Chapter V: Part 5

'"If only his conscience could be touched!" murmured Mr. Ferrier. Would the Major allow him to give Adolphe some little books on the evils of alcohol? Certainly; but the Major thought it was only fair to tell Mr. Ferrier that Adolphe was always ready to sign a pledge against intoxicants. But when he is tipsy, next day he explains with great fluency how the necessity for nervine aliment is insurmountable in a climate like this.

'No; I am not going to Laurette at as early a date as was fixed, because it is now quite evident that mother is out of health. I cannot go until she is better. Dr. Stein is in attendance, and I am head nurse, Allie bottle-washer, Kirsty major-domo. Dr. Stein tells me that our friend Professor Kellwitz contemplates matrimony--at sixty-three, and for the first time!--and to a lady who has been his intimate friend for over twenty years. Is it not dreadful to spoil so tried a friendship in this ruthless way?'

*CHAPTER XV.*

'Fairacre, 1st June.

'Poor, dear Mr. Ferrier has had a severe disappointment with Adolphe, who, under the ex-missionary's unwearied efforts, became not only a total abstainer, but to some extent a lecturer. He devoutly read Mr. Ferrier's good little temperance booklets--nay, learnt much of them by heart; so that when it occurred to some zealous teetotalers to put him on the platform, Adolphe became at once very popular, and was always greeted with cheers. No doubt, like M. Jourdain's dancing-master, who hungered after _un peu de gloire_, Adolphe found that _applaudissements me touchent_. Last Tuesday he went with Mr. Ferrier to address an evening temperance assemblage at a little township four miles away. It seems that on these occasions it is customary sometimes to make certain experiments with alcohol to show its evil effects. When it came to Adolphe's turn to address the meeting, he gave what Mr. Ferrier called "an able and earnest address." At a certain point he broke an egg into a glass and then poured some brandy on it to show what a deleterious effect it had on the albumen. The audience cheered lustily, and were much impressed. But when the next speaker rose, Adolphe was seen to slip behind him and swallow the experiment in a few gulps. Loud expressions of disapproval arose, and Adolphe instantly came forward to defend himself from the "calumny." It was then apparent that he must have been previously imbibing, and, in fact, he had taken a quarter of a bottle of the Major's best brandy to make experiments which should revolt the popular mind against "nervine aliment." When he returned home that night he went weeping into the Major's room, imploring him not to take any more stimulant of any kind, and holding himself up as an example of its evil effects--and all through swallowing a small experiment by an unaccountable error!

'Two days ago I was on a visit at Mrs. Marwood's, and went from there to what the profane called a "disorganized charity meeting," along with Mabel Towers. We, too, went as Mrs. Marwood's deputies. But what singular instructions we received: "Here, you see, girls, is my list," said Mrs. Marwood, producing two octavo sheets with various names and figures, etc.; "you see, there's a large committee of us, and we have to be very business-like. Here are the numbers of things to be given opposite each applicant's name. We decided that at a meeting some days ago. Sometimes we run short, and are obliged to give a pair of trousers instead of a dress; but if any complaints are made, give them a form to fill up and send in, for we have to be very strict and accurate. And if you happen to give too many things to one person, mind you give nothing to the next. Mrs. Benjamin Ezra is to be there to-day; and you must keep an eye on her that she does not give away my share. Her plan is to give heaps away till everything is gone. She either loses her list, or else never looks at it. This is very awkward in a society on such strict business principles as the organized relief."

'Yes; so determined are we to imitate all the charities of the mother-country, that before this "great fertile young Hercules" is yet fifty years old, we not only provide relief works and soup-kitchens and free breakfasts, as we did last winter, but this season we have also an organized relief society, which, among other nefarious tricks, distributes cast-off clothing. But, my dear, I warn you, do not send any money to the philanthropic novelties of our Metropolis. They are frightfully mischievous, and the really deserving poor do not go near them. There is quite enough discriminating benevolence everywhere in the country to cope with all honest poverty. It is when we begin to tease charity-mongers with salaries that impostors and the cunningly vicious have their innings, and that the unabashed professional pauper appears in the land. We have now not only the weaklings, that have been industriously sent us by emigration agents, but the greasy loafers of other provinces who are attracted to ours by our notoriously indiscriminate distribution of alms. Let me tell you of the two first cases on our list, which may, I believe, be taken as average specimens of what the rest were.

'No. 1 applicant: Mrs. O'Mulligan, with two girls.--Causes of destitution: Husband, an ex-publican, long out of employment, large family, furniture seized for rent. Mrs. O'Mulligan soon set us to work, I can assure you. We were the first to arrive, and were ushered into a room lined with wide shelves, full of clothing of all kinds, a great deal of it as good as new. It was like a clothes pawn-shop without the pathos, fortunately also without the dirt. Mrs. O'M. was down for one woman's dress, two ditto for girls; one man's coat, one ditto trousers, one ditto boots. She and the girls followed us into the clothes-room. We soon found dresses for them. Then came the mother's turn; but as she weighed over fourteen stone, it was no light task to fit her. "Shure, now, and you see for yourselves, young ladies, that wouldn't kape on me little finger. Yes, that's a foine thick stuff; but where 'ud I be in it?--outside the most av it." At last she selected a pale blue cashmere, not nearly as large as some useful dresses she had rejected. Mrs. Marwood said this choice must have been made with a view to selling or pawning, and no doubt that was the explanation. Then came the husband's turn. He must have been phenomenal in his proportions, judging by the yards of tape with which Mrs. O'M. measured the upper parts of trousers we turned over for her. At last came a pair that looked as though it must be the gift of a benevolent elephant; so this she put aside. Then she pulled an endless sort of string from her pocket, which turned out to be the measure for a pair of boots. Of course there were none of such an impossible length.

'"It's not, thin, that Mr. O'Mulligan has such a large fut at all at all, but he gets the swelled rheumatzises so bad. Indade, he had an ilegant fut in his young days. But what with the throubles and the sorrow, they seems to git larger ivery year." As the string was twenty inches long, it was evident some mistake was made. It was, in fact, "the lingth av little Paddy's throusers." After all the articles for which this woman was put down had been produced, we politely asked her to take them away. "Is it that this is all I'm to git?" she asked, with a tragic air. We asked her what else she wanted, and she said: "I have six helpless childer, and I want a complate shuit for each. Ye see thim two girrls wid me? Wan av thim has a good ulster on, an' that's a lind; the other, she has a good pair av boots, an' thim is a lind; so is the hat wid a feather on top av my head, an' the gloves on me hands, an' the mantle on me back wid a bead collar." She raised her voice and she flourished her arms as she spoke. Finally she took up three pairs of boys' trousers that were near her and went away, saying she would put us in the papers for cruelty to an "onfortinate rispictable woman wid a husband that had seen better days, and a large family and no support." She turned back at the door and said: "Ye have a great roomful av things sint by the charitable, an' ye sind me away wid a few miserable rags for reasons best beknowns to yerselves!"

'Our next case was a small thin woman with an extraordinary facility for tears. She wept copiously the moment we spoke to her. She never had accepted charity before in all her life, and it was very hard to begin now. With this she made a dart at a heap of boys' shirts that were near her quite new, Mr. Marwood and other wholesale drapers having sent various parcels of clothing from their warehouses. She wiped her eyes, and folded up three shirts. She was down on the list as a widow with one boy; name, Eliza Trimton; and the written oracle restricted her to two articles for herself and three for the boy. I explained this to her, and added that we were bound to keep to our list. Yes, of course--she knew that; and she began to shed tears afresh, and pounced on an elaborate tea-gown that had been sent by someone who had more money than wit. Next she fixed her gaze on a very good ulster, and she instantly began to cry afresh. No one, she said, but those that had seen better days knew how bitter it was to accept alms. With that she folded up the ulster, and put it with the other spoils. "It comes very hard to accept charity for the first time," she murmured, seizing on a blue cloud, a boy's vest, and a pair of merino stockings all at one swoop. For the second time I read over to her the articles to which she was entitled, and thought she had taken the hint, for she began to tie up her bundle. But presently her tears flowed, and she picked up a woman's hat, a boy's greatcoat, and a pair of boots in rapid succession. "But really, you know, this is a great deal more than your share," said Mabel. "More than my share!" retorted Mrs. Trimton, wiping her eyes vigorously. "Who took it on theirselves to know all I want? I never breathed it to anyone I needed so much. Never having accepted charity before, my feelings was too delicate-like." With that she dried her eyes and went away.

'By this time most of the committee-ladies had arrived, and one of them said, as so many applicants were coming to-day, they had better not be admitted into the room where the clothing was. "Of course that is the proper plan," said another lady; "but there will be a heap of letters in the papers saying the public gave so generously to the clothing fund, and that the poor people were not allowed to fit themselves." However, the applicants were finally made to wait outside, and served in their turn alphabetically, an arrangement that gave great umbrage to some. I heard one woman say it was a real shame she should have to wait so long because her name began with Ho. Another woman was in tears because a baby's hood given to her had no pink lining. A neighbour of hers, she said, had one from the Belief Society last week lined with beautiful pink silk, fit for a little princess! "Look at this," said another recipient of aid, holding up a child's handsome scarlet mantle. "There's where the tassel should be, and I won't go away till it's found." Still another woman spoke in broken accents of despair of a pair of shoes that were given to her with one buckle missing. It would be unfair, however, not to mention one old woman who seemed to be quite grateful. We came upon her in the lobby rearranging a man's greatcoat and some other articles of male attire. Someone near her asked if any mistake had been made. "Yes, my dear," she said, in a semi-confidential whisper. Her face was very red, and she carried with her a strong odour of some liquor. "There's been some blessed mistake, and I'm just hurrying away before it's found out. I can get far more for these than for any flimsy perticoats they'd give an old woman like me."

'I am this instant going into the Park Lands with Dorothy to see if a magpie does not give us an act out of a bird comedy. By the way, talking of birds, the last time Mr. Lindsay was here he told me a very Haroun al Raschid anecdote of a man who lost a very peculiar sleeve-link on the Murray Flats, and found it a year afterwards in the playhouse of a silky bower-bird, dangling beside the capsule of a brandy-bottle and the scarlet flowers of the pretty native wistaria. Mem. for my note-book--Would this make a peg on which to hang an alibi? I asked Mr. Lindsay the question, and he promptly said: "Oh, if it was to save a fellow from swinging, of course it would never be found." Now, you know how little speculative or "morbid" he is. Is it possible that life itself is often more morbid than any reflections regarding it?'

*CHAPTER XVI*

'Fairacre, 9th June.

'I cannot report that mother is better; but she insists on thinking of other people as much as if she were quite well. Poor Thomson is failing rapidly. Yesterday at her wish I spent part of the day in taking care of him. I must tell you what happened. After I had chatted with him for a little he said: "There is a chapter, Miss Stella, as I liked when I was a boy--somewhere in the Old Bible part--'tis about being took up by the hair, and looking in at places, and seeing the women-folk weep for Thomas. I'd like you to read it to me."

'Would you be able to find a chapter in the Bible by this? I doubt whether I would, only that lately I have been rather fascinated by Ezekiel. It was the eighth chapter he meant--where the likeness as the appearance of fire put forth the form of a hand, and lifted the prophet up by a lock of his hair. "Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz." "I like them parts o' the Bible, so strange, and yet they seems quite real like." You may be sure that I did not attempt to foist any interpretation upon the text. There is a point at which those who have read much of the best, and those who have read very little, seem to meet--enjoyment of vague mystery and wonder, leading to a subtle sense of the marvels that lurk under the masking raiment of common-place. Just as I rose to go, the storm, which had been gathering all the morning, began to come down in torrents. The rain beat sharply against the window-panes, and the room suddenly darkened. I noticed the sick man gazing at the window with a very sombre look, an expression that had in it something--how shall I say it?--more tragic than poverty or disease. "Miss Stella," he said in a low voice, "do you believe as them that is gone could ever come back from the other world?" "I don't know. I have often wondered whether they do or can," I answered, awed by a sudden conviction that the man, to use our nurses' phrase, had at some time "seen something." He moved restlessly, as though his head were uneasy. I smoothed and shifted his pillow, and then to my dismay I saw that great tears were rolling down his cheeks. No doubt he had moved so that I should not see them, and I had done the very thing I ought not to have done. Some strong wave of emotion swept over him, his bosom heaved convulsively, and he sobbed half aloud.

'I felt horribly distressed, and not knowing what else to do, I tidied up the fireplace and put some wood on the fire. "I saw his face as plain as daylight at that very window, a week ago," he said, when he recovered himself. And then he told me this little story. He came to South Australia twenty years ago, a lad of eighteen. He was for some weeks a knock-about hand on a sheep-station near Jarranda Bay. One of the shepherds suddenly left, and he was sent to take his place. A few days after he went to the Stone Hut, as it was called, he found an old black woman, who was dying, and had with her only her daughter, a half-caste, a slip of a girl of fourteen. They were beside a little creek, and had had nothing to eat for three days except a big snake the girl had killed near the water. They were on their way with other blacks to a great corroborree that was to be held eighty miles further on, when the mother was taken ill and left behind with her only daughter Caloona. Thomson fed them, and gave them all the comforts he could. In a week the old black woman died, and then the girl lived with him. He engaged himself as shepherd for two years, and stayed altogether for eight. Caloona, he said, turned out mighty handy, and she was always so wonderfully thankful. "When you told me about that little dog of yourn, Miss Stella--Fly you call him--I thought he was for all the world like my poor Caloona. She would follow me about, and wanted to wait on me hand and foot, and thought so much on me. I tuk to reading the New Testament, and minding all the good things my grandmother used to tell me. Caloona soon learnt to cook and do things much handier nor many a white woman, and she kept the hut as neat and clean as a new pin. I bought clothes and things for her from a hawker, and, if you believe me, Miss Stella, she looked much prettier in them than many an altogether white girl. She would be up and working before it was light, so as to have breakfast and dinner cooked and come out with me after the sheep. Even when the little boy was born she stopped in the hut but a few days. She was that proud of the little chap--he was fairer than you could believe--and he grew very fast. He was out all day long in the woods with his mother and me, and when it rained we just made a nia-mia of boughs for him and put a 'possum skin over it. He was sharper nor a needle; and many's the time he made us lie down on the grass roaring with laughing at his old-fashioned ways.

'"But onfortinately as he grew older he showed signs of a very bad temper, and he would turn and strike his mother for the least thing. I could not stand that, but Caloona only laughed, and that encouraged him. That was what come between us. I allays heard as mixed bloods was worse nor full blacks or full whites, and I was afraid how the youngster might turn out. When we was out shepherdin', and in the evenings, Caloona used to tell me tales o' her mother's tribe, how they quarrelled and fought, and in the end murdered each other, sometimes, perhaps, for the sake of an emu-skin. As the boy got older I couldn't bear to hear her laugh over them things. Then I thought, 'It's no use beginning to teach the boy if the mother knows no better.' So I began to learn her to read and write. She was not long in learning to read out of a big Testament my mother give to me when I was leaving the old country. But she didn't seem able to take in as Jesus Christ was man and God, and she gave Him a native name as vexed me--meaning 'him as makes believe.' And I suppose I couldn't explain proper, for when I tried most hard she would go off in a fit of laughing, and the youngster would wake up and laugh too, fit to crack his sides, and somehow, when the two laughed in that way, it used to rile me oncommon. The boy was very sharp--everyone as saw him said that--but somehow he was sharpest in doing things he oughter not to do; and when I was trying to teach him like he allays seemed duller, and given to cryin', and his mother used to watch me, her hands all of a tremble at whatever she was doing.

'"Well, Miss Stella, to make a long story short, when the boy was a few weeks over seven I found him setting a puppy on to some sheep with young lambs. I took him by the hand to the hut, and before punishing him I asked why he did such a thing. His mother stood there shiverin', looking at us, and the boy burst out cryin' and denied it hard an' fast. He said he was callin' the dog off. This riled me so much that on the instant I give him a bad thrashin'--worse, I know, nor I should have--so that the mother turned on me very fierce like. I got into a bad Scot, an' told her if she didn't let me bring up the boy proper she had better clear. In course, I never meaned a word of it, and never thought as Caloona would take it to heart. But the boy sulked and would eat no food, an' made believe he was very badly hurt. God knows, perhaps he was, though I didn't believe a word of it, an' I felt very hard agin him for telling such barefaced lies. Next day his mother stayed in the hut with him, and wouldn't even look at me when I was going out. When I came home that night they were both gone, an' from that day to this I never set eyes on them. 'What became of them, an' where are they now?' that's what I says to myself over an' over agin. An', then, a week ago, before the lamp was lighted, I saw the boy out there at the window in the rain as plain as I see you now, Miss Stella.

'"This morning the Canon said as I ought to take the Sacryment, and I was thinking over things. The moment I heered your voice I says to myself, 'I'll tell Miss Stella; she'll understand as 'twasn't through my being such a bad lot.' I haven't got very much longer to live, and I've many times heard that at the last people felt quieter like if they told all that was on their minds. I couldn't tell the Canon, Miss Stella; for in course he'd tell his wife, an' then Lord only knows how many melanchorly psalmses she'd read to me next day! An' yet 'twas through trying to do my best that it all come out wrong, as it were. I never told a word of this to my wife; what 'd be the good? 'Twould only fret her."

'The more simply anything is told, the more is lost in re-telling it with the cold little snout of a pen. The very _mise-en-scene_--the homely little room--the door leading into the kitchen behind, where the worn-out wife rested--everything so quiet and common-place--the rain dashing against the small window, through which the sick man fancied he saw his half-savage boy out in the gloom--all helped to make a quiet but forceful seizure on the heart. Thomson had hardly ceased speaking when Mr. Ferrier entered. The moment I saw him it flashed across my mind that the half-caste boy he told us of some time before might be Thomson's child. The poor man was so exhausted that in a few minutes he fell fast asleep. I motioned Mr. Ferrier to the window, and asked him if he knew anything of that lad's mother. Yes; she had been at the Mandurang Mission six months before she died. Her native name was Caloona. I told him Thomson's story as briefly as possible. "Oh, how wonderful are the ways of the Lord!" he ejaculated at the close--not very relevantly, I thought.

'The sick man was soon wakened by a fit of coughing. When this was over, Mr. Ferrier took his hand and said: "My friend, instead of reading to-day, will you let me tell you a little incident that happened at the Mandurang Mission Station?" Thomson nodded a weary assent, as if he knew beforehand that this could have no interest for him. I was about to slip away, but Thomson asked me to stay a little longer. The ex-missionary's little incident was soon told: How, late at night, a young half-caste woman, with a boy of nine, came to the mission spent with illness and weary wandering. She had lived for years with white people, and then gone back to her tribe. But the savage life was too much for her, and when her strength began to fail she found her way to the mission, anxious to have her boy properly cared for after her death.

'When he learned the names of the mother and son, Thomson's strength seemed to return to him in a strange way. He half sat up, his face all alight, asking a torrent of questions.

'With the tenderness of a gentle-hearted woman Mr. Ferrier gave full details. He divined that this strong, rugged nature, wearied with mortal illness, stricken with remorse for the past, craved hungrily for all that could be told him of the poor fugitive mother and her boy.

'"A few days before her death she seemed to wander," said Mr. Ferrier, "and she kept on saying: 'We got back to the Stone Hut one evening--big one tired and hungry; but strange man there, and we went away. Me want to tell masser boy very good now; but masser gone.'" There was the sound of deep sobs in the room, and Mr. Ferrier's voice failed him. I went to the little window and looked out. The sky was overcast, and on the horizon sheet-lightning played in wide flames. There was thunder in the air, and the atmosphere was heavy, and made me feel that the world is full of desolate women and fugitive children. The murmur of voices went on after a pause--question and answer--and then the one grave voice, with its fervent accents:

'"They are buried in one grave in the mission churchyard at Mandurang. Not far from them my own wife and only daughter lie buried. Ah, my dear friend, their dust reposes there in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the just. In the words of a holy man of old, 'Every body, whether it is dried up into dust or dissolved into moisture, or is compressed into ashes, or is attenuated into smoke, is withdrawn from us, but is reserved for God in the custody of the elements.'" I do not know that poor Thomson took in much of this. "She went back again--she went back again," he said several times, in a low voice.

"'I knew well the youngster was dead ever since I seen him at the window," he whispered to me as I went away. I spare you my reflections, as I walked home in the gathering dusk, on the strangely pathetic threads mingled in the yarn of all lives when we know something of their inward history. What passionate affections to end in a little mound of earth! What fears and agitation and anguish that avail nothing! What vivid hopes held close in the heart, only to vanish fruitlessly as morning mist! What glowing plans, stretching out into the coming years, to end in bitter disillusion and disenchantment with life!

*CHAPTER XVII.*

It was the first week in July before Stella left home for her visit to Melbourne and Lullaboolagana. This delay was occasioned by her mother's illness, which at first seemed trifling, but eventually developed into slow fever. At its worst--and the worst lasted four or five days--the gravest fears were entertained as to the issue. During this time Stella could not be prevailed upon to leave her mother day or night, except at very short intervals. She could sleep only by snatches, and affirmed that she was more rested in the sick-room than she could be elsewhere. Periodical sleeplessness was the only ailment from which she had suffered since her childhood, and at this anxious period her incapacity for sleep took a very pronounced form.

As soon as the invalid was fit to travel, it was arranged that she should accompany Mrs. Raymond, the widowed daughter, to her Coonjooree property--a small sheep-station in the Tatiara district, distant from Adelaide by rail half a day's journey and a quarter of a day's drive.

'You look as much in want of rest as I do, my child,' the mother said fondly, when the preliminary arrangements were made, and Stella sat, pencil in hand, jotting down memoranda of the things Maisie, who was to accompany her in the capacity of maid, should pack up for two or three months' absence from home?

'Do I look like an invalid, mother, really?' she said with a bright smile. 'Esther, why don't you ask me to your sanatorium for the sake of my health? It will sound so dignified.'

'My dear, you know I would be only too happy; but Mrs. Tareling is in despair at your already missing the most brilliant part of the season.'

'Yes; and to make up for missing more, I shall come to Coonjooree for a week. You were afraid to tempt me? Have you not yet learned that to be tempted and fall is our one form of wisdom in some things?'

'Well, that is a delightful item added to our programme,' said Mrs. Raymond. 'The old place will be almost forsaken for two months.'

'Yes, July and August. The memoirs of the Courtland family during this time, in the year of grace 188-, were strewn with events. Fairacre, the paternal home, inhabited only by Tom and Alice, in the guardianship of the Misses Kendall. Esther, I should like to be an invisible onlooker during this regime. Oh, can't you imagine how the two dear Quaker doves will spend their time in chivying after Allie with wraps when she goes out into the garden with Felix? And then there will be Tom and Fanny--of course they will be engaged before we come back.'

'And you, my dear--what will have happened in your case?' said the elder sister wistfully.

'Oh, I shall be two or three months older!' laughed Stella.

There was a difference between her and Mrs. Raymond of thirteen years, but there was a bond of sympathy between the two which was independent of all differences of age and experience.

Stella's week at Coonjooree lengthened into ten days.

'Laurette will understand the fascination that the Mallee Scrub has for one,' said Stella, laughing, as she recalled Mrs. Tareling's undisguised horror of Cannawijera, the station settled on her by her father, and distant from Coonjooree about fifteen miles.

And yet to many the Mallee Scrub, like all deserts, comes to have an inexplicable charm. To realize the change that may gradually be wrought on the mind in this respect, one should, perhaps, enter the Mallee country when the mask of night is falling on the land, and travel for hours under a moon struggling ineffectually for supremacy with driving clouds. In the uncertain light all that can then be seen is an endless succession of densely-scrubbed, low, undulating rises, or plains that stretch indefinitely on every side with clumps of scrub cypress rising here and there above the Mallee bushes. The traveller should further be a guest at one of those home-stations in which a stranger asks himself incredulously what he has ever done to deserve the unbounded hospitality and kindness showered on him. It should be winter-time--or what stands for winter in this dry waterless region. He should waken at sunrise, and gaze for the first time at the Mallee Scrub in the light of day through an eastern window. And there the scene that meets his eye, far and wide as he may have wandered, will be stored in the cells of memory for all time to come. The sight has in it something which compels him to dwell on it long and fixedly, and turn to it again and again, while a strange weight falls on the heart, and the mind for some time vainly seeks a clue to the mingled and contradictory feelings that are awakened.

There, as far as the eye can reach, lies tier beyond tier in endless succession, low chains of ranges, with dense gray-green bushes, tall brown clumps of grass-trees, with patches of white and yellow sand showing between. During winter in the early mornings the sky is often one unbroken mass of gray clouds. As the sullen red in the east that proclaims sunrise dies away, there is no tint or suggestion of colour anywhere visible in heaven or earth. All around, without break or alloy, are the uniform monotonous tones of sand and gray-green bushes; above is the more sombre gray of clouds, in which the eye vainly loses itself, seeking for a lighter tinge. They are so austere and thickly piled--those clouds that promise rain, but pass away oftentimes week after week without a shower. They hide the blue of heaven, and the sunshine, and rigidly shroud the horizons, as if to make the picture more ineffaceable--an arid, formless mass above a sombre, colourless desolation. It is as though one came upon the rigid skeleton of a spent world, or upon a living presentment of primeval chaos, when the earth was without form and void.

A bitter loneliness falls upon the spirit. All the well-loved sunny nooks of the earth seem so far away. Life seems so fleeting--happiness so unreal. The mind is thrown in on itself, and an immense ennui takes possession of the heart--clutches it, oppresses it, as though it were suddenly touched by a heavy hand. It is as though all that men most cling to in life passed away like mist before the sun, till nothing remained but this arid wilderness, without the song of bird, or sound of water, or gleam of flower, or even the over-arching foliage of a tree. In these regions, severe and desolate as the Dead Sea wilderness, in which the Son of Man was assailed by the great enemy of souls, the petty distinctions for which men and women scramble and cheat and lie in everyday life shrink into trivial toys. These vast parched domains, lying in all their nakedness under a sunless sky, have nothing to befool the soul. They have a terrible sincerity in whose cold light not the picture which we so fondly weave of life, but life itself in all its pale disenchantment, makes a sudden seizure on the questioning spirit. In such an hour the multitudinous trifles that choke the soul like the white ashes of a burnt-out wood-fire are blown away as with the breath of a strong west wind winnowing the chaff from the grain. In face of so stern a solitude we cease to deceive ourselves.

The country is not wild. It is in appearance sterile to a degree; it is tame; it is dull; it is oftentimes solitary as a tomb. Few see it for the first time without experiencing a causeless melancholy--nay, often dark forebodings, as of some dread disaster slowly drawing nearer; and yet this wears away, and the country (how is one to account for it?) comes to have a fascination of its own. It is so silent, so severe, so implacable in its veracity. It has no arts with which to allure, no winning surprises, no breaks in its uniformity through the greater part of the year. And though at first this scenery agitates and weighs on those who lie open to the charms that usually draw us to nature, yet after the first shock is over this strange landscape bends the mind to itself, and gains a subtle hold on it--a hold based not so much on tenderness as confidence. It fulfils far more than it promises. Notwithstanding its parched and barren appearance, a little irrigation makes it blossom into wonderful fertility: and though no water is ever seen on its surface, it is believed by those who know the region best that great reservoirs extend far below these infinite leagues of sandy ground. The theory is so far borne out by the fact that, where artesian wells have been sunk in this district, water has been struck in overflowing abundance. Fruit-trees planted where water is available are in four and five years loaded with luscious fruit. Here, as in so many other directions, Nature waits to be governed by obedience to her conditions. Dig, and ye shall find; water, and ye shall reap. If the principle that anyone who makes wasteland productive became its owner were enforced, the Mallee Scrub, instead of being a barren waste, even in appearance, might soon become a great granary of fruit and corn. But even in its present state it has a brief hour of beauty. In the zenith of the Australian spring this scrub is in places sheeted in blossoms: brilliant little orchids; scarlet and yellow pea-like flowers; the pale lemon blossom of the native clematis; the small purple geraniums, with their poignant fragrance when crushed under foot--these, and many other wild blossoms as yet, alas! nameless to the laity, invest the country with a charm all the more deeply felt because of the contrast between these fleeting weeks and the sombre monotony which prevails during the rest of the year.

In July the country was at its dreariest, for the rains which fall, oftentimes with tropical fury, are instantly absorbed by the sand, whose thirst is never satiated; and though there is then more herbage than through the drought of the summer, the uniformity of tints is seldom varied. The sombre olive of the Mallee shrubs; the sterner green of the dwarf honeysuckle, whose pointed leaves when ruffled by the wind show their silver under-lining, like pale buds that never blossom; the solemn deep-sea hue of the scrub cypress; the pallid sage-green of the salt-bush--all are minor tones in the same sad, monotonous, lacklustre hues; yet day by day, as Stella became more intimate with the Mallee Scrub, its nameless attractions grew on her. And one day, as she rambled miles away with the two elder children, she discovered a whole range-side of early epacris. The brief blossoming season of the region was yet two months off, yet here were acres of this radiant native heath, white, and scarlet, and tender pink. The feast this made for the eyes in the midst of the harsh setting all round made Stella feel as if for the first time she knew what the joy of colour meant. And then they were constantly coming upon stores of white immortelles--those snowy blossoms of the desert, so lightly rooted in the sand, it seems as though a passing breath would bear them afar. But no; though the sand-laden wind blows shrill and high, the everlasting-flowers of the wilderness remain in myriads of loosely-rooted clumps. The snowy coronals of silky petals round their deep-gold hearts, on brownish dry stalks, with a few slender leaflets sadly gray-green as the salt-bush itself, all give a tender charm to the flowers. They are scentless, and have none of the dewy bloom of ordinary blossoms; but, seeing that their faces are seldom wet with rain, and that the tips of their roots never touch water, the marvel is that their pensive radiance ever illuminates this parched-up land. Of all the flowers that grow, they are those that one may pluck with least compunction. Weave them into photograph-wreaths or thimble-baskets, and at the end of two years they are as white and silken as on the day they left their native scrub.

*CHAPTER XVIII.*

It was to these placid pursuits that Stella devoted herself on the afternoon preceding her departure for Melbourne. During the past few days she had experienced a curious shrinking from the visit. To read and sew and meditate, to listen to her mother's gentle voice, to wage mimic warfares with her sister over their best beloved authors, to ramble with the children, looking for new flowers and strange birds, seemed just then the plan of life best worth having.

These tranquil days succeeding hours of acute anxiety soothed her into a mood in which the prospect of change and the clamour of strange voices repelled her. She knew so well how she would weary of herself in the society of women whose highest ideal of life was to stifle it with futile details. And then the inevitable meeting with Ted disturbed her in anticipation. In the solitude of the Mallee Scrub those vagrant glimpses of a future wholly pledged to him came to wear the air of a grotesque dream. But she told herself that the strong temptation which assailed her to break faith with Laurette was only another example of her instability. And now Maisie was engaged in labelling the luggage for their early departure in the morning, and Stella sat with her sister in the western veranda busily weaving the immortelles she had gathered with the children that morning.

'I solemnly entrust these four photograph-wreaths to your charge, Esther,' she said, as she gave the finishing touches to one. 'All my life I have seen these little wreaths round pictures, but never have I had any for myself till now.'

'And whose will your pretty wreaths honour?' asked the elder sister.

'One for father and mother--that last one taken of them together--one for you, one for Cuthbert, and one left over.'

'Ah I perhaps for a "nearer one still, and a dearer"?'

'Yes; if he has to sail the salt dividing seas, and go to strange countries, and kill lions like enclosed birds, etc.'

'But why these hard conditions?'

'Oh, just the power of association. Don't you know the way girls have of hanging a man in a cosy nook in their own rooms--a bearded, sun-burnt being, who is away exploring, or in the Northern Territory, or pearling, or gold-digging, or taking stock across an unknown tract of the Continent? There the pictures are so safe and snug, with white everlasting flowers round them, while the men themselves--goodness only knows what they are doing, or what is happening to them in the wilds.'

Stella wreathed a few more immortelles into places less thickly covered, and then held the wreath at a little distance to judge it more critically.

'Yes, that will do; it is worthy to surround the picture even of the unknown one,' she said, with a dawning smile.

'Stella, will you think me inquisitive? Tell me all there is to tell about your unknown partner at the Emberly ball. I have heard broken hints and laughing allusions from Alice,' said Esther, regarding her sister narrowly.

'It is only Alice's idea of a joke,' said Stella, but she coloured slowly. 'There is not much to tell, but I will tell you. Shortly after the ball began Mrs. Leslie came up to me just after a dance, saying, "There is a friend of my husband's, a stranger here, who wishes to be introduced." Some woman seized upon her at the moment to ask a score of questions about the Leslies' departure for Europe. They were going, you know, the very next day. Then Mrs. Leslie tore herself away and led the stranger to me, and all I heard was, "Miss Stella," and I think, perhaps, "Doctor----"; but I am not sure, and I rather hoped I did not hear aright.'

'But why?'

'Well, it is very stupid; but this stranger had what you might call a distinguished air, with a noble brow, and a look as of one dissociated from the vulgar tide of life.'

'But surely a doctor may be and look every inch a gentleman?'

'He may; but then, as a rule, he is not--with us, at any rate. He is the highly-respectable bourgeois, who has taken to expensive habits of living before he can quite afford it. And so he must have a great deal of "tact," and cultivate a trick of looking wise, and of listening reverently to the twaddle of a rich hypochondriac; and, in short, of all the professions, the medical is the one that most easily degenerates into a trade.'

'I think, my dear, you are prejudiced. What about your beloved Dr. Stein?'

'But then, you see, he is a German. Oh, you may laugh; but culture lies at the root of all the professions in Germany far more than in England. As I know neither country, except from an Australian standpoint, I feel qualified to pronounce judgment. But seriously, now--isn't your average doctor exactly like your average pianiste, profoundly out of touch with most of the wider issues of thought or research?'

'But, you see, the profession is a very arduous one. To be a successful doctor a man must be a specialist to a great extent.'

'To be a successful doctor a man, as a rule, gets into the narrowest of grooves; and the more money he makes the more furniture and gew-gaws he heaps about him, instead of limiting his practice and dusting his mind a little more. I don't know whether it is matrimony that destroys the profession, as it ruins the influence of the Protestant clergy.'

'Stella--Stella! you are incorrigible about marriage,' said Esther, laughing. 'The worst of it is you partly mean all you say. But we are not getting on very fast. Let us conclude that the stranger was not a doctor, though, after all, if he resembled his friend Dr. Leslie----'

'Yes; he also is one of the exceptions. But, then, the stranger had the look of one so much--how shall I say it?--devoted to ideas, and not jostled up with the meannesses of ordinary life. And then his mind had an alert literary kind of side to it. You might very well retort on me by asking how I should judge of all this; but, you know, one gets so awfully and wonderfully weary of the commercial stamp of mind and face, one quickly recognises the difference.'

'You must have had a good deal of talk with him.'

'Yes; we wasted no time, not even in dancing. He danced only square dances, and after going through a quadrille we sat out a waltz, which stretched into nearly two more dances. Yes; it sounds rather serious, but so much depends on the way things happen--and you must know we were not on a staircase, nor the recesses of a conservatory, nor on a veranda lit only by moonlight--we were in one of those alcoves that Allie and I have raved about ever since; and in front there was dear, amiable Mrs. Marwood and a large elderly lady from the country, who seemed to have daughters married in every known quarter of the globe. There the two good old dames sat chatting away like two fountains, and there were we two others getting more and more charmed with each other in the irresponsible way of people who meet once--at least, I hope he was charmed with me; I can answer for myself.'

'Oh no! I dare say he was dreadfully bored,' said Esther, smiling. 'And, then, was there not a wonderful Tasmanian fern that partly screened you from the partners you cheated?'

'Yes; a tall, graceful creature, with hundreds of yellowish-green and dusky-brown fronds drooping one over the other, and baby ones curled up tight, fold within fold, looking as though they had taken a vow never to emerge from their infant dreams of the woodland dell where they first saw the light.'

'I should very much like to know what you two others talked of, but perhaps it was too much _a coeur ouvert et a langue delice_ to be confided to a mere elder sister?'

'Oh, nonsense! But what remains of the talk that has delighted us most? One may as well try to recall a walk on the seashore on a summer night. There was the moonlight and the "sparkle of the glancing stars," and there were the waves breaking on the beach, and others coming after them endlessly; but how much can we convey of the scene to another?'

'A good deal,' smiled Esther. 'Do I not remember how your first exercises in composition were writing conversations down verbatim? The pieces of moonlight globed in crystal, as I have heard Allie call the electric light in the alcoves, the flowers, and the crush of people, and the wonderful Austrian band--all that would make talk after a first dance, but not for so very long.'

'Well, after our quadrille my partner said he was only in Adelaide two days. He had just landed, and was on his way to some of the other colonies, though he had fallen into such a piece of luck. I thought it was a very fleeting form of fortune, and said:

'Das Glueck ist eine leichte Dirne
Und bleibt nicht lang am selber Ort.'

A pleased look came into his face. His mother was a German, though brought up in England, and the language was his second mother-tongue. I read Heine, then? Oh yes; and nearly all the German writers; and I had translated Goethe. His face fell comically. I know he was astounded at such conceit, and--you know what a delightful sensation it is to see a little downright fun looming on the horizon--so I said with unmoved seriousness, "I know Kant, too, very well; and it is a great consolation, for when the hairdresser comes to dress my hair for a ball I pass the time by remembering bits out of the 'Kritik of Pure Reason.'"'

'Oh, Stella! what put such a comical thought into your head? Of course, he found you out then?'

'Yes; and we both laughed heartily; and that, you know, is like eating salt together--it is a sort of mental latchkey. When Tom came to claim his dance after my partner and I had sat out a waltz we were both in Rome. I told Tom I would let him off his duty dance, and so we still talked on. An unfortunate man slipped and fell with his partner in front of our alcove. "Surely that is one of the thirty-six tragic situations of life," said my partner. I said there must be a great many more then thirty-six, and we began to count; but we fell out at once. He declared existence would be honeycombed with tragedy if my contentions as to tragic situations were allowed. We grew serious and laughed the next moment, and flouted each other's arguments. "But I will tell you one of the thirty-six," he said: "to dance and talk, and then to part." I was just on the point of saying, "Especially if you do not know your partner's name," when, to my horror, there was Mr. Andrew Harrison, and the polka-mazurka, for which he was down on my programme, almost over.'

'I suppose you did not say you would let him off his duty dance? And did you and your unknown partner meet no more?'

'No; we smiled and bowed and parted, and I saw him no more. And the Leslies sailed next morning; and, of course, the Emberlys could tell nothing of any special stranger, there were so many whose names and faces were equally unknown to them. Now are you satisfied?'

'It is like the beginning of a story--an overture that should be followed by a concert. I wonder----'

Esther paused abruptly, scanning her sister's face with an inquiring look.

'You must not get on the wrong track, Esther,' said Stella, who was now weaving a little thimble-basket out of some everlastings that were left. 'Tom and Allie could not get over my sitting out nearly three dances with anyone. I never did such a thing before; but the attraction was unexpectedly meeting someone who seemed to have all the makings of a friend in him.'

'A friend, my dear? Like Willie Stein and Mr. Harrison, I suppose?'