Books: Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land

R >> Rosa Praed (1851 1935) >> Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land

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She slipped her hand gently into McKeith's, and they remained thus for
nearly a minute without speaking. He was the first to break the
silence.

'Bridget,' he said impetuously, 'we're going to be husband and wife
to-morrow. It makes me tremble, darling--with happiness and hope, and
with fear, too. What have I done, a rough Bushy like me--to win a
woman like you? Well you know how I think about that. And I don't
believe in a man belittling himself to the woman he loves, though it's
just because he loves her so that he feels unworthy of her. And then it
comes over me again--badly sometimes--how little I really know of
you, and of your life, and of your feelings towards the other men you
must have had to do with--one other man in especial, may be, that
you've loved, or may have thought you loved. That's what I want to know
about, my dear.'

Her face was turned from his as she answered:

'What's the good of your knowing, Colin? Whatever there was is past.'

'But IS it past. Over and over again, I've started to ask you and have
pulled back. Now it's got like a festering sore in my heart, and I'm
afraid it will go on festering unless I'm satisfied. There WAS somebody
in especial--a man you cared for and might have married if he had been
a finer sort of chap than he turned out to be?'

She looked at him sharply.

'How do you know? Has Rosamond Tallant been telling you?'

'No,' he said, with complete candour. 'There wasn't a word of that sort
passed between us--and I wouldn't have heeded it if there had.'

'Joan, then? No, I'm sure Joan Gildea wouldn't have talked behind my
back.'

'You may bet your life on that. Joan hasn't said anything about
whatever love-affairs you may have had.'

'Every girl has had love-affairs. I'm no exception to the rule. There's
been no real harm in them. Let them lie--buried in oblivion. They're
not worth resurrecting.'

'No, but,'--he persisted--thinking all the while of that letter--
'Bridget, I must ask you this one thing. Is there any man in the world
you care for more than you care for me? I know,' he added sadly, 'that
you don't love in the way I love you--in the way I'd like to be loved
by you. I know that's too much to expect--yet.'

The melancholy note in his speech touched her.

'I told you that I do WANT to love you, Colin--only I can't help being
what I am,' she said softly. She looked up at him in the pale
brightness of the thin moon and myriad stars. He stood with the faint
illumination from the open windows of Government House upon his fine
head and his neat fair beard. It intensified the gleam in his earnest
blue eyes, while it softened his angularities and bush roughness, and
as she looked up at him, she could not help feeling what a splendid
fellow he was! What a MAN! So much finer than that other man to whom
she had nearly given herself! Ah, she had had an escape! Under all his
show of romantic adventure, his ardent protestations, his magnetic
charm, that other man had been utterly sophisticated, worldly,
self-interested. He had shown this in his money-grabbing, in his
disloyalty both to the woman he had professed to love, and to the woman
he had married for her fortune. Thinking of him in this way, Lady
Bridget felt that in time she might come to care a great deal more for
Colin McKeith,

He caught up her last words.

'Yes, I know that you WANT to love me Biddy, and I hope with all my
heart and soul that you will--or else--' he broke off, his face
darkening.

'Or else--what?'

'I don't know. It would be hell. I can't think such a thing at this
moment. If it comes--well, I'll face it as I've had to face other ugly
things. Don't let us speak of the possibility!'

She sensed some quality in him that she had not realised before.

'You frighten me a little, Colin. It's as if I may any day come up
before something I wasn't prepared for; and yet--I rather like it.'

He smiled at her.

'I'm glad you like it, anyway. You seem to me such a child, Biddy,
though you are always telling me you are such an old soul. I can't for
the life of me make out what you mean by that.'

'Oh! A soul that has come back and back, and has lived a great many--
perhaps naughty--lives.'

'H'm! Yes! Well, one life is good enough for me, and as we can't prove
the other thing, what does it matter anyhow? I wouldn't want you in
another life if you were going to be quite a different person. I want
you as you are in this one. And so I reckon would any man who has ever
been in love with you. Let us go back now to what I was asking you.
Biddy, there WAS a man--one man that you did care for? You've admitted
as much.'

'Yes--I suppose there was.'

'And not so long before you came out here?'

'I suppose that's true too.'

'Bridget!--do you know what's been festering in my mind--the thought
that you might be marrying me in a fit of pique--a sort of reaction.
Biddy--tell me honestly, my dear, if it's anything of that sort?'

She seemed to be considering.

'I don't quite know how to answer you, Colin--if I'm to be absolutely
honest. And I'd always rather tell you the truth.'

'Thank God for that. Let there be truth between us--truth at any
cost.'

'You see,' she said slowly. 'My whole coming out here--everything I've
done lately, has been done in reaction against all I've done and felt
before.'

'Would you have married that man--if everything had been on the
square?'

'What do you mean by "on the square"? I've done nothing to be properly
ashamed of!'

'No--no--I was thinking only of him, Biddy, did you love that man?--
really love him?'

'I'm not sure yet whether I'm capable of what you'd call loving really.
I had a violent attraction to him,'--he remembered the phrase--'I
confess I did feel it dreadfully when he married someone else. Now it
doesn't hurt me. And of course, he has gone out of my life altogether.
I'm glad he has, and I hope he will keep on the other side of the
world.'

'Well, let it stop at that.' He drew a breath of relief. 'I don't
believe you really cared for him. If you had, you couldn't take it as
you do. I'll never bother you again about that man. And, oh, my dear--
my dear--it doesn't seem to me possible that you shouldn't come to
love me, when I love you as I do--with my whole heart and soul--I
worship you, Biddy. And I'll not say again that I'm unworthy of you--a
man who loves a woman like that CAN'T be unworthy.'

He took her in his arms and kissed her. And this time she did not
resist the caress.

They were married with much flourish of trumpets and local
paraphernalia. Never before in the annals of Leichardt's Land had a
wedding taken place from Government House. This one was regarded as
quite an official event. The Executive Council--at that moment about
to undergo the pangs of dissolution--attended in a body. There were a
great many members of parliament present also. It became even a
question whether the official uniforms worn at Sir Luke's 'Swearing In'
should not lend eclat to the occasion. But Colin McKeith vetoed that
proposition.

The bridal party drove straight from the Church to that same
extemporized wharf by the Botanical Gardens which had been put up for
the Governor's State Landing. It had been re-constructed and
redecorated for to-day's event. Thus the embarcation of the bride and
bridegroom, of the viceregal party and the wedding guests, in the
Government yacht, which was to take the new-made pair to the big
mail-boat in the Bay, was almost as imposing a ceremony as the
Governor's Entry into his new kingdom. The day was glorious--an early
Australian winter's day, when the camellia trees are in bud, and the
autumn bulbs shedding perfumes, and garlands of late roses, honeysuckle
and jasmine are still hanging on trellis and tree.

As the bridal party came down the avenue of bunyas, and the band played
the Wedding Chorus from LOHENGRIN a feeling of dream-like incongruity
came over Bridget. She laughed hysterically.

'What a pity Joan Gildea isn't here!' she said. 'Think of the "copy"
she might have made out of this!'

Lady Tallant had conceived the original idea of having the wedding
breakfast on the deck of the Government yacht, while it steamed down
the forty miles between Leichardt's Town and the river bar, beyond
which, in those days, large vessels could not pass. There, the repast
was laid on tables decorated with white blossoms and maidenhair fern,
under an awning festooned with flowers and exotic creepers, and
supported apparently, by palm trees and tree ferns which had been taken
from the Government Gardens.

The bride looked small, pale, and quaint in her white satin dress and
lace veil, now thrown back and partly confining the untidily curling
hair. Some of the reports described her as being like an old picture;
others as a vision from Fairyland. She came barely up to her husband's
shoulder as they stood together, and the adoring pride of his downward
gaze at her, stirred all the women's hearts and roused a sympathetic
thrill in the men's breasts. Colin made a good show in the regulation
bridegroom's frock coat, and with a sprig of orange blossom in his
buttonhole. There was no doubt that he was extremely happy. He gave a
short manly speech in response to Sir Luke's rather academic oration
proposing the health of the wedded pair. The Premier too made a speech,
and so did the Attorney-General, who was best man. Bridget's
bridesmaids had been selected from the daughters of the Executive with
as much attention to precedence as though she had been a royal
princess. All this had delighted the Leichardstonians, and when Sir
Luke read out the congratulatory cablegrams received that morning from
the Earl and Countess of Gaverick, Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, and one
or two other members of the British aristocracy, the enthusiasm was
great.

The speeches were over; the wedding cake had been cut; the river-bar
and the liner were in sight, when Lady Bridget went below and changed
into sea-going blue serge. The mail-boat, beflagged in honor of the
occasion, dipped a salute. The Governor led the bride along the
gangway, introduced the captain of the mail-boat, and there were more
congratulatory speeches, and still more of official ceremony as the
bride passed by a line of inquisitive and admiring passengers--
fortunately there were not many--and down to the state-room prepared
for her. Then the curtain seemed to fall that divided her from her
past, and when the Governor stepped again on to the Leichardt's Land
yacht, and the last farewell had been waved, Lady Bridget felt
thankfully that she had become a private individual at last. Only just
Bridget, wife of Colin McKeith, Bushman, now starting upon her voyage
towards the Wild.

She could not get away from the bewildering sense of unreality. It
dominated every other feeling. She did not even reflect that there was
no going back; that her fate was sealed, and that the Bush was
henceforth to be her prison or her paradise.

All the way up the river, Rosemary Tallant congratulated herself upon
having done the best that was possible for poor Biddy the failure. It
was all entirely satisfactory. She wove a halo of romance round Colin
McKeith, and, after reading her laudation of him, and her description
of Bridget's send off, old Lady Gaverick and the impecunious Chris and
his wife declared to each other that Biddy had done as well for herself
as the family had any reason to expect.

Eliza, Lady Gaverick, was highly pleased, though she would not for the
world have let her niece by marriage know it. Being Scotch herself she
approved of the Scotch bridegroom, and began now to think seriously of
the alteration she subsequently made in her will.

It was a four days' passage to Leuraville the port at which the
McKeith's were to be dropped. Not being a good sailor Lady Bridget
retired to her berth when the steamer got into a choppy sea.

Of course she had no maid. Colin unpacked the cabin trunk and dressing
bag and arranged things so far as he could understand his wife's dainty
toilet equipments, and his mistakes made them laugh and got them over
the first awkwardness of close quarter.

Then he said:

'Now I'm going to stow away my own traps. My cabin is just facing this
and you've only got to call out if you want anything. Eh, but my word!
Biddy, it's a fine thing to be marrying from Government House. The
Company has done us both proud.'

CHAPTER 4

They were landed at Leuraville on the evening of the fourth day. A
tender took them off with the mails--as it happened, they were the
only passengers for that small sea-township. Ordinary business folk
going north, preferred the smaller coasting steamers which put in at
every port. The postmaster, the portmaster, the police magistrate, and
a few local notables were waiting to receive them at the wharf. McKeith
greeted them all heartily and rather shyly introduced them to his
bride. The local men were shy also. They mostly addressed her as Mrs
McKeith. The police magistrate--Captain Halliwell, lean, dark, sallow,
with a rather weak mouth, but more carefully dressed than the others,
and with an English voice, called her Lady Bridget. He was a retired
officer of the ROYAL ENGINEERS. She had been told and now remembered
that men in the ROYAL ENGINEERS were popularly said either to be
religious or cranks. This man was a Christian Scientist which he
announced when apologising for not offering the hospitality of his
house, a new baby having arrived the day previously, ushered into the
world, he explained, by prayer and faith and without benefit of medical
skill.

Bridget knew something about Christian Scientists. She plunged at once
into faith-healing ethics with the police-magistrate, while Colin saw
about getting the trunks off the tender. How odd it seemed to be
talking about London and Christian science in a place like this!

Leuraville too seemed part of a dream. But her face soon lost its
bewildered look. She became interested in her surroundings, although
there was no suggestion here of savage freedom or romantic adventure.

Leuraville showed low and hot and ugly. A red sun near its dropping,
drew up the miasmic vapours from the mangrove-fringed reaches
stretching on either side of the wharf. Some light crafts were moored
about. A schooner was loading up with cattle--wretched diseased
beasts. Bridget watched them with shuddering repulsion--being hoisted
up and slung aboard with ropes. The men at their task swore so
abominably that the police-magistrate stepped up to them and
remonstrated on the plea of a lady's presence. Bridget had never heard
such swear-words. She was used to the ordinary 'damn,' but these oaths
were so horribly coarse. Colin, who was asking local questions of the
other men appeared to take it all as a matter of course. The men
stopped their work to stare at Lady Bridget. They wore dirty corduroys
hitched up with a strap over flannel shirts that were open at the neck
and left their brawny breasts exposed. There were other loafers in
flannel shirts, hitched up trousers and greasy felt or cabbage-tree
hats, and there were two or three blacks of the demoralised type seen
in coast townships. Now, one of the bullocks got loose and rushed
blindly down the wharf, and Bridget shrieked and clung wildly to her
husband's arm until it was headed back again.

Colin laughed at her terror.

'It's all right, Biddy. But how's that for a Bushman's wife. You'll see
lots of cattle up at Moongarr.'

Moongarr was the name off his station which was to be her future home.

'I hate cows. Once I was charged by a wild cow and I've been afraid of
them ever since.'

'That isn't a cow. It's Mickey Field's poley-tailed bullock being
shunted off to the Boiling-Down Works on Shark Island,' said a local
man.

The police-magistrate found his opportunity.

'You wouldn't be afraid, Lady Bridget, if you realised that cow as an
expression of the Divine mind.'

Bridget laughed. Her sense of the queerness of it all was almost
hysterical. She had the Irish wit to make the men grin at her prompt
answer, which when it became bruited up and down the Leura, earned her
the reputation of being sharp at repartee.

'But do you think,' said she confidingly, 'that the cow would be after
realising ME as an expression of the Divine Mind?'

'Eh, you needn't think you're going to knock spots off my wife, any of
you,' cried Colin delighted at the sally. And now he walked and talked
like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came about--
extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders, really
trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet handkerchief
doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour organiser
addressing a knot of station-hands out of work--even a Chinaman--a
Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a nondescript store.
That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the battle cry of
'White Australia.'

All of them showed the deepest interest in the small, pale, picturesque
woman walking by Colin's side.

It seemed incredible to Biddy that she should be walking like that
beside the big Bushman, in this sort of town, and that he should be her
lawful protector.

The street they walked up began from the wharf with two-storied
respectable buildings--the Bank, the Post-Office, the
police-magistrate's residence, some dwelling houses, within palings
enclosing gardens--clumps of bananas, pawpaw apple trees, a few flower
beds, bushes of flaunting red poinsettia, and so forth. There were
stores, public houses, meaner shanties straggling along a dusty road
that lost itself in vistas of lank gum trees.

The Postmaster hoped that Mr McKeith's lady would not find the hotel
too rowdy. It was one of the two-storied buildings, and had a bar
giving onto the street, and a veranda round both upper and lower
storey. A number of Bushmen and loafers were drinking in the bar, and
others were on the edge of the veranda dangling their legs over it into
the street. All of them stopped their talk and their drink to stare at
Lady Bridget. The landlady--a big, florid Irish-woman in black silk,
with a gold chain round her neck came out onto the veranda and greeted
McKeith as an old friend, holding out her hand to Lady Bridget. She
took the husband and wife up to their rooms, a parlour opening on the
balcony, a bedroom over the bar and a little room at the back of it.

'It's a rough sort of shop, Biddy,' said Colin, when the woman had
departed. 'But it will do for a shake-down for to-night. If the steamer
had come in earlier I'd have taken you straight up to Fig Tree Mount,
where the buggy will be waiting for us; and after that we'll begin our
camping out, and you'll be in the real Bush. But we've lost the train,
and must wait till daylight to-morrow. You'll be tired my dear--and
you must be feeling strange,' he added kindly. 'I'll go and have your
traps brought up and leave you to fix yourself. I want to see one or
two chaps and find out whether my drays are down as far as Fig Tree for
stores and what's going on up along the Leura.'

Bridget noticed that the change in McKeith seemed yet more accentuated.
His manner was more curt and decided--rougher than before. He appeared
to have taken on the tone of the Back-Blocks. Yet she admired him. She
did not dislike the roughness.

But she felt a womanish aggrievement at his having left her to undo her
own things. And the rooms were horrible--the meagre appliances--the
course cotton sheets, the awful Reckitt's-blue colouring of the painted
walls. And then the dreadful noise of the men drinking below in the
bar! If this was the Bush! But Colin had said it was not the Bush.

He left her again after dinner which was horrible likewise--burned up
steak, messy fried potatoes and cabbage, an uneatable rice pudding. He
did not seem to mind. The result of his enquiries had left him grim and
preoccupied. Yes, he had taken on the Bushman, and had more or less
dropped the lover. The practical Scotch side of him was uppermost, and
he appeared more disturbed over station affairs than at her want of
appetite. She resented this unreasonably. She had not wanted him to
play the lover in these surroundings, they would have been fatal to
romance, but she had not bargained for his glumness. He was angry at
the non-arrival of his draymen and the probability that they were
drinking at a grog-shanty on the road. He would certainly sack them, he
said if that were the case. And he had disquieting news from Moongarr.
Pleuro had broken out among the cattle. What was Pleuro? Lady Bridget
wondered, but she was not sufficiently interested in cattle to ask the
question. And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a nuisance
--going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who employed
non-Union stockmen and shearers--in one instance, threatening to burn
a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a month
past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought.

It was dreadfully prosaic and boring. After he had gone out again to
transact further business, Lady Bridget went to bed and squirmed
between the cotton sheets, remembering ruefully the luxuries of
Government House. Never in all her life had she slept between cotton
sheets or washed herself in an enamelled tin basin. The noise in the
bar became intolerable. She could hear the swear-words quite
distinctly. They were disgusting. She tried to stop her ears . . . . Oh
what a dreadful life this was into which she had plunged so recklessly!

Her thoughts went back to the old-world--to the luxurious veneer
covering the younger Gavericks' petty economies--stealing the
notepaper at country-houses for the sake of the address--cadging for
motors and dinners--'keeping in' with the people likely to be of use;
pulling strings in a manner which Bridget knew would have been too
utterly galling to Colin McKeith's self-respect. And she thought of her
father and his financial unscrupulousness! But none of these could have
conceived of life without certain appurtenances of that position to
which they and she had been born. The only one who was self-respecting
among the lot was old 'Eliza Countess' as they designated her. It
struck Bridget that Eliza Countess and Colin McKeith had points of
character in common--it was true they both came from Glasgow. She
thought of the parsimonious rectitude--which had of course included
linen sheets and fine porcelain and shining silver--of old Lady
Gaverick's establishment, of its stuffy conventionality--though that
had been soothing sometimes after a dose of Upper Bohemia; and Bridget
wept, feeling rather like a wilful child who had strayed out of the
nursery among a horde of savages.

At last she could bear it no longer. They were singing now--a terrible
thing with a refrain of oaths and GEE-UPS, and whistling noises like
the cracking of whips--a bullock drivers' camp ditty. Bridget
shudderingly decided that a row in Whitechapel could be nothing to this
in the matter of bad language. She got up and paced the sitting-room in
her dressing-gown, wondering when her husband would come and rescue her
from these beasts. Watching for him she could see through the
uncurtained French windows the starry brilliance of the night, and the
moon now in its middle quarter. And down below, the houses and shanties
along the opposite side of the street, the fantastic tufts of the
pawpaws, the long white road stretching away into the ragged blur of
gum-forest.

Presently a firm step sounded on the veranda and came up the stairs.

When Colin opened the door, he saw standing by the table, which had a
kerosene lamp on the red cloth, and, even at this time of the year,
winged insects buzzing around, and sticking to its greasy bowl--a
small white figure like an apparition from another world, in its
wonderful draperies of lace and filmy white, the little pale face
framed in a cloud of shining hair, and the strange eyes wide, scared,
and with tears glistening on the reddened lids.

She cried out at him.

'How could you have left me alone here with those horrible drunken men
down there making such a noise that I thought every minute they would
break in on me? And swearing! I've never dreamed of such dreadful
language; and I can't stand it--I won't stand it a moment longer.'

'You shan't. It's abominable, I've been a thoughtless beast.'

He swooped out through the open door, down the wooden stairs which
creaked under his wrathful steps. Bridget heard him call the landlady,
'Mrs Maloney! Come here!' in a voice of sharp command. Presently she
heard him speaking to the men in the bar, not abusively, indeed almost
good humoured tone, but imperatively.

'Look here, mates.' The uproar stopped suddenly. 'You're decent blokes
I know, and you've all had mothers if you haven't had wives. Well,
there's a lady up there--she's my wife, and she's never heard
bullock-drivers swear before, and you've scared her a bit. Just you
stop it. Shut up and be off like good chaps.'

Some dissentient voices arose; an attempt at drunken ribaldry, strident
hisses, 'Sh! Sh!' Cries of 'Shame.' 'Chuck it!' Then again, McKeith's
voice, this time like thunder. 'Stop that I say--one more word and out
you go, whether you like it or not.'

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