Part 1

Produced by Al Haines.

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.

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.