doorway of the drawing-room, where his wife and sister were seated, with
Lionel, the eldest boy, just then an invalid, on a couch, buried in the
enchanted pages of the 'Arabian Nights.' Courtland was a tall spare
man, with that slight stoop which tall men, who are in the saddle often
ten hours out of the twenty-four, are apt to acquire. He was bronzed
with the sun and constant exposure to all sorts of weather. He was
barely forty, but his dark-brown hair, beard, and moustache were
plentifully sprinkled with gray. His face, when in repose, was grave
almost to sadness, and he would often pass hours without uttering a
word. These are some of the characteristics of a life passed in the
Bush from early manhood. Courtland had been at Eton three years, when
sudden and disastrous reverses, coupled with failing health, led his
father to decide on leaving England for Australia. No one who knew
Hector Courtland when he left Eton--a lad of seventeen--would have
prognosticated that he would become grave, silent, and uumirthful long
before he reached the uplands of middle age. But there are probably few
natures which are not profoundly modified by a semi-Carthusian existence
during the most susceptible years of life.
'You look tired, Hector. Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?' said his
wife.
'Yes, a quart potful. Some sheep got boxed up at the seven-mile hut,
and we had a high old time of it drafting them. Well, Liny, what are
you doing, young man?'
'Reading about Sindbad the Sailor, father. Do you know that Aunt Stella
can tell stories just like a book?'
'No; I never heard her. What sort of stories?'
'The one she told me this morning was about strange people who live
always in the woods.'
'What kind of people, my boy?'
'Well, when they are in the sunshine they are all light. When they are
in the moonshine, it goes through them, so you must step very gently,
and follow them till they get into the shadow; and when they are in
shadow, you cannot tell them from the darkness.'
'Then it seems you do not see them at all?'
'No, father, never; and all the time they are there doing the strangest
things. They catch falling stones and toss them back into the sky, and
there they give more light than fever, and don't fall down any more.
They take old bits of dead bark and make them into butterfly wings, with
gold and purple spots on them. When an old log is burnt up they make
the little geraniums, that smell so sweet, out of the ashes. They never
go to sleep, and they never stop working, and they are never tired and
never seen, and they never let the tiniest scrap of anything go to
waste.'
The father listened with smiling seriousness to these wonders of the
wood. Later on he pleaded to be among the audience when Stella told
twilight stories to the children, and he would listen with profound
interest to the mystical events and subtle fancies that rose to 'Baby's'
lips with tireless vivacity. She certainly had something of the
improvisatrice in her, for never, except when she threw the reins on
fancy's neck in speaking, did such winged words, luminous reaches of
imagination, and quick touches of pathos come to her. Sometimes, when
the grave elder brother listened, he would almost question whether this
could be the merry little child with wide open eyes who had been the
baby among them all when he left home. She had in a manner remained
'Baby' to him ever since.
There is something pathetic in the way that those who are most closely
related may come to be entire strangers. When we are in daily communion
we inevitably weave fancies one concerning the other, which stand to us
in place of knowledge. But all the time--between not only dumb natures,
but those most subtly gifted with utterance--there is that baffling,
inexorable wall of division, that unfathomed abyss in which each human
soul is shrouded from the cradle to the grave.
*CHAPTER XXVII.*
It might seem at first sight that station life in Australia must be a
very slow and dull kind of existence. As a rule, the centres of
civilization are far off, the nearest neighbours many miles away; and
the ordinary modes of amusement, balls, parties, opera, and
theatre-going, etc., are unknown. To many, no doubt, a life so cut off
from external excitement would seem a very maimed and incomplete affair.
But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that all the most
healthful forms of recreation, as opposed to pleasure-seeking, are
opened to squatting life. There are books and magazines to read,
buggies to drive in, horses to ride, visits to be received and paid, and
all the engrossing interests of family life for the women-folk. For the
men there is the ceaseless round of duties, which are on the whole not
more monotonous than the calling of average professional men, and less
arduous, after the early struggles are over, than most other forms of
work. And, then, who has lived for years encircled by great woods
without finding that these unpeopled spaces exercise a fascination, all
their own, over the mind? The tranquil gullies, in which the slender,
stringy bark-trees grow so thick that every sun-ray is intercepted; the
scrubby ranges, which the radiant epacris sometimes turn into a mass of
colour; the swamps, with their wide, gray-green fringe of reeds and
rushes and flocks of water-fowl, that come to them in straggling lines
from far districts that have become waterless; the treeless plains, that
stretch like a mimic ocean to the verge of the far horizon; the swelling
hills, that break the monotony of well-timbered, undulating country; the
sombre vegetation, the gleam of brilliant desert flowers, the calls and
songs of birds, all have a charm of their own, and rise up in the memory
of the Australian exile with an allurement which he never finds in the
crowded cities--nay, not even in the scenery of the Old World.
Stella took very kindly to station life. She found it delightful to be
so closely neighboured by the great unmeasured woods of her native land.
She even regretted that the township of Minjah Millowie was so near.
The views she liked best were those that swept the woods to the north
and west, where one might travel on and on for days without striking any
signs of human habitation. Next day she was on the passion-flower
bridge, alternately absorbed in Keats and in looking across the Home
Field and the stirless masses of foliage beyond, when she heard
approaching footsteps. She turned, to find herself face to face with
her unknown partner at the Emberly ball.
'Miss Stella! Is it possible?' he said in a delighted tone.
They shook hands cordially.
'I believe I know your name now,' said Stella laughingly.
'Oh! it is Langdale. Did you not know that night?'
'No; but since I came here things I have heard of you made me believe
that Dr. Langdale and you were one and the same.'
He laughed with beaming eyes at this division of his individuality.
'Well, I knew you were Miss Stella; and now, I suppose, I may add to
that, Courtland? This is another stroke of good luck--not so fleeting,
I hope, as the first. By the way, should I not ask whether you have got
over the fatigues of the ball?'
'Oh yes! This is the day after.'
'Only, I suppose, you would say it was one of the thirty-six tragic
situations of life that one can never really make believe?'
'You still remember our little debate?'
'Surely. Tell me, do you still think of the "Kritik of Pure Reason"
when the hair-dresser comes before you are going to a ball?'
She laughed merrily, and then said seriously:
'Do you know, I haven't been to any ball half so nice since.'
'And I haven't been to any at all. But they are not much in my line. I
wonder if that exquisite Tasmanian tree-fern is still flourishing?'
'No; it died next morning of pure chagrin.'
'I am sorry to hear that. But why?'
'Because someone near it began an anecdote about Heine, and then went
away without telling it. If there is anything in the world a Tasmanian
tree-fern cannot brook it is an interrupted anecdote.'
'Well, I felt it a great misfortune that your partners discovered you;
but I didn't know the tree-fern sympathized with me. Shall I tell you
that little story?'
'Please. I have often since tried to imagine what it was.'
'It was told to my mother by an old lady who knew Heine. She visited
him one dull day in November, a little over two years before his death.
She found him spent with pain, that had defied his sleeping potion all
through the night. But he was propped up on his mattress-grave, writing
on a tablet. He said it was a poem, which, like life, had turned into a
bad joke on his hands--too long for wit, and too pathetic for the
publishers. It was the story of a peasant-boy from the Thuringian woods,
who had climbed mountain-peaks for edelweiss, gathered violets before
sunrise, who, with tears in their eyes, told him why their petals were
the same in number as the eggs of the swallows, and other weighty
secrets; a boy who made love to the stars at night, and watched a maiden
spinning till he believed that he was a poet. He came to Paris--the
beautiful heathen Circe, who slays her lovers by thousands with the
simples she culls with a brazen sickle by moonlight. But her simples
had no power over the peasant-boy. He played woodland melodies on his
oaten pipe early and late, but no one heeded him. Then he fell ill, and
longed even to death for a sight of his native woods, but most of all
for one of the white violets that Gretchen used to wear at her throat.
Then the evil spirit came to him one midnight, and offered him a white
violet for one of two trifles--a song or his soul. The boy had no longer
the power to make a song in the cruel city that had broken his heart, so
he gave his soul. He held the flower against his lips, but when the dawn
crept into his garret he saw that the violet was a purple one, bleached
with brimstone. Then without a word he turned his face to the wall and
died. They say he looked so young and beautiful that Beelzebub himself
shed tears. "I do not believe this part of the story, however," said
Heine, "for in that case he would give up pinching my nerves with
red-hot pincers in the night when Mathilde is asleep, and there is no
one to drive him away." Of course, much is always lost when a thing of
that kind is repeated from one to the other; but that is the little
anecdote as my mother told it me, as nearly as I can recollect.'
'Well, I think it has Heine's cachet on it. Poor Heine, it seems like a
peep into his room where he lay so cruelly long!'
'Yes, it was a bitter period--those lingering years--when, as he said in
one of his letters, he was no life-enjoying, somewhat comely Greek any
more, who would laugh merrily at morose Nazarenes; but only a poor Jew,
sick to death; a wasted picture of sorrow; an unhappy man.'
'What a crown of thorns life has for the most part offered to the
goldenest-mouthed singers.'
'That is true; but we must not forget that they themselves plaited the
thorns too often, just as we other ordinary mortals do.'
'Ah, but they suffer more; they have less "certainty of waking bliss."
Genius has never been truly acclimatized in the world. The Philistines
always long to put out the eyes of poets, and make them grind corn at
Gaza.'
There was a touch of scorn in Stella's voice and a light in her eyes
which were not lost on her companion, who, indeed, found an evident
pleasure in looking at her, as well as hearing her speak.
'But you must not forget that poets are by nature very vocal, and able
to record their joys and woes with cunning effect. Now take the dumb,
patient way in which the poor--women among them, especially--suffer. It
is nothing uncommon to find a woman has been enduring acute pain at
intervals for years, and all the time going about her work as if nothing
were the matter, and saying very little about it. That, to my mind, is
true heroism. If a poet could ever suffer in the same way, for a month,
say--ye gods! what despairing odes--what declamatory appeals to an
unrighteous Heaven!'
'You talk almost like a heretic.'
'Perhaps I say what appears to me true; that is often the worst sort of
heresy.'
'But surely not if your truth is really true,' said Stella, with an arch
smile.
'Ah, that is a burning question,' returned Langdale, with an answering
smile. 'But without going into the more serious aspect of
affairs--though we should not choose to be in error--yet are there not
many things in which illusions help people more than the truth? Isn't
that perhaps one reason why things, as they are, remain for the most
part so carefully masked?'
'I must think over that before I commit myself. But about the poets;
isn't it their vocation to see the "passionate expression" not only in
the face of all science, but to put into words what others dumbly
endure? When Shelley says:
'"I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away this life of care,
Which I have borne and still must bear,"
he was speaking not only for himself, but for multitudes who have had
the same feeling, but lacked all gift of expression.'
'That just points what I wanted to say. A feeling of that kind is,
after all, fleeting; it takes up but a small part of a working day, and
a working day is, on the whole, a hopeful one. Only the things that
make it so would not produce a lyrical cry.'
'That sounds so reasonable; it is more provoking than a downright
attack.'
'No; but really it is so. Think what it takes of endeavour, of effort,
to make up one day of this world's life. Most of this may be called
downright drudgery. Things that have to be done over and over again, in
almost exactly the same way, simply because people need three meals a
day. And yet the work done has its own interest to each healthy
individual.'
'What, to the women who make buttonholes all their lives, and make
dolls' arms for a shilling the hundred dozen; to the men who break
stones for the road, and work in gangs in factories and mines
underground?'
'Do not forget,' said Langdale with a smile, 'that you are thinking of
these monotonous employments with a highly sensitized imagination. And
even when the work is in far more imaginative grooves--when it brings
the mind into touch with things that do not pass away with the
using--how much more effective for poetry is the reaction, the mistrust,
the vague disappointment, than the moderate satisfaction at moderate
success--the feeling of expectation and looking on, and waiting for what
is to follow, which, after all, give their zest to the average days of
existence?'
'Well, are we to come back to the old idea of banishing poesy because it
is misleading?'
'By no means. Only I think we do not enough realize its tendency to
heighten what is sad in life--often, I think, to exaggerate it. It
isn't the people who have most to do with life that write criticisms on
it. And in all criticisms there is a heightening and a deepening. It
is the craft of the ready writer.'
'You make me think of an expression people often use when anything
dreadful happens--"It is like a dream." And yet the worst things always
happen when we are wide awake. Still, I feel the force of what you say
about the poor. I have often been struck with the uncomplaining, almost
stoical, way in which they take misfortune.'
'Yes, one cannot help being struck with it. "It does feel rather bad,"
they will say, when "intolerable agony" would be our only adequate
expression for what they are enduring. And how simply often they face
death. "I wouldn't mind going, if it weren't for the children," I have
heard poor, long-suffering women say over and over again. What a sinewy,
insinuating expression for passing away from all that we know. There is
no art of the rhetorician here--of the shoemaker who can make a great
shoe for a little foot.'
The two had left the passion-flower bridge by this time, and were slowly
sauntering through the Home Field towards the house. It was the
afternoon of one of those perfect Australian days in which the sky is
widely vaulted in a dome of crystalline clearness; the horizons so
indefinitely enlarged that the limiting-lines are beyond sight; the
world overflowing with sunshine, as though day had been added to day;
while a cool westerly breeze was blowing, that stirred the boughs into
jocund sprightliness, and revealed in the searching light how large the
buds were growing on the limes and birches, and all the old-world trees
that lose their foliage in winter.
'You almost tempt me to think that it is more poetical to be "to dumb
forgetfulness a prey" than to interpret nature and our own hearts to
us,' said Stella. 'But still, I suppose you do love the poets a
little?'
'Fortunately I have got a voucher with me,' he returned laughingly, and
pulled a small brown volume of Moliere out of his pocket.
'Ah! that is one of the beloved among the classics. One reads him each
time as if afresh--for the first time.'
'Yes. As I walked from Minjah Millowie I laughed over Harpagon's
instructions to his servants to conceal the defects of their liveries as
if I had never read them before. Is there anyone else who has the secret
of touching the springs of laughter so irresistibly? And it isn't so
much with broad effects, or even the finer point of wit, but the
perpetual play of the human comedy--the ironical surprises life has in
store for us.'
'You make me long to steal the volume from you. I don't think I have
read "L'Avare" for years.'
'Suppose we exchange? I know Keats very imperfectly. This is just the
atmosphere in which to read him. Now, that is a sort of pledge of
friendship,' he said, as they exchanged books.
'Yes, so it is,' answered Stella heartily.
'Do you know, I often wondered if we should meet again,' he went on. 'I
quite made up my mind that we might be friends if we did, if you will
forgive such boldness.'
'So did I,' returned Stella frankly; and she recalled her conversation
with her sister at Coonjooree.
'Thank you very much,' he returned, with a simple cordiality which was a
marked trait in his manner. 'I foresee that we shall quarrel
occasionally,' he continued gaily, a little afterwards.
'Yes; there is an exasperating reasonableness about you,' she said, with
a soberness only belied by the dancing light in her eyes, 'and that must
breed mischief sometimes. I suppose it comes of your belonging to two
old civilizations firmly rooted in the past.'
He maintained his gravity till her eyes betrayed her, and then they
laughed together.
'You have a way of taking temporary rises out of me which you must
expect to hear of again,' he said; and this threat made food for more
laughter.
And then at that moment Louise, accompanied by two or three little ones,
came in sight among the trees.
'What will my sister-in-law think?' said Stella, with an amused smile.
'She does not know we are old friends.'
What Louise thought as she approached the two was that they looked
extremely companionable. Stella was attired in a close-fitting
cream-coloured cashmere, with a cluster of passion-flowers at her
throat, and a broad straw hat looped up at one side with the same
flowers. A smile hovered about her lips, and as she talked her long
thick lashes and dark slender eyebrows heightened the radiance of her
eyes and cheeks.
Her companion was little over a head taller, with a muscular,
well-formed figure. His eyes were dark gray, his head and brow
strikingly noble--an air well maintained by the rest of the face, more
especially the finely-moulded chin and mouth, whose short upper lip was
defined rather than hidden by a silky black moustache. His hair was of
the same colour; his skin a clear olive tint.
'I do not think I need offer to introduce you to one another,' said
Louise, smiling.
'Well, no. We have just been finishing a talk we began the day after I
landed in Australia,' said Langdale. And then Louise was speedily told
all there was to tell.
'You were sitting on the passion-flower bridge, then, when you met Dr.
Langdale?' said Louise afterwards, when the two were alone. 'Well,
something has happened there at last. For don't you think, under the
circumstances, it was almost an event?'
'Oh yes, it _was_ an event; for we are going to be friends.'
Louise might smile covertly, and feel as sceptical as people usually are
regarding friendship pure and simple between an attractive young woman
and a man barely eight years her senior. But Stella, who was weary of
being made love to, found this prospect of friendship very alluring; and
from the first moment she met him something which she could feel, though
not define, made her feel sure that Langdale was a man capable of being
an intimate friend without degenerating into a lover.
*CHAPTER XXVIII.*
There come epochs in some lives to which the thoughts in all after-years
return with infinite tenderness, and a vague wonder that, in an
existence so beset with common pleasures and turmoils and disillusions,
there should be this tranquil sanctuary by which always there seem to
glide the sweet waters of Siloe that go with silence. Such a period for
Stella were the weeks that followed. The spring was an unusually lovely
one--calm, overflowing with sunshine, and yet cool. Our Australian
woods do not greatly brighten or darken at the approach of any season.
And the monotony of form and colour must often deepen the tendency of
all well-known objects to fail in making us apprehend our surroundings
with eyes quickened by imaginative insight. But here at Lullaboolagana
there were groves and little woods of European trees, whose bare
branches were starred with leaf-buds that swelled from day to day in the
liberal sunlight and the kindly air, making the heart beat with
involuntary gladness at their revelation of the dawn of returning youth.
This miracle, perpetually renewed, of vegetable life so largely drawn
from unseen material, has a subtle power to draw the mind into wondering
conjecture as to presences, unknown as well as unseen, which may be all
around and near us.
It seemed to Stella as if she fully felt for the first time the mystical
significance of this ceaseless throb of returning vigour. And then the
growing intimacy with a mind equipped by training and natural
endowments, with a keen apprehension of the more novel forces that are
moulding thought and life in the present day--equipped, too, with a
calmer, more assured outlook on life than had yet dawned on her
introspective, more apprehensive nature, seemed in a delightful way to
realize that ideal of friendship she found so attractive. They had so
much in common, and yet they were so wide apart. And this led them
often far afield in talk which, though at first chiefly impersonal, yet
led to a growing sympathy. This may be better realized by recording,
though imperfectly, some of the talk that passed between them on
successive occasions.
The second time they met at Lullaboolagana was on the wide western
veranda closed with a thick screen of creepers, where Stella sat sewing
beside her little invalid nephew.
'I wish you had come in time to hear Aunt Stella's story of the little
lost angel,' said the boy.
'Well, hadn't you better tell it to me, Liny?' said Langdale coaxingly.
Lionel, nothing loath--he was one of the children who like to tell a
story almost as much as to hear one--told in his own way the strange
adventures of a little angel who, viewing the earth a long way off, fell
in love with it and came to see it closer. He could fly down easily,
but his wings were not strong enough to bear him back. There was a
little cottage in the woods, in which a girl and her mother lived. The
girl found the little angel, wet with the dew and blue with the cold,
and brought him home. When his wings had dried, the mother plucked most
of the feathers out to stuff a pillow with them. This grieved the angel
so much that he wandered off to the woods, and sat in a very lonely
place waiting for his wings to grow again. But the dragon-flies deafened
him with their buzzing, the crows tried to peck his eyes out, and at
last an emu put sand over him, so that he might be hatched like one of
her own chicks.
'That is all,' said the boy. 'Aunt Stella won't say whether the angel
grew its wings or was choked. I think myself the sand would smother
it--or make it blind. Poor dear little angel!'
'I wonder why your aunt told you such a dofeful story as that?' said
Langdale, speaking to the boy, but looking at the culprit, who showed no
signs of repentance.
'Are you of the same persuasion as my sister Louise?' said Stella.
'When she tells the children stories they are lightened of all
disasters--even "The Babes in the Wood" have a happy time in the end.'
'Well, don't you think the chief justification of stories is that they
are pleasanter than the worst that may happen?'
'Do you really think so?' said Stella, looking very sceptical.