solemn charges on him to turn towards Australia night and morning and
waft her greetings.
They did not say farewell that evening. Hector Courtland was to
accompany his sister part of the way to Melbourne, and was to take her
by way of the Peeloo Plain, on the borders of which his friend Mr. Dene
lived, and Langdale proposed to pay a long-promised visit at the same
time. But many farewells had to be spoken, nevertheless, and do what she
would, the feeling lay heavy at Stella's heart that in leaving
Lullaboolagana, the dearest, tenderest chapter in the book of her
history was over. Here life's dearest mount of vision had been scaled,
its sweetest idyll had been told.
Poor old Mick wept effusively when she bade him good-bye; Dunstan made
it very clear that it was her duty to come back to Lullaboolagana early
next spring, if not sooner.
'Why, Miss Stelly, the place was made for you, I may say; and what will
become of the vagabonds that get their legs broke, I dunno: The crow has
took to no one but yourself, and that poor female as went away with her
brother last week whole and well, and the three horses a kickin' up
their legs as if they never knew what it was to be skelingtons; and even
that blasphemin' cockie had forgotten some of his worst curseses----'
Dunstan lost himself in enumerating the caravan procession that had so
deeply impressed him.
The next afternoon Stella and her brother reached Peeloo Station, where
they were to stay the night. Langdale came near sundown, after paying
some professional visits for Dr. Morrison by the way. There was but a
meagre garden at this station, though it was a wealthy one, like most in
the district. The house, too, had a curiously makeshift appearance.
The fact was that the family from year to year proposed residing in the
vicinity of Melbourne. Near sunset the host proposed an evening ride to
all who cared to go over the great Peeloo Plain, which stretched for
over sixty miles westward. There was an artesian well ten miles off, on
the plain of weeping myalls, he wished to show Courtland.
'Whom the gods love ride across a great Australian plain in the
evening,' said Stella; and Langdale, of course, was instantly converted
to the same opinion. So the four set off westward, when the sun was low
on the horizon. There were heat clouds piled up in an unmoving bank,
through which the sun burned, as it sank, like a smouldering fire that
the wind has fanned till the coals kindle into red heat and the flames
break out, eating their way through the fuel. For a moment before
setting the sun stood all undimmed on the level horizon like a great
fiery ball, and then dropped suddenly out of sight, leaving a deep soft
glow which reached high up in the heavens, and so remained for hours.
This beautiful, unusual appearance was more vivid that evening than it
had ever been before.
The riders followed no road, but took their way across the plain, still
clothed with the luxuriant winter grass, which here and there was
beginning to be touched with the heat languor that a few weeks later
would turn the verdure into sapless flax. But as yet the herbage was so
close and rich that the hoof-beats of the horses scarcely awoke an echo.
The few sounds that were borne with startling distinctness through the
sonorous air died away. The shrill scream of a black cockatoo in the
depths of a weeping myall, the twitter of a little emu wren bounding
through the grass, the loud calls of the white-fronted honey-birds in a
flowering acacia, the hysterical chorus of laughing jackasses in the
wooded bend of a watercourse densely lined with ti-tree, the sudden caw
of a solitary crow in a box-gum, all became silent, one by one. Now and
then a red kangaroo, with his beautiful ruddy tints and faint flush of
dawn-rose on the under-neck, or a doe, clad in delicate steely blue,
bounded near them as they passed.
They flew over the great smooth plain, while the spring wind, vivifying
as a sea-breeze, blew in their faces. At times they came to a stretch
of kangaroo grass, tall and rustling, swayed by the wind that came now
and then running up in little fitful gusts, till the faint billows
formed an exact image of the half-formed waves seen in mid-ocean in
placid summer weather. The earth and sky equally had an unfamiliar
boundlessness that at first lay like a weight on the spirit, and yet
gradually soothed it as the imagination gathered impulse and repose from
the sad magnificent horizons, unbroken by wood or hill, or the gleam of
water. At rare intervals the marvellous uniformity was heightened rather
than interrupted by the course of a creek whose abrupt banks were marked
by a wavering line of box-wood or weeping myall, and sometimes dense
undergrowth. The light of day and the brilliant blue of the sky were
replaced by the dreamy paleness which falls on the world when the
heavens are cloudless, yet hold the stars for some time out of sight,
and the earth lies stretched below without limit and without shadow.
There was no cold look in the sky, no bleakness on the earth. It was
noble in its vast breadth, its virgin promise of fertility--fit to be
the dwelling-place of a race strong, free and generous; careful not only
for the things that advance man's material prosperity, but caring
infinitely as well for all that touches the human spirit with quick
recognition of its immortal kinships.
'It is like no other scene I have ever looked at,' said Langdale, at
length breaking the silence.
'Don't you feel you will remember it all to your dying day?' asked
Stella softly.
'Yes; perhaps when we die we shall remember it better than ever. It is
like a picture of the old classic underworld, with its pale light and
its wide, homeless pastures.'
'Oh, if it would only last for ever--the world flooded in mysterious
light, the horses never tired, the horizon never visible! Why are you
smiling?'
'I would not wish it to go on for ever. I have an earth-creeping
imagination that would soon pine for a local habitation--and Blaettchen
waiting for me inside. But how often we shall recall this ride till we
meet again!'
There were cadenced cries far overhead, as if among the stars, which
began to swim into sight all over the firmament, and looking upward, a
long line of great birds, with dusky wings wide spread, became visible.
'They are swans going to their nesting-places by some swamp,' said
Stella. 'How plaintive and musical their notes are! Don't they make
you understand what someone meant when he said that virtuous melodies
teach virtue?'
'And what virtue could they teach Herzblaettchen that she does not
possess?'
'Handfuls! Try to believe this in time: gentleness, resignation, hope.
Did you not tell me yourself, some time ago, that I was curiously
lacking in hope? I always knew that a friend was more faithful than a
lover!'
'But, Liebe, I am both; only the more I know you, the less I could bear
to have you different.'
'That is what I am always promising when my happiness makes me afraid to
be different. I take refuge in the thought that I am going to be so
useful and helpful--to make some lives happier that without us might be
intolerably hard; to make our future home a little radiant centre.
Anselm, I had rather be a cat and mew at the moon than be
self-complacent and wrapped up in my own prosperity like a cocoon.'
Langdale laughed softly at this quick vehemence of speech.
'But, Stella, how little danger there is of that! Do you want to make
me believe that you have not always been helpful and loving--full of
sympathy and tenderness and quick insight, ready always?'
'Ah, but you don't know how indifferent in between--how ready at any
moment to believe that after all it does not much matter. You do not
know this vagrancy of temperament. You are protected by your
nationalities and your love of work. That gives you an ideal of duty
apart from whim and sudden changes of mood.'
'I always knew that a friend was more faithful than a
"Little-heart-leaflet."'
'Don't laugh at me, Anselm. We shall recall this ride so often, as you
have said: when the days are too long--when people are wearisome: and
that is one of the great qualities of our race everywhere.'
Langdale laughed again, and took off his hat in acknowledgment of this
wide compliment.
'Forgive me, Liebe,' he said, recovering his gravity; 'but this air
seems to get into one's head like champagne. But I promise not to
interrupt again.'
'Well, always while you are away--when I am bored, when I am overcome
with the feeling,
'"Only my love's away,
I'd as lief the blue were gray'--
I shall think of this ride, and remember that I made resolutions to be
better--above all, to be more patient. I can so well understand how it
was with the Foolish Virgins. It is never amusing to wait long. I
should have gone to sleep, I am sure. I should have been caught with my
lamp extinguished. Do you know that seeing you so unwearied--so lost to
every thought but the welfare of that poor woman during the days when
she was so near death--has given me, I think, a more abiding sense of
duty.'
'Sweet St. Charity! how divinely serious your face is just now--heroic
in its earnestness!'
'My heroic moods are exotics; the wings of my soul are not full-grown,
and it takes but very short flights; it comes nestling back to earth so
quickly; it will follow in the wake of your vessel all the way; you may
not see it, but it will be there--especially at dawn. Leave your cabin
window open; for it is only the spirit of a dead soul that can go
through cracks and bars of iron and glass.'
'And will your beloved little soul come and lay a kiss on my face?'
'No. It is not the vocation of a soul to kiss.'
'Nor even to whisper those delicious little _niaiseries_ that make me so
happy? Cruel little soul! Why, then, will it come all that long way?'
'To get into your waistcoat pocket with your watch, and count how fast
time flies.'
It was past nine o'clock when they returned to the Peeloo station. The
host and Courtland lingered at the stable after they dismounted.
Langdale and Stella bade each other farewell on the wide veranda covered
in with passion-flowers and a luxuriant Queensland bignonia.
Langdale had to leave by daybreak, as he was anxious about one of the
patients he visited that day--a splitter living among the great tiers of
peppermint eucalyptus that lay behind the Messmate Ranges--a man who had
been injured by a falling tree. Stella was very brave, and kept a
smiling face to the last. Then she went in and chatted for awhile with
the lady of the house, while the men smoked on the veranda. She had
gone to her own room before they came in.
*CHAPTER XXXVII.*
Laurette had never been more airily cheerful and full of gossip than she
was on the day after Stella's arrival.
'We have all the morning to gossip in. I asked Mrs. Carter and Dora to
afternoon tea, so there is no chance of their dropping in at some
unearthly hour. To-morrow evening we are going to rehearsals of private
theatricals at the Jorans'. By the way, they have returned from England
since you were here. They are among our _creme de la creme_ in
Melbourne. What confers the distinction? Well, at present, the very
inner circle is rather High-Church, and of course has the right of
tambour at Government House, and one must be very wealthy or'--Laurette
made a slight pause, so as to make the point with emphasis--'one must be
connected with the British aristocracy, or with the viceregal family.'
'When the two are combined, one must hold every blessing that this life
affords in the hollow of one's hand,' said Stella with a becoming
gravity.
'Yes, my dear, unless one has to retreat to the depths of the Mallee
Scrub, as I must shortly do. But I shall devote myself to the education
of the children. But about the Jorans. Thomas Joran has had what you
might call a romantic career. The very earliest glimpse of him in
colonial history: he hawked elderly cabbages in the streets of
Melbourne--at least, they would have been streets if they had been made.
Well, I don't mean that any decaying vegetable is romantic; but then
compare the status of a man employed in that way and one who entertains
a Duke and goes to Court. But it was rather a sell about the Duke. You
see, the Jorans entertained him sumptuously. Some people say that, in
all, they spent four thousand pounds on him in less than a week. What
it must have cost them in special trains alone! I myself have sometimes
seen Joran haggard with anxiety, hunting up railway officials, while
Mrs. Joran stood sentinel lest a common populace should even peep in at
the blue satin lining, or the butler, who was in a separate compartment,
in charge of the ice and champagne. Naturally a man could not have all
this gold and incense lavished on him without making some return. So
when the Duke left our shores, he cordially invited the Jorans to visit
Rookcourt when they were next in England, thinking he was safe because
they had only just returned.
'But "the dear Duke" had scarcely sailed, when weighty reasons compelled
the Jorans to do likewise. In fact, Mrs. Joran, in a burst of
confidence, confided to me that it would be unpardonable not to respond
to the Duke's pressing invitation. But sad to say, the only recognition
his Grace accorded them was that a younger son asked Mr. Joran to lunch
with him at a Radical Club. You may talk of the aboriginal myths, but I
think they are very paltry compared to spending five or six thousand
pounds, and getting in return a five-shilling lunch! It could not have
cost more, for out of compliment to his guest, Lord Augustus had
colonial claret, the kind we can buy in Melbourne at fifteen shillings a
gallon. Oh, I assure you, it was quite five or six thousand pounds the
Jorans spent, between the voyages and a mansion in Park Lane for three
months, and servants that made them believe the nobility never ate
beefsteak that cost less than two-and-sixpence a pound. Still this last
visit to England was not altogether without consolation. The British
Government was about that time bent on what is called "knitting the
bands of the empire closer." So people from the remotest isles and
colonies were patronized and invited in troops, like tenants on
rent-day, to various very funny entertainments. The Jorans went with a
crowd of others, to lunch or breakfast or something at Windsor Castle.
The greatest mar-joy in the arrangement was that an over-worried Court
official was heard to exclaim in despair, "Good Lord! I thought this
was the day for the negroes!" Mrs. Joran never mentions the Windsor
visit to me now; she did so once or twice to begin with, but I
invariably said, "Well, it must have been comical to see all those
darkies from Benares and Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula. And, by the
way, were there any of the Chins from Burmah who hang missionaries to
make the rice grow? I take an interest in them, because the Dowager
Countess of Essington--Talbot's aunt, you know--spends a small fortune
on the dreadful creatures---- But no, I am mixing things up like the
poor gold-rod-in-waiting, or whoever it was.... Haven't you heard the
story, dear Mrs. Joran?" Naturally she doesn't give one the chance to
trot this out too often.'
'Well, I suppose Mrs. Joran does not sheathe her claws when she gets a
chance to tell you amusing anecdotes,' said Stella, who sat listening to
this sprightly malice with a good deal of amusement. 'I have always
heard that kindness and a wish to please are at the root of true
breeding--so you seem to have the article here to perfection.'
'Oh, that's all very well, when one is in the country,' returned
Laurette. 'Why, when I am at Cannawijera, and the squatters' wives
around ask me my opinion of their bonnets, I assure them they are
perfectly _chic_--awful things, you know, with black cotton lace, and
the wings of those demi-monde African parrots, that tear your eyes out
with their staring yellow and green. Oh, Talbot is well, thanks. He has
gone into some sort of partnership with a man who buys land at a
shilling a yard, and sells it at L10 a foot. Mining is so frightfully
risky--perhaps land is, too; but you can cut up land, it seems, into
minute globules, and yet build houses on it. I don't understand exactly
how it is done, and yet I have seen it in a way, just as I have seen
conjurers' tricks. You give one of these men your handkerchief and he
gets eggs out of it--though you know there were none when you gave it to
him.
'Driving about in the suburbs, I have often seen vacant pieces of land
for awhile. By-and-by there are great placards as big as a house put up
on lofty poles: "This valuable piece of land, situated in the very best
suburb of the metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere, is to be sold at a
ridiculously low price," and so on. That is what they write on these
enormous placards. And though there is nothing to be seen near them,
except, perhaps, a few dirty children and rusty kerosene tins, when you
see such an announcement in big letters for a few weeks you somehow
begin to believe it.
'Then there are columns in the newspapers about the rising suburb--the
suburb which is coveted by the _elite_ of Australia; the suburb where
the irritating hum of the sanguinary mosquito is never heard. Then you
get a fat letter containing an elegant circular, with daisies and
butterflies round the border, and a map of the place--all showing that
in some way every blessing this earth affords is grouped round the
rising suburb. If you read the advertisement and the circular, and have
a five-pound note to spare, and never go near the land, you're sure in
the end to buy an allotment. You see, you need pay only a few pounds to
begin with. But then you pay a few shillings a week as well, for the
rest of your life, or till you throw it up--I mean the land, not your
life, though some unfortunate people have done both. But if you do that
you lose all you have paid. So altogether it comes to a lot of
money--only I am afraid the "boom," as they call it, is going off, for
at a sale last week, only the auctioneer, and the boy that rang the
bell, and Talbot, turned up. But now tell me about Lull and
Minjah-Millowie, and all your people there; and the Mortons, don't they
live not far off? And who is this Dr. Langdale all the good people rave
about?'
Only once before had Laurette seen the colour flash into Stella's face
in such endless wavelets. To hide her confusion she broke into a
laughing account of some of Mrs. Morton's funny little stories. But
without this Laurette had concluded that all Julia's surmises were well
founded. The girl looked so radiantly, so insultingly happy. She fell
into such dreamy little reveries--her lips softly parted, her eyes
shining with a gentler irradiation than of old. And then she studiously
avoided Langdale's name. Heartless coquette that she was, after
encouraging Ted's addresses for years, she was now prepared to throw him
over at a moment's notice to satisfy an absurd whim of being in love.
As if there were no such thing as duty in the world! Nothing was more
characteristic of Laurette than the way in which she always fell back on
the moral foundations of life as the true mainspring of her actions when
she found herself in what she called a 'fix.' She ignored everything
that it suited her to forget, and when meditating some paltry little
scheme that had every element of meanness and treachery on a small
scale, a virtuous glow stole over her as if she were reinforced by the
law and the prophets, and obedience to the Ten Commandments was what she
lived for. But here she seemed to have entered a _cul-de-sac_ in which
there was no move in her power that could further her purposes.
'There is nothing so easy to make as a tradition,' one of our best-loved
novelists once wrote; and many lesser people find it also very easy upon
occasion. There was no tradition, oral or written, that Laurette was
not prepared to invent. But to what avail? Ted would come, and the
first few words between him and Stella might serve to explode all
Laurette's painstaking efforts to keep the girl in the strait and narrow
path of duty. A point had come in which invention without deeds was
valueless--but what could she do? Nothing except wait the course of
events with a heart prepared for any little justifiable artifice that
would keep her brother's life from being wrecked by the selfish
perversity of a heedless girl--one bent only on her own scheme of
happiness, regardless of the sacred claims of the past! She was
undoubtedly in love with this man--was she engaged to him? A hundred
times the question rose to Laurette's lips. A feverish sort of
hopelessness grew on her as she marked those little signs that in
themselves are so slight, and which yet, linked together, furnish so
strong a chain of evidence.
Many things had conspired to tax Laurette's nerves lately, and she found
this additional suspense intolerable. But the instinct of secrecy, of
concealment, which comes to be a second nature with those in whom a life
of small intrigue has grown and waxed strong, restrained her. Nothing
could, after all, be gained by asking this question. She would wait and
watch.
Stella escaped early into her own room that night, and wrote for a long
time, a happy light on her face, and warm blushes often mantling in her
cheeks, which would have told their own tale to an onlooker. This was
what she wrote:
'DEAREST FRIEND,
'I was half glad and half sorry that we did not meet in the morning.
Our homeward ride was so altogether precious--so far removed from the
ordinary grooves of life--it was better to part in the starlight and see
each other no more. I almost wish we should not meet again till you
return from England. And yet, of course, it is only my pen that says
this. Yes, I soon went to my room; I sat without a lamp looking out
into the beautiful night, with its soft, deep glow and ethereal
starlight, and I made a picture of it all in my mind, which I will keep
forever and forever. Oh, I am so very sure that nothing we can see in
any other world in any other life can be dearer or more alluring than
that ride together over the great plain, stretching indefinitely on
every side as if it passed beyond the confines of the world. The
shadowy clumps of trees, the dark lines that marked the watercourses,
the tall kangaroo grass undulating gently like stormless billows, the
cries of water-fowl far overhead, the muffled hoof-beats of our horses,
the boundless expanse, the solitude, above all, the pale, wistful light,
making visible the faint lilac of the sky, the uncertain gray-green of
the earth--I held them all, making a picture of them that should not
pass away. I looked at them long and steadfastly till the secret of
their changeless uniformity, their unbroken peace, their sweet serenity,
penetrated my heart. Do you remember the fragrance of the wild
geraniums that our horses crushed under their hoofs in one place? It
comes floating in with the moonbeams at this moment. But to be the
elixir of life it must be accompanied with the sound of a voice--_the_
voice which in all God's wide universe---- But is this what one writes
to a "friend"? And what is the use of trying to make a pen say all that
rises in the heart?
'Oh, you little cold, good creature! I say to it; you are sometimes
wonderfully cunning. You have a tongue of your own that often dives
down after thoughts, and brings them out triumphantly, after a fashion
that sets stammering speech at defiance. But where are your eyes, that
brighten with happy smiles, and grow dim with excess of joy? And where
are your cheeks to glow and turn cold in a breath? And, above all, where
are your hands that with a touch, a little timid good-night clasp, make
the tongue feel like a clown who has nothing to say but the worn-out
tags of songs long known by heart? All these gifts come to you only in
the hands of a master from whom you learn the strange magic of playing
on the hearts of men from generation to generation, like a clarion heard
at dawn....