with

a modest salary of a hundred and twenty.

Every one liked him cordially--they could not help it. But every one

was unfeignedly glad when one of the relatives made a great effort, and,

by dint of interviewing Members of Parliament and getting a little

influence to bear here and a little there, worked him into the Civil

Service, the appointment being that of Crown Land Agent at Wilgandra,

the salary two hundred and forty pounds, less ten pounds for the

Superannuation Fund.

Wilgandra was so far away--three hundred and seventy-three miles back,

back, away in the heart of the country--the very farthest town to which

the Government sent its Land Agents. Surely the bad penny could never

turn up again to vex their peace!

Even Mrs. Cameron's anxious soul was set at rest.

The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no

society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable. But

the work seemed smooth and easy, and after so many ups and downs the

quiet security of the small hot township seemed delicious to her.

It was not that Mr. Cameron drank or gambled, or possessed indeed any

highly coloured sin. He was simply one of the impracticables, the

dreamers, that the century has no room for.

He had written verses that the weekly papers had accepted; indeed, a few

daintily delicate things had found their way into the best English

magazines.

He had painted pictures--a score of them, perhaps; the art societies had

accepted three of them, refused nine, and never been even offered the

remainder; no one had ever bought one of them.

He had composed some melodies that a musical light passing through

Sydney professed to be captivated with, had promised to have published

in London, and had forgotten entirely.

When they were unpacking their much-ravelled chattels the first night in

Wilgandra, James Cameron came to his great paint-box that the late

family vicissitudes had prevented him touching for so long.

'Ah,' he said, and a light of great pleasure came into his grey eyes as

he lifted it from the packing-case and rubbed the dust off it with his

good cuff--'mine old familiar friend. Why, Molly darling, I shan't know

myself with a brush in my hand again. With all the spare time there

will be here, I ought to do some good work at last.'

Then his wife laid down the stack of little torn pinafores and patched

jackets and frocks she was lifting from another box, and crossed the

room and knelt down by her husband's side, just where he was kneeling

beside the rough packing-case that had held his treasure.

'Dear one,' she said, 'dear one, Jim, Jim,'--one hand went round his

neck, her head, with its warm brown hair that the grey was threading

years too soon, pressed against his shoulder, her face, old, young, sad,

smiling, looked into his, her brave brown eyes held tears.

'Why, little woman,' he said, 'what is it--what is troubling you?

Smiling time has come again, Molly, the worries are all left behind with

Sydney.'

'Jim,' she said, and her hand tightened on the paint-box he held, 'Jim,

do you know we have five children, five of them, five?'

'Well, girlie,' he said, and got up and sat down on the edge of the box

and drew her beside him, 'haven't we an income of two hundred and thirty

pounds for them, a princely sum, when we are in a place where there is

nothing to tempt us to buy? And we hardly left any debts behind us this

time.'

'But, dearest, dearest,' she urged, 'if you get hold of this, we shall

not have it a year; you will get up in cloudland and forget to furnish

your returns or some such thing, and then you will be dismissed again.'

'Ah, Molly,' he said, his face falling, 'always the gloomy side.

Couldn't you have given me a night of happiness?'

A stinging tear fell from the woman's eyes.

'I couldn't, I couldn't,' she said; 'the danger made my heart grow sick

again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. _I_ love

your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses

but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what _have_ they

done?'

The man's eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a

circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see

their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were

disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just

at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to

crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn,

anxious-eyed creature.

His face whitened. 'It is worse than drink!' he said.

She acquiesced sadly.

'Nothing else would make me take it from you,' she said, her wet eyes

falling again to the paint-box; 'and if it were you and I only against

the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get

ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!'

He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of

genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into

his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his

life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the

policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the

whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.

He gave his wife a passionate kiss.

'You are right,' he said, 'take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin

from now to be a man.'

Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother's brow were

fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a

home around her where before had only been a house; the children were

taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to

Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.

The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate

themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome

yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.

Then the name began to crop up in the country news of the daily papers.

Another wonder-child for Australia had been discovered, it seemed--a

certain Challis Cameron, a mite of eight years who was creating much

excitement in the township of Wilgandra.

Presently from the larger towns near the paragraphs also were sent. A

concert had been given in aid of the Church Fund, and a pleasing

programme had been submitted. Among the contributors was a tiny child,

Challis Cameron, whose wonderful playing fairly astonished the big

audience.

Before Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had quite waked up to the situation, an

enthusiastic committee had been formed, a subscription list started and

filled, and a sum of sixty pounds thrust into their astonished hands,

for the child to be taken to Sydney for lessons.

Nowhere on the earth's surface is there a a land where the people are so

eager to recognise musical talent, so generous to help it, as in

Australia.

Mr. and Mrs. Cameron looked at each other when they were left alone, a

little dismay mingled with their natural pride. And from each other

they looked to the paddock beside their house where all the children

were playing. This especial child was unconcernedly filling up her

doll's tea-cups with a particularly delightful kind of red mud, and then

turning out the little shapes and calling Bartie to come and look at her

'jellies.'

Talent they had always known she had, but hardly thought it was anything

much above that of any child very fond of music. As a baby she had

cried at discords; at three years old she used to stand at the end of

the piano and make quite pretty little tunes with one hand in the

treble, while Bartie thumped sticky discords in the bass. At four she

used to stand beside Hermie, whom her mother was teaching regularly, and

in five minutes understood what it took her sister an hour to learn

imperfectly. At four, too, her head hidden in the sofa-cushion, she

could call out the names of not only single notes but chords also, as

Hermie struck them. So her mother undertook her tuition too, and in two

years these paragraphs were appearing in the papers.

But to go away with her and stay in Sydney while masters there heard her

and taught her! What was to become of the other four, and the husband

who needed his wife so much?

'I am afraid we must send her to a boarding-school there,' she faltered.

'How can I leave the home?'

But later the child came and stood at her knee; a tall, thin, little

child she was, with fair fine hair that fell curlless down her back, and

in her eyes that touch of grey that makes hazel eyes wonderful.

The face was delicately cut, the skin clear and pale; only when the pink

ran into it was she pretty.

'I made another song, mamma,' she whispered.

The dying light of the long still day was in the room, very far away in

some one's fig-trees the locusts hummed, a sprinkle of sweet rain had

fallen, the first for months, and the delicate scent of it came through

the window.

'What is it, darling?' whispered the mother.

The child's eyes grew larger, she swayed her tiny body to and fro.

'Oh, the roses, the roses and the shivery grass! Oh, the sea! Oh, the

little waves running on the sand! Oh, the wind, blowing the little

roses till they die! Oh, the pink roses crying, crying! Oh, the sea!

Oh, the waves of the crying sea!'

The mother's arm went round the little body, down into the depths of

those eyes she looked, those eyes with their serious brown and grey

lights mingling, and for one clear moment there looked back at her the

strange little child-soul that dwelt there.

Out at the door there was a clamour, Roly demanding bread-and-jam. From

the paddock came a sudden gust of quarrelling, the next-door children,

with Hermie, shrill-voiced, arbitrating. Probably down in the street

Bartie was fighting any or all of the boys who passed.

'Dear heart!' ran the woman's thoughts. 'My days are too crowded to tend

this little soul. Better that she too asked bread-and-jam of me.'

'Play it for me, mother,' said the child, and plucked at her hand. 'I

can't; I have tried and tried, and the sea won't cry, only the roses.'

'Nonsense, nonsense!' said the troubled mother; 'run and play till

bedtime. Play chasings with Roly and Floss, or be Bartie's horse. Have

you forgotten the reins I made him?'

The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.

'I will get the reins,' she said nervously, obediently.

Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could

say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or

strangers.

Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every

moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid

coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the

shilly-shallying in using it.

So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk

beside her in a second-class carriage.

'We shall be back in a month at most,' she called out for the twentieth

time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.

But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said,

the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her

concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat

high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off

the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to

bury her excited little face on her mother's breast.

Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of

its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it

insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its

hands recklessly into its pockets.

Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the

anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her

pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose

of sending the child to Germany.

And now what to do?

The small house at Wilgandra seemed going along very steadily; Mr.

Cameron had not once failed to furnish the reports due from him to the

Government. The lady-help selected by the mother had the house and the

children and the father in a state of immaculate order. She was a

magnificently capable, managing woman; every one, Mr. Cameron

especially, stood much in awe of her, and unquestioningly obeyed her

smallest mandate; even Roly, unbidden, performed magnificent ablutions

before he presented himself for a meal, and Hermie was often to be seen

surreptitiously trying to mend her own pinafores in the paddock.

Mrs. Cameron could not but confess her place was not crying out for her

to the extent she had imagined; indeed, the wonderful lady-help, Miss

Macintosh, seemed to have brought the home into a far better state of

order and discipline than even she, the mother, had been able to do.

Little Floss was a healthy and most independent babe of two; Roly, three

years old, was a sturdy mannikin who stared at her stolidly when, her

heart full of tears, she stooped over him and asked, did he want her to

go away again?

'Mamma mustn't go away in a big ship, must she, sweetheart? You can't

do without her again, can you?' she said.

But Roly was a sea-serpent swimming on the dining-room floor, and the

interruption irritated him.

'Yes,' he assented, with swift cheerfulness, 'mamma go in big ship.

Good-bye, good-bye!'--and he waved an impatient hand to get rid of her.

Hermie and Bartie had just started to a good private school near at

hand, and the teaching--all honour to the mistress!--was of so skilful

and delightful a nature that the two could hardly summon patience to

wait for breakfast ere they set out for the happy place. So Challis's

claims tugged hard.

'But you--what of you, my husband?' she said. 'You cannot spare me; it

is absurd for you to even think of it!'

But he was excited and greatly moved at the thought of his child's

genius. Deep down, in his heart was the knowledge that had he himself

been given a chance he could have made a name for himself in this world.

But there was always uncongenial work for him, always something else to

be done, 'never the time and the place and the loved one all together.'

'Let us give her her chance,' he said. 'It is early morning with her.

Don't let ours be the hands to block her, so that when evening comes she

can only stand wistful.'

So they sailed away, the mother and the wonder-child; behind them the

plain little home, before, the Palaces of Music.

*CHAPTER III*

*The Second Lady-Help*

'The droop, the low cares of the mouth,

The trouble uncouth

'Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain

To put out of its pain.'

And for actually six months that home survived! After that the

crumbling was to be expected, for some discerning man came along, and

married the marvellous lady-help out of hand.

Mr. Cameron spent five pounds in the purchase of a pair of _entree_

dishes for a wedding-present, and was unhappy that he could so very

inadequately reward her great services. But there was a curious air of

buoyancy and relaxation observable in him the first day the house was

free of her.

At tea he got _The Master of Ballantrae_ out, and read boldly all

through the meal, a thing he had not ventured to do for eighteen months.

And out in the frozen shrubbery at midnight, with the Master and Mr.

Henry thrusting at each other, he spilled the tea that Hermie passed

him. When he saw the wide brown stain he had made on the table's

whiteness--although the ridiculous fancy pursued him that it was the

Master's life-blood smirching the snow--he looked up startled, full of

apologies. But there was only Hermie's childish face in front of him;

and though she said, 'Oh, papa!' as became a president of the tea-tray,

she looked away the next second to laugh at Roly, who had spread his

bread with jam on both sides, and did not know how best to hold it. And

Cameron felt so much a man and master of his fate once more, that he

stretched right across the table to help himself to butter, instead of

politely requesting the passing of it. For three months the household

ran a merry course. Hermie, a bright little woman of eleven, begged her

father to let her 'keep house' and give the orders to Lizzie, the very

young general servant.

The father bent his thoughts five minutes to the problem; Miss Macintosh

had been away now a fortnight, and everything seemed going along really

delightfully. What need to break the sweet harmony of the days by

getting in some person whose principles counted reading at table and

spilling tea among the cardinal vices?

And Lizzie, the State girl, was at his elbow with a shining face. She

was fifteen, she said--fifteen was real old! Now why should the master

go getting in any more of them lady-helps, who did nothing but scold

from morning to night? She, Lizzie, would undertake all there was to do

in this place 'on her head.'

Cameron smiled at the eager girls, and, while hardly daring to consent,

put off for a further day the engagement of a successor to Miss

Macintosh. And the three months ran gaily along, and still Hermie sat

importantly at the head of the table, and still her father read, and

still Roly spread his bread upon both sides.

There was always a good table--far better than either the mother or

lady-help had kept.

For the family grocer had an alluring way of suggesting delicacies, when

he came for his orders that certainly no mistress of eleven or handmaid

of fifteen could withstand.

'Almonds?' he would say. 'Very fine almonds this week, Miss

Cameron--three pounds did you say--yes? And what about jam? I have it

as low as fivepence a tin, but there is no knowing what cheap fruit

these makers use.'

'Oh,' Hermie would say, 'I must have very good jam, of course, or it

might make my little sister ill! How much is good jam?'

'There's strawberry conserve, a shilling a tin,' the man would

say--'pure fruit and pure sugar, boiled in silver saucepans.'

'Silver saucepans! That couldn't hurt Flossie! We will have six tins

of that, please,' the small house-woman would answer. Then there were

biscuits; Miss Macintosh, frugal soul, only gave Wilgandra, when it came

calling, coffee-biscuits at sevenpence a pound with its afternoon tea.

Hermie regaled it upon macaroons at half a crown. Then Lizzie would

have her say. What was the use of cooking meat and vegetables on

washing-day, ironing-day, and Saturdays, she would say, when you could

get them tinned from a grocer? So tins of tongue, and whitebait, and

pressed meats, French peas, asparagus, and such, were added weekly to

the order, the grocer sending to Sydney for the unusual things. 'We are

saving a lady-help's wages,' Hermie would say, 'and it saves the

butcher's bills, so it is not extravagant a bit.'

It was not until the third month that the day of reckoning came. Then

the grocer, grown a trifle anxious over his unusual bill, which no one

was settling, ventured to accost Mr. Cameron one day on his verandah and

present it.

'No haste, of course,' he said politely, 'only as your good lady and

Miss Macintosh always paid monthly, I thought you might not like it

going on much longer.'

When he had bowed himself out, Mr. Cameron rubbed his suddenly troubled

brow a moment. Money, bills! The thought had actually never crossed

his mind all these three months! His wife first and then Miss Macintosh

had always managed the finances of the family. Indeed, one of Mrs.

Cameron's injunctions to the lady-help had been, 'When Mr. Cameron's

cheque for his quarter's salary comes, please be sure to remind him to

pay it into the bank.' And Miss Macintosh had never failed to do so,

nor to apply for the twelve pounds monthly for payment of the household

bills.

He went into the dining-room and began to rummage helplessly about his

writing-table. To save his life he could not recollect what had become

of his last cheque, for there was a conviction on his mind that he had

never paid it into his account.

Hermie was at the table, Mrs. Beeton's cookery-book spread open before

her; over her shoulders peeped the heads of Bartie and Roly, absorbed in

the contemplation of the coloured plate picturing glorified blancmanges

and jellies. For was not to-morrow Roly's fifth birthday, for which

great preparation must be made by the young mother of the house?

'Children,' said the father at last entreatingly, 'come and help me; I

have lost a very important envelope.'

For over an hour did that family search from one end of the house to the

other. It was Lizzie's happy thought that discovered it.

'A long blue envelope, with no stamp on it and just printing

instead--why, there was one like that in the kitchen drawer with the

dinners on it,' she said.

She rushed for it, and met her anxious master with it held triumphantly

out.

The back of the envelope bore dinners for the week in Hermie's round

careful hand.

_Mon._--Roast fowl, mashed potatoes, collyflower, pink jellie

and gem cakes.

_Tues._--Tong, blommange and strawberry jam, rainbow cake.

_Wed._--Sardenes, current buns, yelow jelly and merangs.

Mr. Cameron thrust a trembling hand into the depths of it, and, to his

exquisite relief, was able to draw out the cheque for his quarterly

sixty pounds.

In danger of the kitchen fire, in danger of the dust-box, in danger of

Roly's passion for paper-tearing, in danger of all the wind-storms that

had sprung up and torn raging through the place, in danger of all these

for three months, and still safe!

The relief took the man back into the dining-room, responsibility for

his family to the front for the third time in his life.

He ran through the bills with a sinking heart. Instead of twelve pounds

a month that Miss Macintosh's carefulness had made suffice, little

Hermie had brought up the totals to twenty-eight--eighty-four pounds for

the quarter, to be deducted from the sixty pounds that must also pay

rent and clothes and many other things.

The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had

been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with

the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the

changed meals as much as the boys--Cameron had quite a boyish appetite

for good things, and Hermie's brilliant menus had been delightful to him

after a long course of Miss Macintosh's boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle

roly-polies, and milk sagos.

'A first-rate little manager,' he always called her, when he passed up

his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he

recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more

expensive than rhubarb or rice.

'Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!' she said, awake at last to

the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear

commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such

an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction,

and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.

'But I am eleven,' she kept repeating sadly, 'eleven, papa. I ought to

have known.'

There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys'

school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother's

conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each

day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights

that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.

But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and

found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one

to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake

himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of

the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied

three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he

took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over

heavy.

But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning

home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.

The father's blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.

'Is my son a thief,' he said, 'that he should treat me so? Or is it he

despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?'

With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his

conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat

on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never

resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.

No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas,

when the boy marched in with the year's prize for punctuality under his

arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.

'I like a man of honour,' he said. But the two events together, the

grocer's bill and the master's call, decided the father he must enter

into submission and have another lady-help, for the children's sake.

How to obtain one? He made inquiries about Wilgandra, but the class of

people from whom he sought to take one were of the mind that prevails in

many of the country towns and bush settlements. They would rather

starve than serve--at all events where they were known. Now and again a

self-respecting intelligent girl broke away from her life and went off

with her trunk to find service in Sydney.

But, for the most part, the daughters of a house up to the number of

seven, or even ten, stayed under the cramped roof-tree of their fathers,

and led an unoccupied, sheepish existence, till marriage or death bore

them off to other homes.

So in despair Cameron wrote off to a Sydney registry office, and asked

the manageress to send him a lady. Just before he closed the letter the

happy freedom of the last three months led him to add a postscript, 'I

should like the lady you select to be of not too managing a

disposition--gentle and pleasant.'

The registry office keeper rubbed her hands; here surely at last was a

chance to dispose of Miss Browne--Miss Browne, who was ever on the

books, who was sent off to a situation one week, and came back with red

eyes and a hopeless expression the next, dismissed incontinently as

incapable.

The registry office keeper turned up the town Wilgandra in her railway

time-table.

Three hundred and seventy-three miles away! Surely at such a distance,

especially as the employer was paying the expensive fare, Miss Browne

might be regarded as settled for a space of three months!

Mr. Cameron had no complaint to make of his new lady-help on the score

of being of a managing disposition. She was gentleness itself--that

kind of deprecating gentleness that makes the world feel uncomfortable.

She tried pitifully hard to be pleasant--pleasant and cheerful. She

worked from earliest morning to late at night, and accomplished about as

much as Hermie could in two hours. It took her nerveless fingers nearly

a quarter of an hour to sew on a waistcoat button, and in little more

than a quarter of an hour the button would have tumbled off again.

Lizzie seldom trusted her to cook anything; when she did so the poor

lady invariably emerged from the kitchen with her hands burnt in several

places, sparks in her eyes, the front width of her dress scorched, her

hair singed, and her poor frail body so utterly exhausted, the family

would insist upon her instant retirement to bed.

Nobody knew what the woman's life had been, where had gone the vigour,

the energy, the graces that should still have been hers, for her years

were barely thirty-five.

A crushing sorrow, disappointment on the heel of disappointment,

loneliness, or perhaps only a grey life full of petty cares passed in a

scorching, withering climate--one or all of these things had dried the

sap out of her, and left of what might have been a gracious creature,

radiating pleasure and comfort, only the rags and bones of womanhood.

The Camerons suffered her patiently for three long months; then the

father gathered his courage up in both hands, closed his ears to the

pity that clamoured at his heart, and told her gently enough that she

must go.

She threw up her fluttering hands and sank on the sofa--in her eyes the

piteous look of amaze and grief that your fireside dog would wear if you

took a sudden knife to him. So kind had the family been, so patient,

the poor creature had told herself exultingly that they were satisfied,

even pleased with her, and had hugged the novel, delicious thought to

sleep with her for the last two months.

She asked shakingly what she had done.

'Nothing, nothing at all,' Cameron reassured her eagerly; 'it is merely,

merely I can see you are not strong enough for such a hard place as

mine.'

'A hard place!' she cried, and looked at him dazed. 'Why, there are

only five of you, and Lizzie to do all the rough work! I've been where

there were ten, and done the washing and everything. I've been where

there were nine, and had to chop the wood and draw the water myself.

I've been mother's help and had to carry twin babies miles in the sun.

I've been where the children pinched and scratched me. I've been at

places where I rose at half-past four, and found my way to bed at

eleven. And in none have I ever given notice myself. A hard place!

Dear heart!'

'My dear Miss Browne,' Cameron said, and such was the fluent nature of

the man that his eyes were filled, and he had no idea that he lied, 'it

was solely for the sake of your health I spoke. You look so delicate.

If you think the duties are not too heavy, why, I shall be most heartily

obliged to you if you will stay with us indefinitely.'

Then he went away to seek his children, to tell them her story, and beg

their tenderest patience.

*CHAPTER IV*

*The Painting of The Ship*

'Never a bird within my sad heart sings,

But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings.'

Yet his coward pen never plucked courage to itself to write across seas

of this family incubus.

The earlier letters had spoken variously of 'Miss Macintosh,' or 'the

lady-help'; now there was never a name given, the references being

merely to 'the lady-help.' Even the children scrupulously followed this

up.

When the Marvellous One had gone off with her _entree_ dishes to her new

home, the father had said, 'Children, we will not tell mother just yet

that Miss Macintosh has left, it would only worry her. We will wait

till we can write and say we have another one as good.'

So the tale of Hermie's housekeeping and the mislaid cheque never

crossed the sea, and the mother in her far German boarding-house

continued to comfort herself with the thought of Miss Macintosh's

perfections.

When Miss Browne's shortcomings made themselves glaringly patent, the

pens again shallied in telling the story.

'It is so close to Challis's concert, we mustn't worry them with our

little troubles, children,' the father said.

So Bartie and Hermie continued to write guarded letters; and if the

boy's hand at times ran on to tell how Miss Browne had put ugly patches

on his clothes, or the girl's heart began to pour itself out on the thin

paper and speak of the discomfort of the new reign, recollection would

come flooding, the letters would be cast aside and new ones written,

short, studied, and never saying more in reference to the vexed question

than 'the lady-help had taken Floss out for a walk.'

'I hope Miss Macintosh sees you have your little pleasures,' the mother

would write. 'You do not tell me about birthday parties or picnics.

Don't forget mother loves to hear of it all.'

And Hermie would write back sadly:

'The lady-help is very busy just now, but when she has more time she is

going to let us have a party.'

'I tremble each mail,' the mother wrote once, 'lest your letter should

bring me news that Miss Macintosh is engaged and about to be married.

It is strange such a woman has not been snapped up long before this.'

And Cameron answered:

'I do not think you need worry, my darling, about the lady-help

marrying. She has given me to understand she has had a disappointment,

and will never marry.'

But the very guarding of the letters, the reading of them over, to be

sure nothing had been let slip, made them seem poor and lifeless to the

anxiously devouring eyes the other side of the world.

She wrote at last:

'Sweetheart, from what you don't say, more than from what you do, I

learn of your loneliness. You are so dull, my poor boy, and the days

rise up and sink to rest all grey like one another. Yet a little more

patience, and surely there will be plenty of money to make life all

sunshine for you. But just for a little brightness, darling, reach down

that box of paints we put away on the cupboard top, get out your

brushes, and let them help the hours to fly. While the Conservatorium

has been closed for vacation Challis and I have been four days in Rome.

And she found me crying one morning in a picture gallery, in front of

some great picture, a Raphael, or an Andrea del Sarto--some one, at all

events, who painted with hands of fire. And yet it was not the subject

of the picture that moved me, unless it was that the magic canvas

wrought me to the mood that is yours so often. All I thought of was the

cold harsh woman, the Martha with blind eyes, who, that first day in

Wilgandra, took away by force and at the same time the paint-box and the

glow from your life. My boy, my sweetheart, let me give it back. Ah,

would that I could stand on the chair and reach it down from the

cupboard and put it into your hands myself! But do it now, my darling,

this moment. I know you will be careful and not risk your position by

forgetfulness. And when you are loneliest, when you miss me most, let

the brushes take my place.'

Cameron had been reading his letter at the tea-table.

'Children,' he said, and rose up, his face working, his eyes shining

strangely, 'children, mother wants me to paint pictures again. I--she

says I am to get the box down.'

The table had no comprehension of the greatness of the matter, but rose

up at once, at seeing the father so moved. Roly brought his mug of

sweetened milk along with him, Floss continued to bite at her crust of

bread-and-jam, Miss Browne fluttered about, Hermie and Bart pressed at

their father's elbow.

'Bring a chair, Bartie,' Cameron said, 'here at the cupboard in the

hall.'

'Mine cubbub,' interjected Floss; 'me's hat in dere. Go 'way, daddie.'

'I'll climb up,' said eager Bart. 'What is it up there, dad?'

'Give me the chair--let me reach it down myself,' Cameron said, and

stepped up and stretched his long arm to the top.

A dusty mustard-box! The children's eyes brightened with swift thoughts

of treasure, then dulled when the lid was flung back and displayed

nothing but a chaos of dirty oil-tubes and brushes.

But when they saw their father's glistening eyes, saw him fingering the

same tubes with a tender, lingering touch, looking at the brushes'

points, they did not tell him they were disappointed in the treasure.

Instead, Bart led off with a cheer.

'Hurrah for daddie the artist!' he shouted.

'Hurrah!' cried Hermie.

''Rah!' shrilled Roly.

Floss claimed a kiss.

'Me dive daddie dat,' she said in her kindest way, 'out mine cubbub.'

And thus was the painting of the ship begun.

'Can you see what I mean, Bart?' Cameron said two months later, when the

picture was almost finished, so desperately had he worked at it.

'You mean it for a ship, don't you?' Bart said. 'If I'd been you,

though, dad, I'd have painted a steamship with two funnels. People

don't think much of sailing-boats now.'

'Can you see what I mean, Hermie?' Cameron said, and wistfulness had

crept into his eyes.

Hermie's blue-flower eyes were regarding the great canvas dubiously.

'Couldn't you have made the water blue, papa?' she said; 'the sea is

blue, you know. P'raps, though, you hadn't enough blue paint. But I like

it to be a sailing-boat; steamships aren't so clean.'

The man's heart clamoured for his wife, who had never been at a loss to

find what he meant. For a moment it seemed intolerable to him that she

was not there at his elbow, to share the exaltation of the moment with

him.

'Run away, run away,' he said irritably to Hermie and Bart; 'you shake

my elbow, you worry me; run away.'

Miss Browne made a hysterical noise in her throat.

'It is so sad,' she said; 'what is it you have done to it? It is only a

ship and a man, and yet--do you know I can hardly keep the sobs back

when I look at it.'

To her amaze her employer turned eagerly round, shook her hand again and

again in warmest gratitude, and fell to painting once more with feverish

haste.

The canvas showed a livid stretch of coast and ocean, and a spectre ship

with a spectre captain at the helm.

The ship had an indescribably sad effect. You saw her straining through

the strong, repellent waves, you heard her cordage creaking, you saw her

battling stem struggling to push a way. She was a living thing,

breaking her heart over the black hopelessness of her task. The

captain's face burnt flame-white out from the canvas; his desperate eyes

stared straight ahead; his long hand held the helm in a frightful grip.

You knew he was aware he would never round his cape; you knew he would

fight to do so through all eternity.

The Camerons celebrated the day of the finishing of the picture as a

high holiday. The children had ten shillings tossed to them to spend as

they liked. They bought a marvellous motley of edible things, and

dragged their father and Miss Browne up the Jib to partake of them. It

were sheer madness to suppose a whole half-crown's worth of Brazil nuts;

to say nothing of chocolates, tarts and other extreme dainties, could be

discussed within the cramped walls of a house in a street. The whole

width of the heavens was needed, and a thousand gum-trees, and the smell

of earth and grass.

Cameron walked about on the heights as if on air. He had not painted

that canvas that stood, still wet, down below in the straggling town.

He had entertained a spirit, something stronger, fiercer, more

triumphantly capable than himself. He could have flung up his arms and

run shouting up and down, shouting thanks to the winds, the trees, the

sailing skies, that the spirit had taken its dwelling in him.

Magnificent fancies came bursting upon him; now and again he held his

head, so rich were the conceptions, so strong felt his hand to bring

them into instant being.

An urgent craving for his wife took hold of him--he strode away from the

children's shouts, away from Miss Browne, who sat wretched because she

had forgotten the tin-opener, and the tea, and the sugar.

He found himself down near the creek, with the gums waving eighty feet

above his head, gums with snow patches of blossoms on them, stern gums,

smiling gums, red, silver, blue. And he called, 'Molly,' and the trees

encouraged him.

And again, 'Molly,' 'Molly,' and there burst up to his lips from his

heart all the words he had had to stifle away since the sailing of her

ship. All that he would have poured out to her these last two years,

all that had lain quiet and kept his being stagnant since that last

agonised clinging of her arms.

'I thought I could bear it,' the man said to the trees, 'but I can't--it

is too much! Are you listening to me, Molly? I must have you again to

talk to. She has had you long enough--Challis has had her share of you;

now I must have you again. These children take us from each other,

Molly. We are very fond of them, but we should have more time to love

each other without them, to love like we did twelve years ago. I want

you, to tell you about the picture, Molly, Molly. Can you hear, darling,

can you hear?'

And sometimes she seemed near to him, seemed a part of the air, the

trees, the earth, and he raved to her and talked joyously.

And sometimes he lost her, the delicate spirit webs broken by the

world's machinery, and he dropped his head on his arms and wept.

But when the thread snapped finally, and nothing could bring her to him

again, he groped his way upwards, for now the loneliness, after the

speaking, was a thing he dared not bear. The children welcomed him

eagerly. They had wanted him so badly, they said, for dinner, and here

he came only just in time for tea. Would he please open that tin of

jam--there was no opener, but perhaps he could do it with a bit of

broken bottle? And there were no matches; would he please use his and

light the fire? The tea was forgotten, but hot milk and water would be

nice, perhaps, but there was only a little milk remaining, and the sugar

had been left behind. He fell to laughing, and was thereby restored to

more normal mind. He lighted the fire, and water and milk circulated

round the little party, and refreshed it. He attended to the

wounded--Bart had gashed his hand attempting the opening of that tin of

jam, Hermie had a tick in her arm, Roly had stirred up a nest of

bull-dog ants, and had met with his due reward, Floss had eaten too many

chocolates, and Miss Browne had been stuck in the mud, attempting to get

water from a pot-hole; her large shabby shoes looked pathetically

ridiculous.

So by the time he had helped all his lame dogs over their stiles, and

got them ready for marching home, his mood was quite a happy one again.

He went down the mountain-side, Floss in his arms, Bart and Hermie on

either side, Miss Browne and Roly close at hand.

And with a flushed face and happy eyes and a fluent tongue he told them

all manner of wonderful things; in very truth he could keep them to

himself no longer. How the world was going to be very pleased indeed

with his picture, and hang it in so famous a place that Challis would

not be the only one making the name of Cameron celebrated. And how a

whole mint of gold was going to be given to him for it--Hermie and Miss

Browne would be able to order all they liked and more from the family

grocer. And how he was going to send for mamma to come at once to stay

with them again, so that they could all live happily to the end of their

days.

Through the little town they wound with eyes shining at the thought.

Hermie's order-loving soul was soothed at the vision of domestic peace

once more. Bart resolved to keep his best knickerbockers for the

mother-fingers to mend.

'Can she make puddings?' said Roly, who despised the culinary skill of

Miss Browne. And 'Mam-mam,' murmured little sleepy Floss, not because

her mind held recollection of using the name, but because a baby

next-door spoke it incessantly, and it seemed pleasant. Only Miss Browne

looked wistful-eyed; a mother such as this seemed would never deem her

capable enough; Christmas would see her back in Sydney, weariedly

waiting occupation in the registry office.

They turned the key of the door--Lizzie had had holiday also. And on

the threshold, pushed beneath the door by the post-boy, lay another long

blue envelope with no stamp upon it, and only printed letters instead.

Cameron picked it up, quite without suspicion--his cheque for the

quarter, he supposed.

But the reading told him he was dismissed the service for his

carelessness and the culpable neglect of his duties during the past four

months.

*CHAPTER V*

*Dunks' Selection*

'Well, it is earth with me; Silence resumes her reign,

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.'

'I shouldn't think it can be very much farther, dad,' said Bart.

'I believe we have passed it,' Hermie sighed; 'I am sure we have come

much more than nine miles,' and she mopped her hot cheeks that the sun,

burn as he would, had never freckled.

Cameron, the reins slack in his hand, looked doubtfully from side to

side.

'It ought to be somewhere here,' he said; 'isn't that a fence at the top

of the hill? Yes, I'm sure it is.' He touched the horse lightly with

the switch that Floss held, and on they went again. They were in a

borrowed broken-springed buggy, the five of them and Miss Browne, come

out to see the home their father was buying--none of them, not even the

father, had seen it yet.

For a couple of months after his dismissal Cameron had lingered on in

the house in Wilgandra, too bewildered and helpless to know what to do.

It was not the first time a similar crisis had happened, but before his

wife had always taken matters in hand, looked up situations for him in

the papers, interviewed influential people, brushed his clothes and sent

him out with little to do but present himself to his employer.

But now he was completely at sea.

He wrote a few letters to Sydney friends, vaguely asking if they knew of

'a billet.' But seven years' silence makes strangers of ones best

friends; some were scattered, and dead letters were the only reply;

others wrote to say Sydney had never been in such a state of hopeless

depression, and strongly advised him not to come to add to the frightful

army of the unemployed.

'Why not go on the land?' said one or two of them. 'A man like you with

a growing family should do well there, and you would at least be your

own master and free from "a month's notice."'

Cameron first asked the children what they thought of 'going on the

land.'

When they heard this meant moving to a new place, and having sheep and

growing all their own things, and each one helping, they were enchanted.

Cameron was too shy and reserved to have made many friends in the

township, but he put on a clean cool coat and filled his pipe and

wandered forth, with the vague idea of asking some one's advice on the

matter. But there was a race-meeting in a neighbouring township, and

the streets were almost deserted, the tradespeople and the

land-and-estate agent being the only men at their posts. The latter,

however, struck Cameron as the very man to ask. And Cameron struck the

agent as the very man for whom he had been waiting. There was a

selection, he said, a few miles away--eighty acres of fine land that its

drunken owner, Dunks, had hardly stirred since he had taken it up.

There was a five-roomed cottage on it, there were fifty head of sheep,

poultry, a couple of horses, a cart, and all tools. Dunks, anxious to

get to Sydney, was willing to let all go for two hundred and fifty

pounds.

But Cameron went home hopeless, he could as easily raise two thousand

pounds as two hundred and fifty.

Hermie met him with a registered letter from which a cheque for a

hundred fluttered. Challis's professors, it seemed, had allowed her to

give a few concerts in the midst of her course of lessons, and five

hundred pounds had been the result.

'The child insists that I shall send a hundred,' ran the letter, 'for

you all to buy presents with, and though I don't know what you can

buy--but sheep--in Wilgandra, I send it. More I do not enclose, my dear

one, for well do I know how shockingly you would lose and give it away.

But all have some fun with this hundred, and now every penny that comes

I shall jealously bank for the future and for the child's own use, as is

but fair and right.'

Cameron and Bartie and Hermie went eagerly off to the agent's again.

Cameron held up his cheque, and asked if it would do if they paid that

amount down and the rest on terms. And the agent, after a little demur,

was agreeable--had he not that morning been visited by Dunks, who said

he would take as low as a hundred and fifty to be rid of the place?

Cameron almost handed the cheque over there and then, but then some of

the prudence learned from his wife came to him, and he pocketed it

instead, and said they would go and look at the place.

Thereupon, the following Saturday, the agent lent his buggy, gave

directions for finding, and this was the journeying.

'Yes,' Cameron said, 'this must be it, but there doesn't seem to be a

gate. I suppose we had better go through these sliprails. Get down and

lift them out, Bart.'

The early summer, in her eagerness and passion for growth and beauty,

had been tender even to Dunks' selection. The appearance of the place

appalled none of the buggy-load.

Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums

were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their

soberness.

Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for

lambs, and a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the

cottage and gambolled with the children. There was a bleating calf with

a child's pink sash tied round its neck, fluff balls of chickens ran

under the feet, downy ducklings were picking everywhere.

And all this young life was so beautiful a sight that the children were

wild with rapture, and Cameron's dreamy beauty-loving soul told him here

was the home for him.

The cottage shocked him somewhat, it was so very tumbledown, the roof

was so low, the windows so broken.

He began to consider whether he had not better take up a selection for

himself near at hand and run up his own cottage, these walls were hardly

worth the pulling down.

But Mrs. Dunks began to talk to him, and her apron was at her eyes

nearly all the time. He learned that Dunks was the best of men, and only

weak. If once they could get from this neighbourhood and his bad

companions to Forbes, where her own people were, he would surely reform.

He learned that Mrs. Dunks had nine children, all under fourteen; that

she was in a consumption, and only the air of Forbes could cure her. It

seemed to him that he could not turn round to this fragile, heavily

burdened creature, look into her fever-bright, anxious eyes, and tell

her he would not give her this chance to end her days among her own

people.

So he looked at all the young life again, and the sheer sun, bursting

out of the wattles, and was glad to be persuaded that a little paint and

a bit of timber would make the house quite new again.

'Do you think,' he said, and turned round to the woman, 'that you could

give me possession of the place in a month?'

And the woman burst into thankful tears, and told him they would be gone

to-morrow.

'I've packed up for going eighteen times this year,' she said through

her tears. 'I've got my hand well in.'

Dunks was away in the township, the youngest baby was lying in her arms

looking up at her with pure eyes, and the pale wraith death, whom she

ever felt beside her, had kept her conscience tender.

'Did--did you say the agent told you two hundred and fifty?' she

faltered.

Cameron thought of his children and braced himself up.

'He did,' he said firmly, 'and I cannot possibly give you a penny-piece

more. I consider it is a very fair price.'

'But--but----' the woman began again.

'It is no use, I can go no further,' Cameron said, 'so please do not

waste your breath'--and he unhobbled his horse and prepared for the

journey home, his face set away from her, lest he should be softened.

How could he dream she wanted to tell him that a hundred and fifty was

all they had asked, and more than the place was worth, so ill in repair

was everything? Then the thought of this man's famous child came to

her--Challis, with fingers of gold. What were a hundred pounds to the

father of such a child?

She looked away from the eyes of her babe, she forgot that she and death

were met, and replied:

'Very well, we will take two hundred and fifty, Mr. Cameron.'

Going homewards in the jolting buggy the talk was of the happiest.

'Miss Browne and I will look after the fowls, daddie,' Hermie said.

'An' me,' said Floss.

'You and I must get the crops in,' Bart and his father told each other.

But how this would be done, and what the crops should be, they had but

the remotest notion; still, it was a phrase heard often in Wilgandra,

and sounded well.

'Will it take you long to learn to shear the sheep?' asked Miss Browne

timidly.

Cameron looked a trifle disturbed. Sheep seemed very right and proper

things to own when one was 'going on the land,' but it had not yet

occurred to him to think to what use he was going to put them.

Bart's observation of his neighbours had been a little keener than this,

however.

'We sha'n't get any wool to mention from that handful,' he said. 'I

suppose they are for killing. Mrs. Dunks says they use a sheep a week.

Her husband kills one every Saturday.'

'Who--who--oh, surely you will not have to kill them, Mr. Cameron!' said

Miss Browne, shuddering with horror. 'Surely you will not be expected

to kill them for yourself.'

The thought of it turned Cameron sick; it seemed to him he had never

quite got over chopping off a fowl's head once for his wife, though it

was nine years ago.

Roly gloated over the thought.

'I'll shoot them with my bow and arrow,' he said.

Cameron wiped his brow.

'I suppose one could use a gun to them, eh, Bart?' he said.

But Bart looked doubtful.

Nearing home Cameron gave the reins to Bartie, and leaped out and walked

the last mile or two, wrestling with the problem how he might turn

himself from a dreamer of dreams into a practicable, hard-working man of

business. It had to be done, some way, somehow, or what to do with

these children, and how to face his wife?

Then suddenly he found his thoughts had wandered to the sunset fire that

blazed before him in the sky; he was putting it in a picture, massing up

the purple banks, touching the edges with a streak of scarlet.

When he convicted himself of the wandering he groaned aloud.

'There is only one way,' he said, and walked into his house with lifted

head.

The children were stretching their limbs after their cramping drive,

Roly and Bart panting on the floor, a cup of water beside them so warm

and flat and tasteless that even thirst would not bring them to it.

Bart was talking of Nansen, picturing stupendous icebergs, revelling in

the exquisite frigidity of the water in which Nansen had washed

luxuriously every day. The exercise actually cooled the little party

down one degree. Then in to them came their father.

'I want a bonfire made in the yard,' he said; 'a very big one, I have

something to burn.'

The boys were upright in a moment and on their way; even Floss tossed

down the newspaper with which she was fanning herself (the _Wilgandra

Times_, with which was incorporated the _Moondi Mercury_), and rushed to

partake of the fun, and Hermie and Miss Browne found themselves impelled

to go and see what was happening.

Such a blaze! Bart raked up a lot of garden rubbish and added tree

branches. Roly, feeling quite authorised since the bonfire had been

commanded by his father and was no illicit one of his own, made journeys

to and from the wood-heap and piled on the better part of a quarter of a

ton of wood just paid for.

Then down came the father, his blue eyes a little wild, his mouth not

quite under his own control. He had his mustard-box under his arm.

'Oh, daddie!' Hermie cried and sprang at him. 'Oh no, no, no!'

But he pushed her aside.

'Don't speak to me--none of you speak one word,' he said, and he stooped

and dropped the box where the flames leapt.

'No, no, no!' Hermie screamed, and rushed at it, and put a hand right

through the flame and touched the box, then drew back, helpless, crying.

'Get away!' Bart said, and pushed her back from danger and took the work

himself, a rake for aid.

He dragged the charred box out, Miss Browne fluttered round him and

caught at the lid and burnt her hands, and fell over the rake and singed

her hair and eyebrows. Roly and Floss, carried off their feet by the

excitement, rushed to help, and the box lay safely on the grass again,

two minutes from the time it had been in the flames.

'Let it alone, no one dare to touch it!' commanded the father, and the

voice was one the children had never heard before.

He picked the box up, hot and blackened as it was, and flung it on the

fire again; the lid fell off, there came a rain of tubes and

paint-brushes, a splutter or two from the turpentine, the smell of burnt

paint, then the fire burnt steadily again, and there was silence that

only Hermie's bitter crying broke.

The father had gone back to the house; he came down to them once again

and this time The Ship was in his arms.

Surely an ill-starred ship! There had been no money to send it to

Sydney for the artists there to appraise; Cameron, absolutely frightened

when he found how the debts were growing, exhibited it in Wilgandra and

a neighbouring town or two, and marked it ten pounds.

But who in the back-blocks was going to give that sum for a picture

without a frame? The coloured supplements, with elaborate plush

surrounds, satisfied the artistic yearnings of most of the community,

and The Ship came back to sad anchorage in the Cameron dining-room.

But to burn it!

Hermie gave a fresh despairing cry. Floss, Bart, and Roly stood

absolutely still, the instinct of obedience strong at such a crisis.

Cameron's arm was again raised, but Miss Browne flung herself right upon

him and clung to the canvas, her weak hands suddenly filled with

strength and tenacity.

[Illustration: 'NOT THIS, NOT THIS,' SHE CRIED, 'ANYTHING BUT THIS.']

'Not this, not this!' she cried. 'Anything but this! Give it to me--I

will keep it from your sight--I will hide it away--it shall never meet

your eyes. My ship, my ship, you shall not burn it.'

She held it in her arms, actually torn from his grasp.

Cameron glanced around--the leaping flames, the startled children,

Hermie's hysterical sobbing, Miss Browne's wild attitude of daring and

defiance--he told himself he had taken a theatrical vengeance on

himself.

'Oh, do as you like,' he said irritably, and turned back to the house.

'Bart, put a bucket of water on that fire.'

One month from the night of the sacrifice the Camerons were in

possession of the selection, and Mrs. Dunks was lying in peace among

those of her own people who rested from the sun's heat in the Forbes

graveyard.

*CHAPTER VI*

*Thirty Thousand a Year*

'Ah, for a man to arise in me,

That the man I am may cease to be.'

'I should think we might get the bag of corn now, eh, Bart?' Cameron

wiped his brow, and stopped to survey the patch of ground that looked so

smooth.

Bart looked at it critically.

'I think we'd better give it another turn, dad,' he said, and hitched

the string-mended harness a little more securely to the jaded horse.

'It's such a lunatic plough, it misses twice for every time it hits.'

Cameron looked at the wide space of ground to be gone over yet again.

'I'm very anxious to get the corn in,' he said. 'You see, we're a month

late as it is, and it will be a big saving in feed when we have it to

cut.'

'Yes; but it is no good unless the ground is ready,' Bart said. 'We

have no manure or anything like the _Journal_ says. We'd better give it

an extra turn.'

'You're quite right, quite right, my boy,' Cameron said, and led his

horse on again, up and down, up and down the furrows.

'I don't like such a lot of stumps being left in,' Bart said, the

seventh time in an hour that the plough had gnashed on one. 'In the

_Journal_ there's a picture of a stump eradicator--a grand little

machine. We'll have to save up and get it, dad.'

'Ay, ay,' said the father; 'still, I don't think the stumps will

interfere very much. The corn can easily come up between them.'

'It would be easier ploughing,' sighed Bart, following the horse about

in a waved line.

'You're tired out, lad; knock off for a spell,' Cameron said. 'I keep

forgetting how young you are. We have been working here since

eight--five hours.'

But Bart would work till he dropped rather than leave off a minute

before his father. He took a long drink at the oatmeal water Miss

Browne had made, and went on stooping, picking out the stones, digging

spots the unfaithful plough had left untouched, following the horse

while his father dug.

Cameron was thin as a rail. Ever since they had come here he had worked

like a man possessed, for the spectacle that came to haunt his nights

was of his children in actual need of bread. He had left debts behind

him in the township--a hundred pounds' worth of them; there was a

hundred and fifty yet to pay on the selection; and the patching-up of

the house, rough as it had been, had taken money. There was seed to

buy, there were tools to mend or replace, interest to pay on the money

he had borrowed on the place--a thousand other things.

And not one word of all the changes did the letters carry across the

secret seas.

'There is no need to worry mamma unnecessarily,' Cameron said to the

children. 'When we have made a great success of the place and paid

everything off, then we will tell her.'

Across the acres came the insistent sound of the dinner-bell.

'I don't think I'll stop,' Cameron said, 'I'm not hungry. Off you go,

Bart, and don't come back for an hour.'

But Bart was learning the art of managing his father.

'The poor old nag wants a rest,' he said. 'We must take her up and give

her a drink and some oats. And I'd come in to dinner, dad, if I were

you. Hermie will be disappointed if you don't.'

So they went up to the little patchwork house together.

It was not to a very tempting repast the bell had summoned them.

Hermie, no longer able to order macaroons and whitebait and tinned

oysters to make delicacies with, had, childlike, lost interest in the

culinary department of the house. And Miss Browne was no artist; to her

a leg of mutton represented nothing but a leg of mutton, and fricassees

and such tempting departures seemed but tales in the cookery book never

to be put to practical use.

To-day there were chops--fried. Years back, when Lizzie came fresh from

the State to Mrs. Cameron's tutelage, she had been instantly instructed

in the fine art of grilling. But now that there was no one to insist

upon these delicate distinctions, and the frying-pan was so much easier

labour, Cameron was slowly forgetting the taste of grilled meat.

There were potatoes too; the family took it for granted that these were

necessarily nasty things, either watery or burnt.

Bread and jam--no longer silver-pan conserve, but cheap raspberry, in

which the chief element was tomato--finishing the pleasing repast.

Miss Browne sat at the head of the table, exhausted and dishevelled, for

she had swept the room, had sewn on four buttons, and dressed Floss, and

set the table.

Cameron, before removing to the selection, had dismissed her again,

gently enough; he knew it would be impossible to continue to pay her ten

shillings a week for being a nuisance to them.

And again she had wept and wrung her hands and entreated to remain. The

tears streaming down her cheeks, she told him the time she had been in

his family was the happiest in her life. She would not dream of taking

money now, she said; but she implored him to let her work for her home.

So here she was, still at the head of the table, faithfully apportioning

the dish of chops and keeping the smallest and worst-cooked one quietly

for herself, and pouring out tea, which all the family drank with each

and every meal, so slowly and confusedly that her own was always cold

before she touched it.

'Not a chop?' she said to Cameron. 'Oh, but you really must. Think of

the severe physical labour you are continually doing. Just a small one!

You touched no meat yesterday, nor the day before.' She looked on the

verge of tears.

'Don't trouble, I don't care for any,' Cameron said. 'I'll have

some--some,'--his eyes wandered round the table in search of something

nicer than the potatoes--'some bread and butter.'

But Lizzie's prentice hand at bread! And store butter three weeks old!

He reached himself _Pendennis_, and, helped by the pleasant gossiping of

the mayor, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls.

All through the meal Miss Browne lamented over his appetite, but he

heeded her voice just as much as he did the flies that buzzed round his

tea-cup--both were integral parts of life, and to be endured.

'May I put you a chop aside, and warm it up for your tea?' she persisted

anxiously.

He put his finger on the place in the book and looked up for one second.

'I am going to try vegetarianism,' he said. 'I have come to the

conclusion that meat does not agree with me.'

And it did not. Every second Saturday now with his own hands he was

obliged to kill a sheep for the sake of his family; he found a man would

charge ten shillings each time to come the distance. The physical

nausea for the task was such that from the time he first took the knife

into his shuddering hand to the day they buried him, no morsel of animal

food passed his lips.

The children were still--a month after they had come--full of

magnificent enthusiasms. Hermie and Miss Browne were going to restore

the fallen fortunes of the family by raising poultry. Hermie worked

intoxicating sums on paper, and even Miss Browne, distrustful of the

child's arithmetic, on checking the figures could find so little wrong

that she began to be a-tremble with delight at the prospect herself.

Bart himself, the only one of the family touched with caution, found

they had left sufficient margin for losses, and assented that a fortune

might assuredly be made.

For who could dispute the fact that the grocer charged from one to two

shillings a dozen for his eggs, according to season? Let them reckon on

the basis of one shilling. And Small, the butcher, charged three and

sixpence to four and sixpence a pair for table fowls. Let them be very

safe, and say two and sixpence.

They were starting with the twelve fowls the Dunks had left on the

estate. Now if one hen in one year brought up three clutches of

chickens, how many would that make? Hermie, with shining eyes, cried

thirty-nine; but Bart, who had seen mortality among chickens, refused to

put down more than twenty.

'Very well,' said Hermie, 'count twenty, if you like, only I know it

will be thirty-nine, I shall be so careful of them. Twelve hens with

twenty chickens each--that will be--that will be--what are twelve

twenties, Miss Browne?'

'Two hundred and forty,' replied the lady, amazed herself that it could

be so much, 'two hundred and forty! Why, I have never seen so many

together in my life.'

Bart wrote down the figures two hundred and forty.

'Fowls grow up in six months,' Hermie said. 'Lizzie says so, and her

mother used to keep fowls. The _Journal_ says--I read it this

morning--that fowls generally lay two hundred eggs a year.'

'Say one hundred and fifty,' Bart said.

'Very well,' said Hermie. 'Please, Miss Browne, what are two hundred

and forty times one hundred and fifty?'

'My dear,' gasped Miss Browne, 'I--I really need a pencil for that.'

Bart offered his stump, and Miss Browne was five minutes working the

sum, so sure was she she must have made an astounding mistake somewhere.

'It--it certainly comes to thirty-six thousand,' she said at last.

'Would you please multiply it by a shilling a dozen, and say what it

comes to,' was Hermie's further request.

Miss Browne again took a surprising time to do the simple sum.

'A hundred and fifty pounds,' she said.

'That is for the first year,' Hermie said; 'but now would you please

work it out on this big piece of paper, and see what we should get the

second year. Two hundred and forty fowls----'

'And the twelve you began with, too,' said Roly.

Hermie was quite willing to be cautious.

'We won't count them, we'll allow for them dying, too,' she said. 'Two

hundred and forty fowls with, say, twenty chickens each in the year.

What's that?'

Miss Browne's pencil worked.

'Four thousand eight hundred,' she said.

'And they lay one hundred and fifty eggs a year.'

Miss Browne looked quite shaken at the result her arithmetic

produced--seven hundred and twenty thousand eggs! Three thousand

pounds!

The excitement made her work out the results of the third year, and she

was weeping when the sun came out--sixty thousand pounds. She was

weeping for her grey spoiled life. Exquisite dresses, travel, health,

even marriage, and little children of her own, would have been all

possible, had she worked these sums years and years ago, and set to work

with twelve fowls.

Bart still had misgivings.

'More might die than that,' he said.

Hermie was quite pale with excitement.

'We have counted that half that come out die,' she said, 'and Lizzie

says her mother always reared ten out of every thirteen. We have only

counted six. But count three, if you like; still, that is thirty

thousand pounds. And we have not counted selling any.'

Even Bart saw the moderation that only counted three chickens to each

hatching, and his doubts died away.

Visions of all this wealth intoxicated the children; they tore their

father from his book; Hermie told him, with eyes ashine with tears and

little heaving breast, that he was never to do any more of that dreadful

ploughing, that in three years they would be making thirty thousand a

year, at least, by no harder work than just feeding the fowls and

packing up eggs.

He smiled at them very gently; he could not bear to damp their ardour.

In very truth he could not exactly find out why these figures should not

be as they seemed.

'Of course you would have a huge feed-bill and want a big run of land,'

he said.

Bart gave a comprehensive sweep of his young arm towards the scrubby

bush-land that lay around them.

'As much as we like for a shilling an acre a year,' he said.

'But the feed-bill?'

'Five thousand a year would buy enough at all events, and still we'd

have twenty-five thousand left,' Hermie said jubilantly. 'You will give

up the ploughing, won't you, daddie?'

Cameron temporised, and said he would just do a little while the

chickens grew.

That night a violent wind came up with drenching rain. Cameron lay

listening to it, wondering what skies were over the head of his beloved

whom the seas held from him.

Then he heard doors opening and shutting, whispered words, and finally a

series of very angry cackles. He threw on some clothes, and went to

find out the meaning. In the living-room an oil lamp was flaring in the

draught, a Plymouth rock was roosting on the piano top, a white Leghorn

was regarding the sofa suspiciously. On the floor sat Hermie, rubbing a

wrathful fowl dry with a Turkish bath-towel, and presently in staggered

Bartie and Miss Browne, the former with five fowls by the legs, the

latter nervously holding one at arm's length.

Cameron fell into a convulsion of silent laughter, so earnest were the

children, so absorbed. And Miss Browne, poor Miss Browne, how ludicrous

she looked with her scanty hair flying ragged round her shoulders, her

figure clad in an ancient mackintosh, her mouth frightened, her eyes

heroic with the endeavour not to let go the fowl, which twisted itself

madly to peck at her trembling hand!

'I don't know what you are laughing for, papa,' Hermie said, a trifle

offended. 'The fowl-house leaks dreadfully.'

'But it has rained half a dozen nights since we came; you never brought

the things in here before, my child,' he urged.

Hermie received Miss Browne's contribution on her knee, and fell to

drying its dejected feathers.

'We didn't know before that each of them was worth two thousand five

hundred pounds,' she said. 'Please, papa, will you hold Bartie's fowls,

so that he can light the fire. We are going to give them something hot

to drink.'

*CHAPTER VII*

*Come Home! Come Home*

.

'Oh, that 'twere possible,

After long grief and pain,

To find the arms of my true love

Around me once again!'

Five years dragged on. Sometimes word came that the travellers were at

last coming home, and Cameron's heart grew warm, only to grow cold

again, as he realised he dare not let them come to this. Then, while

the agony of dread still was crushing him, the next mail would bring the

bitter relief that the time was not yet--the agent or the music masters

or some one else had found another year was necessary, or the great

career would be spoiled. Not one word all this time of the selection,

else had the 'career' been in instant danger of the ruin predicted, the

mother would have journeyed at the greatest possible number of knots an

hour back to them. Her dreamer of dreams depending on a selection, her

children depending on her dreamer, become his own master!

Yet surely the man had had his lesson, and toiled now marvellously,

piteously.

Five years, and not one idle day.

Five years of bewildered struggling with unknown enemies--drought,

hurricanes of wind, bush fires, devastating rains, a soil that the

farmer born and bred could hardly have made pay. Never a complaining

word. Hermie, growing to womanhood, broke her heart over his life at

times.

There was even a day when she fell down on her knees at a chair, and

covered paper wildly with a pen that commanded her mother to come home.

Cameron working obstinately on one frightful day, the thermometer one

hundred and seventeen degrees, had a 'touch of the sun,' and even after

the doctor had left him quieted, his head in cool cloths, his

temperature falling, he still moaned for his wife, cried to her like a

child, stretched out his arms, raved, besought her to hold his hand. It

was then that Hermie broke her promise, down on her knees, just hidden

by the bed-curtain, writing wildly with the pen she had brought for the

doctor to write his prescription.

'By the next boat,' she wrote; 'if you wait for the one after, it will

be wicked of you. How can you stay like this? Challis, Challis--all our

lives spoiled for her to have a chance! We have no chance; father's life

is worse than any dog's. Challis--I think I hate Challis! Going along

quietly and happily, are we? Miss Macintosh taking your place? We are

starving, worse than starving; the food we have to eat is worse than

none at all. He needs delicate things, ice and invalid dishes, properly

cooked. I have just been to the safe to look what I could get, and the

mutton has gone bad--it goes bad nearly every day in summer here; there

is no milk, for the cows have no feed, there is some nasty mouldy bread

and bad butter, and golden syrup with flies in it, and sugar alive with

ants. You! You and Challis are eating the best things that can be

bought with money. I hate Challis! The doctor says we are to keep his

head cool with water, and to stand vessels full of water about the room

to cool the air. The well is nearly dry, the sun has turned the tank

water bad, or else a wombat or a bird has fallen in, and it is

poisonous. Bartie has gone a mile with the cart to beg some from the

Dalys.

'Miss Macintosh taking care of us all so nicely! We have no one in the

world but Miss Browne. Oh yes, we have told you lies and lies, but you

ought not to have believed them. You should have come to see for

yourself that he was happy and well. Oh, if you could hear him crying,

just to hold your hand, he says, and to hear you talk! Ah, mother,

mother, mother, how cruel you are!'

But the spirit of the man, just learning to be indomitable, kept him

back from long illness. In four days he was up again, easily turned

sick and faint, but able to lie on the sofa, and even take an interest

in the delicacies that Hermie set before him. She had ridden Tramby

into Wilgandra herself, gone to the grocer, and implored him for nice

things--calf's foot jellies, and whitebait, and Canadian tinned fruit.

'My sister, Challis Cameron, the pianist will be back soon. I have

written for them to come, so you will be sure to be paid.'

And the grocer, a kindly spot in his heart still for the youngest

housekeeper he had ever taken orders from, made up a big basket of

tinned goods, and said he would wait for Challis to pay him.

'Hermie,' Cameron said from the sofa on the fifth day, 'my head is still

confused, but I seem to remember when I was very bad that you kept

telling me mamma was coming. There has been no letter, has there?'

Hermie grew a little pale.

'No, there has been no letter, papa,' she said.

'Hermie,' he cried, after spending a minute trying to find the reason

for her curiously averted head, 'you did not write for mamma, Hermie?'

She turned to him then, her blue young eyes on fire.

'I did,' she said; 'it is time, more than time she came. If she does

not come soon, you--we--we shall all be dead!'

'Child, child!' he said.

He had risen from his sofa and gone to the window, to look once more

with aching eyes at his wretched lands. If this had been the green isle

in the sea he had dreamed of making it, he would have sent long ago

himself. But these desolate acres!

'Child,' he groaned, 'I couldn't let her come to this. I am only half a

man--half a man. God left the manliness out of me when He made me, and

gave me womanish ways instead. And I have never fought them down, as it

must have been meant I should do. But I will begin again, I will work

harder--things must take a turn, and then I can meet her, and she will

not despise me. Child, God has no more awful punishment than when He

lets those we love despise us. Send another letter, tell her not to

come yet--not just yet. Let me have one more chance.'

Hermie was sobbing at his side, pulling at his arm, trying to urge him

back to the sofa. She knew he was not talking to her, knew he was hardly

aware she was there, but her sensitive spirit, leaping at his troubles

with him, was bowed down with the knowledge and weight of them. How she

loved this man--this grey-haired, blue-eyed man at her side! Hardly the

love of daughter for father; her feelings for him had in them something

of the passionate, protecting tenderness of a mother for a crippled

child.

'Lie down,' she said, 'there--let me move these pillows; that is better.

She must come--she should have come long ago. And I told her to be sure

to come by the next boat. Now lie still; I am going to get your lunch.'

The exertion and emotion had tried him exceedingly. He lay still,

still, his face to the wall; and now his mood brought a tear from under

his eyelid. It was too late! She would have started! Ah, well, praise

God for that! God who took these things out of our hands. She was

coming--he might give up for a little time, and lie with his head on her

breast; she who had always forgiven him would forgive him still and

clasp him to her, and call him, 'Dear One.' Then all he would ask would

be the happiness of dying before the world began again.

The happy tears rolled down his cheeks. Hermie, tip-toeing back with her

tray, saw them, and was filled with dismay. What had she done by this

interference?

'Darling,' she said, dropping beside him, 'don't mind, don't mind. The

letter is not posted yet--Bartie was going to take it in this afternoon.

It is not mail day till to-morrow. We will not send it.'

Not posted! Not posted! She was not coming--she might not know of his

extremity, his need for her! The chill wind passed over him and dried

his tears, dried his heart.

'Here is the letter,' the poor child cried; 'don't look like that,

darling. I would not vex you for the world. Shall I tear it up?'

He looked at it piteously. Oh, that Bartie had it, riding with it

through the bush, summoning her, summoning her!

'Shall I burn it?' said the poor little girl.

'Yes,' he said, 'burn it.' His voice was lifeless, his eyes stared

dully at the wall.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*An Atheist*

'Thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat

of the day.'

Hermie put her letter and all hopes of rescue together into the kitchen

fire.

Life was an endless drab again.

She went listlessly out, and stood on the doorstep to look at it.

Her father did not want her, he had pushed his lunch aside, and bidden

her, irritably--he who was so gentle--to leave him to himself.

Bart, poor grave little Bart, a man at fourteen, was working about the

place. Neither he nor the young ones had gone to school while the

father had been ill. He and Roly had been all the morning beating

monotonously at a bush fire just across the road. There was no

excitement about it, there seemed little danger; the fire burned

quietly, steadily--it had been burning for two days--but this morning it

had crept to the fences; the boys had been obliged to cut boughs and

beat at it.

Roly sat on the fence most of the time, and sleepily kept back the

cunning yellow tongues from the patch Bart had entrusted to him. Bart

walked up and down, mechanically threshing out the little licking flames

that longed to curl round the fence.

Sometimes he left Roly on guard, and went to do necessary work, feed the

two calves, shed a burning tear over the dying sheep, give Tramby a few

drops of water.

Hermie went down to him wearily, a sun-bonnet on her head.

'There's no danger about the fire?' She looked at it a little

apathetically.

'Oh no; if there were three of us, we could put it all out. Roly's not

much use, of course.'

'Bart, what are we going to do?'

'For water? Oh, Daly's going to let me have a big cask to-night.

You've got half a bucketful still, haven't you? I didn't want to take

Tramby out till it was cooler. Reminds me, I must mend the cart--that

old shaft's smashed again.'

'And when that cask's gone?'

'Oh, I'll go and get some from old Perry. His well's not half dry, and

there's only himself. But don't you go and be wasteful, Herm--no

washing clothes and that sort of waste.'

'I want a bath--I want to turn on a tap, and not have to use just a

dipper or two. All Challis has to do is turn on a tap.' Hermie spoke

with a strange bitterness.

Bart smiled good-humouredly. 'Yes, she's a lucky little beggar,' he

said. 'My word, if I could have the bath-water she wastes, I'd make

this poor old place look up a bit.'

He looked round on the desolate acres, looked at them with yearning

affection. He was a quiet-natured boy; he did not call himself unhappy;

he would have felt he had nothing left to ask for, had he but a

plentiful water supply for the stock and crops, and better tools to work

with, and a little more strength in that young arm of his. Like his

mother, he had the knack of doing the thing at hand with all his power,

and already he was a far more proficient farmer than his father would

ever be.

'What are you going to do now?' the girl asked, as he hurried away.

'I'll come with you if you like.' Such a hot, patient young face his

was, it smote her that she seldom heeded him. He looked pleased at her

faint show of interest.

He showed her the corn, coming up bravely, the wheat patch, not drooping

quite as much as it might have done. He pointed to the trees in the

little orchard. 'In another month or two those apricots and peaches

will be about ripe,' he said; 'make a nice change, won't they?' His

eyes dwelt lovingly on the green small fruit. 'When the drought

breaks----'

'Pshaw!' said the girl.

'Oh,' the lad said cheerfully, 'it will, one of these days; then we'll

go along grand.'

He had caught the spirit of patience, of acceptance of ills, from the

settlers about.

'But the sheep, nothing will give them life again!' The girl's eyes

burned.

The boy had no fortitude against this; he gave a sudden wet glance

towards the far end of the selection.

'Let's go and see how they're getting on,' he said in a low tone.

The girl rebelled.

'No--why?' she said. 'It only makes us miserable, and we can't help.'

'All right, you go back,' Bart said. 'I'll have to go. I might have to

light another fire.'

Hermie followed him.

The sheep crept away from the house to die, once they found no water was

to be had there. They chose to lie down and cease to be at the spot

where once had been a dam. Patches of ashes showed where Bart had piled

wood over the poor carcases and burnt them up, in his wise young

knowledge that the air must be kept pure.

None were dead to-day, though fifty seemed dying. Half a dozen brown

ragged little lambs filled the air with piteous outcry.

Hermie's heart swelled.

'Can't you do anything?' she said.

'No,' he said, 'they'll have to go. I've had to give them up, dear. If

I can get water for the house for the next week, I'll be glad. Daly is

running very short himself.'

There were footsteps in the bush just near, a panting of breath, a

curious dragging sound.

'Floss,' said Hermie, and remembered for the first time she had not seen

her little sister for hours. 'Where can she have been?'

The child was dragging a bucket. Her face was almost purple with the

heat; she had kept her eyes half closed, to shut out the almost

unendurable glare, and did not know she was so close to home till she

stumbled almost into Bart's arms.

When she saw Hermie there too, she clung to the handle jealously.

'It's not for the house,' she said, 'so don't you think it. Let it

alone, Bart! Bart, if you take it, I'll scratch.'

Such a fierce little face it was!

'I'm only going to carry it for you, Chucks,' Bart said. 'You shall do

what you like with it.'

'True'n honour?'

'True and honour.'

The little girl relinquished her hold, but kept a guarding eye on the

precious fluid.

'Where did you get it, old girl?' Bart said.

'Don't tell father?'

'Why ever not?' said Hermie.

Floss turned on her vehemently.

'I took it,' she said. 'Don't care, I'm glad. They've got a whole cask,

the greedies, and lots of money, so they can get as much as they like.

They get casks from the Bore, and they're sent down in the train, and

they've got a cart to fetch it. They drink it all themselves--pigs!

They don't care about the sheep.'

'Not the Scotts, Floss--you've not been stealing the poor Scotts'

water?' cried Hermie, aghast. The Scotts lived in a miserable hut on

the adjoining selection, and were the nearest neighbours.

Flossie's eyes blazed indignantly.

'Them!' she said. 'They've got less than us! I got it from those mean

measuring men.'

Hermie looked puzzled.

'She must mean that camp of surveyors down the road,' Bart said. 'It's

a mile away at least. Why, you poor old Flossie, have you been right

down to that camp for this little drop of water?' He put his disengaged

arm over her bony little shoulders.

Floss caught her breath, and looked unhappily into the half-full bucket.

'The first one was fuller,' she said, 'but the s-sheep nearly knocked me

down to g-get it, and they s-s-spilled it on the g-ground.' Her voice

shook with sorrow for the waste.

'Twice,' muttered Bart, 'she's been twice, Hermie.'

They were back among the sheep now, and Bart hardly knew what to do with

such a drop among so many.

'This one,' said Floss; 'look at its poor eyes--and that one lying down,

and the little lambs, Bartie.'

Bart put the bucket to the noses of the ones she touched, but had to

drag it away before the poor things had half what they wanted.

A piteous bleat went up from the others.

'I--I think I'll just get one more,' Floss said, and almost staggered to

the bucket. 'It's quite easy to steal it now; the camp's left all by

itself. Oh, I must get one more--look at that one's eyes.'

But Bart picked her up in his arms, and started back to the house with

her.

'You'll just come and lie down quietly,' he said. 'I never saw anything

like your face. You'll be ill like father. Poor little Floss! poor

little old Floss!'

'There--there would have been half a bucket more,' said Floss, 'only I

nearly fell once, and it s-s-spilled.' She was sobbing on his shoulder,

sobbing heart-brokenly, hard little Floss who never cried.

Hermie took the child from her brother at the door.

'I'll undress her and sponge her,' she said; 'that will cool her a

little, but I quite expect she will be ill like father. Well, it is all

Challis's fault.'

In an hour Floss lay asleep, the fierce heat of her cheeks a little

faded, and Hermie's hands were idle again.

Miss Browne was helping Lizzie to fold the poor rags of clothes from the

wash; the father still begged to be left alone; outside Bart and Roly

still threshed monotonously at the fire.

Hermie went into the tiny bedroom that had been run up for her because

the house was too small--the bedroom that the mother had been so pleased

to hear was built. She found herself looking in the glass at herself,

looking sadly, listlessly.

She saw a girl, thin, undeveloped, with a delicately cut face, and

shadows lying like ink-smears beneath her eyes. Her womanhood was

coming, and she had no strength to meet it; at her age she should have

had rounded limbs and pleasing curves. She seemed to recognise this, as

she gazed unhappily at her angles. Her hair pleased her, for the sun

was making a glory of it; there was a nameless beauty about her face

that she recognised vaguely.

'I shall never marry,' she sobbed. 'No one ever comes here but that

heavy, stupid Morty. I shall be like Miss Browne in a few more years.

I'm getting untidy now--no one can be tidy in clothes like these; I

never care how I do my hair--what is the use, when there is no one to

see it? I've not been to a party or a proper picnic, like the girls in

the book, in all my life. I shouldn't know what to do, if I did go to

one. No; I shall grow just like Miss Browne, and it is all Challis's

fault.'

A portrait of the sweet-faced girl-player hung on the wall. Hermie tore

it down from its place and broke it into fragments.

'I'm just tired to death of seeing you smile!' she muttered.

Miss Browne came in--Miss Browne, with perspiration on her face and a

strand or two of her colourless hair loose. She carried an armful of

Hermie's clothes from the wash. 'They are a very bad colour,' she said,

'but we cannot blame Lizzie, when there was next to no water. My dear,

what is the matter?'

Hermie did not even wipe the tears from her face; she was sitting still,

her hands on her knees, and letting the salt drops trickle drearily down

her cheeks.

Miss Browne took a step towards her, then paused timidly. There had

never been much intimacy or confidence between them. Hermie, with her

innate love of daintiness and beauty and the hardness of youth, despised

while she pitied the poor woman.

'Is it--anything I can help--your father--Floss--you are

anxious--worried?'

'Oh no,' said Hermie, 'I wasn't thinking of any one but myself.' She

leaned her head back, and had a sense of pleasure in her rolling tears.

'I suppose I'm not much more miserable than usual; but then I expect you

are miserable--every one is, I think.'

'But not in the middle of the day, love,' the lady-help said.

'Why not?'

'Oh'--vaguely--'there isn't time, as a rule. One is so busy. It is a

different thing when you go to bed.'

'What do you do then,' said Hermie, 'when you are miserable in bed?'

Miss Browne thought a second. 'I think I say my prayers,' she said.

'And if that does not cure you?'

'I say them again.'

'And if you are still miserable?'

'I--I think I go to sleep then; one is generally tired.' She spoke

apologetically.

Hermie leaned her head still farther back. 'Saying prayers would not

help me much,' she said. 'I am an atheist.'

'What?' screamed Miss Browne.

'An atheist,' said Hermie. 'It is very comfortable to be one. You have

only to think about eating and sleeping. Oh dear!'

She arose languidly and administered water to Miss Browne, who was

gasping alarmingly. 'This room is hot,' she said. 'Go and lie down in

your own. You shouldn't have made me talk, if you didn't want to hear

things. Mind that bit of loose wood at the door.'

Miss Browne, thus dismissed, went away like a chidden child, but her

eyes were full of terror, and her very knees trembled. She groped her

way to the sitting-room and poured out the frightful story into Mr.

Cameron's ears.

He made his own way presently to the hot, cramped bedroom. Hermie had

let her hair down, and was sitting on the edge of the bed surveying her

poor little prettinesses tragically in the looking-glass.

Her father sat down on the bed beside her, and disclaimed fatigue and

headache and everything else she urged upon him.

'What is this Miss Browne tells me, little one?' he said, and almost

indulgently, so young, slight, and absurd she looked, to be questioning

eternity.

Hermie twisted her wavy hair up into a hard plain knot.

'I only said I was an atheist,' she said, and her young lips quivered

and her eyes grew wild.

He put his arm round her.

'How long have you been feeling like this, childie?'

She burst into a passion of frightened tears.

'Since yesterday morning,' she said.

'Tell me about it,' he whispered.

She swallowed a few sobs. 'I'm tired of saying prayers, nothing gets

better--nothing comes. It--it's easy enough to believe in God, if you

live in Sydney and have water laid on--and cool days and money and a

mother. But out here--oh, He can't expect us to believe in Him!'

'I think a few of us do,' he said.

'Us!' she repeated. 'You don't believe anything, do you, father? I've

never heard you say a word. I have thought for long enough you were an

atheist too.'

He took his arm away and moved to the little window; it was almost ten

minutes before he turned round and came back to her.

'Child,' he said, 'sometimes I think my mistakes are too many for me. I

have nothing to say to you. I dare not even say, Forgive me. Poor

little child, to have come to such rocks! I should have helped you long

ago. Only, you see, I had got in the habit of leaving these things to

mother.'

'Mother did not often go to church,' said Hermie discontentedly. 'I

don't remember her talking religion much.'

'She breathed it instead,' he said; 'she is the best woman in the world,

never forget that, Hermie. When we were first married I was full of the

young university man's talk--brain at war with established doctrines.

She never came over weakly to me, as some women might have done, she

never kept spotlessly aloof, indeed, she conceded me freely many of my

points. But she managed to make it plain to me that all these questions

mattered very little--Christ, and prayer, and love, and doing our

best--those were her rocks, and waves of dogma washing for ever on them

could not move them.'

'Did she ever read any of those books of yours--those on the top shelf?'

whispered Hermie.

'Ah,' said Cameron, 'you have been reading those, have you? Oh yes, she

was never afraid to read anything that was written, but she

distinguished between faith and creed. She said she did not try to

explain or understand God, only to believe in Him. She is quite right.

It is the hard names, the popular orthodoxies, the iron creeds, that

take the soul and heart and warmth out of religion. When you were

little, she did nothing more than show you God as your Father, and

Christ as your Saviour, to be tenderly loved and obeyed, and gone to for

refuge and comfort.'

'No,' said Hermie.

'No; it was her way. She wanted the love of God to be a living thing to

you all--a glad, warm, spontaneous thing, like the love you bore us,

only deeper. She would have no lines and rules and analyses of it while

you were small. It was not a thing she actually spoke about very often,

but white hours, find room for themselves at times--on plain Mondays and

Saturdays as often as on quiet Sundays, and she had a way of making the

influence of them run, clear, fresh, pleasant streams through the

mud-flats of life. Can you realise in any degree what it is to me to

find her daughter with such thoughts, Hermie?' His voice was very low.

Hermie pulled the pin from the plain tight knob, and let all her hair

hide her flushed face again.

'If--if only I had known you thought like this!' she muttered.

'Yes,' he said; 'it is a thing I shall never be able to put away from my

mind again, that I did not let you know. A man gets in the way of

keeping quiet things like these to himself, but I should not have

forgotten I had children. I knew Miss Browne was a good woman, whatever

her faults, and I felt that I might leave you to her. Don't think I am

excusing myself.'

'It was not your fault, darling, darling,' Hermie said, and clung to

him; 'but think how miserable we are--all of us, even poor little Floss!

How can He forget us like this?'

Cameron's blue eyes looked out at the blue sky.

'Not to understand, only to believe. He does not lead us always through

green pastures. The severe and daily discipline makes us shrink, no

doubt. But we have to go on.'

'Oh, darling, I do love you, I do love you!' wept the girl.

'Tie up your hair, childie, and we will go down and sit among the roses,

if any are still alive. I am quite strong enough to walk.'

He opened the door, and they went out together, and neither looked at

the sky. But here had gathered a brave cloud host, and there another

contingent came, determined, black-browed, strenuously fighting the

long-victorious sun, desperately clinging together. And over the

fainting earth flashed its lights, and through the heavens tore the

sudden thunder of its guns.

And the battle was to it.

Down came the sweet torrents of the rain, and the cracked, piteous earth

lay breathlessly glad and still beneath it. You heard the calves call

to their mothers, the surprised whinny of the horses seeking shelter.

You saw the sheep struggling to their feet and lapping the wet grass

with swollen tongues.

You heard the birds making all sorts of new little cries and noises, as

they flew wildly for shelter--birds many of them that had been born and

grown to make nests for themselves, and never known the strange

phenomenon of rain.

You heard the hisses and splutters of the bush fires, as the evil spirit

went out of them.

You saw a lad come up from them, his beating bough still in his hand,

the lines of his young grave face all broken up, and the glad tears

bursting out, to meet the deluge of rain that beat in his face.

You saw a small girl rushing out half dressed and heedless of the

torrent, for the exquisite pleasure of seeing the sheep drink.

You saw a woman with thin, blown hair and a drab complexion saying her

prayers in her bedroom.

Down where the roses were just recalled to life, Hermie was clinging to

her father, both wet through with the sweet blinding rain.

'Oh, you didn't believe me, did you?' she cried. 'As if I could--as if

I could! It was just that the dust had got into my heart and choked me.

Oh, darling, I never really meant that dreadful thing! Dearest, you

don't think I meant it, do you?' Her tears were gushing out in streams.

'I never believed it for one moment,' he said, and kissed her, and led

her back to the house.

*CHAPTER IX*

*Mortimer Stevenson*