novels--English and French--and always have been. Now, if you begin to
read stories at eight, by the time you get to be thirty-one you are at
the mercy of contemporaries for fiction. Oh, I assure you, some of my
contemporaries who write novels would fare very badly if they fell into
my hands. What doleful evenings they have given me, when the day's work
was over, and I have sat down in solitude, proposing to forget problems
and maladies and the imbecile people who so constantly beset us in life!
But, no! the modern novelist, instead of taking the good the gods
provide us in wholesome cheerful lives, shows invention in nothing but
incredible disasters. If they give us anything new, it is in the way of
fools and diseases and villains, and every conceivable shade of human
meanness.'
'While all the time you want a glorified Arcadia, where all the good
people are happy and the wicked ones either overthrown or turned from
the evil of their ways?'
'Or why don't you say ignored? Think how intolerable human society
would be if people were not agreed to ignore a great deal, and rightly
so.'
'I do wish you would give me some idea of what your favourite novels
should be. At present--what between hiding away the misery of life and
ignoring the evil of it--I can only think of fairy tales with the
fairies left out.'
'Well, you amuse me. Here are you, quite evidently blessed with a
physique without flaw--with all your time to spend in the way that seems
best to you--with money, position and friends, and a healthy capacity of
enjoyment--and yet you affect to believe that books cannot be real
unless they are waking nightmares of misadventure.'
'But how could a tale be made that anyone would read out of good health
and immunity from destitution? Not that I am one of those happy beings;
for I am awfully poor,' said Stella.
'Are you really?' said Langdale, looking curiously at the pale pink
_crepe de chine_ which was one of Stella's favourite materials of wear.
'Yes; I have only thirteen pounds a quarter for everything.'
'What, for rent and food and the incidence of taxation? You must manage
very well.'
'Oh, you are laughing at me! Of course I mean for my clothing.'
'And do you mean to say you are poor upon that?'
'Yes; the worst of all poverty, debt. My note-book is full of entries,
in my brother Tom's handwriting: "Lent this day to Stella, five pounds;
to be paid again to me when she can. I say five pounds!"'
'That has a very business-like sound,' said Langdale, smiling.
'Oh yes; and after these notes I also write: "I owe unto Tom five
pounds, lawful money of Australia, which I did borrow of him. Heaven
grant he may get it back." But this is a digression.'
'Not at all, as far as I am concerned,' answered Langdale, speaking
quite gravely, but with a lurking smile in his eyes. 'A young lady who
has fifty-two pounds a year and sundry pound-notes for mere dresses and
ribbons, and yet is desperately poor, is just fit to be a member of that
growing fraternity of malcontents who are so ready to rail at Nature and
Providence.'
'Now you are quite mistaken,' said Stella, with equal gravity. 'It was
only yesterday afternoon I saw a laughing-jackass swoop down and swallow
a great, blind-worm that Dunstan, our gardener, turned over, and yet I
asked neither Providence nor Nature a single question. It was an ugly
creature, and I was quite content it should be gobbled up out of sight.'
This delicate insinuation that, when we find little to complain of in
life, it is because we ourselves are protected from the worst barbs of
misfortune, was not lost on Langdale.
'But then an angel is higher up in the scale--nearer to our own sacred
caste of humanity,' he said with a quiet smile; 'and so you protest
against accident to one of these by making a poignant little tale out of
its disasters. How characteristic that is of so much of our modern
literature, which piles up often the outward accidents of existence and
all the time leaves out its very kernel.'
'Tell me what you think is left out.'
'Life itself. The strong warm instinct of clinging to the earth even
when its harvests do not whiten fully to allay our hunger--the instinct
that makes the man who has writhed in pain through the night carry food
in trembling spoonfuls to his lips in the morning, while a glow of
thankfulness rises in his heart because he yet lives to see the light of
day--ah! it is a subtle ensnaring game, this life of ours. And to
most--I am sure of it--the very fact of being alive is a good that
outweighs the bitterest evils.'
'And yet you have been so often in the presence of the terrors of life.
In London there must be swarms of people about whom everyone must feel
it would be better if they never saw the light. It seems to me that in
hospitals and poor-houses a doctor must often feel that death rather
than life would be the great boon.'
'I am afraid you will think I am very callous,' said Langdale with a
smile; 'but such a thought has very seldom forced itself on me; and when
it has, I have rejected it as treasonable. I dare say you are right.
Habit may engender a bias on the side of life apart from its conditions.
Fortunately for us, we have only to take one part at a time in the stage
of life.'
'Yes, you are concerned with pulling a man through, not with the
question whether it is worth while. Now, I am one of the lookers-on at
the play. I do not hold a retaining fee on one side or the other, and
so I perceive how unmoral this ardour for prolonging this existence
really is.'
Stella spoke with extreme gravity; but seeing that Langdale really
thought she was in earnest, she could not refrain from laughter.
'It is very charitable of you to assume that this ardour for keeping
people in life counts for so much,' he said, smiling. 'But, joking
aside,' he added after a pause, 'there is an absorbing interest often in
watching how incredibly near a human being may draw to the unknown
bourne, and yet struggle back to health once more. What is the subtlety
of man compared to the subtlety of Nature? someone has said. And Nature
is in nothing so subtle as the extraordinary rallies she makes on the
side of life. And thus, in a great crisis, when one pang of remorse or
a dark foreboding as to the future might turn the scales against
recovery, the senses are wrapped in unconsciousness as impenetrable as
that of early childhood.'
'You make me feel that a struggle against death might be more
entertaining to watch than the life that followed.'
'But when you are a little older you will find that the great thing is
the game itself,' returned Langdale, with the frank, catching smile
characteristic of him; 'the endless interaction of motive and
expectation, of work and play, of the wider outlook on human affairs,
which is so distinctive of modern days, lend the world an interest that
outbalances its dreariness.'
'Yes; as long as we do not try to peer below the surface,' returned
Stella half smilingly.
'And then,' went on Langdale, 'there is a strong element of _opera
bouffe_ in the world, apart from moral or deeply serious considerations;
so much interplay that lightens work.'
'Even in the wards of a hospital?'
'Yes. I had to laugh as I rode out yesterday, recalling a case that was
admitted into our casual ward a week or two before I left hospital. It
was a man who had been run over, and whose head was badly hurt. It
appears he had been drinking for some time. He explained to me, as he
was getting better, that he was a poet, whose ideas would flow only
under alcoholic stimulant. This unfortunate accident made him lose the
thread of a great epic, which would have made his fame. "Oh! what was
it--what was it?" he would say, and then he would implore me to help to
recover his epic. It was a theme colossal in its grandeur, and yet full
of pathos and interest. I suggested heaven and hell. "Ah! don't you
see, that when people have ceased to hope for one or fear the other,
such a theme is impossible. Besides," he said, "the critics would at
once say I was imitating Dante and Milton." Then I said, "A great
monarch--one dethroned," etc. "A monarch!" he said, in a tone of
disdain, "a creature that nowadays has either to ape the manners of the
common herd, or keep himself locked up like a criminal!" "Woman?" then
I said in despair. "Oh, woman--woman, who broke my head, and has
storied the prophets in every age----" he replied, beginning to sob.'
They both laughed at this reminiscence. Then Mrs. Courtland and the
governess joined them, and the conversation became general.
*CHAPTER XXIX.*
Three weeks of Stella's visit at Lullaboolagana had passed, when her
brother Claude and his young wife returned from their travels. It had
been arranged that they were to live at the head station a year or two
before starting an establishment on their own account. Mrs. Claude was
a good-looking, vivacious young woman, who, as is the wont of
travellers, had brought back many tales of the countries she had seen.
They had spent February and March in England among relations on both
sides, and this, on the whole, was the part of their foreign experience
which oftenest afforded themes of reminiscence.
'Some days would begin bright,' she would say, 'and then all at once a
fog would come on. After peering into the sky for some time you would
find the sun in the most awkward position, looking for all the world
like an old worn-out rose-coloured platter. But even when there was no
fog you would think the sky was coming down on top of you. It was so
awfully low and dark, and all the trees shivering--I used to long to put
a petticoat on the poor things. And at Uncle Courtland's rectory in
Devonshire I found a little blue gum trying to live. Oh dear, I nearly
cried over it.'
'Why? well, you must have been homesick!' said Louise.
'Well, I don't know--but at any rate I was very dull. They went to
church so often, and I felt I ought to go too. One of the girls had been
to Girton, and she is a little like Stella in some things--but the rest
seem to look on her as a pagan.... I couldn't believe you had more
sunshine here than you liked. You begin to understand why English
people laugh so little.'
'But do they?' questioned Stella, who was listening and sewing by a
French window that opened on the veranda. 'I think all the English
people I have known laughed as much as we do; and what other nation has
produced such humorists?'
'Oh yes, long ago. Now they laugh most when they are here--like Dr.
Langdale. I should think there must be millions of women in England who
never laughed out in all their lives. I suppose that's why they take
everything so seriously. If you're five minutes late for breakfast they
look at you as if you had stabbed the cook--or worse; for they would say
a cook can be replaced, but if you waste the time you can never get it
back.'
'You see, dear, we get rather lax ideas of punctuality in the long hot
summers,' said Louise apologetically.
'Oh, my goodness! how I should like to see some of our relations
there--panting on their bedroom floors instead of seeing that everyone
is at the table to the minute! Such a fuss over wasting the time!
Claude says it's part of "_le cant Anglais_." What better can you do
when the sun never shows himself?'
'You speak as though you had been rather in a wet blanket there,' said
Stella, smiling, 'and found the people rather _agacant_. Now, I think
nice English people are the nicest of all.'
'Yea, in Australia, away from the rest,' said Nell, with a sparkle in
her eyes; 'but a houseful gets upon the nerves--and as for a whole
country full of them, nothing but the thought of leaving it for
Australia, say, keeps you up. I can see you don't take that in quite;
but wait till you go there, Stella. I don't believe you would stay two
days at your uncle's. They are for ever talking of church and the
anti-Unionists.'
No doubt Mrs. Claude could have enlarged eloquently on the subject had
it not been cut short by the entrance of her mother and sister Julia,
who were speedily followed by Dr. Langdale. He stayed only a few
minutes, however, being on his way to Nareen, and having merely called
with a book for Stella. Mrs. Morton could never see Dr. Langdale
without entering on conjectures as to whether he might not settle in
Victoria, instead of returning to London when his year was up.
'We do so need good doctors in this country,' she said; 'and really the
young men who take their degrees in Melbourne and Sydney seem anxious to
cut people up just out of curiosity to see what's inside them.'
There was a general laugh at this, but Mrs. Morton did not speak in a
joking spirit.
'Indeed, girls, it is true. There was that young Dr. Jones at
Warracootie. Not a fowl could they keep. He was trying to invent a
liver pill, and used to try its effects on hens and ducks. They all
died in convulsions. He said it was in the sacred cause of science and
humanity--but surely it's better to have your own eggs fresh laid. And
then, if he knew as much about the liver as he should, would his pills
act in that way?'
'But, for all we know, Dr. Langdale may be engaged to be married, and
obliged to return,' said Miss Morton, and she managed to watch Stella's
face as she spoke. But she did not glean anything from the survey.
Then Mrs. Claude, who knew the rather callous way in which her sister
was prone to investigate and thresh out any subject that interested her,
changed the conversation. But the subject was one on which Miss Morton
was conscious of an aching void for information, and next Sunday, when
Claude and his wife were spending the day at Broadmead, the Morton
station, Miss Julia returned to the subject again.
She was a young woman who took her prospect of settling in life, as she
would have called it, very seriously. It was now nearly three years and
a half since she and Mr. Ritchie had been, as she thought, on the verge
of becoming engaged. She had had frequent opportunities of meeting him
during her visits to her brother and his wife, Ted's elder sister. She
believed that Ted still admired her a good deal--that she formed, in
fact, a sort of second string to his bow, which he would soon fall back
on, if only he were finally convinced that Stella was not to be won, or,
better still, if Stella married. This was a calculating, not to say
mercenary, way of looking upon marriage for a good-looking young woman
of twenty-five. But we sometimes forget that the freedom of choice in
marriage, which it permitted to women of the Anglo-Saxon race, has the
effect of making some of them regard the institution on cool business
principles. It is an 'arrangement' made by themselves, instead of by
the mothers, as in France. Indeed, no French mother could go to work in
a more disenchanted way in this respect than a certain type of
Australian girl. 'I am getting on in life,' she will say, examining the
corners of her eyes and the parting of her hair critically. And then
she counts over the number of eligible men in her circle, and makes a
mental tick against the name of the one who combines most money with
good looks. If he dies, or marries the wrong woman, the process of
ticking has to be gone over again.
But to do Miss Morton justice, affection, though not of an absorbing
nature, had something to do with her designs on Ted Ritchie. She could
readily have loved him, and would much sooner have married him than,
say, the dissipated younger son of an English peer, as her friend
Laurette had done. She had, indeed, during the period when Ted seemed
seriously bent on coming to the point, discarded a local suitor, who was
quite as wealthy as the recreant knight, but twenty years older, and
with a fringe of crimson hair scantily surrounding a singularly flat
crown. His eyes, too, were of the protruding order, and his chin fell
away a good deal. Altogether, he had very much the look of a frog that
has lived through many winters. Still, he had fifteen thousand a year,
and such an income always placed a marriage above the odious category of
scratch matches. But he was a shy sort of creature, and seemed to have
taken a woman's 'No' as being final. He would doubtless require
unmistakable tokens of goodwill to bring him to the point once more.
Now, though Miss Morton was not romantic in her disposition, though she
had started in life with few ideals, while those that she had were of a
tough, serviceable kind, yet she hesitated, and delayed showing those
tokens while Ted was still in the land of the living--in other words,
unmarried. If she could only write to tell Laurette that Stella was
engaged! Before she left Melbourne the two had canvassed the whole
affair in that exhaustive, unreserved fashion habitual to many women in
talking over their own and other people's affairs.
'I consider Stella as good as engaged to Ted after all that has passed,'
Laurette had said. And when Julia came home, it was with a fixed
resolve to regard Ted as no longer among the quick; and she had even
planned those overtures which would convince Mr. Timothy Haydon that,
though a girl might decline to leave the parental roof over three years
ago, it did not follow that she would always be in that negative mood.
He would come home with them from church one Sunday, as he sometimes
did, and a little accidental stroll in the garden together and a
judicious leading would surely be enough. But, then, before this visit
or stroll came off, she found that Stella Courtland and Dr. Langdale
were 'as thick as two thieves,' as she expressed it in writing to
Laurette. On getting this letter, Laurette had instantly written back
asking Julia to be sure to let her know if anything happened. It was
rather early days for anything to have 'happened' in Laurette's sense of
the term; but, then, speedy wooings are not rare in Australia,
especially when there is a separation in near prospect. Stella's visit
was not to extend beyond the middle of September, while Dr. Langdale's
original intention was to return to England in October. And then they
saw so much of each other: they had so much to say, and looked grave,
and laughed, and interested, and animated all in turn. What could such
proceedings mean, but that they were fascinated by each other and
falling in love?
And then, in the midst of her dubitations on the point, Mr. Timothy
Haydon suddenly announced his intention of visiting England after
shearing. It was well known to his friends that he had a tribe of
unmarried elderly female relations in England--cousins of all degrees of
nearness and remoteness. He would never return 'alive,' Julia was
certain of that. If she was not prepared to resign him, to let him
become the victim of a foreign brave of the female 'sect,' she must take
speedy action. But what if, after the day on which that stroll should
come off in the garden with a successful issue, she heard that the knell
of Ted's hopes as far as Stella was concerned had been rung! It was a
cruel position for a young woman whose fate lay in her own hands, as
far, at any rate, as the second best match possible to her was
concerned. It was like the story of the old woman who was driving her
pigs to market. In her perplexity Julia resolved to play the part of
the rope in that legend of the nursery. According to the light that was
in her, she resolved on a little experiment of her own to bring matters
to a crisis.
Two days before Mrs. Claude returned there had been a lawn-tennis party
at Dr. Morrison's. Dr. Langdale was one of the players, and during an
interval in which Miss Morton and he were looking on, the lady took the
opportunity of speaking of Stella's play as a prelude to playing the
part of the rope.
'Miss Courtland never strikes the ball except on the run. Now, which do
you think is the better way to play a stroke, Dr. Langdale?'
'The way in which you are most successful, I should say,' answered
Langdale, smiling.
'I would like awfully to learn how to put on twist when I give a service
as Miss Courtland does. I wish she were to settle here when she
marries; but her future home will be a long way off.'
'Yes?' said Dr. Langdale. But Julia could not detect any show of
surprise. There was, perhaps, a slight, slow alteration of colour, and
in a little while he added: 'I did not know that Miss Stella was to be
married.'
'Oh, it is a very old story! She was engaged for a short time years ago
to the gentleman and broke it off, and now it is on, or as good as on,
again--at least, so her sister-in-law that is to be told me. Perhaps I
should not have spoken. But'--with an arch smile--'I thought, as you
are such good friends, that you knew.'
'Well, I hope the happy man deserves his good luck,' returned Langdale;
and there the matter dropped.
In thinking over it afterwards, a panic seized Julia that she might have
put a rachet in the wheels instead of giving them a spin. But no; she
felt certain people could not be so intimate without 'talking over'
things that concerned them. If Langdale was at all affected, he would
not rest till he found out whether this was true. Such rumours often
advanced affairs in a marvellous way; but since then eight days had come
and gone, and there was no sign. Miss Morton used to lie awake at night
thinking that after all she might fall between two stools. And now
shearing would soon begin, and she was as undecided as ever about that
stroll in the garden with Mr. Timothy Haydon.
So on this Sunday she resolved to glean all that she could, hoping for
some light that would help her to come to a decision. After dinner she
and Mrs. Claude went into the banksia-covered arbour at the far end of
the garden, the very spot in which Julia had pictured herself gently
leading her Adonis of fifty into the primrose path of dalliance. She
recalled him as she had seen him that morning (his pew was not far from
theirs in church), and her heart fell. His fiery fringe of hair was
getting scantier, his eyes paler and more blinking, his wrinkles more
obtrusive. And then she thought of Ted. The contrast between the two
gave her a sense of faltering dismay. Then she thought of Stella as an
interloper, whose unpardonable wilfulness overshadowed her own (Julia's)
plans like a nightshade.
'Well, Nell, and how do you get on with Stella Courtland, on the whole?'
she said, suddenly rousing herself out of the reverie in which the
probable and possible husband formed a disconcerting foreground.
'Oh, charmingly! Who could help liking her?--so full of fun, and all
kinds of unexpected fancies.'
'You seem to have rather a trick of standing round her at Lull, when she
talks; but, for my own part, I like a girl with a more open disposition.
Now, who would see her with Dr. Langdale without thinking they were
lovers, or going to be?' said Julia, with much animation.
'Well, and supposing they were?' said Mrs. Claude, a little surprised at
her sister's tone.
'Supposing they were! And she as good as engaged to Ted Ritchie!'
retorted Julia.
She was determined to put her case bluntly, so as to extort her sister's
opinion all the more quickly.
But instead of evoking any sharp denial, as she hoped to do, a sudden
light seemed to fall on Mrs. Claude.
'Well, now, that explains what has begun to puzzle me,' she said slowly;
and at these words poor Julia's heart fell.
'What has been puzzling you, Nell?'
'The sort of fast friendship there is between Stella and Dr. Langdale,
without any approach to love-making.'
'Without any approach to love-making!' echoed Julia bitterly. 'Well,
Nell, you must be a greenhorn to be taken in by such stuff. Why, you
cannot see the two together without knowing at once they are playing at
being friends; but it's about the shabbiest disguise I ever saw.'
'Oh, I know how you look at it, Julia,' said Mrs. Claude, with a quiet
smile. 'You only see part of the play, and the other part you put
together all endways.'
'Well, I see only part, but enough is as good as a feast, they say.
Why, last Thursday when I was over there I saw them meeting at the
passion-flower bridge, and it took them a solid hour to get from there
to the house! And yet till Stella appeared you know the sort of deadly
calm the Doctor always maintained to young ladies. Indeed, Mrs. Waring
felt certain there was something behind it all--that he was privately
married, or a woman-hater, or something.'