THE WONDER-CHILD
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Title: The Wonder-Child
Author: Ethel Turner
Release Date: May 25, 2014 [EBook #45683]
Language: English
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[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: ’HERMIE.’ (See page 134.)]
THE WONDER-CHILD
An Australian Story
BY
ETHEL TURNER
(MRS. H. R. CURLEWIS)
Author of ’Seven Little Australians,’ ’The Camp
at Wandinong,’ ’The Story of a Baby,’ ’Three
Little Maids,’ etc.
’The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,
Is, not to fancy what were fair in life,
Provided it could be,—but finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means,’—ROBERT BROWNING.
With Illustrations by Gordon Browne
_FIFTH IMPRESSION_
LONDON
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Paul’s Churchyard E.C.
1901
*CONTENTS*
CHAP.
I. TWO WORLDS
II. THE WONDER-CHILD
III. THE SECOND LADY-HELP
IV. THE PAINTING OF THE SHIP
V. DUNKS’ SELECTION
VI. THIRTY THOUSAND A YEAR
VII. COME HOME! COME HOME
VIII. AN ATHEIST
IX. MORTIMER STEVENSON
X. ’I LOVE YOU’
XI. A SQUATTER PATRIOT
XII. R.M.S. UTOPIA
XIII. THE BUSH CONTINGENT
XIV. HOME TO THE HARBOUR
XV. HEART TO HEART
XVI. THE ROSERY
XVII. CROSSING THE VELDT
XVIII. A SKIRMISH BY THE WAY
XIX. THE MOOD OF A MAID
XX. MISS BROWNE
XXI. THE MORNING CABLES
XXII. CONCLUSION
*THE WONDER-CHILD*
*CHAPTER I*
*Two Worlds*
’Ah me! while thee the seas and sounding shores
Hold far away.’
They were walking from the school to the paddock where the children’s
horses, thirty or forty nondescript animals, grazed all day long.
’Sh’ think,’ said Peter Small, son of the butcher who fed
Wilgandra,—’Sh’ think you could have afforded one sprat at least for
teacher’s present!’
’Afforded!’ quoth Bartie Cameron. ’I could have afforded a thousand
pounds!’
’Then why d’ye ’ave ’oles in your stockings, and bursted boots?’ asked
Peter.
’’Cause it’s much nicer than having darns and patches,’ returned Bartie,
looking disparagingly upon his companion’s neater garments.
’My old man’s got a mortgage on your sheep,’ said Peter, baffled on the
patches.
’We like mortgages,’ said Bartie airily; ’they make the sheep grow.’
’We’ve got a new red carpet comin’ for our livin’-room,’ shouted Peter.
Bartie looked him over contemptuously.
’I’ve got a sister in London, and she makes fifty pounds a night by her
playing.’
’You’re a lie!’ said Peter, who was new to the school, and did not know
the Camerons.
’Take this, then!’ said Bartie, and put his strong young fist in the
face of his friend.
A big girl, saddling her horse, came and pulled them apart, after they
had had a round or two.
’Haven’t I got a sister who makes fifty pounds a concert?’ demanded
Bartie breathlessly.
’Ain’t he a lie?’ demanded the son of the slaughterer.
The big girl arbitrated instantly. Certainly Bartie had a sister who
made hundreds and hundreds—more shame to her. Peter had better go home
and read the papers, if he did not believe it.
Peter said he did read the papers; he had never seen anything in them
about no sisters.
’What papers?’ said the girl.
’_P’lice Budget and War Cry_, of course,’ answered the boy.
’That’s the sort of paper _your_ sister would be in,’ Bartie said; ’mine
is always in the cables.’ He turned off from both girl and boy, and
made his way to where a half-clipped horse nibbled at the exhausted
pasturage.
A small girl of eight had, with incredible exertion, put the huge saddle
on its back; Bartie had nothing to do but fasten the girths in place and
put on the bridle. He flung himself up, and moved the animal close to a
stump; Floss, the small girl, climbed to a place behind him, and a
nine-year-old boy, playing marbles near, rose up at the sight of the
moving horse, pocketed his marbles, swung his bag of books round his
neck, and clambered up to the third place on the steed’s broad neck.
All the paddock was a-move. There was a general race down to the
sliprails, a gentle thunder of horses’ hoofs and boys’ shouts, broken by
the shriller cries and ’Good-byes’ of the girls.
Then up and down, left and right, away along the branching roads rode
the country school children, tea and home before them, behind, one more
day of the quarter’s tedium dropped away for ever.
The Cameron horse jogged along; as a rule she had only Roly and Floss to
carry, Bartie having a rough pony to journey on; but to-day the pony had
wandered too far to be caught before school-time, so Tramby had an extra
burden, and walked sedately.
Floss had a tiny red palm to show.
’Why, that’s three times this week you’ve had the cane! You must be
going it, Floss,’ said Roly.
’It was sewing,’ sighed Floss; ’how would you like to sew? I know you’d
go and hide behind the shed.’
The front horseman turned his head. ’It’s time you did learn, Floss,’
he said; ’look at my stockings, I’m sick of having holes in them. Look
at my trousers.’
’I heard Miss Browne telling you to leave them for her to mend,’ said
Floss.
’No, thanks,’ said Bart; ’I know her mending too jolly well. She’d
patch it with stuff that ’ud show a mile off.’
’Yes, look at my elbows,’ Roly said; and though the positions forbade
this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new
rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.
Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes
and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and
her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock
was exquisite—a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully
embroidered.
’I wish some more of Challis’s frocks would come,’ she sighed; ’this
one’s so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.’
’Why, she’d be shivering,’ said Roly.
’Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!’
’Think how hot it is here!’ sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming
little face with her disengaged hand.
’I got the mail,’ Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his
pocket—a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue
with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the
postmark of Windsor.
’Suppose they’re stopping with the Queen again,’ he added laconically.
’Wonder what they have for tea at her house?’ sighed Flossie, and her
system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in
prospect for her own meal.
Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and
stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out
the sliprail—nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then
she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the
passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.
Their father’s selection stretched before them, eighty acres of
miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o’clock
coppery sky, summer and drought time.
[Illustration: HOME FROM SCHOOL.]
Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a
stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not
saying very much, for Wilgandra’s vegetation as a rule copied the
neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant
to the eye in country wilds.
There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen
orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow
grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty
things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have
carried, but still in good condition—it seemed as if the mortgage was
fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered
off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.
Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was
rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her
arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about
in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River
Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves
lapped idly.
There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and
a table.
Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah,
and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.
There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely
pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that
Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it
was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the
room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in
her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.
’Have you got the mail?’ she asked.
Bartie nodded.
’Go and fetch father,’ he said; ’he’s down with the roses, I saw his hat
moving.’
He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged
off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her
little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table,
on which was no cloth as yet.
’Miss Browne,’ he called, the very tears in his voice, ’Miss Browne,
isn’t tea ready?’
A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying
into the room.
’Poor Roly!’ she said. ’Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending
your best jacket, and didn’t notice the time. But I’ll soon have it
ready now.’ She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and
at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the
dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged,
and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.
Then she noticed the rent of extraordinary dimensions in Bartie’s coat,
the same jagged place that had made even Peter Small exclaim.
’Dear, dear,’ she said, ’this will never do. This really must not go a
moment longer. Where is my thimble? Where can I have put my thimble?
Give me that coat, Bartie, this minute, if you please.
Bartie took it off, but sat with jealous eye upon it all the time it was
in her hands. He would have it mended his way.
’Now, look here,’ he said, ’please don’t go putting any fresh stuff in
it. Just sew it over and over, so the places come together. I’ll take
to mending my own clothes. It’s just the way you go letting new pieces
in that spoils your mending, Miss Browne.’
’But, Bartie dear,’ the gentle lady said, ’see, my love, when a place is
torn right away like this, we have to put fresh stuff underneath. I’ll
just get a tiny bit from my work-basket.’
’You just won’t,’ said Bartie stubbornly. ’You give it to me, and I’ll
mend it myself’—and he actually took the needle and cotton and cobbled
it over till there certainly was no hole left.
’Now, my love,’ he said, and held it up triumphantly.
’But it will break away again to-morrow,’ said Miss Browne, in deep
distress. ’If you would just let me put a little patch, Bartie.’
But Bartie clung to his coat.
Roly had strayed out to look at his kangaroo-rats, but now came back.
The tears came to his voice again at the sight of Miss Browne, sitting
with her thimble on, looking helplessly at Bartie.
’Oh dear,’ he said, ’isn’t there never going to be any tea?’
’You poor little fellow!’ she said. ’Just one minute more, Roly dear.
You can be sitting down.’
Hermie had gone flying across the ground to a place in the eighty acres
where the ground dipped into a little valley. It was all fenced round
with wire, to keep off the fowls and sheep. Within there grew roses in
such beauty and profusion as to astonish one. She saw a very old
cabbage-tree hat bending over a bush, and darted towards it.
’Dad,’ she said, ’dad darling, come along in; the mail has come.’
There rose up a man, grey as his own selection, a man not more than
five-and-forty. Eyes blue as Hermie’s own looked from under his grey
eyebrows, a grey beard covered his mouth.
’The mail, did you say, little woman?’ he said, and stopped to prune
just one more shoot here, and snip off just one more drooping blossom.
’And tea, too, darling; at least I suppose it will be ready some day.
Come along, you are very tired, daddie. Why did you start ploughing a
day like this?’
The man sighed.
’It had to be done, girlie; but see, I gave myself a reward. I have
been down here an hour. Now let us go and read our letters.’
As they reached the living-room they found Miss Browne dusting the piano
and tidying the music; the setting of the table was advanced one stage
further, that is, the knives and forks were now on.
Roly came up again from another visit to his rats.
’Miss Browne,’ he said, ’oh dear, oh dear!’—and stalked off to the
kitchen, to demand of Lizzie, the young State girl who scrubbed and
washed for them, where was the corned beef for tea, and wasn’t there any
butter?
But the father was tearing open the letters. Hermie and Bartie hung over
his shoulder, reading just as eagerly as he. Floss crouched between his
knees to catch the crumbs. Roly, munching while he waited at a hunch of
ill-coloured bread, kept an eye and an ear for any spoken news, and Miss
Browne moved continually about the room, straightening chairs, altering
the position of the table vases, rearranging the knives and forks.
Mr. Cameron looked up, and drew forward a chair next to his own.
’Do sit down, Miss Browne,’ he said; ’I am sure you are very tired. Sit
down, and let us enjoy this all together.’
So Miss Browne, too, joined the circle, Roly watching her with a
brooding eye.
’WINDSOR CASTLE.
’OH, MY DEAR ONES, MY DEAR ONES’ ran the white letter,—’Is the earth
shaking beneath me, have my hands ague, that my pen trembles like this?
We are coming home, home, home. No false reports this time, no
heart-sickening disappointment; the papers are actually signed for a
long season, and we leave by the Utopia in six weeks. The news came an
hour ago. I saw an equerry coming in with the letters, saw the letter
that meant so much carried up to my room by a house steward, and had to
pass along the corridor and leave it. Challis was going down to play to
the Queen in her private sitting-room. But after it all was over how we
went to our rooms again! There was only a chambermaid in sight, and for
the last twenty yards of corridor we ran. Home, home, home, to your
arms, my husband, my dear one, my patient old sweetheart! Home to my
little girls, my boys, my little boys! Darlings, my eyes are streaming.
Oh, to hold you all again, to feel you, to touch my Hermie’s hair—is it
all sunlight yet?—to be crushed with Bartie’s hug, to hold again the
poor little babies I left, my Roly, my little Floss. Ah, dear ones,
dear ones, now it is all over, now we are coming, coming to you, I can
let you know. Oh, these weary, weary years, these great cities where we
have no home, no corner of a home. I have broken my heart for you all
every night since I came away. Six years, my dear ones, six years of
nights to break my heart. Be sorry for mother, and love her, darlings.
Have you forgotten her, Hermie? Bart, Bart, have you kept a little love
warm for her? Ah, dear God, my babies will not know me, little Floss
will turn away her head. My sweetheart, my sweetheart, if the time has
been as long for you, and pleasures as tasteless, and all things as
void, then my heart sickens afresh, for I know what your life has been.
’What has kept me up all this weary time I cannot even think. Whatever
it was, it has snapped now, and I am limp, useless, broken up into
little bits, like nothing so much as a little child stretching out its
arms and crying to its mother. Can you not see my arms stretching,
stretching to you? Does not my cry come to your little town? It is
Challis who is the woman now; she sees my work is done. She had begun
to show me the bracelet the Queen gave her, and to tell me what every
one had said, but I had torn open Warner’s letter, and found the home
orders had come. She is packing various little things now, and has
rung, and given orders with the dearest little air of self-possession.
"Sit down and write, and tell daddie," she said; "I will see to
everything now."
’The carriage is to come for us in an hour. We have been here three
days, and every one has been as kind and as enthusiastic as they are
always. We go to Sandringham on Friday; the Princess asked for Challis
to play for her guests that night; the Dowager Empress is to be there,
and others.
’Then at Manchester an immense farewell concert on Monday; Mr. Warner
says two thousand seats are already booked to hear the "Wonder-Child";
another at Plymouth on Friday; a rush up to Edinburgh, just for her to
appear at the Philharmonic. They are only giving her forty pounds for
the night, but Mr. Warner is unwilling for her to lose the Scotch
connection.
’Then peace, perfect peace, and home. I sit and try to fancy the
changes the six years have made in the home. I am glad you have had two
new bedrooms built; that will allow you to have a study again,
sweetheart, and Hermie a drawing-room—sixteen is sure to be hankering
for one. The furniture is looking a little shabby, I know; but of
course that can be easily remedied, and I have always had my boxes
stuffed with art vases and bits of brass and bronze, ready for when the
good time came. You have probably laid down new carpets long ere this
in all the rooms, but I shall bring some rugs and Eastern squares, for I
doubt if your back-block towns have supplied what would satisfy my now
cultured taste.
’I suppose people wonder at you still being stuck to the Civil Service
at a wretched two hundred and fifty pounds a year. Isn’t the prevailing
idea that we are rolling in money? There is surprisingly little for all
the enthusiasm there has been—I think Mr. Warner said he had banked
three thousand pounds for her—all the rest goes in expenses, which are
enormous. We are obliged to be at the best hotels, and to be dressed
up-to-date; that runs away with big sums. And the advertising that Mr.
Warner says is so necessary swallows gigantic amounts. This has been
the first year with much profit. Sometimes when I dress my little
girlie in her Paris frocks I think of Hermie, making last season’s do
again, perhaps. Did the last box of Challis’s frocks do for Flossie?
The lady-help, I am sure, will have been able to cut them down.
’Do not let us think of the future, sweetheart, I cannot bear it yet. I
cannot leave you any more, you must not be left; Challis has had her
meed of her mother now, and it is the turn for the others. Yet Mr.
Warner says it must be kept up, this life of hers, this Wandering Jew
life. It is the price great artists pay. But the child is brave.
’"You shall not have it any more, mamma," she said when I read this out;
"you shall go home to daddie for always now."
’But when I looked at her face it was pale, and there was that wan look
in it that comes sometimes. To think of the little tender thing bearing
all this alone!
’But we must not think of the future, sweetheart; we must not think of
it for an instant. You will come to Sydney to meet us? Perhaps only you.
And we will come straight home to Wilgandra with you. If she ruins her
chances for ever, she shall have one month’s quiet home before the
Sydney season begins. Mr. Warner will try to prevent this, but I shall
be very firm. Then you must get leave, and children and all, we will go
to Sydney together, and you shall hear the darling play. To think you
have none of you ever seen great audiences carried away by her little
fingers!
’Ask the lady-help not to do up my bedroom for me. I want to see the
faded pink and white hangings, and the sofa with the green roses on it,
and the knitted counterpane that grandma made—just as they were when I
left them.
’Oh, my little home, not beautiful, not even very comfortable, stuck
away in that hot little town hundreds of miles from Sydney—my heart is
breaking for you!’
Nobody spoke when the letter was finished—nobody, indeed, had spoken all
the way through. Tired little Floss, finding no news forthcoming, had
fallen asleep.
Roly had sat down to the table, and was sawing an end off the corned
beef. Miss Browne, since nothing was read aloud, had gently risen up
and was dusting the piano, to be less in the way. But from time to time
she glanced at the letter, alarm in her eyes. Could it be the little
golden girl was ill?
The father put down the letter, and his hand shook.
’Coming home,’ he said, and rose up, looking dazed; ’we—we must stop her
at once, of course. Children, how can we stop her?’
Bart’s chest was heaving. For a second he had heard the crying come to
the little town, and seen the stretching of the arms.
But out of the window lay the grey selection that she had never seen;
closer at hand were the rents in his clothes, the broken places on his
boots. He pulled himself together.
’I’ll go down to the post and cable to her not to come,’ he said; ’you
be writing it down, dad.’
And Hermie’s girl-heart was breaking. The letter had shaken the very
centre of her being, and wakened in her a passion of love and longing
for this tender woman. Oh, to be held by her, kissed, caressed—to feel
that hand on the hair she could not help but know was pretty!
But looking up she saw her father’s anguished gaze around him—Bart’s
manly mastery of himself. She brushed her tears aside.
’I’ll get the pen and ink,’ she said; ’it—it’s late—the cable ought to
go to-night.’
Miss Browne sat down, quivering with the suspense.
’Which,’ she whispered, ’which of them is dead, your mother or little
Challis?’
Bartie it was who laughed—a hoarse apology for a laugh.
’Dead!’ he said; ’they’re coming home, Miss Browne!’
It was Miss Browne’s turn to look anguished. She rose up and moved
uncertainly about the room, she began to tidy the music in feverish
haste, she dusted the piano yet again.
Then she turned to Mr. Cameron with one hand fluttering out.
’I—I—must ask you to let me have a s—shilling,’ she quavered; ’the—the
boys really must have their hair cut before she sees them.’
*CHAPTER II*
*The Wonder-Child*
’Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God’s child with His dew
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and
blue,
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings.’
Up to the last eight years Mr. Cameron’s friends and relatives had
always had their hands full with finding positions for him that would
enable him to support his wife and family.
Once or twice he was in receipt of five hundred a year, but much more
frequently he would be in a bank or an insurance company, starting with
a modest salary of a hundred and twenty.
Every one liked him cordially—they could not help it. But every one was
unfeignedly glad when one of the relatives made a great effort, and, by
dint of interviewing Members of Parliament and getting a little
influence to bear here and a little there, worked him into the Civil
Service, the appointment being that of Crown Land Agent at Wilgandra,
the salary two hundred and forty pounds, less ten pounds for the
Superannuation Fund.
Wilgandra was so far away—three hundred and seventy-three miles back,
back, away in the heart of the country—the very farthest town to which
the Government sent its Land Agents. Surely the bad penny could never
turn up again to vex their peace!
Even Mrs. Cameron’s anxious soul was set at rest.
The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no
society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable. But
the work seemed smooth and easy, and after so many ups and downs the
quiet security of the small hot township seemed delicious to her.
It was not that Mr. Cameron drank or gambled, or possessed indeed any
highly coloured sin. He was simply one of the impracticables, the
dreamers, that the century has no room for.
He had written verses that the weekly papers had accepted; indeed, a few
daintily delicate things had found their way into the best English
magazines.
He had painted pictures—a score of them, perhaps; the art societies had
accepted three of them, refused nine, and never been even offered the
remainder; no one had ever bought one of them.
He had composed some melodies that a musical light passing through
Sydney professed to be captivated with, had promised to have published
in London, and had forgotten entirely.
When they were unpacking their much-ravelled chattels the first night in
Wilgandra, James Cameron came to his great paint-box that the late
family vicissitudes had prevented him touching for so long.
’Ah,’ he said, and a light of great pleasure came into his grey eyes as
he lifted it from the packing-case and rubbed the dust off it with his
good cuff—’mine old familiar friend. Why, Molly darling, I shan’t know
myself with a brush in my hand again. With all the spare time there
will be here, I ought to do some good work at last.’
Then his wife laid down the stack of little torn pinafores and patched
jackets and frocks she was lifting from another box, and crossed the
room and knelt down by her husband’s side, just where he was kneeling
beside the rough packing-case that had held his treasure.
’Dear one,’ she said, ’dear one, Jim, Jim,’—one hand went round his
neck, her head, with its warm brown hair that the grey was threading
years too soon, pressed against his shoulder, her face, old, young, sad,
smiling, looked into his, her brave brown eyes held tears.
’Why, little woman,’ he said, ’what is it—what is troubling you?
Smiling time has come again, Molly, the worries are all left behind with
Sydney.’
’Jim,’ she said, and her hand tightened on the paint-box he held, ’Jim,
do you know we have five children, five of them, five?’
’Well, girlie,’ he said, and got up and sat down on the edge of the box
and drew her beside him, ’haven’t we an income of two hundred and thirty
pounds for them, a princely sum, when we are in a place where there is
nothing to tempt us to buy? And we hardly left any debts behind us this
time.’
’But, dearest, dearest,’ she urged, ’if you get hold of this, we shall
not have it a year; you will get up in cloudland and forget to furnish
your returns or some such thing, and then you will be dismissed again.’
’Ah, Molly,’ he said, his face falling, ’always the gloomy side.
Couldn’t you have given me a night of happiness?’
A stinging tear fell from the woman’s eyes.
’I couldn’t, I couldn’t,’ she said; ’the danger made my heart grow sick
again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. _I_ love
your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses
but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what _have_ they
done?’
The man’s eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a
circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see
their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were
disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just
at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to
crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn,
anxious-eyed creature.
His face whitened. ’It is worse than drink!’ he said.
She acquiesced sadly.
’Nothing else would make me take it from you,’ she said, her wet eyes
falling again to the paint-box; ’and if it were you and I only against
the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get
ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!’
He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of
genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into
his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his
life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the
policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the
whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.
He gave his wife a passionate kiss.
’You are right,’ he said, ’take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin
from now to be a man.’
Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother’s brow were
fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a
home around her where before had only been a house; the children were
taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to
Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.
The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate
themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome
yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.
Then the name began to crop up in the country news of the daily papers.
Another wonder-child for Australia had been discovered, it seemed—a
certain Challis Cameron, a mite of eight years who was creating much
excitement in the township of Wilgandra.
Presently from the larger towns near the paragraphs also were sent. A
concert had been given in aid of the Church Fund, and a pleasing
programme had been submitted. Among the contributors was a tiny child,
Challis Cameron, whose wonderful playing fairly astonished the big
audience.
Before Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had quite waked up to the situation, an
enthusiastic committee had been formed, a subscription list started and
filled, and a sum of sixty pounds thrust into their astonished hands,
for the child to be taken to Sydney for lessons.
Nowhere on the earth’s surface is there a a land where the people are so
eager to recognise musical talent, so generous to help it, as in
Australia.
Mr. and Mrs. Cameron looked at each other when they were left alone, a
little dismay mingled with their natural pride. And from each other
they looked to the paddock beside their house where all the children
were playing. This especial child was unconcernedly filling up her
doll’s tea-cups with a particularly delightful kind of red mud, and then
turning out the little shapes and calling Bartie to come and look at her
’jellies.’
Talent they had always known she had, but hardly thought it was anything
much above that of any child very fond of music. As a baby she had
cried at discords; at three years old she used to stand at the end of
the piano and make quite pretty little tunes with one hand in the
treble, while Bartie thumped sticky discords in the bass. At four she
used to stand beside Hermie, whom her mother was teaching regularly, and
in five minutes understood what it took her sister an hour to learn
imperfectly. At four, too, her head hidden in the sofa-cushion, she
could call out the names of not only single notes but chords also, as
Hermie struck them. So her mother undertook her tuition too, and in two
years these paragraphs were appearing in the papers.
But to go away with her and stay in Sydney while masters there heard her
and taught her! What was to become of the other four, and the husband
who needed his wife so much?
’I am afraid we must send her to a boarding-school there,’ she faltered.
’How can I leave the home?’
But later the child came and stood at her knee; a tall, thin, little
child she was, with fair fine hair that fell curlless down her back, and
in her eyes that touch of grey that makes hazel eyes wonderful.
The face was delicately cut, the skin clear and pale; only when the pink
ran into it was she pretty.
’I made another song, mamma,’ she whispered.
The dying light of the long still day was in the room, very far away in
some one’s fig-trees the locusts hummed, a sprinkle of sweet rain had
fallen, the first for months, and the delicate scent of it came through
the window.
’What is it, darling?’ whispered the mother.
The child’s eyes grew larger, she swayed her tiny body to and fro.
’Oh, the roses, the roses and the shivery grass! Oh, the sea! Oh, the
little waves running on the sand! Oh, the wind, blowing the little
roses till they die! Oh, the pink roses crying, crying! Oh, the sea!
Oh, the waves of the crying sea!’
The mother’s arm went round the little body, down into the depths of
those eyes she looked, those eyes with their serious brown and grey
lights mingling, and for one clear moment there looked back at her the
strange little child-soul that dwelt there.
Out at the door there was a clamour, Roly demanding bread-and-jam. From
the paddock came a sudden gust of quarrelling, the next-door children,
with Hermie, shrill-voiced, arbitrating. Probably down in the street
Bartie was fighting any or all of the boys who passed.
’Dear heart!’ ran the woman’s thoughts. ’My days are too crowded to tend
this little soul. Better that she too asked bread-and-jam of me.’
’Play it for me, mother,’ said the child, and plucked at her hand. ’I
can’t; I have tried and tried, and the sea won’t cry, only the roses.’
’Nonsense, nonsense!’ said the troubled mother; ’run and play till
bedtime. Play chasings with Roly and Floss, or be Bartie’s horse. Have
you forgotten the reins I made him?’
The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.
’I will get the reins,’ she said nervously, obediently.
Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could
say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or
strangers.
Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every
moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid
coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the
shilly-shallying in using it.
So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk
beside her in a second-class carriage.
’We shall be back in a month at most,’ she called out for the twentieth
time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.
But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said,
the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her
concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat
high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off
the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to
bury her excited little face on her mother’s breast.
Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of
its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it
insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its
hands recklessly into its pockets.
Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the
anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her
pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose
of sending the child to Germany.
And now what to do?
The small house at Wilgandra seemed going along very steadily; Mr.
Cameron had not once failed to furnish the reports due from him to the
Government. The lady-help selected by the mother had the house and the
children and the father in a state of immaculate order. She was a
magnificently capable, managing woman; every one, Mr. Cameron
especially, stood much in awe of her, and unquestioningly obeyed her
smallest mandate; even Roly, unbidden, performed magnificent ablutions
before he presented himself for a meal, and Hermie was often to be seen
surreptitiously trying to mend her own pinafores in the paddock.
Mrs. Cameron could not but confess her place was not crying out for her
to the extent she had imagined; indeed, the wonderful lady-help, Miss
Macintosh, seemed to have brought the home into a far better state of
order and discipline than even she, the mother, had been able to do.
Little Floss was a healthy and most independent babe of two; Roly, three
years old, was a sturdy mannikin who stared at her stolidly when, her
heart full of tears, she stooped over him and asked, did he want her to
go away again?
’Mamma mustn’t go away in a big ship, must she, sweetheart? You can’t
do without her again, can you?’ she said.
But Roly was a sea-serpent swimming on the dining-room floor, and the
interruption irritated him.
’Yes,’ he assented, with swift cheerfulness, ’mamma go in big ship.
Good-bye, good-bye!’—and he waved an impatient hand to get rid of her.
Hermie and Bartie had just started to a good private school near at
hand, and the teaching—all honour to the mistress!—was of so skilful and
delightful a nature that the two could hardly summon patience to wait
for breakfast ere they set out for the happy place. So Challis’s claims
tugged hard.
’But you—what of you, my husband?’ she said. ’You cannot spare me; it
is absurd for you to even think of it!’
But he was excited and greatly moved at the thought of his child’s
genius. Deep down, in his heart was the knowledge that had he himself
been given a chance he could have made a name for himself in this world.
But there was always uncongenial work for him, always something else to
be done, ’never the time and the place and the loved one all together.’
’Let us give her her chance,’ he said. ’It is early morning with her.
Don’t let ours be the hands to block her, so that when evening comes she
can only stand wistful.’
So they sailed away, the mother and the wonder-child; behind them the
plain little home, before, the Palaces of Music.
*CHAPTER III*
*The Second Lady-Help*
’The droop, the low cares of the mouth,
The trouble uncouth
’Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain
To put out of its pain.’
And for actually six months that home survived! After that the
crumbling was to be expected, for some discerning man came along, and
married the marvellous lady-help out of hand.
Mr. Cameron spent five pounds in the purchase of a pair of _entrée_
dishes for a wedding-present, and was unhappy that he could so very
inadequately reward her great services. But there was a curious air of
buoyancy and relaxation observable in him the first day the house was
free of her.
At tea he got _The Master of Ballantrae_ out, and read boldly all
through the meal, a thing he had not ventured to do for eighteen months.
And out in the frozen shrubbery at midnight, with the Master and Mr.
Henry thrusting at each other, he spilled the tea that Hermie passed
him. When he saw the wide brown stain he had made on the table’s
whiteness—although the ridiculous fancy pursued him that it was the
Master’s life-blood smirching the snow—he looked up startled, full of
apologies. But there was only Hermie’s childish face in front of him;
and though she said, ’Oh, papa!’ as became a president of the tea-tray,
she looked away the next second to laugh at Roly, who had spread his
bread with jam on both sides, and did not know how best to hold it. And
Cameron felt so much a man and master of his fate once more, that he
stretched right across the table to help himself to butter, instead of
politely requesting the passing of it. For three months the household
ran a merry course. Hermie, a bright little woman of eleven, begged her
father to let her ’keep house’ and give the orders to Lizzie, the very
young general servant.
The father bent his thoughts five minutes to the problem; Miss Macintosh
had been away now a fortnight, and everything seemed going along really
delightfully. What need to break the sweet harmony of the days by
getting in some person whose principles counted reading at table and
spilling tea among the cardinal vices?
And Lizzie, the State girl, was at his elbow with a shining face. She
was fifteen, she said—fifteen was real old! Now why should the master
go getting in any more of them lady-helps, who did nothing but scold
from morning to night? She, Lizzie, would undertake all there was to do
in this place ’on her head.’
Cameron smiled at the eager girls, and, while hardly daring to consent,
put off for a further day the engagement of a successor to Miss
Macintosh. And the three months ran gaily along, and still Hermie sat
importantly at the head of the table, and still her father read, and
still Roly spread his bread upon both sides.
There was always a good table—far better than either the mother or
lady-help had kept.
For the family grocer had an alluring way of suggesting delicacies, when
he came for his orders that certainly no mistress of eleven or handmaid
of fifteen could withstand.
’Almonds?’ he would say. ’Very fine almonds this week, Miss
Cameron—three pounds did you say—yes? And what about jam? I have it as
low as fivepence a tin, but there is no knowing what cheap fruit these
makers use.’
’Oh,’ Hermie would say, ’I must have very good jam, of course, or it
might make my little sister ill! How much is good jam?’
’There’s strawberry conserve, a shilling a tin,’ the man would say—’pure
fruit and pure sugar, boiled in silver saucepans.’
’Silver saucepans! That couldn’t hurt Flossie! We will have six tins
of that, please,’ the small house-woman would answer. Then there were
biscuits; Miss Macintosh, frugal soul, only gave Wilgandra, when it came
calling, coffee-biscuits at sevenpence a pound with its afternoon tea.
Hermie regaled it upon macaroons at half a crown. Then Lizzie would
have her say. What was the use of cooking meat and vegetables on
washing-day, ironing-day, and Saturdays, she would say, when you could
get them tinned from a grocer? So tins of tongue, and whitebait, and
pressed meats, French peas, asparagus, and such, were added weekly to
the order, the grocer sending to Sydney for the unusual things. ’We are
saving a lady-help’s wages,’ Hermie would say, ’and it saves the
butcher’s bills, so it is not extravagant a bit.’
It was not until the third month that the day of reckoning came. Then
the grocer, grown a trifle anxious over his unusual bill, which no one
was settling, ventured to accost Mr. Cameron one day on his verandah and
present it.
’No haste, of course,’ he said politely, ’only as your good lady and
Miss Macintosh always paid monthly, I thought you might not like it
going on much longer.’
When he had bowed himself out, Mr. Cameron rubbed his suddenly troubled
brow a moment. Money, bills! The thought had actually never crossed
his mind all these three months! His wife first and then Miss Macintosh
had always managed the finances of the family. Indeed, one of Mrs.
Cameron’s injunctions to the lady-help had been, ’When Mr. Cameron’s
cheque for his quarter’s salary comes, please be sure to remind him to
pay it into the bank.’ And Miss Macintosh had never failed to do so,
nor to apply for the twelve pounds monthly for payment of the household
bills.
He went into the dining-room and began to rummage helplessly about his
writing-table. To save his life he could not recollect what had become
of his last cheque, for there was a conviction on his mind that he had
never paid it into his account.
Hermie was at the table, Mrs. Beeton’s cookery-book spread open before
her; over her shoulders peeped the heads of Bartie and Roly, absorbed in
the contemplation of the coloured plate picturing glorified blancmanges
and jellies. For was not to-morrow Roly’s fifth birthday, for which
great preparation must be made by the young mother of the house?
’Children,’ said the father at last entreatingly, ’come and help me; I
have lost a very important envelope.’
For over an hour did that family search from one end of the house to the
other. It was Lizzie’s happy thought that discovered it.
’A long blue envelope, with no stamp on it and just printing
instead—why, there was one like that in the kitchen drawer with the
dinners on it,’ she said.
She rushed for it, and met her anxious master with it held triumphantly
out.
The back of the envelope bore dinners for the week in Hermie’s round
careful hand.
_Mon._—Roast fowl, mashed potatoes, collyflower, pink jellie and
gem cakes.
_Tues._—Tong, blommange and strawberry jam, rainbow cake.
_Wed._—Sardenes, current buns, yelow jelly and merangs.
Mr. Cameron thrust a trembling hand into the depths of it, and, to his
exquisite relief, was able to draw out the cheque for his quarterly
sixty pounds.
In danger of the kitchen fire, in danger of the dust-box, in danger of
Roly’s passion for paper-tearing, in danger of all the wind-storms that
had sprung up and torn raging through the place, in danger of all these
for three months, and still safe!
The relief took the man back into the dining-room, responsibility for
his family to the front for the third time in his life.
He ran through the bills with a sinking heart. Instead of twelve pounds
a month that Miss Macintosh’s carefulness had made suffice, little
Hermie had brought up the totals to twenty-eight—eighty-four pounds for
the quarter, to be deducted from the sixty pounds that must also pay
rent and clothes and many other things.
The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had
been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with
the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the
changed meals as much as the boys—Cameron had quite a boyish appetite
for good things, and Hermie’s brilliant menus had been delightful to him
after a long course of Miss Macintosh’s boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle
roly-polies, and milk sagos.
’A first-rate little manager,’ he always called her, when he passed up
his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he
recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more
expensive than rhubarb or rice.
’Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!’ she said, awake at last to
the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear
commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such
an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction,
and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.
’But I am eleven,’ she kept repeating sadly, ’eleven, papa. I ought to
have known.’
There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys’
school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother’s
conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each
day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights
that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.
But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and
found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one
to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake
himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of
the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied
three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he
took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over
heavy.
But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning
home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.
The father’s blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.
’Is my son a thief,’ he said, ’that he should treat me so? Or is it he
despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?’
With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his
conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat
on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never
resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.
No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas,
when the boy marched in with the year’s prize for punctuality under his
arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.
’I like a man of honour,’ he said. But the two events together, the
grocer’s bill and the master’s call, decided the father he must enter
into submission and have another lady-help, for the children’s sake.
How to obtain one? He made inquiries about Wilgandra, but the class of
people from whom he sought to take one were of the mind that prevails in
many of the country towns and bush settlements. They would rather
starve than serve—at all events where they were known. Now and again a
self-respecting intelligent girl broke away from her life and went off
with her trunk to find service in Sydney.
But, for the most part, the daughters of a house up to the number of
seven, or even ten, stayed under the cramped roof-tree of their fathers,
and led an unoccupied, sheepish existence, till marriage or death bore
them off to other homes.
So in despair Cameron wrote off to a Sydney registry office, and asked
the manageress to send him a lady. Just before he closed the letter the
happy freedom of the last three months led him to add a postscript, ’I
should like the lady you select to be of not too managing a
disposition—gentle and pleasant.’
The registry office keeper rubbed her hands; here surely at last was a
chance to dispose of Miss Browne—Miss Browne, who was ever on the books,
who was sent off to a situation one week, and came back with red eyes
and a hopeless expression the next, dismissed incontinently as
incapable.
The registry office keeper turned up the town Wilgandra in her railway
time-table.
Three hundred and seventy-three miles away! Surely at such a distance,
especially as the employer was paying the expensive fare, Miss Browne
might be regarded as settled for a space of three months!
Mr. Cameron had no complaint to make of his new lady-help on the score
of being of a managing disposition. She was gentleness itself—that kind
of deprecating gentleness that makes the world feel uncomfortable. She
tried pitifully hard to be pleasant—pleasant and cheerful. She worked
from earliest morning to late at night, and accomplished about as much
as Hermie could in two hours. It took her nerveless fingers nearly a
quarter of an hour to sew on a waistcoat button, and in little more than
a quarter of an hour the button would have tumbled off again.
Lizzie seldom trusted her to cook anything; when she did so the poor
lady invariably emerged from the kitchen with her hands burnt in several
places, sparks in her eyes, the front width of her dress scorched, her
hair singed, and her poor frail body so utterly exhausted, the family
would insist upon her instant retirement to bed.
Nobody knew what the woman’s life had been, where had gone the vigour,
the energy, the graces that should still have been hers, for her years
were barely thirty-five.
A crushing sorrow, disappointment on the heel of disappointment,
loneliness, or perhaps only a grey life full of petty cares passed in a
scorching, withering climate—one or all of these things had dried the
sap out of her, and left of what might have been a gracious creature,
radiating pleasure and comfort, only the rags and bones of womanhood.
The Camerons suffered her patiently for three long months; then the
father gathered his courage up in both hands, closed his ears to the
pity that clamoured at his heart, and told her gently enough that she
must go.
She threw up her fluttering hands and sank on the sofa—in her eyes the
piteous look of amaze and grief that your fireside dog would wear if you
took a sudden knife to him. So kind had the family been, so patient,
the poor creature had told herself exultingly that they were satisfied,
even pleased with her, and had hugged the novel, delicious thought to
sleep with her for the last two months.
She asked shakingly what she had done.
’Nothing, nothing at all,’ Cameron reassured her eagerly; ’it is merely,
merely I can see you are not strong enough for such a hard place as
mine.’
’A hard place!’ she cried, and looked at him dazed. ’Why, there are
only five of you, and Lizzie to do all the rough work! I’ve been where
there were ten, and done the washing and everything. I’ve been where
there were nine, and had to chop the wood and draw the water myself.
I’ve been mother’s help and had to carry twin babies miles in the sun.
I’ve been where the children pinched and scratched me. I’ve been at
places where I rose at half-past four, and found my way to bed at
eleven. And in none have I ever given notice myself. A hard place!
Dear heart!’
’My dear Miss Browne,’ Cameron said, and such was the fluent nature of
the man that his eyes were filled, and he had no idea that he lied, ’it
was solely for the sake of your health I spoke. You look so delicate.
If you think the duties are not too heavy, why, I shall be most heartily
obliged to you if you will stay with us indefinitely.’
Then he went away to seek his children, to tell them her story, and beg
their tenderest patience.
*CHAPTER IV*
*The Painting of The Ship*
’Never a bird within my sad heart sings,
But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings.’
Yet his coward pen never plucked courage to itself to write across seas
of this family incubus.
The earlier letters had spoken variously of ’Miss Macintosh,’ or ’the
lady-help’; now there was never a name given, the references being
merely to ’the lady-help.’ Even the children scrupulously followed this
up.
When the Marvellous One had gone off with her _entrée_ dishes to her new
home, the father had said, ’Children, we will not tell mother just yet
that Miss Macintosh has left, it would only worry her. We will wait
till we can write and say we have another one as good.’
So the tale of Hermie’s housekeeping and the mislaid cheque never
crossed the sea, and the mother in her far German boarding-house
continued to comfort herself with the thought of Miss Macintosh’s
perfections.
When Miss Browne’s shortcomings made themselves glaringly patent, the
pens again shallied in telling the story.
’It is so close to Challis’s concert, we mustn’t worry them with our
little troubles, children,’ the father said.
So Bartie and Hermie continued to write guarded letters; and if the
boy’s hand at times ran on to tell how Miss Browne had put ugly patches
on his clothes, or the girl’s heart began to pour itself out on the thin
paper and speak of the discomfort of the new reign, recollection would
come flooding, the letters would be cast aside and new ones written,
short, studied, and never saying more in reference to the vexed question
than ’the lady-help had taken Floss out for a walk.’
’I hope Miss Macintosh sees you have your little pleasures,’ the mother
would write. ’You do not tell me about birthday parties or picnics.
Don’t forget mother loves to hear of it all.’
And Hermie would write back sadly:
’The lady-help is very busy just now, but when she has more time she is
going to let us have a party.’
’I tremble each mail,’ the mother wrote once, ’lest your letter should
bring me news that Miss Macintosh is engaged and about to be married.
It is strange such a woman has not been snapped up long before this.’
And Cameron answered:
’I do not think you need worry, my darling, about the lady-help
marrying. She has given me to understand she has had a disappointment,
and will never marry.’
But the very guarding of the letters, the reading of them over, to be
sure nothing had been let slip, made them seem poor and lifeless to the
anxiously devouring eyes the other side of the world.
She wrote at last:
’Sweetheart, from what you don’t say, more than from what you do, I
learn of your loneliness. You are so dull, my poor boy, and the days
rise up and sink to rest all grey like one another. Yet a little more
patience, and surely there will be plenty of money to make life all
sunshine for you. But just for a little brightness, darling, reach down
that box of paints we put away on the cupboard top, get out your
brushes, and let them help the hours to fly. While the Conservatorium
has been closed for vacation Challis and I have been four days in Rome.
And she found me crying one morning in a picture gallery, in front of
some great picture, a Raphael, or an Andrea del Sarto—some one, at all
events, who painted with hands of fire. And yet it was not the subject
of the picture that moved me, unless it was that the magic canvas
wrought me to the mood that is yours so often. All I thought of was the
cold harsh woman, the Martha with blind eyes, who, that first day in
Wilgandra, took away by force and at the same time the paint-box and the
glow from your life. My boy, my sweetheart, let me give it back. Ah,
would that I could stand on the chair and reach it down from the
cupboard and put it into your hands myself! But do it now, my darling,
this moment. I know you will be careful and not risk your position by
forgetfulness. And when you are loneliest, when you miss me most, let
the brushes take my place.’
Cameron had been reading his letter at the tea-table.
’Children,’ he said, and rose up, his face working, his eyes shining
strangely, ’children, mother wants me to paint pictures again. I—she
says I am to get the box down.’
The table had no comprehension of the greatness of the matter, but rose
up at once, at seeing the father so moved. Roly brought his mug of
sweetened milk along with him, Floss continued to bite at her crust of
bread-and-jam, Miss Browne fluttered about, Hermie and Bart pressed at
their father’s elbow.
’Bring a chair, Bartie,’ Cameron said, ’here at the cupboard in the
hall.’
’Mine cubbub,’ interjected Floss; ’me’s hat in dere. Go ’way, daddie.’
’I’ll climb up,’ said eager Bart. ’What is it up there, dad?’
’Give me the chair—let me reach it down myself,’ Cameron said, and
stepped up and stretched his long arm to the top.
A dusty mustard-box! The children’s eyes brightened with swift thoughts
of treasure, then dulled when the lid was flung back and displayed
nothing but a chaos of dirty oil-tubes and brushes.
But when they saw their father’s glistening eyes, saw him fingering the
same tubes with a tender, lingering touch, looking at the brushes’
points, they did not tell him they were disappointed in the treasure.
Instead, Bart led off with a cheer.
’Hurrah for daddie the artist!’ he shouted.
’Hurrah!’ cried Hermie.
’’Rah!’ shrilled Roly.
Floss claimed a kiss.
’Me dive daddie dat,’ she said in her kindest way, ’out mine cubbub.’
And thus was the painting of the ship begun.
’Can you see what I mean, Bart?’ Cameron said two months later, when the
picture was almost finished, so desperately had he worked at it.
’You mean it for a ship, don’t you?’ Bart said. ’If I’d been you,
though, dad, I’d have painted a steamship with two funnels. People
don’t think much of sailing-boats now.’
’Can you see what I mean, Hermie?’ Cameron said, and wistfulness had
crept into his eyes.
Hermie’s blue-flower eyes were regarding the great canvas dubiously.
’Couldn’t you have made the water blue, papa?’ she said; ’the sea is
blue, you know. P’raps, though, you hadn’t enough blue paint. But I like
it to be a sailing-boat; steamships aren’t so clean.’
The man’s heart clamoured for his wife, who had never been at a loss to
find what he meant. For a moment it seemed intolerable to him that she
was not there at his elbow, to share the exaltation of the moment with
him.
’Run away, run away,’ he said irritably to Hermie and Bart; ’you shake
my elbow, you worry me; run away.’
Miss Browne made a hysterical noise in her throat.
’It is so sad,’ she said; ’what is it you have done to it? It is only a
ship and a man, and yet—do you know I can hardly keep the sobs back when
I look at it.’
To her amaze her employer turned eagerly round, shook her hand again and
again in warmest gratitude, and fell to painting once more with feverish
haste.
The canvas showed a livid stretch of coast and ocean, and a spectre ship
with a spectre captain at the helm.
The ship had an indescribably sad effect. You saw her straining through
the strong, repellent waves, you heard her cordage creaking, you saw her
battling stem struggling to push a way. She was a living thing,
breaking her heart over the black hopelessness of her task. The
captain’s face burnt flame-white out from the canvas; his desperate eyes
stared straight ahead; his long hand held the helm in a frightful grip.
You knew he was aware he would never round his cape; you knew he would
fight to do so through all eternity.
The Camerons celebrated the day of the finishing of the picture as a
high holiday. The children had ten shillings tossed to them to spend as
they liked. They bought a marvellous motley of edible things, and
dragged their father and Miss Browne up the Jib to partake of them. It
were sheer madness to suppose a whole half-crown’s worth of Brazil nuts;
to say nothing of chocolates, tarts and other extreme dainties, could be
discussed within the cramped walls of a house in a street. The whole
width of the heavens was needed, and a thousand gum-trees, and the smell
of earth and grass.
Cameron walked about on the heights as if on air. He had not painted
that canvas that stood, still wet, down below in the straggling town.
He had entertained a spirit, something stronger, fiercer, more
triumphantly capable than himself. He could have flung up his arms and
run shouting up and down, shouting thanks to the winds, the trees, the
sailing skies, that the spirit had taken its dwelling in him.
Magnificent fancies came bursting upon him; now and again he held his
head, so rich were the conceptions, so strong felt his hand to bring
them into instant being.
An urgent craving for his wife took hold of him—he strode away from the
children’s shouts, away from Miss Browne, who sat wretched because she
had forgotten the tin-opener, and the tea, and the sugar.
He found himself down near the creek, with the gums waving eighty feet
above his head, gums with snow patches of blossoms on them, stern gums,
smiling gums, red, silver, blue. And he called, ’Molly,’ and the trees
encouraged him.
And again, ’Molly,’ ’Molly,’ and there burst up to his lips from his
heart all the words he had had to stifle away since the sailing of her
ship. All that he would have poured out to her these last two years,
all that had lain quiet and kept his being stagnant since that last
agonised clinging of her arms.
’I thought I could bear it,’ the man said to the trees, ’but I can’t—it
is too much! Are you listening to me, Molly? I must have you again to
talk to. She has had you long enough—Challis has had her share of you;
now I must have you again. These children take us from each other,
Molly. We are very fond of them, but we should have more time to love
each other without them, to love like we did twelve years ago. I want
you, to tell you about the picture, Molly, Molly. Can you hear, darling,
can you hear?’
And sometimes she seemed near to him, seemed a part of the air, the
trees, the earth, and he raved to her and talked joyously.
And sometimes he lost her, the delicate spirit webs broken by the
world’s machinery, and he dropped his head on his arms and wept.
But when the thread snapped finally, and nothing could bring her to him
again, he groped his way upwards, for now the loneliness, after the
speaking, was a thing he dared not bear. The children welcomed him
eagerly. They had wanted him so badly, they said, for dinner, and here
he came only just in time for tea. Would he please open that tin of
jam—there was no opener, but perhaps he could do it with a bit of broken
bottle? And there were no matches; would he please use his and light the
fire? The tea was forgotten, but hot milk and water would be nice,
perhaps, but there was only a little milk remaining, and the sugar had
been left behind. He fell to laughing, and was thereby restored to more
normal mind. He lighted the fire, and water and milk circulated round
the little party, and refreshed it. He attended to the wounded—Bart had
gashed his hand attempting the opening of that tin of jam, Hermie had a
tick in her arm, Roly had stirred up a nest of bull-dog ants, and had
met with his due reward, Floss had eaten too many chocolates, and Miss
Browne had been stuck in the mud, attempting to get water from a
pot-hole; her large shabby shoes looked pathetically ridiculous.
So by the time he had helped all his lame dogs over their stiles, and
got them ready for marching home, his mood was quite a happy one again.
He went down the mountain-side, Floss in his arms, Bart and Hermie on
either side, Miss Browne and Roly close at hand.
And with a flushed face and happy eyes and a fluent tongue he told them
all manner of wonderful things; in very truth he could keep them to
himself no longer. How the world was going to be very pleased indeed
with his picture, and hang it in so famous a place that Challis would
not be the only one making the name of Cameron celebrated. And how a
whole mint of gold was going to be given to him for it—Hermie and Miss
Browne would be able to order all they liked and more from the family
grocer. And how he was going to send for mamma to come at once to stay
with them again, so that they could all live happily to the end of their
days.
Through the little town they wound with eyes shining at the thought.
Hermie’s order-loving soul was soothed at the vision of domestic peace
once more. Bart resolved to keep his best knickerbockers for the
mother-fingers to mend.
’Can she make puddings?’ said Roly, who despised the culinary skill of
Miss Browne. And ’Mam-mam,’ murmured little sleepy Floss, not because
her mind held recollection of using the name, but because a baby
next-door spoke it incessantly, and it seemed pleasant. Only Miss Browne
looked wistful-eyed; a mother such as this seemed would never deem her
capable enough; Christmas would see her back in Sydney, weariedly
waiting occupation in the registry office.
They turned the key of the door—Lizzie had had holiday also. And on the
threshold, pushed beneath the door by the post-boy, lay another long
blue envelope with no stamp upon it, and only printed letters instead.
Cameron picked it up, quite without suspicion—his cheque for the
quarter, he supposed.
But the reading told him he was dismissed the service for his
carelessness and the culpable neglect of his duties during the past four
months.
*CHAPTER V*
*Dunks’ Selection*
’Well, it is earth with me; Silence resumes her reign,
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.’
’I shouldn’t think it can be very much farther, dad,’ said Bart.
’I believe we have passed it,’ Hermie sighed; ’I am sure we have come
much more than nine miles,’ and she mopped her hot cheeks that the sun,
burn as he would, had never freckled.
Cameron, the reins slack in his hand, looked doubtfully from side to
side.
’It ought to be somewhere here,’ he said; ’isn’t that a fence at the top
of the hill? Yes, I’m sure it is.’ He touched the horse lightly with
the switch that Floss held, and on they went again. They were in a
borrowed broken-springed buggy, the five of them and Miss Browne, come
out to see the home their father was buying—none of them, not even the
father, had seen it yet.
For a couple of months after his dismissal Cameron had lingered on in
the house in Wilgandra, too bewildered and helpless to know what to do.
It was not the first time a similar crisis had happened, but before his
wife had always taken matters in hand, looked up situations for him in
the papers, interviewed influential people, brushed his clothes and sent
him out with little to do but present himself to his employer.
But now he was completely at sea.
He wrote a few letters to Sydney friends, vaguely asking if they knew of
’a billet.’ But seven years’ silence makes strangers of ones best
friends; some were scattered, and dead letters were the only reply;
others wrote to say Sydney had never been in such a state of hopeless
depression, and strongly advised him not to come to add to the frightful
army of the unemployed.
’Why not go on the land?’ said one or two of them. ’A man like you with
a growing family should do well there, and you would at least be your
own master and free from "a month’s notice."’
Cameron first asked the children what they thought of ’going on the
land.’
When they heard this meant moving to a new place, and having sheep and
growing all their own things, and each one helping, they were enchanted.
Cameron was too shy and reserved to have made many friends in the
township, but he put on a clean cool coat and filled his pipe and
wandered forth, with the vague idea of asking some one’s advice on the
matter. But there was a race-meeting in a neighbouring township, and
the streets were almost deserted, the tradespeople and the
land-and-estate agent being the only men at their posts. The latter,
however, struck Cameron as the very man to ask. And Cameron struck the
agent as the very man for whom he had been waiting. There was a
selection, he said, a few miles away—eighty acres of fine land that its
drunken owner, Dunks, had hardly stirred since he had taken it up.
There was a five-roomed cottage on it, there were fifty head of sheep,
poultry, a couple of horses, a cart, and all tools. Dunks, anxious to
get to Sydney, was willing to let all go for two hundred and fifty
pounds.
But Cameron went home hopeless, he could as easily raise two thousand
pounds as two hundred and fifty.
Hermie met him with a registered letter from which a cheque for a
hundred fluttered. Challis’s professors, it seemed, had allowed her to
give a few concerts in the midst of her course of lessons, and five
hundred pounds had been the result.
’The child insists that I shall send a hundred,’ ran the letter, ’for
you all to buy presents with, and though I don’t know what you can
buy—but sheep—in Wilgandra, I send it. More I do not enclose, my dear
one, for well do I know how shockingly you would lose and give it away.
But all have some fun with this hundred, and now every penny that comes
I shall jealously bank for the future and for the child’s own use, as is
but fair and right.’
Cameron and Bartie and Hermie went eagerly off to the agent’s again.
Cameron held up his cheque, and asked if it would do if they paid that
amount down and the rest on terms. And the agent, after a little demur,
was agreeable—had he not that morning been visited by Dunks, who said he
would take as low as a hundred and fifty to be rid of the place?
Cameron almost handed the cheque over there and then, but then some of
the prudence learned from his wife came to him, and he pocketed it
instead, and said they would go and look at the place.
Thereupon, the following Saturday, the agent lent his buggy, gave
directions for finding, and this was the journeying.
’Yes,’ Cameron said, ’this must be it, but there doesn’t seem to be a
gate. I suppose we had better go through these sliprails. Get down and
lift them out, Bart.’
The early summer, in her eagerness and passion for growth and beauty,
had been tender even to Dunks’ selection. The appearance of the place
appalled none of the buggy-load.
Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums
were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their
soberness.
Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for
lambs, and a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the
cottage and gambolled with the children. There was a bleating calf with
a child’s pink sash tied round its neck, fluff balls of chickens ran
under the feet, downy ducklings were picking everywhere.
And all this young life was so beautiful a sight that the children were
wild with rapture, and Cameron’s dreamy beauty-loving soul told him here
was the home for him.
The cottage shocked him somewhat, it was so very tumbledown, the roof
was so low, the windows so broken.
He began to consider whether he had not better take up a selection for
himself near at hand and run up his own cottage, these walls were hardly
worth the pulling down.
But Mrs. Dunks began to talk to him, and her apron was at her eyes
nearly all the time. He learned that Dunks was the best of men, and only
weak. If once they could get from this neighbourhood and his bad
companions to Forbes, where her own people were, he would surely reform.
He learned that Mrs. Dunks had nine children, all under fourteen; that
she was in a consumption, and only the air of Forbes could cure her. It
seemed to him that he could not turn round to this fragile, heavily
burdened creature, look into her fever-bright, anxious eyes, and tell
her he would not give her this chance to end her days among her own
people.
So he looked at all the young life again, and the sheer sun, bursting
out of the wattles, and was glad to be persuaded that a little paint and
a bit of timber would make the house quite new again.
’Do you think,’ he said, and turned round to the woman, ’that you could
give me possession of the place in a month?’
And the woman burst into thankful tears, and told him they would be gone
to-morrow.
’I’ve packed up for going eighteen times this year,’ she said through
her tears. ’I’ve got my hand well in.’
Dunks was away in the township, the youngest baby was lying in her arms
looking up at her with pure eyes, and the pale wraith death, whom she
ever felt beside her, had kept her conscience tender.
’Did—did you say the agent told you two hundred and fifty?’ she
faltered.
Cameron thought of his children and braced himself up.
’He did,’ he said firmly, ’and I cannot possibly give you a penny-piece
more. I consider it is a very fair price.’
’But—but——’ the woman began again.
’It is no use, I can go no further,’ Cameron said, ’so please do not
waste your breath’—and he unhobbled his horse and prepared for the
journey home, his face set away from her, lest he should be softened.
How could he dream she wanted to tell him that a hundred and fifty was
all they had asked, and more than the place was worth, so ill in repair
was everything? Then the thought of this man’s famous child came to
her—Challis, with fingers of gold. What were a hundred pounds to the
father of such a child?
She looked away from the eyes of her babe, she forgot that she and death
were met, and replied:
’Very well, we will take two hundred and fifty, Mr. Cameron.’
Going homewards in the jolting buggy the talk was of the happiest.
’Miss Browne and I will look after the fowls, daddie,’ Hermie said.
’An’ me,’ said Floss.
’You and I must get the crops in,’ Bart and his father told each other.
But how this would be done, and what the crops should be, they had but
the remotest notion; still, it was a phrase heard often in Wilgandra,
and sounded well.
’Will it take you long to learn to shear the sheep?’ asked Miss Browne
timidly.
Cameron looked a trifle disturbed. Sheep seemed very right and proper
things to own when one was ’going on the land,’ but it had not yet
occurred to him to think to what use he was going to put them.
Bart’s observation of his neighbours had been a little keener than this,
however.
’We sha’n’t get any wool to mention from that handful,’ he said. ’I
suppose they are for killing. Mrs. Dunks says they use a sheep a week.
Her husband kills one every Saturday.’
’Who—who—oh, surely you will not have to kill them, Mr. Cameron!’ said
Miss Browne, shuddering with horror. ’Surely you will not be expected
to kill them for yourself.’
The thought of it turned Cameron sick; it seemed to him he had never
quite got over chopping off a fowl’s head once for his wife, though it
was nine years ago.
Roly gloated over the thought.
’I’ll shoot them with my bow and arrow,’ he said.
Cameron wiped his brow.
’I suppose one could use a gun to them, eh, Bart?’ he said.
But Bart looked doubtful.
Nearing home Cameron gave the reins to Bartie, and leaped out and walked
the last mile or two, wrestling with the problem how he might turn
himself from a dreamer of dreams into a practicable, hard-working man of
business. It had to be done, some way, somehow, or what to do with
these children, and how to face his wife?
Then suddenly he found his thoughts had wandered to the sunset fire that
blazed before him in the sky; he was putting it in a picture, massing up
the purple banks, touching the edges with a streak of scarlet.
When he convicted himself of the wandering he groaned aloud.
’There is only one way,’ he said, and walked into his house with lifted
head.
The children were stretching their limbs after their cramping drive,
Roly and Bart panting on the floor, a cup of water beside them so warm
and flat and tasteless that even thirst would not bring them to it.
Bart was talking of Nansen, picturing stupendous icebergs, revelling in
the exquisite frigidity of the water in which Nansen had washed
luxuriously every day. The exercise actually cooled the little party
down one degree. Then in to them came their father.
’I want a bonfire made in the yard,’ he said; ’a very big one, I have
something to burn.’
The boys were upright in a moment and on their way; even Floss tossed
down the newspaper with which she was fanning herself (the _Wilgandra
Times_, with which was incorporated the _Moondi Mercury_), and rushed to
partake of the fun, and Hermie and Miss Browne found themselves impelled
to go and see what was happening.
Such a blaze! Bart raked up a lot of garden rubbish and added tree
branches. Roly, feeling quite authorised since the bonfire had been
commanded by his father and was no illicit one of his own, made journeys
to and from the wood-heap and piled on the better part of a quarter of a
ton of wood just paid for.
Then down came the father, his blue eyes a little wild, his mouth not
quite under his own control. He had his mustard-box under his arm.
’Oh, daddie!’ Hermie cried and sprang at him. ’Oh no, no, no!’
But he pushed her aside.
’Don’t speak to me—none of you speak one word,’ he said, and he stooped
and dropped the box where the flames leapt.
’No, no, no!’ Hermie screamed, and rushed at it, and put a hand right
through the flame and touched the box, then drew back, helpless, crying.
’Get away!’ Bart said, and pushed her back from danger and took the work
himself, a rake for aid.
He dragged the charred box out, Miss Browne fluttered round him and
caught at the lid and burnt her hands, and fell over the rake and singed
her hair and eyebrows. Roly and Floss, carried off their feet by the
excitement, rushed to help, and the box lay safely on the grass again,
two minutes from the time it had been in the flames.
’Let it alone, no one dare to touch it!’ commanded the father, and the
voice was one the children had never heard before.
He picked the box up, hot and blackened as it was, and flung it on the
fire again; the lid fell off, there came a rain of tubes and
paint-brushes, a splutter or two from the turpentine, the smell of burnt
paint, then the fire burnt steadily again, and there was silence that
only Hermie’s bitter crying broke.
The father had gone back to the house; he came down to them once again
and this time The Ship was in his arms.
Surely an ill-starred ship! There had been no money to send it to
Sydney for the artists there to appraise; Cameron, absolutely frightened
when he found how the debts were growing, exhibited it in Wilgandra and
a neighbouring town or two, and marked it ten pounds.
But who in the back-blocks was going to give that sum for a picture
without a frame? The coloured supplements, with elaborate plush
surrounds, satisfied the artistic yearnings of most of the community,
and The Ship came back to sad anchorage in the Cameron dining-room.
But to burn it!
Hermie gave a fresh despairing cry. Floss, Bart, and Roly stood
absolutely still, the instinct of obedience strong at such a crisis.
Cameron’s arm was again raised, but Miss Browne flung herself right upon
him and clung to the canvas, her weak hands suddenly filled with
strength and tenacity.
[Illustration: ’NOT THIS, NOT THIS,’ SHE CRIED, ’ANYTHING BUT THIS.’]
’Not this, not this!’ she cried. ’Anything but this! Give it to me—I
will keep it from your sight—I will hide it away—it shall never meet
your eyes. My ship, my ship, you shall not burn it.’
She held it in her arms, actually torn from his grasp.
Cameron glanced around—the leaping flames, the startled children,
Hermie’s hysterical sobbing, Miss Browne’s wild attitude of daring and
defiance—he told himself he had taken a theatrical vengeance on himself.
’Oh, do as you like,’ he said irritably, and turned back to the house.
’Bart, put a bucket of water on that fire.’
One month from the night of the sacrifice the Camerons were in
possession of the selection, and Mrs. Dunks was lying in peace among
those of her own people who rested from the sun’s heat in the Forbes
graveyard.
*CHAPTER VI*
*Thirty Thousand a Year*
’Ah, for a man to arise in me,
That the man I am may cease to be.’
’I should think we might get the bag of corn now, eh, Bart?’ Cameron
wiped his brow, and stopped to survey the patch of ground that looked so
smooth.
Bart looked at it critically.
’I think we’d better give it another turn, dad,’ he said, and hitched
the string-mended harness a little more securely to the jaded horse.
’It’s such a lunatic plough, it misses twice for every time it hits.’
Cameron looked at the wide space of ground to be gone over yet again.
’I’m very anxious to get the corn in,’ he said. ’You see, we’re a month
late as it is, and it will be a big saving in feed when we have it to
cut.’
’Yes; but it is no good unless the ground is ready,’ Bart said. ’We
have no manure or anything like the _Journal_ says. We’d better give it
an extra turn.’
’You’re quite right, quite right, my boy,’ Cameron said, and led his
horse on again, up and down, up and down the furrows.
’I don’t like such a lot of stumps being left in,’ Bart said, the
seventh time in an hour that the plough had gnashed on one. ’In the
_Journal_ there’s a picture of a stump eradicator—a grand little
machine. We’ll have to save up and get it, dad.’
’Ay, ay,’ said the father; ’still, I don’t think the stumps will
interfere very much. The corn can easily come up between them.’
’It would be easier ploughing,’ sighed Bart, following the horse about
in a waved line.
’You’re tired out, lad; knock off for a spell,’ Cameron said. ’I keep
forgetting how young you are. We have been working here since
eight—five hours.’
But Bart would work till he dropped rather than leave off a minute
before his father. He took a long drink at the oatmeal water Miss
Browne had made, and went on stooping, picking out the stones, digging
spots the unfaithful plough had left untouched, following the horse
while his father dug.
Cameron was thin as a rail. Ever since they had come here he had worked
like a man possessed, for the spectacle that came to haunt his nights
was of his children in actual need of bread. He had left debts behind
him in the township—a hundred pounds’ worth of them; there was a hundred
and fifty yet to pay on the selection; and the patching-up of the house,
rough as it had been, had taken money. There was seed to buy, there
were tools to mend or replace, interest to pay on the money he had
borrowed on the place—a thousand other things.
And not one word of all the changes did the letters carry across the
secret seas.
’There is no need to worry mamma unnecessarily,’ Cameron said to the
children. ’When we have made a great success of the place and paid
everything off, then we will tell her.’
Across the acres came the insistent sound of the dinner-bell.
’I don’t think I’ll stop,’ Cameron said, ’I’m not hungry. Off you go,
Bart, and don’t come back for an hour.’
But Bart was learning the art of managing his father.
’The poor old nag wants a rest,’ he said. ’We must take her up and give
her a drink and some oats. And I’d come in to dinner, dad, if I were
you. Hermie will be disappointed if you don’t.’
So they went up to the little patchwork house together.
It was not to a very tempting repast the bell had summoned them.
Hermie, no longer able to order macaroons and whitebait and tinned
oysters to make delicacies with, had, childlike, lost interest in the
culinary department of the house. And Miss Browne was no artist; to her
a leg of mutton represented nothing but a leg of mutton, and fricassees
and such tempting departures seemed but tales in the cookery book never
to be put to practical use.
To-day there were chops—fried. Years back, when Lizzie came fresh from
the State to Mrs. Cameron’s tutelage, she had been instantly instructed
in the fine art of grilling. But now that there was no one to insist
upon these delicate distinctions, and the frying-pan was so much easier
labour, Cameron was slowly forgetting the taste of grilled meat.
There were potatoes too; the family took it for granted that these were
necessarily nasty things, either watery or burnt.
Bread and jam—no longer silver-pan conserve, but cheap raspberry, in
which the chief element was tomato—finishing the pleasing repast.
Miss Browne sat at the head of the table, exhausted and dishevelled, for
she had swept the room, had sewn on four buttons, and dressed Floss, and
set the table.
Cameron, before removing to the selection, had dismissed her again,
gently enough; he knew it would be impossible to continue to pay her ten
shillings a week for being a nuisance to them.
And again she had wept and wrung her hands and entreated to remain. The
tears streaming down her cheeks, she told him the time she had been in
his family was the happiest in her life. She would not dream of taking
money now, she said; but she implored him to let her work for her home.
So here she was, still at the head of the table, faithfully apportioning
the dish of chops and keeping the smallest and worst-cooked one quietly
for herself, and pouring out tea, which all the family drank with each
and every meal, so slowly and confusedly that her own was always cold
before she touched it.
’Not a chop?’ she said to Cameron. ’Oh, but you really must. Think of
the severe physical labour you are continually doing. Just a small one!
You touched no meat yesterday, nor the day before.’ She looked on the
verge of tears.
’Don’t trouble, I don’t care for any,’ Cameron said. ’I’ll have
some—some,’—his eyes wandered round the table in search of something
nicer than the potatoes—’some bread and butter.’
But Lizzie’s prentice hand at bread! And store butter three weeks old!
He reached himself _Pendennis_, and, helped by the pleasant gossiping of
the mayor, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls.
All through the meal Miss Browne lamented over his appetite, but he
heeded her voice just as much as he did the flies that buzzed round his
tea-cup—both were integral parts of life, and to be endured.
’May I put you a chop aside, and warm it up for your tea?’ she persisted
anxiously.
He put his finger on the place in the book and looked up for one second.
’I am going to try vegetarianism,’ he said. ’I have come to the
conclusion that meat does not agree with me.’
And it did not. Every second Saturday now with his own hands he was
obliged to kill a sheep for the sake of his family; he found a man would
charge ten shillings each time to come the distance. The physical
nausea for the task was such that from the time he first took the knife
into his shuddering hand to the day they buried him, no morsel of animal
food passed his lips.
The children were still—a month after they had come—full of magnificent
enthusiasms. Hermie and Miss Browne were going to restore the fallen
fortunes of the family by raising poultry. Hermie worked intoxicating
sums on paper, and even Miss Browne, distrustful of the child’s
arithmetic, on checking the figures could find so little wrong that she
began to be a-tremble with delight at the prospect herself. Bart
himself, the only one of the family touched with caution, found they had
left sufficient margin for losses, and assented that a fortune might
assuredly be made.
For who could dispute the fact that the grocer charged from one to two
shillings a dozen for his eggs, according to season? Let them reckon on
the basis of one shilling. And Small, the butcher, charged three and
sixpence to four and sixpence a pair for table fowls. Let them be very
safe, and say two and sixpence.
They were starting with the twelve fowls the Dunks had left on the
estate. Now if one hen in one year brought up three clutches of
chickens, how many would that make? Hermie, with shining eyes, cried
thirty-nine; but Bart, who had seen mortality among chickens, refused to
put down more than twenty.
’Very well,’ said Hermie, ’count twenty, if you like, only I know it
will be thirty-nine, I shall be so careful of them. Twelve hens with
twenty chickens each—that will be—that will be—what are twelve twenties,
Miss Browne?’
’Two hundred and forty,’ replied the lady, amazed herself that it could
be so much, ’two hundred and forty! Why, I have never seen so many
together in my life.’
Bart wrote down the figures two hundred and forty.
’Fowls grow up in six months,’ Hermie said. ’Lizzie says so, and her
mother used to keep fowls. The _Journal_ says—I read it this
morning—that fowls generally lay two hundred eggs a year.’
’Say one hundred and fifty,’ Bart said.
’Very well,’ said Hermie. ’Please, Miss Browne, what are two hundred
and forty times one hundred and fifty?’
’My dear,’ gasped Miss Browne, ’I—I really need a pencil for that.’
Bart offered his stump, and Miss Browne was five minutes working the
sum, so sure was she she must have made an astounding mistake somewhere.
’It—it certainly comes to thirty-six thousand,’ she said at last.
’Would you please multiply it by a shilling a dozen, and say what it
comes to,’ was Hermie’s further request.
Miss Browne again took a surprising time to do the simple sum.
’A hundred and fifty pounds,’ she said.
’That is for the first year,’ Hermie said; ’but now would you please
work it out on this big piece of paper, and see what we should get the
second year. Two hundred and forty fowls——’
’And the twelve you began with, too,’ said Roly.
Hermie was quite willing to be cautious.
’We won’t count them, we’ll allow for them dying, too,’ she said. ’Two
hundred and forty fowls with, say, twenty chickens each in the year.
What’s that?’
Miss Browne’s pencil worked.
’Four thousand eight hundred,’ she said.
’And they lay one hundred and fifty eggs a year.’
Miss Browne looked quite shaken at the result her arithmetic
produced—seven hundred and twenty thousand eggs! Three thousand pounds!
The excitement made her work out the results of the third year, and she
was weeping when the sun came out—sixty thousand pounds. She was
weeping for her grey spoiled life. Exquisite dresses, travel, health,
even marriage, and little children of her own, would have been all
possible, had she worked these sums years and years ago, and set to work
with twelve fowls.
Bart still had misgivings.
’More might die than that,’ he said.
Hermie was quite pale with excitement.
’We have counted that half that come out die,’ she said, ’and Lizzie
says her mother always reared ten out of every thirteen. We have only
counted six. But count three, if you like; still, that is thirty
thousand pounds. And we have not counted selling any.’
Even Bart saw the moderation that only counted three chickens to each
hatching, and his doubts died away.
Visions of all this wealth intoxicated the children; they tore their
father from his book; Hermie told him, with eyes ashine with tears and
little heaving breast, that he was never to do any more of that dreadful
ploughing, that in three years they would be making thirty thousand a
year, at least, by no harder work than just feeding the fowls and
packing up eggs.
He smiled at them very gently; he could not bear to damp their ardour.
In very truth he could not exactly find out why these figures should not
be as they seemed.
’Of course you would have a huge feed-bill and want a big run of land,’
he said.
Bart gave a comprehensive sweep of his young arm towards the scrubby
bush-land that lay around them.
’As much as we like for a shilling an acre a year,’ he said.
’But the feed-bill?’
’Five thousand a year would buy enough at all events, and still we’d
have twenty-five thousand left,’ Hermie said jubilantly. ’You will give
up the ploughing, won’t you, daddie?’
Cameron temporised, and said he would just do a little while the
chickens grew.
That night a violent wind came up with drenching rain. Cameron lay
listening to it, wondering what skies were over the head of his beloved
whom the seas held from him.
Then he heard doors opening and shutting, whispered words, and finally a
series of very angry cackles. He threw on some clothes, and went to
find out the meaning. In the living-room an oil lamp was flaring in the
draught, a Plymouth rock was roosting on the piano top, a white Leghorn
was regarding the sofa suspiciously. On the floor sat Hermie, rubbing a
wrathful fowl dry with a Turkish bath-towel, and presently in staggered
Bartie and Miss Browne, the former with five fowls by the legs, the
latter nervously holding one at arm’s length.
Cameron fell into a convulsion of silent laughter, so earnest were the
children, so absorbed. And Miss Browne, poor Miss Browne, how ludicrous
she looked with her scanty hair flying ragged round her shoulders, her
figure clad in an ancient mackintosh, her mouth frightened, her eyes
heroic with the endeavour not to let go the fowl, which twisted itself
madly to peck at her trembling hand!
’I don’t know what you are laughing for, papa,’ Hermie said, a trifle
offended. ’The fowl-house leaks dreadfully.’
’But it has rained half a dozen nights since we came; you never brought
the things in here before, my child,’ he urged.
Hermie received Miss Browne’s contribution on her knee, and fell to
drying its dejected feathers.
’We didn’t know before that each of them was worth two thousand five
hundred pounds,’ she said. ’Please, papa, will you hold Bartie’s fowls,
so that he can light the fire. We are going to give them something hot
to drink.’
*CHAPTER VII*
*Come Home! Come Home*
