Books: Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land
R >>
Rosa Praed (1851 1935) >> Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 | 24 |
25
Moongarr Bill's epistolary style was bald in its directness.
Dear Sir-- he began:--
The biggest mistake we ever made in our lives was not following up the
streak of colour you spotted in that gully running down from Bardo
Range to Pelican River. If we had stopped, and done a bit of stripping
for alluvial, for certain, we should have found heavy, shotty gold,
with only a few feet of stripping. But I've done better than that--got
on the lead--dead on the gutter. To my belief, that gully is the top
dressing of a dried up underground watercourse. It's a pocket chock
full of gold.
You see, it's like this:
Here followed technical details given in local gold-digger's
phraseology which would only be intelligible to a backwoods prospector
or a Leichardt's Land mining expert. McKeith read all the details
carefully, turning the page over and back again in order to read it
once more. There was no doubt--making due allowance for Moongarr
Bill's exaggerative optimism--that the find was a genuine one.
The writer resumed:
'I've pegged off a twenty men's ground, this--being outside the area
of a proclaimed goldfield--our reward as joint discoverers. The ground
joins on to your old pegs; and the wonder to me is that nobody has ever
struck the place. However, that's not so queer as you might think, for
there has been very little talk of gold up here--in fact the P.M. does
Warden's work. Besides, the drought has kept squatters from pushing
out, and it's too far off for the casual prospector. Luckily, the
drought has driven the Blacks away too, further into the ranges; and I
haven't seen any Myalls this trip like the ones that went for us last
time. It's a pity Hensor pegged out then. He'd have come in for a slice
of luck now--we three being the only persons in the world--until I
lodged my information at the Warden's office this morning--who had
ever raised the colour in this district or had any suspicion of a show.
I reckon though that if the find turns out as I think, you'll be making
things up to little Tommy.
I'm to have my Miners' Right all properly filled up to-morrow, and
shall make tracks back to the gully at once, so as to leave no chance
of the claim being jumped. I've named it "McKeith's Find" so your name
won't be forgotten. I don't count on a big rush at first--all the
better for you--but I shall be surprised if we are not entitled at the
end of four months to our Government reward of 500 pounds, as there are
pretty sure to be two hundred miners at work by that time.
I'm writing to Ninnis--though I don't know if he has done his job yet
--telling him to lose no time in getting here; and you won't want
telling to do the same. I reckon that whether the drought has broken by
this time or not, it will pay you better to start for here than to wait
at the station until there are calves coming on to brand and muster.
Ninnis will be in with us all right, and it would be a fine thing if
you came up together. He's a first-rate man, and has had a lot of
experience in the Californian goldfields. Poor luck, however, or he
wouldn't have come over to free-select on the Leura.
It took me a good three weeks to get as far as the Pelican Creek, and I
couldn't have done it in the time if there had been Blacks about.
Knowing the lay of the country too, made it easier than it was before
for us. Cudgee has turned out a smarter boy than Wombo was. No fear of
Myalls with their infernal jagged spears being round without his
sniffing them. One of the horses died from eating poison-bush. Don't go
in for camping at a bend in Pelican Creek, between it and a brigalow
scrub, first day you sight Bardo Range going up the Creek, where
there's a pocket full of good grass one side of a broken slate ridge--
IT'S NO GOOD. But I wouldn't swop the other horses for any of
Windeatt's famous breed. There's some things it would be well for you
and Ninnis to bring, and a box of surveyor's compasses would come in
handy.
Here followed half a page on practical matters, and then the letter
ended.
McKeith pondered long over Moongarr Bill's letter, as he sat in the
veranda smoking and watching a little cloud on the horizon, and
wondering whether rain was coming at last. . . . If Moongarr Bill was
right, the gold-find would mean a fresh start for him in his baulked
career. At any rate, it behoved him to take advantage of the chance and
to go forth on the new adventure without unnecessary delay. But the
savour was gone for him from adventure--the salt out of life. The
stroke of luck--if it were one--had come too late.
And now the Great Drought had broken at last.
Next evening there came up a terrific thunderstorm, and a hurricane
such as had not visited the district for years. It broke in the
direction of the gidia scrub, and razed many trees. It passed over the
head-station and travelled at a furious rate along the plain.
Hailstones fell, as large as a pigeon's egg, and stripped off such
leafage as the drought had left. Thunder volleyed and lightning blazed.
Part of the roof of the Old Humpey was torn off. The hide-house was
practically blown away. The great white cedar by the lagoon was struck
by lightning, and lay, a chaos of dry branches and splintered limbs,
one side of the trunk standing up jagged and charred where it had been
riven in two.
Upon the hurricane followed a steady deluge. For a night and a day, the
heavens were opened, and poured waterspouts as though the pent rain of
nine months were being discharged. The river 'came down' from the heads
and filled the gully with a roaring flood. The lagoon was again almost
level with its banks. The dry water-course on the plain sparkled in the
distance, like a mirage--only that it was no mirage. No one who has
not seen the extraordinary rapidity with which a dry river out West can
be changed into a flooded one, could credit the swiftness of the
transformation.
Then the heavens closed once more. The sun shone out pitilessly bright,
and the surface earth looked, after a few hours, almost as dry as
before. But the life-giving fluid had penetrated deep into the soil;
the rivers and creeks were running; green grass was already springing
up for the beasts to feed upon. The land was saved. Alas too late to
save the ruined squatters. There were so few of their beasts left.
Nevertheless, the rain brought new life and energy to the humans.
Kuppi, the Malay boy fetched buckets of water from the replenished
lagoon, and scoured and scrubbed with great alacrity. He came timidly
to his master, and asked if he might not wash out with boiling water
the closed parlour and Lady Bridget's unused bedroom. He was afraid
that the white ants might have got into them.
McKeith's face frightened Kuppi. So did the imprecation which his
innocent request evoked. He was bidden to go and keep himself in his
own quarters, and not show his face again that day at the New House.
Since Lady Bridget's departure, McKeith had slept, eaten and worked in
the Old Humpey, his original dwelling.
But Kuppi did not know that the white ants had not been given a chance
to work destruction upon 'the Ladyship's' properties. Regularly every
day, McKeith himself tended those sacred chambers. Bridget's rooms were
just as she had left them.
He had done nothing yet towards dismantling that part of the New House
in which she had chiefly lived. He had put off the task day after day.
But since receiving Moongarr Bill's letter, and now that the drought
had broken, and the Man in Possession a prospect as certain as that
there would come another thunderstorm, he knew that he must begin his
preparations to quit Moongarr.
To do this meant depriving himself of the miserable comfort he found
during wakeful nights and the first hour of dawn--the time he usually
chose for sweeping and cleaning his wife's rooms--of roaming,
ghost-like, through the New House where every object spoke to him of
her. In the day time, he shrank from mounting the steps which connected
the verandas, but in the evenings, he would often come and stroll along
the veranda, and sit in the squatter's chair she had liked, or in the
hammock where she had swung, and smoke his pipe and brood upon the
irrevocable past. And then he would suddenly rush off in frantic haste
to do some hard, physical work, feeling that he must go mad if he sat
still any longer.
To-day however, after Kuppi had fled to the kitchen, he went into his
old dressing room and stood looking at the camp bed, and thought of the
day of Bridget's fever when Harris had given him her note to Maule, and
he had sat here huddled on the edge of the bed wrestling dumbly with
his agony. The association had been too painful, and in his daily
tendance he had somewhat neglected this room and had usually entered
the other by the French window from the veranda. Thus, he saw now that
a bloated tarantula had established itself in one corner, between wall
and ceiling, and an uncanny looking white lizard scuttered across the
boards, and disappeared under a piece of furniture, leaving its tail
behind. A phenomenon of natural history at which, he remembered now,
Bridget had often wondered.
He opened the door of communication--where on that memorable night, he
had knocked and received no answer--and passed through it treading
softly as though he were visiting a death chamber. And indeed, to him,
it was truly a death chamber in which the bed, all covered over with a
white sheet, might have been a bier, and the pillows put lengthwise
down it, the shrouded form of one dearly loved and lost. He gazed
about, staring at the familiar pieces of furniture, out of wide red
eyes, smarting with unshed tears. In her looking glass, he seemed to
see the ghost-reflection of her small pale face with its old whimsical
charm. The shadowy eyes under the untidy mass of red-brown hair, in
which the curls and tendrils stood out as if endowed with a magnetic
life of their own; the sensitive lips; the little pointed chin; and, in
the eyes and on the lips, that gently mocking, alluring smile.
There were a few poems that Colin had taught himself to say by heart,
and which he would recite to himself often when he was alone in the
Bush. THE ANCIENT MARINER was one, and there were some of Rudyard
Kipling's and he loved THE IDYLLS OF THE KING--in especial GUINIVERE.
Three lines of that poem leaped to his memory at this moment.
'THY SHADOW STILL WOULD GLIDE FROM ROOM TO ROOM
AND I SHOULD EVERMORE BE VEXT WITH THEE
IN HANGING ROBE AND VACANT ORNAMENT.'
He went to the wardrobe where her dresses hung as she had left them,
only that daily, he had shaken them, cared for them so that no hot
climate pest should injure them. And in so doing, he had been
overwhelmingly conscious of the peculiar, personal fragrance, her
garments had always exhaled--an experience in which rapture and
anguish blended.
How he had loved her! . .. God! how he had loved her! . . . And yet,
latterly, how he had got to take his supreme possession of her as a
matter of course; had allowed the joy of it to be blunted by depression
and irritability over sordid station worries. He remembered with
piercing remorse how often he had neglected the trivial courtesies to
which he knew she attached importance. How he had been prone to sullen
fits of moodiness; had been rough, even brutal, as in that episode of
the Blacks. . . . Brutal to her--this dainty lady, his fairy princess!
. . . And now he had lost her. She was gone back to her own world and
to her own kin.
If only he had yielded to her then about the Blacks! If he had curbed
his anger, shown sympathy with the two wild children of Nature who were
better than himself, in this at least that they had known how to love
and cling to each other in spite of the blows of fate! He had
horse-whipped Wombo for loving Oola, and swift retribution had come
upon himself. . . . That he should have lost Bridget because of the
loves of Wombo and Oola! It was an irony--as if God were laughing at
him. He set his teeth and laughed--the mirthless laugh which had
startled Harris. . . . Well, whether it were automatic or planned
retribution on the part of the High Powers, the trouble could be evened
up and done with. 'I was a damned fool,' he said to himself; 'and I've
been taught my lesson too late for me to benefit by it. Except this way
--I'm not going to be DOWNED for ever. I'll go through my particular
piece of hell, on this darned old earth if I must, and then I'll wipe
the slate and come out on top of something else that isn't love.
There's possibilities enough along the Big Bight to satisfy most men's
ambition. And it's not much odds any way, so long as SHE isn't
seriously hurt.'
With that summing up of the matter, he seemed to gain stoic energy. Now
he went back to his dressing room, and pulled out to the veranda a
couple of worn portmanteaux. Into these he put a variety of personal
belongings. Among them, pictures from the walls, and old photographs in
frames that had been on the dressing table. It was significant that
none of these were portraits of his wife. The portmanteaux he dragged
along the veranda to the side of the steps leading down to the front
garden. Then, instead of returning to Lady Bridget's room, he attacked
an escritoire in the parlour in which he had kept family and private
papers, and which flanked her Chippendale bureau. He brought out
another collection--notebooks, papers, bundles of letters dating much
further back than his occupation of Moongarr--salvage from the wreck
of his old home. His mother's workbox; his father's SHAKESPEARE; the
family Bible--a piteous catalogue. He looked long at the book and the
photographs. These last were portraits of his father, his mother and
his sisters, who had all been massacred by the Blacks, when he was a
boy. He separated all such relics from the general lot, placing them,
and also two or three packets of papers upon a shelf-table in the
veranda--it was that table where Lady Bridget had laid the cablegram
from Lord Gaverick, which she had shown him the day before she had left
Moongarr. Now it seemed to him an altar of sacred memories. He brought
various other small things out of the parlour--things he had not the
heart to destroy--all belonging to his youth--and placed them there.
As he looked at them, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and a wave
of emotion passed over his face, softening its hardness for an instant.
But the grimness came back. He made a quick movement back to Lady
Bridget's room; and when, after a minute or two, he came out again, he
was carrying a curious object which he had taken out of the deep drawer
beneath her hanging wardrobe. It was a dry piece of gum-tree bark,
shrivelled and curled up at the sides, so that the two edges almost
met. At first he put it on the heap that he had turned out of the
portmanteaux for destruction. His grim thought had been to top with
this strange memorial of his marriage-night, the funeral pyre he had
intended to build. But again the spasm of emotion contorted his
features. His shoulders shook, and a dry choking sound came from his
lips. He took up the piece of bark too, and laid it with the
daguerreotypes on the table. He seemed afraid to give himself time to
think, but went from room to room here and in the Old Humpey, dragging
one thing after another out on to the veranda. Some of the heavier
articles he had to hoist over the steps connecting the two verandas,
and then to drag them down the other steps into the front garden, where
they strewed the gravel round the centre bed.
In spring and summer, when the Chinamen had been there to water and
Lady Bridget to superintend the planting and pruning, this bed had
always been gay with flowers, banking a tall shrub of scented verbena
the perfume of which she had been particularly fond of. Now there were
weeds--most of them withered--instead of flowers. The verbena bush
had long been dead, and the dry leaves and branches, beaten down by the
late storm, made a bed of kindling.
Never was there garden so desolate--the young ornamental trees and
shrubs all dead; the creepers dead also; even the hardy passion vines
upon the fence, mere leafless, fruitless withes of withered stems.
McKeith paused after lugging down two squatters' chairs--the first
house carpentering he had done for his wife after their arrival at the
head-station, and in which, he had resolved, no future owner of
Moongarr should ever sit. That was the thought fiercely possessing him.
Rough chairs and tables and such-like that had been there always, might
remain. But no sacrilegious hands should touch things made for her, or
with which she had been closely associated. They should be burned out
here in the deserted front garden, where not even Kuppi--the only
other occupant of the head-station--would witness his preparations. He
himself would lay and kindle the funeral pyre, and to-night, when there
would be only the stars to see him, he would light the first holocaust.
He stood considering. Sweat dropped from his forehead. His gaunt frame
was trembling after his effort, which had been heavy, and he leaned
against one of the tarred piles supporting the veranda to rest. But
only for a few minutes. Then, his feverish activity recommenced. He
piled up the wooden furniture on the bed of withered verbena branches,
filled the interstices with dead leaves that he collected from the
garden, laid the smaller things--books, papers, pictures--where they
would assist the conflagration, and did not stop until the pyre had
reached to the level of the veranda railing. He reflected grimly that
there was a chance of sparks setting fire to the house itself, and
calculated the extent of the gravel between, deciding that if he was
there to watch there would be no danger.
All the time, the old kangaroo dog, Veno had been nosing round him,
sniffing at the objects lying round, then looking up at him with
bleared, wistful eyes, and evidently unable to understand these strange
proceedings. Once or twice, he had roughly pushed the dog away, but,
when he had finished the work and seated himself from sheer fatigue on
the veranda steps, Veno came and squatted beside him, the dog's head
upon his knee. He filled his pipe and smoked ruminatively; the exertion
had had one good effect; it had dulled the fierceness of his pain.
As he sat there--a faint breeze that had risen with the approach of
sunset, cooling his heated body--he thought again about Moongarr
Bill's letter. He looked at the great pyre in front, and caught the
gleam of the lagoon below through the bare branches of the trees the
little ripple on its surface, the freshening green at its marge. Then
he gazed out over the vast plain towards the horizon. From his low
position on the steps, the middle distance was hidden from him. Through
the reddish tinge cast by the lowering sun, he could discern, far off
likewise, the unmistakable signs of new-springing grass and the course
of the river, for so long non-existent. From the gully he heard the
sound of rushing water. It had been a roaring torrent just after the
storm, and he knew that a flood must have come down from the heads.
Yes, the Drought had broken. The plain would soon be green again.
Flowers would spring up as they had done for Bridget's bridal
home-coming. If the rain had fallen a few months sooner the station
might have been saved.
And even now, with the remnant of three or four hundred cattle,
provided there were no crippling debt, no spectre of the Man in
Possession, he might still hang on, and in time retrieve his losses,
lie low, sink artesian wells, make the station secure for the future.
He had been so fond of the place. He had taken up the run with such
high hopes; had so slaved to increase his herd, to make improvements on
the head-station. He had looked upon this as the nucleus of his
fortune; the pivot on which his career as one of the Empire-builders
would revolve. . . . And now. . . .
Well, some clever speculator no doubt would buy it at a low price
during the Slump, stock it with more cattle, work it up during a good
season or two, and, when cattle stations boomed once more, sell it at
an immense profit. That was what he himself would have done had he been
a speculator in similar conditions. Even still, he could do it with a
small amount of capital to supply a sop for the Bank. . . . Now that
the Drought had broken they would be more likely to let him go
on. . . . He thought of the 3,000 pounds Sir Luke Tallant had made him put
into settlement on his marriage. He had not wanted to do that at the time;
his Scotch caution had revolted against the tying up of his resources,
and his instinct was justified. If only he had command of that money
now! It was his own; his wife was rich; that was the one benefit he
could have taken from her. . . . But it was impossible to broach the
question.
Suddenly the dog stirred uneasily, sniffed the air and leaped to the
gravel walk where it stood giving short, uncertain barks, as though
aware of something happening outside for which it could not account.
McKeith lifted his head, bent in the absorption of his thought, and
looked about for the disturber of Veno's placidity. But Kuppi was
nowhere in sight, nor was there sign of other intruder. Where he sat,
the garden fence, overgrown with withered passion vines, bounded his
vision, and had anybody ridden or driven up the hill through the lower
sliprails, he would not have seen them, probably would not have heard
them. For there were no longer dogs, black boys, Chinamen or station
hands to voice intimation of a new arrival. All the old sounds of
evening activity were hushed. No mustering-mob being driven to the
stockyard; no running up of milkers or horses for the morrow; no goats
to be penned--they had been killed off long ago; no beasts grazing or
calling--no audible life at all except that of the birds, who, since
the rain, had found their notes again and were telling each other
vociferously that it was time to go to bed. Indeed, the silence and
solitariness of the once busy head-station had enticed many of the
shyer kinds of birds from the lagoon and the forest. Listening, as he
now was, intently, McKeith could hear the gurgling COO-ROO-ROO of the
swamp pheasant, which is always found near water--and likewise rare
sound--the silvery ring of the bell-bird rejoicing in the fresh-filled
lagoon.
But Veno was still uneasy, and Colin got up on to the veranda. He stood
there, listening all the while, strained expectancy in his eyes as if
he too were vaguely conscious of something outside happening. . . .
And now he did hear something that made him go white as with uncanny
dread. It was a footstep that he heard on the veranda of the Old Humpey
--very light, a soft tapping of high heels and the accompanying swish
of drapery--a ghostly rustle--'a ghostly footfall echoing.'. . . For
surely in this place it could have no human reality.
It approached along the passage between the two buildings, halted for a
few seconds, and then mounted to the front veranda.
The man was standing with his back to the Old Humpey. He would not
turn. A superstitious fear fell upon him and made his knees shake and
his tall, lean frame tremble. . . . He DARED not turn his head and look
lest he should see that which would tell him Bridget was dead.
But the dead do not speak in syllables that an ordinary human ear can
hear. And Colin heard his own name spoken in accents piercingly clear
and sweet.
'Colin.'
To him, though, it was as a ghost-voice. He stood transfixed. And just
then the dog bounded past him. It had flown up the steps barking
loudly. That could be no immaterial form upon which the creature flung
itself, pawing, nosing, licking with the wildest demonstrations of joy.
He heard the well-remembered tones:
'Quiet Veno. . . . Good dog. . . . Lie down Veno--Lie down.'
The dog seemed to understand that this was not a moment for
effusiveness. Without another sound, it crouched upon its haunches
gazing up at the new-comer.
Then Colin turned. Bridget was standing not a yard from him. A slender
figure in a grey silk cloak, with bare head--she had flung back her
grey sun-bonnet and shrouding gauze veil. . . . He saw the face he knew
--the small, pale face; the shadowy eyes, wide and bright with an
ecstatic determination, yet in them a certain feminine timorousness;
the little pointed chin poked slightly forward; the red-brown hair--
all untidy curls and tendrils, each hair seeming to have a life and
magnetism of its own. It was just as he had so often pictured her in
dreams of sleep and waking.
He gazed at her like one who beholds a vision from another world. And
then a great sob burst from him--the pitiful sob of a strong man who
is beaten, broken with emotion. The whole being of the man seemed to
collapse. He staggered forward, and such a change came over the gaunt,
hard face, that Bridget saw it through a rain of tears which fell down
her cheeks.
'Oh, Colin--Won't you speak to me?'
'Biddy!' He went close to her and gripped her two wrists, holding her
before him while his hungry eyes seemed to be devouring her.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 | 24 |
25