Part 10

'Hush!' she said. 'There, don't talk, don't try to tell me. I know, darling. You lost the position, and you couldn't get another, and you're all as poor as poor can be. Pooh! what does that matter? You have none of you starved, since you are all alive, and the end has come. Poor hands, poor hands,'--her kisses and tears covered them,--'have they been breaking stones that the children might have bread?'

'Molly,' he said, anguished, 'your worst thought cannot picture what I have brought them to.'

She trembled a little--Hermie, little Floss, the boys!

But she laughed.

'They are alive--they are together, and not in the Benevolent Asylum. My darling, I don't mind in the very least.'

'Molly,' he cried, 'you cannot dream how bad it is! It is Dunks' selection; we have been there four years!'

She trembled again, for she had seen Dunks' selection, and the memory of it was yet in her mind.

But again she laughed.

'It will have made them all hardy,' she said; 'I can see it has done so, or Roly wouldn't be sleeping out of doors.'

'My wife,' he said, 'my wife, my wife!'

They clung together.

'The past is gone,' she whispered. 'I will never leave you again.'

'My wife, my wife!'

'Together now till death; nothing else shall part us, nothing else.'

'My wife!'

Her tears rained down, mingled with his, and fell away into the greyness of his beard.

They clung together, and the room and the world faded. They clung together, and there was no one in all space but themselves and God--God who had given them into each other's arm once more.

Challis came to the door--she had knocked twice, to tell them that the luggage had come from the ship--then she turned the handle, for she thought they had gone out.

But those faces! Those faces of the father and mother, wet, uplifted, almost divine!

Very softly she closed the door again, and stole away.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*The Rosery*

They cling in the moonlight, they kiss each other. "Child, my child!" and "Mother, mother!"'

Bart was on Wilgandra Station to meet them--Bart, healthy-looking and sinewy, if thin; he wore white flannel trousers, a white linen coat, and a new straw hat with a new fly-veil attached. Mrs. Cameron had looked when her husband cried, 'There's Bart,' with eyes that expected to see an out-at-elbow lad, possibly barefoot, probably ill-developed. But there was nothing she would have changed.

'Of course they all wanted to come to meet you,' the boy said, when the first glad greetings were over, and the great panting, shrieking train had become just a quiet black thread climbing the side of the next rise. 'But I didn't want to crowd the buggy.'

'The buggy!' his father said. 'I was just going into the hotel to get one. I'm glad you thought to order it.'

'It's Mr. Stevenson's,' Bart said. 'He sent it down this morning for me to meet you in,' and he led them with much satisfaction to the handsome roomy sociable he had in waiting. Their own solitary equipage, the shabby cart drawn by Tramby and driven by young Daly, was in readiness for the many boxes.

Once, in carrying the luggage to the cart, Bart and his father found themselves alone on the station for a moment. Bart gave a laughing glance from his father's to his own apparel.

'Isn't it a lark?' he said. 'I feel quite shy of myself, don't you?'

'Do the girls look nice?' Cameron said anxiously.

'Spiffin,' said Bart, 'and Miss Browne's got a new dress, and even curled her hair. I say, have you told mother about Miss Browne?'

'Yes, she is quite prepared.'

'And she knows about the selection?'

'She knows about the selection.'

'We've--we've been tidying up a bit, dad. I think you'll find it's a bit--er--tidier.' There was a flush on the boy's cheek, a look of suppressed excitement in his eyes. 'Let's get on now; the horse doesn't like to stand, and everything's in.'

They drove up the road that wound out of civilised Wilgandra away to parts where the bush took on its wild character again, and rolled either side of them in unbroken severity and loneliness for miles.

But it was early winter now, and the thankful land lay smiling and happy-eyed beneath a cooler sky. Even the newest clearings flaunted rich carpets of grass, green as grass only springs where a bush fire has purged the ground for it. The air was fragrant with the bush scents that rise after rain. A cool, quiet breeze swayed the boughs of the ocean-waste of trees, here and there it lifted the long string of warm-coloured bark--autumn's royal rags--that hung from the silvered trunks.

Cameron was driving, and mechanically turned the horse's head at the place where he had always turned for the sliprails of his selection.

And there were no sliprails!

He turned an astonished glance at Bart, but the boy's eyes only danced.

'I'll get down and open the gate,' he said demurely, and jumped down while his father stared at the neat white gate with The Rosery painted on in black letters. Could this be Dunks' selection that stretched before the head of the horse that bore them slowly along? This the grey, dreary place that had cast its colour over the souls of those who looked at it. A drive ran up from the gate to the house, not a smooth, red gravelled drive by any means, but it was cleared and stumped now all its length and width, and went with pleasant windings between the trees.

A low white two-rail fence divided the bush and sheep ground from the land about the house; the small orchard showed freshly ploughed up and trenched between the trees; a vegetable garden was laid out, and the peas and beans were above the ground already. The flower-beds near the house were dug and weeded, as if they had been beds in the Botanical Gardens; and dahlias, little sunflowers, and cosmea of all shades made a gay mass of colour. The pixies' hands had even attacked the cottage; Cameron himself had given it a coat of red paint that had much altered its forlorn aspect; these new hands had carried the coat of paint even over the dreary galvanised iron roof, had 'picked out' the chimneys, and windows, and verandah-posts with white, added a seven-foot verandah all round, and knocked a French window into the walls here and there.

'Why,' cried Challis, 'it's the sweetest, darlingest little place I ever saw! Oh, I never want to go away from it again!'

Mrs. Cameron was looking with eyes full of pleased surprise.

'Why, Jim,' she said, 'why, dearest, it is really very nice, very nice indeed, so peaceful-looking. You did not prepare me for anything like this.'

Cameron swallowed a lump in his throat.

'I didn't prepare myself,' he began; but his wife's hand was fluttering to the fastening of the sociable door, and her ears were no longer for him, for Hermie and Roly were running out to meet her.

Such a rushing into arms, such kissings, such a choking of laughter and tears! Mrs. Cameron held Hermie to her and from her, and to her again, and marvelled to find her almost a woman.

'My pretty girl, my pretty girl!' she said, the fond tears starting, and Hermie blushed herself into even lovelier colour than before.

Challis kissed her sister and clung to her a moment, then stood away shy and pink, almost crying. Hermie's hair was done 'on top,' her dress was long, so long; she was very pretty and sweet-looking; but oh, there would never be any whispering and whispering in bed--she was far too grown up for that.

Roly came up to the sister and submitted the edge of his left ear to her kiss. He looked at her critically.

'Did the Queen cry when you came away?' he said.

'I didn't notice,' said Challis. 'She was in the garden when I went to say good-bye, and she waved her handkerchief when I got back to the house--perhaps she had been crying into it.'

'Floss, Floss! I want my baby,' the mother's voice was saying.

Hermie looked about her distressed.

'Will you take no notice just yet, darling?' she said. 'She is very--shy, but she won't be able to stay away long; she's hiding somewhere.'

'Well, look here,' Roly said, 'I suppose she'll be wanting to come out here and see you----'

'Who?' said Challis, who also was looking longingly for the little girl she was going to put to bed at night.

'That Queen-woman, of course,' said Roly. 'Look here, you can tell her straight before she comes I'm not going to take my tent down for her. You can let her have Miss Browne's bedroom, and you can't see it from that window. Miss Browne's got a cheek. Wanted me to take it down just for you and mother, cos she says it's untidy.'

'Why, we're dying to see the tent, aren't we, mother?' Challis said.

Mrs. Cameron's arm went round her boy's shoulder, and her lips down to his round, closely cropped head. He dodged skilfully.

'Come and see the tent,' he said. Then a gush of gentler feeling came up in his little boy-heart, and he moved up to her again and rubbed his head on her arm. 'If you like,' he said, 'I'll let you sleep out in it to-night, but not her,' and he pointed a finger at Challis; 'she'd get messing about and trying to tidy up.'

He dragged them round to the back of the cottage, where the tent stood, a most dilapidated spread of ragged canvas.

'Look here,' the owner said, nearly bursting with pride, 'up there, that's the fly, keeps it cool. I can sit in it on the hottest day.'

'No one else could,' laughed Bart.

Roly took no heed of the depreciation.

'See that? That's my water-bag; hang it in a draught, and it's as cool as you like.'

'No,' said Bart again, 'only as _you_ like.'

'See this? Keep my meat in it, flies can't get in, hang it up out of the way. Here's my gridiron--here's my frying-pan.'

'Why,' cried Hermie, 'Miss Browne's been looking for the frying-pan all the morning!'

'Let her cook her things in the oven,' said Roly. 'See this? It's my bunk, made it myself--just legs of trees, and you stretch canvas on it. No sheets for me, only this blue blanket----'

The blanket moved convulsively, a little brown bare foot was sticking out of one end of it, a strand of straight light hair showed at the other.

'Flossie!' the mother cried, and made a rush at the bunk.

The small girl sat up.

'Go away!' she said. 'Go away! I won't be kissed. I'm not your girl. Keep your old dolls for yourself.'

'Flossie,' cried the mother, 'Flossie!' and tried to gather her up as if she had been two instead of seven, and tried to kiss her; but Floss covered her face tightly with her bony little hands.

'Floss,' said Cameron, 'don't be ridiculous. Kiss your mother, and why are you not dressed?'

Hermie was looking ready to cry. Had she not herself put the child a clean white frock on, and tried to curl her hair and seen her into shoes and stockings? And here was the naughty little thing barefoot, and in a ragged print frock!

'Kiss your mother,' Cameron said sternly, the surprised pain on his wife's face angering him against the child.

Floss turned a sullen little face to her mother, but her lips did not move.

'Now kiss Challis,' the father said; for the mother, stooping over the child, had hidden it from him that he had only been half obeyed. Challis came forward to put a loving arm round the ragged shoulder. But Floss struggled to the ground, dived under the bunk, dragged at one of the tent-pegs, and was out and flying off to the bush like a wild rabbit before any one could stop her.

'Go and fetch her back, Bart,' Cameron said, extreme annoyance in his tone.

'It was to be expected,' Mrs. Cameron said, but she looked a little white. 'We mustn't force her; you must let me lay siege to the fortress my own way.'

They went into the cottage, and Miss Browne showed herself--Miss Browne, with her usual strands of hair in little tight curls round her forehead, and a ready-made blouse and skirt of white pique vainly endeavouring to accommodate itself to her figure.

'Oh dear!' she said, 'most ashamed, most grieved, Floss, peculiar disposition, soon come round, hope a pleasant journey, hot, dusty, must be hungry, Roly, ashamed, grieved, most untidy tent, unwilling to take it down, like to wash and take hats off, bedroom, show the way, dinner, hoped they would like it, not what they were accustomed to, holes in curtains, had not had time to mend them, must excuse table, afraid not a good manager, ignorant many things.'

'Everything is very nice,' Mrs. Cameron said. 'I am quite sure you have always done your best. Mr. Cameron has told me how hard you have worked, and you must let me thank you for it. There, there, I am afraid you have overtired yourself preparing for us. Don't trouble any more, we are going to shake down into place at once, Challis and I, and forget we have ever been away.'

'Oh, my love,' said Miss Browne, 'my dear, oh, my love!' and went away into the kitchen, and wept happily all the time she helped Lizzie to dish up the dinner.

'Be quick,' said Roly, as the travellers went to a bedroom to take off their hats, 'there's fowls for dinner. It's Bluey, and Speckle, and Whitey. Whitey'll be the fattest, he was mine.'

'Oh dear,' said Hermie, as she shut the bedroom door, 'I wish he hadn't said that. Now father won't eat any. He never eats meat at all, but he likes poultry unless any one says anything like that. He says he likes to think of dinner just as dinner, and hates to remember the things have once been walking about. Now it won't be roast fowl at all to him, but just Whitey.'

'I don't think he heard,' said Challis; 'he was looking at the roses on the dinner-table, and saying, "I hope they didn't break my Souvenir de Terese Levet when they plucked these."'

Hermie laughed.

'Dear old dad!' she said. 'Mother, I don't know how he could have done so long without you if it had not been for his roses.'

'I must go down and see them,' the mother said, and tossed her bonnet off hastily. 'See, he is already going out to them. Is there time before dinner, darling? Plainly he can't wait any longer.'

She went through the long window on to the verandah, and caught him up.

Challis was taking off her hat, brushing her hair, removing the signs of travel with a dainty deftness born of so frequent journeys. Hermie's eyes followed her everywhere. They saw a girl not tall for her fourteen years, slender, not over strong-looking. Soft light hair fell away down her back, curlless, waveless. The greyish, hazel eyes were full of quiet shining, the face was thin, yet soft and childish, the mouth sensitive, a little sad.

'Oh,' she said, 'the smell of the soap, Hermie! I can see the other bedroom so well--the Wilgandra one, and your bed was near the fireplace, and mine had white tassels on, and there was a pink vase on the washstand for our tooth-brushes.'

Hermie looked in slight bewilderment at the pieces of common household soap that her sister held; she did not realise that the girl had seen and smelt nothing but scented since she went away, and that this plain yellow piece was pungent with the old days.

'Where am I going to sleep, Hermie?' said the little girl, and her heart throbbed with the hope that Hermie would cry, 'With me, of course.'

'Bart is going to sleep out in the tent with Roly,' Hermie said, hanging up the well-cut little travelling-coat with a sigh for its style. 'You'll have his room.'

'Where do you sleep?' Challis ventured.

'Dad and Bart built me a little room across there,' said Hermie.

'And Floss?'

'Her cot is in Miss Browne's room.'

Challis was glad bed-time was still some hours off; she had never yet slept in a room all to herself, but did not like to tell Hermie so.

Roly banged at the door. 'There you go,' he said, 'grabbing everything, Hermie. She wants to come out and finish looking at the tent.'

'Finish looking at your grandmother!' laughed Hermie, then blushed vexedly. That was such a favourite phrase of Bart's she unconsciously fell into it herself; but what would Challis think of such slang, Challis, who was used to the conversation of cultured, travelled people? Challis, who looked such a little lady in her well-cut English-looking clothes, and spoke with the clipped, clear pronunciation her mother had insisted upon all these years?

Challis, of course, would think her a boor, an uneducated, unrefined Australian back-blocks girl. Well, whose fault was it if she was?' She turned to her sister coldly. 'If you have finished we may as well go.'

Challis followed her meekly.

'Flossie,' said the mother, going into a bedroom when it was eight o'clock at night, and the rebel had come in and put herself to bed, 'I've just been unpacking my box and found this for Hermie. Do you think it is pretty?'

She held up the daintiest of hats.

Flossie looked at it, then squeezed her eyes up tight.

'Don't want to see it,' she said.

'We are unpacking the boxes,' the mother said; 'I thought you might like to put your dressing-gown on and come and watch.'

'Don't want to watch,' said Floss; 'haven't got any dressing-gown.'

Mrs. Cameron was standing in the bedroom doorway. She held out a box of fascinating doll's tea-things.

'Those are rather pretty, aren't they?' she said. 'We almost decided on a blue set, but then these little pink flowers seemed so fresh-looking we took it.'

Flossie sent a devouring gaze to the beautiful boxful through the bars of her cot. Then she squeezed her eyes up tightly again.

'Wouldn't look at them,' she said.

The mother went away, and the darkness deepened in the room, and Floss lay gazing with hard eyes at a patch of light thrown from the living-room lamp upon the ceiling.

Her heart swelled more and more; she pictured miserable scenes in which, while the rest of the family flaunted about in silk, she, Floss, was attired in rags and had crusts only to eat.

'Only,' she muttered to herself, 'I won't eat them, and then I'll die, and p'r'aps she'll be sorry.'

There was a movement in the room.

'I think I'll lie down quietly on your bed for an hour, Miss Browne,' the mother's voice was saying; 'it will do my head good. Yes, thank you, I have the bottle of lavender water here; I never travel without getting a bad head.'

Miss Browne shook up the pillows and left her; this idea of making capital out of the headache was her own. 'Flossie never can bear any one to suffer,' she said. 'I always remember when I first came here, and she was only about three, some one cut a snake in half along the road. And what must the child do but rush from us and pick up one half--by the mercy of God, the tail half! You remember, Hermie? Bart, my love, you can't have forgotten that shocking day? She came running back to us crying dreadfully, and with that horrible thing in her hands. "Mend it, mend it!" she sobbed "oh, poor sing, poor sing, mend it twick!"'

So Mrs. Cameron went to lie on the bed far from Floss, and to sigh occasionally, once or twice to moan, as indeed she could, for her headache was severe.

At the sighs there were restless movements in the cot; at the first moan the little figure climbed over the rail.

'I don't mind bathing your head,' she said, her voice a little unsteady. 'Is it hurting you much?'

'Yes,' sighed the mother, 'it is very bad.'

Floss dipped her handkerchief in the water-jug, and kept laying it softly on the aching forehead. For ten minutes Mrs. Cameron allowed herself to be thus ministered to, and presently the child sat down on the bed, almost within the arm that yearned to circle her. 'Would you like me to fan it?' she whispered. 'Fanning is good.'

'I would rather you laid your little hand on it,' said the mother.

The little hand lay there instantly.

'I think a kiss on it would do it more good than anything else,' whispered the mother, 'just a little one, sweetheart, sweetheart.'

'I couldn't,' quavered Floss. 'I promised faithfly and somenley.'

'Promised who?'

'Me.'

'What do you mean?'

'When you say, "See my finger wet, see it dry, cut my throat suresever I die," you've got to keep to it.'

'And you promised yourself like that that you wouldn't kiss me--me--mamma, who has been away for years and years breaking her heart for her little baby.'

'Oh,' gasped Floss, the fortress nearly down, 'but we might have got dropsy, truly, dropsy and deafness, me and Roly; May Daly's mother says so; you gen'ally get them after measles.'

'But you didn't, you didn't, Tiny. I prayed and prayed over the seas to God to take care of you all for me, and I knew He would. See how well and strong you all are! But ah, I never thought Tiny would break my heart like this.'

Her voice quivered--fell away; Floss, putting up an uncertain hand through the darkness, found the cheek above her quite wet.

'Mother!' she cried, and was face downward in a minute sobbing relievedly on her mother's breast.

When they had lain together happy and quiet for a little time, the mother stirred to go, for Miss Browne must come to bed.

Floss gave her a final hug. 'I do love you,' she said.

'My baby,' murmured the mother. Floss shook back her straight hair and climbed off the bed and got into her own.

'But I'm not going to let that Challis off,' she said. 'I'll just have to take it out of her.'

*CHAPTER XVII*

*Crossing the Veldt*

'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.' 'Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.' 'Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to death and such as are for the sword, to the sword.' _Jeremiah_.

His good horse under him, a thunder-clouded sky above, a strange country astretch on every side, Mortimer was off, despatches in his pocket from his own colonel to the colonel of an Imperial regiment stationed some hundred and thirty miles away.

The day hung heavy from the sky, the land lay sad hearted and patient-eyed beneath it.

Yet now for the first time in all the weeks he had been on African soil Mortimer felt at home with his surroundings, even happy in them. The tumultuous days that lay behind him--he felt that some other, not he, had been living them. The frantic excitement of the send-off, the days at sea, the storm or two, the troubles with the horses, the uneventful landing on the unfamiliar shores, the hurried packing off up country by train, the feverish days and nights in camp at the bewildered little village that saw the armies of the greatest nation on earth swarming about its quiet fields, his first patrol and the fierce whizz and rattle of marvellously harmless bullets from a deserted-looking kopje, his first battle, with its horrid nightmare of flashing lights and thundering guns, its pools of blood, its contorted human faces, its agonised horses writhing in the dust--these were all nothing to him now, but the coloured bits of glass one shakes about in a kaleidoscope.

The smell of tents and of spent gunpowder was no longer in his nostrils; the brown earth alone sent up its homely odour, and he drew the breath of it in with thankfulness. Such a quiet country; silent little farms asleep in the afternoon's sunshine, their crops long since ready, but gathered only by the birds. The cottages, some of them empty of all signs of habitation, some of them with their doors carefully locked on all a woman's treasure of furniture and homely things.

Here and there the sheep had not been driven off, but cropped placidly at the plentiful pasturage. Mortimer's heart went out to the brown soft things.

On and on he rode, finding his way with a bushman's instinct for the right path.

The sky grew grey and more grey.