"and she kept on saying: 'We got back to the Stone Hut one evening--big
one tired and hungry; but strange man there, and we went away. Me want
to tell masser boy very good now; but masser gone.'" There was the
sound of deep sobs in the room, and Mr. Ferrier's voice failed him. I
went to the little window and looked out. The sky was overcast, and on
the horizon sheet-lightning played in wide flames. There was thunder in
the air, and the atmosphere was heavy, and made me feel that the world
is full of desolate women and fugitive children. The murmur of voices
went on after a pause--question and answer--and then the one grave
voice, with its fervent accents:
'"They are buried in one grave in the mission churchyard at Mandurang.
Not far from them my own wife and only daughter lie buried. Ah, my dear
friend, their dust reposes there in the sure and certain hope of the
resurrection of the just. In the words of a holy man of old, 'Every
body, whether it is dried up into dust or dissolved into moisture, or is
compressed into ashes, or is attenuated into smoke, is withdrawn from
us, but is reserved for God in the custody of the elements.'" I do not
know that poor Thomson took in much of this. "She went back again--she
went back again," he said several times, in a low voice.
"'I knew well the youngster was dead ever since I seen him at the
window," he whispered to me as I went away. I spare you my reflections,
as I walked home in the gathering dusk, on the strangely pathetic
threads mingled in the yarn of all lives when we know something of their
inward history. What passionate affections to end in a little mound of
earth! What fears and agitation and anguish that avail nothing! What
vivid hopes held close in the heart, only to vanish fruitlessly as
morning mist! What glowing plans, stretching out into the coming years,
to end in bitter disillusion and disenchantment with life!
*CHAPTER XVII.*
It was the first week in July before Stella left home for her visit to
Melbourne and Lullaboolagana. This delay was occasioned by her mother's
illness, which at first seemed trifling, but eventually developed into
slow fever. At its worst--and the worst lasted four or five days--the
gravest fears were entertained as to the issue. During this time Stella
could not be prevailed upon to leave her mother day or night, except at
very short intervals. She could sleep only by snatches, and affirmed
that she was more rested in the sick-room than she could be elsewhere.
Periodical sleeplessness was the only ailment from which she had
suffered since her childhood, and at this anxious period her incapacity
for sleep took a very pronounced form.
As soon as the invalid was fit to travel, it was arranged that she
should accompany Mrs. Raymond, the widowed daughter, to her Coonjooree
property--a small sheep-station in the Tatiara district, distant from
Adelaide by rail half a day's journey and a quarter of a day's drive.
'You look as much in want of rest as I do, my child,' the mother said
fondly, when the preliminary arrangements were made, and Stella sat,
pencil in hand, jotting down memoranda of the things Maisie, who was to
accompany her in the capacity of maid, should pack up for two or three
months' absence from home?
'Do I look like an invalid, mother, really?' she said with a bright
smile. 'Esther, why don't you ask me to your sanatorium for the sake of
my health? It will sound so dignified.'
'My dear, you know I would be only too happy; but Mrs. Tareling is in
despair at your already missing the most brilliant part of the season.'
'Yes; and to make up for missing more, I shall come to Coonjooree for a
week. You were afraid to tempt me? Have you not yet learned that to be
tempted and fall is our one form of wisdom in some things?'
'Well, that is a delightful item added to our programme,' said Mrs.
Raymond. 'The old place will be almost forsaken for two months.'
'Yes, July and August. The memoirs of the Courtland family during this
time, in the year of grace 188-, were strewn with events. Fairacre, the
paternal home, inhabited only by Tom and Alice, in the guardianship of
the Misses Kendall. Esther, I should like to be an invisible onlooker
during this regime. Oh, can't you imagine how the two dear Quaker doves
will spend their time in chivying after Allie with wraps when she goes
out into the garden with Felix? And then there will be Tom and
Fanny--of course they will be engaged before we come back.'
'And you, my dear--what will have happened in your case?' said the elder
sister wistfully.
'Oh, I shall be two or three months older!' laughed Stella.
There was a difference between her and Mrs. Raymond of thirteen years,
but there was a bond of sympathy between the two which was independent
of all differences of age and experience.
Stella's week at Coonjooree lengthened into ten days.
'Laurette will understand the fascination that the Mallee Scrub has for
one,' said Stella, laughing, as she recalled Mrs. Tareling's undisguised
horror of Cannawijera, the station settled on her by her father, and
distant from Coonjooree about fifteen miles.
And yet to many the Mallee Scrub, like all deserts, comes to have an
inexplicable charm. To realize the change that may gradually be wrought
on the mind in this respect, one should, perhaps, enter the Mallee
country when the mask of night is falling on the land, and travel for
hours under a moon struggling ineffectually for supremacy with driving
clouds. In the uncertain light all that can then be seen is an endless
succession of densely-scrubbed, low, undulating rises, or plains that
stretch indefinitely on every side with clumps of scrub cypress rising
here and there above the Mallee bushes. The traveller should further be
a guest at one of those home-stations in which a stranger asks himself
incredulously what he has ever done to deserve the unbounded hospitality
and kindness showered on him. It should be winter-time--or what stands
for winter in this dry waterless region. He should waken at sunrise,
and gaze for the first time at the Mallee Scrub in the light of day
through an eastern window. And there the scene that meets his eye, far
and wide as he may have wandered, will be stored in the cells of memory
for all time to come. The sight has in it something which compels him
to dwell on it long and fixedly, and turn to it again and again, while a
strange weight falls on the heart, and the mind for some time vainly
seeks a clue to the mingled and contradictory feelings that are
awakened.
There, as far as the eye can reach, lies tier beyond tier in endless
succession, low chains of ranges, with dense gray-green bushes, tall
brown clumps of grass-trees, with patches of white and yellow sand
showing between. During winter in the early mornings the sky is often
one unbroken mass of gray clouds. As the sullen red in the east that
proclaims sunrise dies away, there is no tint or suggestion of colour
anywhere visible in heaven or earth. All around, without break or
alloy, are the uniform monotonous tones of sand and gray-green bushes;
above is the more sombre gray of clouds, in which the eye vainly loses
itself, seeking for a lighter tinge. They are so austere and thickly
piled--those clouds that promise rain, but pass away oftentimes week
after week without a shower. They hide the blue of heaven, and the
sunshine, and rigidly shroud the horizons, as if to make the picture
more ineffaceable--an arid, formless mass above a sombre, colourless
desolation. It is as though one came upon the rigid skeleton of a spent
world, or upon a living presentment of primeval chaos, when the earth
was without form and void.
A bitter loneliness falls upon the spirit. All the well-loved sunny
nooks of the earth seem so far away. Life seems so fleeting--happiness
so unreal. The mind is thrown in on itself, and an immense ennui takes
possession of the heart--clutches it, oppresses it, as though it were
suddenly touched by a heavy hand. It is as though all that men most
cling to in life passed away like mist before the sun, till nothing
remained but this arid wilderness, without the song of bird, or sound of
water, or gleam of flower, or even the over-arching foliage of a tree.
In these regions, severe and desolate as the Dead Sea wilderness, in
which the Son of Man was assailed by the great enemy of souls, the petty
distinctions for which men and women scramble and cheat and lie in
everyday life shrink into trivial toys. These vast parched domains,
lying in all their nakedness under a sunless sky, have nothing to befool
the soul. They have a terrible sincerity in whose cold light not the
picture which we so fondly weave of life, but life itself in all its
pale disenchantment, makes a sudden seizure on the questioning spirit.
In such an hour the multitudinous trifles that choke the soul like the
white ashes of a burnt-out wood-fire are blown away as with the breath
of a strong west wind winnowing the chaff from the grain. In face of so
stern a solitude we cease to deceive ourselves.
The country is not wild. It is in appearance sterile to a degree; it is
tame; it is dull; it is oftentimes solitary as a tomb. Few see it for
the first time without experiencing a causeless melancholy--nay, often
dark forebodings, as of some dread disaster slowly drawing nearer; and
yet this wears away, and the country (how is one to account for it?)
comes to have a fascination of its own. It is so silent, so severe, so
implacable in its veracity. It has no arts with which to allure, no
winning surprises, no breaks in its uniformity through the greater part
of the year. And though at first this scenery agitates and weighs on
those who lie open to the charms that usually draw us to nature, yet
after the first shock is over this strange landscape bends the mind to
itself, and gains a subtle hold on it--a hold based not so much on
tenderness as confidence. It fulfils far more than it promises.
Notwithstanding its parched and barren appearance, a little irrigation
makes it blossom into wonderful fertility: and though no water is ever
seen on its surface, it is believed by those who know the region best
that great reservoirs extend far below these infinite leagues of sandy
ground. The theory is so far borne out by the fact that, where artesian
wells have been sunk in this district, water has been struck in
overflowing abundance. Fruit-trees planted where water is available are
in four and five years loaded with luscious fruit. Here, as in so many
other directions, Nature waits to be governed by obedience to her
conditions. Dig, and ye shall find; water, and ye shall reap. If the
principle that anyone who makes wasteland productive became its owner
were enforced, the Mallee Scrub, instead of being a barren waste, even
in appearance, might soon become a great granary of fruit and corn. But
even in its present state it has a brief hour of beauty. In the zenith
of the Australian spring this scrub is in places sheeted in blossoms:
brilliant little orchids; scarlet and yellow pea-like flowers; the pale
lemon blossom of the native clematis; the small purple geraniums, with
their poignant fragrance when crushed under foot--these, and many other
wild blossoms as yet, alas! nameless to the laity, invest the country
with a charm all the more deeply felt because of the contrast between
these fleeting weeks and the sombre monotony which prevails during the
rest of the year.
In July the country was at its dreariest, for the rains which fall,
oftentimes with tropical fury, are instantly absorbed by the sand, whose
thirst is never satiated; and though there is then more herbage than
through the drought of the summer, the uniformity of tints is seldom
varied. The sombre olive of the Mallee shrubs; the sterner green of the
dwarf honeysuckle, whose pointed leaves when ruffled by the wind show
their silver under-lining, like pale buds that never blossom; the solemn
deep-sea hue of the scrub cypress; the pallid sage-green of the
salt-bush--all are minor tones in the same sad, monotonous, lacklustre
hues; yet day by day, as Stella became more intimate with the Mallee
Scrub, its nameless attractions grew on her. And one day, as she
rambled miles away with the two elder children, she discovered a whole
range-side of early epacris. The brief blossoming season of the region
was yet two months off, yet here were acres of this radiant native
heath, white, and scarlet, and tender pink. The feast this made for the
eyes in the midst of the harsh setting all round made Stella feel as if
for the first time she knew what the joy of colour meant. And then they
were constantly coming upon stores of white immortelles--those snowy
blossoms of the desert, so lightly rooted in the sand, it seems as
though a passing breath would bear them afar. But no; though the
sand-laden wind blows shrill and high, the everlasting-flowers of the
wilderness remain in myriads of loosely-rooted clumps. The snowy
coronals of silky petals round their deep-gold hearts, on brownish dry
stalks, with a few slender leaflets sadly gray-green as the salt-bush
itself, all give a tender charm to the flowers. They are scentless, and
have none of the dewy bloom of ordinary blossoms; but, seeing that their
faces are seldom wet with rain, and that the tips of their roots never
touch water, the marvel is that their pensive radiance ever illuminates
this parched-up land. Of all the flowers that grow, they are those that
one may pluck with least compunction. Weave them into
photograph-wreaths or thimble-baskets, and at the end of two years they
are as white and silken as on the day they left their native scrub.
*CHAPTER XVIII.*
It was to these placid pursuits that Stella devoted herself on the
afternoon preceding her departure for Melbourne. During the past few
days she had experienced a curious shrinking from the visit. To read
and sew and meditate, to listen to her mother's gentle voice, to wage
mimic warfares with her sister over their best beloved authors, to
ramble with the children, looking for new flowers and strange birds,
seemed just then the plan of life best worth having.
These tranquil days succeeding hours of acute anxiety soothed her into a
mood in which the prospect of change and the clamour of strange voices
repelled her. She knew so well how she would weary of herself in the
society of women whose highest ideal of life was to stifle it with
futile details. And then the inevitable meeting with Ted disturbed her
in anticipation. In the solitude of the Mallee Scrub those vagrant
glimpses of a future wholly pledged to him came to wear the air of a
grotesque dream. But she told herself that the strong temptation which
assailed her to break faith with Laurette was only another example of
her instability. And now Maisie was engaged in labelling the luggage
for their early departure in the morning, and Stella sat with her sister
in the western veranda busily weaving the immortelles she had gathered
with the children that morning.
'I solemnly entrust these four photograph-wreaths to your charge,
Esther,' she said, as she gave the finishing touches to one. 'All my
life I have seen these little wreaths round pictures, but never have I
had any for myself till now.'
'And whose will your pretty wreaths honour?' asked the elder sister.
'One for father and mother--that last one taken of them together--one
for you, one for Cuthbert, and one left over.'
'Ah I perhaps for a "nearer one still, and a dearer"?'
'Yes; if he has to sail the salt dividing seas, and go to strange
countries, and kill lions like enclosed birds, etc.'
'But why these hard conditions?'
'Oh, just the power of association. Don't you know the way girls have
of hanging a man in a cosy nook in their own rooms--a bearded, sun-burnt
being, who is away exploring, or in the Northern Territory, or pearling,
or gold-digging, or taking stock across an unknown tract of the
Continent? There the pictures are so safe and snug, with white
everlasting flowers round them, while the men themselves--goodness only
knows what they are doing, or what is happening to them in the wilds.'
Stella wreathed a few more immortelles into places less thickly covered,
and then held the wreath at a little distance to judge it more
critically.
'Yes, that will do; it is worthy to surround the picture even of the
unknown one,' she said, with a dawning smile.
'Stella, will you think me inquisitive? Tell me all there is to tell
about your unknown partner at the Emberly ball. I have heard broken
hints and laughing allusions from Alice,' said Esther, regarding her
sister narrowly.
'It is only Alice's idea of a joke,' said Stella, but she coloured
slowly. 'There is not much to tell, but I will tell you. Shortly after
the ball began Mrs. Leslie came up to me just after a dance, saying,
"There is a friend of my husband's, a stranger here, who wishes to be
introduced." Some woman seized upon her at the moment to ask a score of
questions about the Leslies' departure for Europe. They were going, you
know, the very next day. Then Mrs. Leslie tore herself away and led the
stranger to me, and all I heard was, "Miss Stella," and I think,
perhaps, "Doctor----"; but I am not sure, and I rather hoped I did not
hear aright.'
'But why?'
'Well, it is very stupid; but this stranger had what you might call a
distinguished air, with a noble brow, and a look as of one dissociated
from the vulgar tide of life.'
'But surely a doctor may be and look every inch a gentleman?'
'He may; but then, as a rule, he is not--with us, at any rate. He is
the highly-respectable bourgeois, who has taken to expensive habits of
living before he can quite afford it. And so he must have a great deal
of "tact," and cultivate a trick of looking wise, and of listening
reverently to the twaddle of a rich hypochondriac; and, in short, of all
the professions, the medical is the one that most easily degenerates
into a trade.'
'I think, my dear, you are prejudiced. What about your beloved Dr.
Stein?'
'But then, you see, he is a German. Oh, you may laugh; but culture lies
at the root of all the professions in Germany far more than in England.
As I know neither country, except from an Australian standpoint, I feel
qualified to pronounce judgment. But seriously, now--isn't your average
doctor exactly like your average pianiste, profoundly out of touch with
most of the wider issues of thought or research?'
'But, you see, the profession is a very arduous one. To be a successful
doctor a man must be a specialist to a great extent.'
'To be a successful doctor a man, as a rule, gets into the narrowest of
grooves; and the more money he makes the more furniture and gew-gaws he
heaps about him, instead of limiting his practice and dusting his mind a
little more. I don't know whether it is matrimony that destroys the
profession, as it ruins the influence of the Protestant clergy.'
'Stella--Stella! you are incorrigible about marriage,' said Esther,
laughing. 'The worst of it is you partly mean all you say. But we are
not getting on very fast. Let us conclude that the stranger was not a
doctor, though, after all, if he resembled his friend Dr. Leslie----'
'Yes; he also is one of the exceptions. But, then, the stranger had the
look of one so much--how shall I say it?--devoted to ideas, and not
jostled up with the meannesses of ordinary life. And then his mind had
an alert literary kind of side to it. You might very well retort on me
by asking how I should judge of all this; but, you know, one gets so
awfully and wonderfully weary of the commercial stamp of mind and face,
one quickly recognises the difference.'
'You must have had a good deal of talk with him.'
'Yes; we wasted no time, not even in dancing. He danced only square
dances, and after going through a quadrille we sat out a waltz, which
stretched into nearly two more dances. Yes; it sounds rather serious,
but so much depends on the way things happen--and you must know we were
not on a staircase, nor the recesses of a conservatory, nor on a veranda
lit only by moonlight--we were in one of those alcoves that Allie and I
have raved about ever since; and in front there was dear, amiable Mrs.
Marwood and a large elderly lady from the country, who seemed to have
daughters married in every known quarter of the globe. There the two
good old dames sat chatting away like two fountains, and there were we
two others getting more and more charmed with each other in the
irresponsible way of people who meet once--at least, I hope he was
charmed with me; I can answer for myself.'
'Oh no! I dare say he was dreadfully bored,' said Esther, smiling.
'And, then, was there not a wonderful Tasmanian fern that partly
screened you from the partners you cheated?'
'Yes; a tall, graceful creature, with hundreds of yellowish-green and
dusky-brown fronds drooping one over the other, and baby ones curled up
tight, fold within fold, looking as though they had taken a vow never to
emerge from their infant dreams of the woodland dell where they first
saw the light.'
'I should very much like to know what you two others talked of, but
perhaps it was too much _a coeur ouvert et a langue delice_ to be
confided to a mere elder sister?'
'Oh, nonsense! But what remains of the talk that has delighted us most?
One may as well try to recall a walk on the seashore on a summer night.
There was the moonlight and the "sparkle of the glancing stars," and
there were the waves breaking on the beach, and others coming after them
endlessly; but how much can we convey of the scene to another?'
'A good deal,' smiled Esther. 'Do I not remember how your first
exercises in composition were writing conversations down verbatim? The
pieces of moonlight globed in crystal, as I have heard Allie call the
electric light in the alcoves, the flowers, and the crush of people, and
the wonderful Austrian band--all that would make talk after a first
dance, but not for so very long.'
'Well, after our quadrille my partner said he was only in Adelaide two
days. He had just landed, and was on his way to some of the other
colonies, though he had fallen into such a piece of luck. I thought it
was a very fleeting form of fortune, and said:
'Das Glueck ist eine leichte Dirne
Und bleibt nicht lang am selber Ort.'
A pleased look came into his face. His mother was a German, though
brought up in England, and the language was his second mother-tongue. I
read Heine, then? Oh yes; and nearly all the German writers; and I had
translated Goethe. His face fell comically. I know he was astounded at
such conceit, and--you know what a delightful sensation it is to see a
little downright fun looming on the horizon--so I said with unmoved
seriousness, "I know Kant, too, very well; and it is a great
consolation, for when the hairdresser comes to dress my hair for a ball
I pass the time by remembering bits out of the 'Kritik of Pure
Reason.'"'
'Oh, Stella! what put such a comical thought into your head? Of course,
he found you out then?'
'Yes; and we both laughed heartily; and that, you know, is like eating
salt together--it is a sort of mental latchkey. When Tom came to claim
his dance after my partner and I had sat out a waltz we were both in
Rome. I told Tom I would let him off his duty dance, and so we still
talked on. An unfortunate man slipped and fell with his partner in
front of our alcove. "Surely that is one of the thirty-six tragic
situations of life," said my partner. I said there must be a great many
more then thirty-six, and we began to count; but we fell out at once.
He declared existence would be honeycombed with tragedy if my
contentions as to tragic situations were allowed. We grew serious and
laughed the next moment, and flouted each other's arguments. "But I
will tell you one of the thirty-six," he said: "to dance and talk, and
then to part." I was just on the point of saying, "Especially if you do
not know your partner's name," when, to my horror, there was Mr. Andrew
Harrison, and the polka-mazurka, for which he was down on my programme,
almost over.'
'I suppose you did not say you would let him off his duty dance? And
did you and your unknown partner meet no more?'