RACHEL'S FIRST VISIT IN MELBOURNE.
In the last week of August, when the place was looking its
loveliest--the rustic gables of the pretty house all hung with wistaria,
and the shrubberies full of fragrant bushes of purple and white
lilac--Mrs. Hardy, Mr. Kingston, and Rachel took their departure from
Adelonga. It was to one of them a truly heart-breaking business.
Rachel stood on the verandah while the horses were being put to,
clasping Lucilla and the baby alternately to her heart, and wept without
restraint, until her eyes were swollen, and her delicate colour resolved
into unbecoming red patches, and there was scarcely a trace of her
beauty and brightness left.
No one but herself was at all able to realise what this moment cost her.
She was not only leaving a place where she had spent the happiest period
of her youth; not only parting from friends with whom she had
established the most tender and sympathetic relations; she was closing a
chapter, or rather a brief passage, which was the one inspired poem of
her life; and she was saying good-bye to Hope.
As long as she was at Adelonga, there was the chance that Mr. Dalrymple
might come back--at any rate, notwithstanding the Queensland
arrangements, there was a constant impression that he was near. And as
long as she was at Adelonga she had felt bold to strive, by various
feeble and ineffectual devices, to extricate herself from her
engagement.
Now she was going where it seemed to her her lover would never be
allowed to reach her, and where in a hard world of money and fashion,
and under the terrible dominion of "the house," she would be a helpless
victim in the hands of Fate.
"Good-bye, darling Lucilla!" she sobbed; "thank you so much--I have been
so happy here--I am so sorry to go away!"
The gentle woman was inexpressibly touched, and of course cried for
company. Mrs. Hardy had her own maternal reluctance to face an
indefinite term of separation from her daughter. And altogether Mr.
Kingston was not without justification for his unusually irritable frame
of mind.
He did not like to see women crying; he was particularly annoyed that
Rachel should exercise so little command over herself, and that she
should have red eyes and a swollen nose; and he was uneasy about the
untoward episode which had been the first hitch in the smooth current of
his engagement, and wondered whether it could be possible that a
lingering fancy for that Dalrymple fellow was making her so unwilling to
return to her Melbourne life.
Moreover, he hated country travelling--long drives over rough bush
roads, and bivouacs at country inns, where the food was badly cooked and
the wine detestable; and he was suspicious about the behaviour of the
Adelonga horses, whose little traits of character came out rather
strongly in the invigorating air of spring; and he had a nasty touch of
gout.
However, the day was fine, and the drive was lovely. As she was carried
along, with the soft air blowing in her face, full of the delicious
fragrance of golden wattle, Rachel ceased to cry--becoming calm, and
pensive, and pretty again--and took to meditation; wondering, for the
most part, what Queensland was like, and how it was she could ever have
thought Melbourne, as a place of residence, preferable to the bush.
They passed a charming little farmhouse, more picturesque in the simple
elegance of its slab walls and brown bark roof than any Toorak villa of
them all, set in its little patch of garden, with fields of young green
corn and potatoes, neatly fenced in, behind it. It had its little rustic
outbuildings, its bright red cart in the shed, its tidy strawyard, its
cows and pigs and poultry feeding in the bush close by.
The farmer was working in his garden; the farmer's wife, on her knees
beside him, was weeding and trimming the borders of thyme that ringed
the little flower beds. They both paused to gaze at the imposing
equipage crashing along with its four strong horses, and at the ladies
and gentlemen perched so high above them; and Rachel, looking down from
her box-seat, thought she had never seen such a picture of rural and
domestic peace. She had suddenly ceased to regard material wealth and
splendour as in any way essential to happiness.
To live in some such home as this (provided one had enough to live on
and to pay one's way), working with one's own hands for the man one
loved--that seemed to her at this moment the ideal lot in life.
Having started from Adelonga an hour before noon, the horses were taken
out at two o'clock to be fed and watered, and the little party camped
beside a shady water-hole for lunch.
Lucilla had put up a bounteous basket of good things, and all the
materials for afternoon tea; and the fun of arranging the grassy table
first, and of making a fire and boiling the kettle afterwards--not to
speak of the very satisfactory meal that intervened--had its natural
effect upon our impressionable heroine of eighteen.
Her _fiance_, much revived by a tumbler of dry champagne, carefully
cooled in the water-hole, was also in improved spirits and temper, and
he set himself to be very kind to his little sweetheart, and forgave her
all her misdeeds.
Between three and four, having had their tea, the horses were put to,
and they started on their way again; and just at nightfall they arrived
at the railway, and at the inn where they were to spend the night.
Here they found dinner awaiting them, of which Rachel partook in sleepy
silence; and she went to bed soon afterwards, and slept too soundly even
to dream of trouble.
In the morning they parted from Mr. Thornley, and started by the first
train to town; at noon they lunched in a railway refreshment-room; and
in the middle of the afternoon they found themselves once more in
Toorak, being helped out of the family brougham by good-natured Ned, and
welcomed into the green satin drawing-room by his bright-faced wife.
"And so you are back again at last!" exclaimed Beatrice gaily, as she
took her young cousin into her arms. "And how are you, dear child? Why
you look quite pale. Take off your hat and sit down at once, and have
some tea. Mr. Kingston, I don't think this country air that they talked
so much about has done anything very wonderful after all. Rachel is not
looking so well as she was when she left."
Rachel blushed a lovely rose-colour immediately, of course, and Mr.
Kingston looked up at her with vague anxiety.
"I don't think she is, myself," he said; "I noticed it as soon as I got
up there. But she will be all right now she is home again."
"I am only tired," murmured Rachel.
"A girl like you has no business to be tired," retorted the little
woman brusquely.
It did not escape her sharp eyes that something was the matter, and she
determined to take the earliest opportunity to find out what it was.
"I do hope to goodness," she said to herself, "that it is not her
engagement that she is tired of--and everything going on so nicely!"
And then she took off Rachel's sealskin cap and jacket, settled her by
the fireside, furnished her with a cup of fragrant tea and some thin
bread and butter, and left her to herself while she attended to her
mother's wants.
Beatrice and her tea had a generally cheering and invigorating effect.
Mr. Kingston, making himself comfortable in a very easy chair, grew
talkative and witty upon the news of the day and the latest items of
fashionable gossip; in the society of this charming little woman of the
world--_his_ world--the satisfaction of being in town again began to
creep over him pleasantly.
He stayed for half an hour--outstaying Ned, who retired modestly at the
end of twenty minutes; then he led Rachel into the hall, kissed her,
told her to go to bed early and come out with him for a ride in the
morning, and went off to his club--sorry to leave his little lady-love,
but glad to be able to get his letters, to hear what was going on in
Melbourne, and to read his "Argus" on the day of publication again.
After his departure Mrs. Hardy and Beatrice plunged fathoms deep in
talk. Mrs. Hardy wanted to know how her husband and her servants, and
her neighbours and her friends, had been conducting themselves during
her absence, and Beatrice wanted minute particulars about Lucilla and
the baby.
Rachel had no occasion to feel herself _de trop_; at the same time she
saw she was not wanted. She sauntered softly round the room, laid some
music scattered about over the piano in a neat pile, re-arranged some
yellow pansies that were tumbling out of a green Vallauris bowl, and
then stole noiselessly into the hall and out of the house.
The grounds of the Hardy domain were more beautiful with flowers now
than she had ever seen them; but she did not stay amongst the flowers.
She went down little lonely paths, intersecting vegetable beds and
forcing-frames, to a gate at the bottom of the kitchen-garden, where she
was within speaking distance of the workmen engaged on the new house,
with nothing to impede a full view of their operations.
She was feverishly anxious to know how they were going on--whether they
were still "pottering at the foundations," or whether the stage of walls
had set in.
The working day was not yet over, and the well-known chinking and
clinking of the stonemason's implements smote her ear. She thought,
when she began to count them, that there were a great many more men than
there used to be, and she wondered why this was.
The young man who was sent out by the architects to supervise the
builders, and whose acquaintance she had made with Mr. Kingston, was
walking about the dusty enclosure, and presently recognising her, he
lifted his hat, and then seeing that she still lingered, came up to the
gate to speak to her.
"How are you getting on, Mr. Moore?" she asked pleasantly. "Are you
still doing the foundations?"
Mr. Moore assured her that they had completed the foundations, and that
they were getting on splendidly.
"Won't you come out and have a look at what has been done?" he inquired.
She thanked him and said she would; and he opened the gate with
alacrity, and escorted her through a labyrinth of bricks and stones,
over ground strewn thickly with sharp-edged chips that cut holes in her
boots, very well pleased to be the first to show her the progress that
had been made in her absence.
She could see for herself that a great deal had been done. The trenches
were filled up; great square blocks of stone ridged the outlines of the
ground-floor rooms--little bits of rooms they looked, and not at all
like the stately and spacious apartments of the architect's design; but
it seemed to her that what had been done could not be a tenth or
twentieth part of all that there was to do.
"I suppose," she said, "it takes a long time to build the walls and make
such a quantity of windows?"
"Oh, dear, no," responded Mr. Moore cheerfully. "All the worst of the
work is over now, as far as the shell is concerned; the walls will run
up in no time. It is a big house, but there are plenty of men on it, and
all materials ready. It is after the shell is done that the real tedious
work commences."
"You mean after the roof is on?"
"Yes. The interior decorations are the chief thing about this house.
The outside is not much."
"When do you expect the shell will be finished?" asked Rachel, in fear
and trembling.
"Some time in the course of the summer--within the next two or three
months probably."
"And the roof on?"
"Oh, yes; of course the roof on," he replied.
There was a pause; and then she said in a very small, thin voice:
"Thank you, Mr. Moore. I think I must go back now."
He escorted her back to the garden gate, lifted his hat, and bade her
good evening; and it struck him suddenly--with far more force than it
had struck Beatrice--that she was looking extremely unwell, and not at
all like the bright and blooming creature that she was when she went
away.