Part 2

It was not that Mr. Cameron drank or gambled, or possessed indeed any highly coloured sin. He was simply one of the impracticables, the dreamers, that the century has no room for.

He had written verses that the weekly papers had accepted; indeed, a few daintily delicate things had found their way into the best English magazines.

He had painted pictures--a score of them, perhaps; the art societies had accepted three of them, refused nine, and never been even offered the remainder; no one had ever bought one of them.

He had composed some melodies that a musical light passing through Sydney professed to be captivated with, had promised to have published in London, and had forgotten entirely.

When they were unpacking their much-ravelled chattels the first night in Wilgandra, James Cameron came to his great paint-box that the late family vicissitudes had prevented him touching for so long.

'Ah,' he said, and a light of great pleasure came into his grey eyes as he lifted it from the packing-case and rubbed the dust off it with his good cuff--'mine old familiar friend. Why, Molly darling, I shan't know myself with a brush in my hand again. With all the spare time there will be here, I ought to do some good work at last.'

Then his wife laid down the stack of little torn pinafores and patched jackets and frocks she was lifting from another box, and crossed the room and knelt down by her husband's side, just where he was kneeling beside the rough packing-case that had held his treasure.

'Dear one,' she said, 'dear one, Jim, Jim,'--one hand went round his neck, her head, with its warm brown hair that the grey was threading years too soon, pressed against his shoulder, her face, old, young, sad, smiling, looked into his, her brave brown eyes held tears.

'Why, little woman,' he said, 'what is it--what is troubling you? Smiling time has come again, Molly, the worries are all left behind with Sydney.'

'Jim,' she said, and her hand tightened on the paint-box he held, 'Jim, do you know we have five children, five of them, five?'

'Well, girlie,' he said, and got up and sat down on the edge of the box and drew her beside him, 'haven't we an income of two hundred and thirty pounds for them, a princely sum, when we are in a place where there is nothing to tempt us to buy? And we hardly left any debts behind us this time.'

'But, dearest, dearest,' she urged, 'if you get hold of this, we shall not have it a year; you will get up in cloudland and forget to furnish your returns or some such thing, and then you will be dismissed again.'

'Ah, Molly,' he said, his face falling, 'always the gloomy side. Couldn't you have given me a night of happiness?'

A stinging tear fell from the woman's eyes.

'I couldn't, I couldn't,' she said; 'the danger made my heart grow sick again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. _I_ love your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what _have_ they done?'

The man's eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn, anxious-eyed creature.

His face whitened. 'It is worse than drink!' he said.

She acquiesced sadly.

'Nothing else would make me take it from you,' she said, her wet eyes falling again to the paint-box; 'and if it were you and I only against the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!'

He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.

He gave his wife a passionate kiss.

'You are right,' he said, 'take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin from now to be a man.'

Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother's brow were fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a home around her where before had only been a house; the children were taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.

The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.

Then the name began to crop up in the country news of the daily papers. Another wonder-child for Australia had been discovered, it seemed--a certain Challis Cameron, a mite of eight years who was creating much excitement in the township of Wilgandra.

Presently from the larger towns near the paragraphs also were sent. A concert had been given in aid of the Church Fund, and a pleasing programme had been submitted. Among the contributors was a tiny child, Challis Cameron, whose wonderful playing fairly astonished the big audience.

Before Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had quite waked up to the situation, an enthusiastic committee had been formed, a subscription list started and filled, and a sum of sixty pounds thrust into their astonished hands, for the child to be taken to Sydney for lessons.

Nowhere on the earth's surface is there a a land where the people are so eager to recognise musical talent, so generous to help it, as in Australia.

Mr. and Mrs. Cameron looked at each other when they were left alone, a little dismay mingled with their natural pride. And from each other they looked to the paddock beside their house where all the children were playing. This especial child was unconcernedly filling up her doll's tea-cups with a particularly delightful kind of red mud, and then turning out the little shapes and calling Bartie to come and look at her 'jellies.'

Talent they had always known she had, but hardly thought it was anything much above that of any child very fond of music. As a baby she had cried at discords; at three years old she used to stand at the end of the piano and make quite pretty little tunes with one hand in the treble, while Bartie thumped sticky discords in the bass. At four she used to stand beside Hermie, whom her mother was teaching regularly, and in five minutes understood what it took her sister an hour to learn imperfectly. At four, too, her head hidden in the sofa-cushion, she could call out the names of not only single notes but chords also, as Hermie struck them. So her mother undertook her tuition too, and in two years these paragraphs were appearing in the papers.

But to go away with her and stay in Sydney while masters there heard her and taught her! What was to become of the other four, and the husband who needed his wife so much?

'I am afraid we must send her to a boarding-school there,' she faltered. 'How can I leave the home?'

But later the child came and stood at her knee; a tall, thin, little child she was, with fair fine hair that fell curlless down her back, and in her eyes that touch of grey that makes hazel eyes wonderful.

The face was delicately cut, the skin clear and pale; only when the pink ran into it was she pretty.

'I made another song, mamma,' she whispered.

The dying light of the long still day was in the room, very far away in some one's fig-trees the locusts hummed, a sprinkle of sweet rain had fallen, the first for months, and the delicate scent of it came through the window.

'What is it, darling?' whispered the mother.

The child's eyes grew larger, she swayed her tiny body to and fro.

'Oh, the roses, the roses and the shivery grass! Oh, the sea! Oh, the little waves running on the sand! Oh, the wind, blowing the little roses till they die! Oh, the pink roses crying, crying! Oh, the sea! Oh, the waves of the crying sea!'

The mother's arm went round the little body, down into the depths of those eyes she looked, those eyes with their serious brown and grey lights mingling, and for one clear moment there looked back at her the strange little child-soul that dwelt there.

Out at the door there was a clamour, Roly demanding bread-and-jam. From the paddock came a sudden gust of quarrelling, the next-door children, with Hermie, shrill-voiced, arbitrating. Probably down in the street Bartie was fighting any or all of the boys who passed.

'Dear heart!' ran the woman's thoughts. 'My days are too crowded to tend this little soul. Better that she too asked bread-and-jam of me.'

'Play it for me, mother,' said the child, and plucked at her hand. 'I can't; I have tried and tried, and the sea won't cry, only the roses.'

'Nonsense, nonsense!' said the troubled mother; 'run and play till bedtime. Play chasings with Roly and Floss, or be Bartie's horse. Have you forgotten the reins I made him?'

The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.

'I will get the reins,' she said nervously, obediently.

Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or strangers.

Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the shilly-shallying in using it.

So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk beside her in a second-class carriage.

'We shall be back in a month at most,' she called out for the twentieth time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.

But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said, the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to bury her excited little face on her mother's breast.

Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its hands recklessly into its pockets.

Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose of sending the child to Germany.

And now what to do?

The small house at Wilgandra seemed going along very steadily; Mr. Cameron had not once failed to furnish the reports due from him to the Government. The lady-help selected by the mother had the house and the children and the father in a state of immaculate order. She was a magnificently capable, managing woman; every one, Mr. Cameron especially, stood much in awe of her, and unquestioningly obeyed her smallest mandate; even Roly, unbidden, performed magnificent ablutions before he presented himself for a meal, and Hermie was often to be seen surreptitiously trying to mend her own pinafores in the paddock.

Mrs. Cameron could not but confess her place was not crying out for her to the extent she had imagined; indeed, the wonderful lady-help, Miss Macintosh, seemed to have brought the home into a far better state of order and discipline than even she, the mother, had been able to do. Little Floss was a healthy and most independent babe of two; Roly, three years old, was a sturdy mannikin who stared at her stolidly when, her heart full of tears, she stooped over him and asked, did he want her to go away again?

'Mamma mustn't go away in a big ship, must she, sweetheart? You can't do without her again, can you?' she said.

But Roly was a sea-serpent swimming on the dining-room floor, and the interruption irritated him.

'Yes,' he assented, with swift cheerfulness, 'mamma go in big ship. Good-bye, good-bye!'--and he waved an impatient hand to get rid of her.

Hermie and Bartie had just started to a good private school near at hand, and the teaching--all honour to the mistress!--was of so skilful and delightful a nature that the two could hardly summon patience to wait for breakfast ere they set out for the happy place. So Challis's claims tugged hard.

'But you--what of you, my husband?' she said. 'You cannot spare me; it is absurd for you to even think of it!'

But he was excited and greatly moved at the thought of his child's genius. Deep down, in his heart was the knowledge that had he himself been given a chance he could have made a name for himself in this world. But there was always uncongenial work for him, always something else to be done, 'never the time and the place and the loved one all together.'

'Let us give her her chance,' he said. 'It is early morning with her. Don't let ours be the hands to block her, so that when evening comes she can only stand wistful.'

So they sailed away, the mother and the wonder-child; behind them the plain little home, before, the Palaces of Music.

*CHAPTER III*

*The Second Lady-Help*

'The droop, the low cares of the mouth, The trouble uncouth 'Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain To put out of its pain.'

And for actually six months that home survived! After that the crumbling was to be expected, for some discerning man came along, and married the marvellous lady-help out of hand.

Mr. Cameron spent five pounds in the purchase of a pair of _entree_ dishes for a wedding-present, and was unhappy that he could so very inadequately reward her great services. But there was a curious air of buoyancy and relaxation observable in him the first day the house was free of her.

At tea he got _The Master of Ballantrae_ out, and read boldly all through the meal, a thing he had not ventured to do for eighteen months. And out in the frozen shrubbery at midnight, with the Master and Mr. Henry thrusting at each other, he spilled the tea that Hermie passed him. When he saw the wide brown stain he had made on the table's whiteness--although the ridiculous fancy pursued him that it was the Master's life-blood smirching the snow--he looked up startled, full of apologies. But there was only Hermie's childish face in front of him; and though she said, 'Oh, papa!' as became a president of the tea-tray, she looked away the next second to laugh at Roly, who had spread his bread with jam on both sides, and did not know how best to hold it. And Cameron felt so much a man and master of his fate once more, that he stretched right across the table to help himself to butter, instead of politely requesting the passing of it. For three months the household ran a merry course. Hermie, a bright little woman of eleven, begged her father to let her 'keep house' and give the orders to Lizzie, the very young general servant.

The father bent his thoughts five minutes to the problem; Miss Macintosh had been away now a fortnight, and everything seemed going along really delightfully. What need to break the sweet harmony of the days by getting in some person whose principles counted reading at table and spilling tea among the cardinal vices?

And Lizzie, the State girl, was at his elbow with a shining face. She was fifteen, she said--fifteen was real old! Now why should the master go getting in any more of them lady-helps, who did nothing but scold from morning to night? She, Lizzie, would undertake all there was to do in this place 'on her head.'

Cameron smiled at the eager girls, and, while hardly daring to consent, put off for a further day the engagement of a successor to Miss Macintosh. And the three months ran gaily along, and still Hermie sat importantly at the head of the table, and still her father read, and still Roly spread his bread upon both sides.

There was always a good table--far better than either the mother or lady-help had kept.

For the family grocer had an alluring way of suggesting delicacies, when he came for his orders that certainly no mistress of eleven or handmaid of fifteen could withstand.

'Almonds?' he would say. 'Very fine almonds this week, Miss Cameron--three pounds did you say--yes? And what about jam? I have it as low as fivepence a tin, but there is no knowing what cheap fruit these makers use.'

'Oh,' Hermie would say, 'I must have very good jam, of course, or it might make my little sister ill! How much is good jam?'

'There's strawberry conserve, a shilling a tin,' the man would say--'pure fruit and pure sugar, boiled in silver saucepans.'

'Silver saucepans! That couldn't hurt Flossie! We will have six tins of that, please,' the small house-woman would answer. Then there were biscuits; Miss Macintosh, frugal soul, only gave Wilgandra, when it came calling, coffee-biscuits at sevenpence a pound with its afternoon tea. Hermie regaled it upon macaroons at half a crown. Then Lizzie would have her say. What was the use of cooking meat and vegetables on washing-day, ironing-day, and Saturdays, she would say, when you could get them tinned from a grocer? So tins of tongue, and whitebait, and pressed meats, French peas, asparagus, and such, were added weekly to the order, the grocer sending to Sydney for the unusual things. 'We are saving a lady-help's wages,' Hermie would say, 'and it saves the butcher's bills, so it is not extravagant a bit.'

It was not until the third month that the day of reckoning came. Then the grocer, grown a trifle anxious over his unusual bill, which no one was settling, ventured to accost Mr. Cameron one day on his verandah and present it.

'No haste, of course,' he said politely, 'only as your good lady and Miss Macintosh always paid monthly, I thought you might not like it going on much longer.'

When he had bowed himself out, Mr. Cameron rubbed his suddenly troubled brow a moment. Money, bills! The thought had actually never crossed his mind all these three months! His wife first and then Miss Macintosh had always managed the finances of the family. Indeed, one of Mrs. Cameron's injunctions to the lady-help had been, 'When Mr. Cameron's cheque for his quarter's salary comes, please be sure to remind him to pay it into the bank.' And Miss Macintosh had never failed to do so, nor to apply for the twelve pounds monthly for payment of the household bills.

He went into the dining-room and began to rummage helplessly about his writing-table. To save his life he could not recollect what had become of his last cheque, for there was a conviction on his mind that he had never paid it into his account.

Hermie was at the table, Mrs. Beeton's cookery-book spread open before her; over her shoulders peeped the heads of Bartie and Roly, absorbed in the contemplation of the coloured plate picturing glorified blancmanges and jellies. For was not to-morrow Roly's fifth birthday, for which great preparation must be made by the young mother of the house?

'Children,' said the father at last entreatingly, 'come and help me; I have lost a very important envelope.'

For over an hour did that family search from one end of the house to the other. It was Lizzie's happy thought that discovered it.

'A long blue envelope, with no stamp on it and just printing instead--why, there was one like that in the kitchen drawer with the dinners on it,' she said.

She rushed for it, and met her anxious master with it held triumphantly out.

The back of the envelope bore dinners for the week in Hermie's round careful hand.

_Mon._--Roast fowl, mashed potatoes, collyflower, pink jellie and gem cakes.

_Tues._--Tong, blommange and strawberry jam, rainbow cake.

_Wed._--Sardenes, current buns, yelow jelly and merangs.

Mr. Cameron thrust a trembling hand into the depths of it, and, to his exquisite relief, was able to draw out the cheque for his quarterly sixty pounds.

In danger of the kitchen fire, in danger of the dust-box, in danger of Roly's passion for paper-tearing, in danger of all the wind-storms that had sprung up and torn raging through the place, in danger of all these for three months, and still safe!

The relief took the man back into the dining-room, responsibility for his family to the front for the third time in his life.

He ran through the bills with a sinking heart. Instead of twelve pounds a month that Miss Macintosh's carefulness had made suffice, little Hermie had brought up the totals to twenty-eight--eighty-four pounds for the quarter, to be deducted from the sixty pounds that must also pay rent and clothes and many other things.

The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the changed meals as much as the boys--Cameron had quite a boyish appetite for good things, and Hermie's brilliant menus had been delightful to him after a long course of Miss Macintosh's boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle roly-polies, and milk sagos.

'A first-rate little manager,' he always called her, when he passed up his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more expensive than rhubarb or rice.

'Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!' she said, awake at last to the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction, and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.

'But I am eleven,' she kept repeating sadly, 'eleven, papa. I ought to have known.'

There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys' school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother's conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.

But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over heavy.

But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.

The father's blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.

'Is my son a thief,' he said, 'that he should treat me so? Or is it he despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?'

With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.

No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas, when the boy marched in with the year's prize for punctuality under his arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.

'I like a man of honour,' he said. But the two events together, the grocer's bill and the master's call, decided the father he must enter into submission and have another lady-help, for the children's sake.