Sisters by Ada Cambridge




CHAPTER I.



Guthrie Carey began life young. He was not a week over twenty-one when,
between two voyages, he married Lily Harrison, simply because she was a
poor, pretty, homeless little girl, who had to earn her living as a
nondescript lady-help in hard situations, and never had a holiday. He
saw her in a Sandridge boarding-house, slaving beyond her powers, and
made up his mind that she should rest. With sailor zeal and
promptitude, he got the consent of her father, who was glad to be rid
of her out of the way of a new wife; took the trembling, clinging child
to the nearest parson, and made her a pensioner on his small wages in a
tiny lodging of her own. They honeymooned for a fortnight, off and on,
as his ship could spare him--the happiest pair of mortals in the wide
world--and then parted in tears and anguish unspeakable for the best
part of a twelvemonth.

He came back to find himself a father. Wonderful experience for
twenty-one! Never was such a heavenly mystery of a child! Never such an
angelic young mother!--eighteen, and with the bloom of that most
beautifying convalescence like a halo about her. He was first mate now,
with a master's certificate and a raised salary; it was time to make a
home. So while she nursed the baby in Sandridge--with the aid of a
devoted friend, the landlady's cousin--Guthrie Carey busied himself
across the way at Williamstown, fixing up a modest house. He also had a
devoted friend, in the person of a Customs officer, whose experienced
wife took charge of the operations. Lily was to see nothing until all
was ready for her. It was to be a "pleasant surprise".

The last touches had been given--tea put in the caddy, meat and butter
in the safe, flowers in the vases. Mrs Hardacre, in her best gown,
spread a festive supper-table, and Bill, her spouse, stood by with a
Government launch to take the proud young husband to his wife, and to
bring them back together.

Lily awaited him, trembling, tearful, wild with the joy of going home.
Her step-mother had come to Sandridge to see her off, and had brought
her a present of a macintosh, on the merits of which she dilated with
fervour as she twirled it round and round.

"Buttons right down to the feet," she urged persuasively, "and cape
hanging below the waist"--the second Mrs Harrison was a big woman.
"You might go through a deluge in it. And so stylish, my dear! You can
wear it when you go out in threatening weather of an afternoon, and be
quite smart."

"Well, it's pretty threatening now," said Guthrie uneasily. "I don't
know that it wouldn't be wiser--"

"Oh, no, no!" Lily implored. "No trains tonight! No way but this,
Guthrie. I can't get wet--in this nice waterproof. I don't care how it
blows--the more the better--with you with me."

"But baby?"

"We can keep him safe. He is going to be rolled in your 'possum rug. We
can take him inside if it is cold. Oh, we MUST go by sea, Guthrie!"

"Call this sea?" he mocked.

It was sea to her, who had never been beyond the Heads. She expected to
concentrate in the fifteen-minutes' trip across the bay the interest of
years of travel on land. There was nothing like blue water to this
sailor's wife, whose heart had been upon it for so many anxious months;
the extravagance of her partiality was the joke of husband and friends
against her.

"All right," said Guthrie; "come along, then!"

He was impatient to get her away from these people, and under his own
roof.

The second-hand macintosh was again pressed upon her.

"Oh, thanks--thanks! But I think I won't put it on just yet, as it is
not raining. My dress is warm."

Her dress was the wedding dress--chosen for use as well as beauty--a
delicate pink stuff, with a watered sash to match, in which she looked
like a school-girl on breaking-up day. She had a fancy to go to her
home in state, and also to make an appearance that would do her husband
credit before Mr and Mrs Hardacre.

"Here is your fascinator, my dear," said the motherly landlady,
offering the wisely-selected substitute for Lily's hat. "Let me tie it
on for you--there!"

The fascinator of white wool, made and adjusted properly,
accounts for its name; and Guthrie was sure that he had never seen a
lovelier picture than his darling's face in that soft frame. She was
ready now--as ready as she meant to be until the Customs launch had
seen her--and turned to pick up the large bundle that had the little
baby in the middle of it.

"I'll carry him, Lily."

"No, no, Mr Carey, I'm going to carry him," said the landlady's cousin,
a strapping young woman, whose arms were equal to the task--"as far as
the boat, at any rate."

She did so, the elder ladies supporting her on either side. Guthrie and
Lily led the procession, hand in hand.

Ah, how like another world it was, coming out upon that breezy platform
from the gutter-smelling streets! And how royal a proceeding it seemed
to Lily to be, the setting apart of a Government vessel solely and
entirely to convey her to her new abode, as if she were a little queen
going to her husband's kingdom. She could not help holding herself with
dignity, if not with a trifle of vaingloriousness, as, between
half-a-dozen eager hands and admiring eyes, she stepped down into it.

"Now, have you got everything?" the landlady called from the pier. "Oh,
everything--everything in the world!" Guthrie shouted, in reply.

"Where's your waterproof, Lily?" screeched the step-mother. "Better put
it on, my dear; and I'd advise you to sit under cover, both of you.
You'll be drenched if you don't, in this wind. Why, Mr Hardacre, it's
blowing a perfect gale!"

"A bit fresh, ma'am," Bill admitted; "just enough to keep us
lively. All aboard, Mr Casey? Pass the word, sir, when you're ready."

"Ready!" called Guthrie. And then he said something to the men, Bill
Hardacre and his mate Dugald Finlayson, about having everything on
board--all his life and happiness, or something to that effect--at
which they laughed and chaffed him as the launch backed from the pier,
and started off in the tearing hurry characteristic of Customs boats.

Lily was in the cabin with the baby and the landlady's cousin, who had
'got round' Mr Hardacre to give her a return passage, after seeing the
little family safe home. Husband and wife had frowned at the suggestion
of having her with them on the launch, but when they had shut her in
out of sight and hearing, and found themselves free to follow their own
devices untrammelled by their child, they did not mind so much.

"Hadn't you better--?" Guthrie began, when his wife reappeared,
clinging to the door-jamb; but she exclaimed again:

"No, no! Let me be outside with you!" She wanted to feel "at sea" with
him, to bathe herself, under the shelter of his protection, in the
magnificent, tempestuous, inspiring night. To her, cooped up all her
life in streets and prosaic circumstances, there was something in the
present situation too poetical for words. No bride who had married
money, and was setting out by P. & O. upon her luxurious European tour,
could have been more keenly sensible of the romance of foreign travel
than she, crossing Hobson's Bay in a borrowed Customs launch; while the
squally darkness surrounding and isolating her and her mate
immeasurably enhanced the charm. "I want to see it--to feel it!" she
pleaded. "The air is so clean and fresh! The sea is so grand tonight!
How beautiful it smells! Guthrie, I must have been born for a sailor's
wife--I love it so!"

"Of course you were," the sailor assented heartily. "No manner of doubt
about that. Well, sit here, if you prefer it, sweetheart"--on the
stern grating--"only mind you don't catch cold. And don't let us get
that pretty frock spoiled before the Williamstown folks have seen it."

He steadied her while she stood to have the big macintosh drawn closely
about her--the round cape, flapping far and wide in the rough wind,
was like an unmanageable sail, he said--and when she was again seated,
he tucked it about her knees and feet. Buttons being hard to find and
fasten, he pulled the two fronts of the garment one over the other
across her lap, and she sat upon the outer one. Then he readjusted the
white fascinator, winding the fluffy ends round her neck, and finally
encircling all with his stalwart arm. There she sat, resting against
him, her left hand in his left hand, her contented eyes shining like
stars in the dark. They were practically alone in space, their deck
companions having thoughtfully turned their backs and made themselves
as remote as possible.

A long sigh fluttered through Lily's parted lips from her surcharged
heart. Guthrie heard it through all the clamour of the gale--for it
really was a gale--and the noise of the screw and fiercely snorting
funnel. He stopped his face to hers.

"Tired, pet?"

"No," she murmured, "oh, no!"

"What, then?"

"Only happy--PERFECTLY happy."

"Same here," he said, careless how he tempted Fate--"only more so."

Their lips met, and were holding that sweetest kiss of lovers that are
man and wife, when a wave, driven by the wind, flung a shower of spray
at them, giving each a playful slap of the face as a hint not to be too
confident.

"Hadn't you better get inside?" he urged, as he wiped her cheek.

"It'll be rougher still directly." "Oh, no, it's splendid! The rougher
the better. I'm so glad it's rough. I can't take any harm, so well
wrapped up, and with you, my husband."

"Ah, Lil!" The hug he gave her in acknowledgment of the word made her
gasp for breath. He was so carried away that he had to use both arms,
whereby a lurch of the boat nearly unseated him. "Never," he declared,
in an intense whisper--"never shall you come to harm, my precious one,
while you've got me to protect you; I can promise you that."

"Dear," she returned, in the same kind of tone, "I know I never shall."

And she cuddled closer up to him, and he took a firmer grip of her.
There was no rail for either to hold to, and drawing out from the
shelter of the pier, and meeting the force of the southerly swell, the
launch had begun to dance like a cork on boiling water.

"Why, there's quite a sea on," remarked Guthrie, with a laugh. "I hope
it won't make you sea-sick."

"Sea-sick!" she echoed, with fine scorn. "I am a sailor's wife, sir."

"Bless your little heart, I've been sea-sick myself many a time,
and for not much more than this, either. However, it'll soon be over.
There's home waiting for us, Lil--"

"Where? Where?" she interrupted him, with a tender eagerness. The
launch was tossed high in the air, and the lights of Williamstown
stretched across the darkness in front of them like a band of jewels.

"Oh, you can't distinguish it," said Guthrie, "but it's there--it's
one of those lights; Mrs Hardacre said she was going to keep the blind
up and the gas flaring, so that we might see it as we came over."

"That's what I shall do when you come back next time," said the girl,
with a voice like a dove cooing. "Make a beacon to guide you home."

"No fear that I shall mistake the course, little woman."

He had an irresistible impulse to hug her with both arms again, and
they happened to be on the verge of the river current. Hardacre and
Finlayson both shouted, "Look out, sir!" but he was not looking out--
his sailor eyes were otherwise occupied, and so he did not perceive the
enemy of love making the spring to seize him. Just as he was folding
his mate to his breast, he heard the warning cry for'ard, and it was
then too late to avert the catastrophe. In the same instant a sudden
wave struck the launch, and nearly turned her over, and the young wife
and husband, holding to nothing but one another, and simply sitting
upon an unprotected plank, were tipped out as easily as balls from a
capsized basket.

"Oh, this is too absurd!"

That was Guthrie's mental ejaculation in the astonishing first
moment. A deep-sea sailor, who had come through what he had come
through, to let himself be caught unawares by such a paltry mischance
as this! Then, what an unspeakable ass to have been so careless--to
have shown himself incapable of protecting his wife, after all his
boasts! Would he ever hear the last of it as long as he lived? Poor
little woman! How cold the water felt when he thought of her tender
skin. And her pretty dress, that she had set such store by, in which
she had intended to go to church with him on Sunday--utterly
destroyed, of course! Well, he must make shift to afford her another
and smarter one, and get it made quickly. She should have her pick and
choice. As the following wave soused his uprising head, slapping him
full in the face, so as to confuse and blind him for a second or two,
the fear that she might get "a dose of it" before they could pull her
out made him sharply anxious. If she got a bad cold, a shock to her
nerves, perhaps a serious illness, he would never forgive himself. And
what a sell that would be--what waste of this precious holiday, this
second honeymoon, so much sweeter than the first--after the weary
waiting for it!

He cleared his eyes, and had a momentary view of the surroundings
before another wave rushed upon him. Waves they were, by George! He
would not have believed it possible that such a sea would be running
right up here, in this little duck-pond of a bay. It had seemed rough
on the boat, but viewed from the surface, it might have been the middle
of Atlantic wastes. They were in the river channel--worse luck!--and
the south wind was dead on to it, bringing up the swell from outside;
and the swell, that had set that way for days, was so heavy as
to drive him back faster than his powerful limbs could propel him in
the other direction. At first the launch seemed to want to dance over
him, but when he rose on a swirl of water to take his bearings after
the first bewilderment, she was a couple of lengths away, cutting the
most extraordinary capers in her efforts to put about. Her own lights,
and those of the beacons at the river mouth, showed him all her stern
grating and bright deck fittings as she heeled over, hanging to the
side of one of those ridiculous ocean rollers out of bounds; and he
thought it no wonder that he--even he--had been tossed off under the
circumstances. The crew, who were not sitting on a skimming dish, as it
were, had their work cut out to hold on. As he looked, he measured his
drift with serious disquietude, although the preposterous idea of
anybody being drowned had not as yet occurred to him. Drowned HERE! A
good joke, indeed! Why, they were within hail of Sandridge, and
half-a-dozen ships--or they would have been, but for the noise of wind
and water, which smothered lesser sounds; and the lights of
Williamstown--amongst them that of the little home awaiting him--
studded the shore on the other hand, near and clear, like the eyes of a
host of watching friends. And in Hobson's Bay, which could hardly cover
the body of a sunk yacht; and right up by the river, which had to be
dredged all the time to keep it open!

But where was Lily? It scared him to find himself out of arm's reach of
her, forced back by the swell, and not to see her immediately when he
was able to look. He saw the launch--which of course was entirely
occupied in her rescue--and saw two white buoys floating, and
saw a line thrown, but nothing else, except the wild water that
buffeted him, and the moonless night overhead. And he remembered that
the river channel--indeed, Hobson's Bay in any part--was just as
dangerous as mid-Atlantic to one who could not swim. The thought
clutched him like a hand at his throat.

"Got her?" he yelled, in a fury of terror. "Got her? See her?"

He strained to make himself heard by the men on the launch in a way to
burst his heart. They shouted something that he could not understand,
and a line came whizzing past him. He caught it as it dropped, and soon
lessened the distance between them. Then he perceived a long boat-hook
stretching out into the darkness; it went up and down with the toss of
the boat like the fishing-rod of an impatient school-boy, and a few
yards beyond its reach, where it touched water, there was a dim smudge.
He knew it for the full cape of Lily's macintosh, outspread upon the
waves. They alternately rumpled and smoothed it, flapping it into all
shapes as they tossed and toyed with it; but, by the mercy of Heaven,
it had held her up. In the middle of the mass he could see her dear
little head hanging forward and downward, just under the surface, out
of which a larger or smaller speck of her white fascinator rose and
gleamed as each roll swung her up into the light of the boat's lamp
turned upon the spot. This told him that she was already helpless and
unconscious, although ten seconds had not elapsed since she went over.
God send that she had not struck anything--that her heart was not weak
--that she was not subject to any of the mysterious consequences
of shock peculiar to the more than ordinarily complex women! At any
rate, she had not had time to drown. He had seen a man recovered after
being under for forty minutes, and in less than one they would be
taking her full speed to Williamstown, signalling for the doctor as
they went. What would the fellows ashore make of the three whistles--
three times there before they got across? They would know the launch
that blew them, and her present errand, and think, perhaps, that the
crew were on the spree. But no, they would have more sense than that;
they would look at the wild night, and conclude that something had
happened. So would the doctor, who would hear the summons from his bed.
What would they all say to him, Guthrie Carey, with his good seaman's
record behind him, when he brought his wife home in such a state of
dilapidation? However, all's well that ends well. Let him only have her
safely there, and he would not mind what anybody said; and he'd take
precious good care not to run any risks with her again.

Water-logged as he was, and cramped in his overcoat, he made a violent
bound towards the floating cape, lunged twice, caught it at the second
try, and pulled it eagerly--alas! too eagerly. He felt the tug of
Lily's weight only just long enough to be sure that she was there, and
then--the fastenings gave way, and she slipped through! The empty
garment swam up to him on the edge of a new wave, which clapped it over
his face like a gigantic plaster.

Oh, this was dreadful! She would be rescued eventually, of course--
amongst them they would not let her drown, not if skill and
courage had any show at all--but the fact that she was in danger could
no longer be ignored. She was a little delicate thing, already
overcome, and precious time was wasting, when every second was of the
most stupendous consequence. With a frenzied gesture, Guthrie shook off
the cloak, spluttered, spat, and made a dive to intercept her as she
went down, wondering as he did so whether breath and strength would
hold out if he missed her and had to follow her to the bottom. The
swing of the swell was awful, and the darkness of the blind night too
cruel for words.

"If only I had this cursed coat off!" he dumbly sobbed. "If only I
could get rid of these damned laced boots!" Bad words would have been
forgivable even had he not been a sailor.

He missed her, groped desperately, to the verge of suffocation, and
came up to cough, and groan, and pump breath enough to take him down
again. It would have cost five minutes to get his clothes off, and
there was not a single second to spare--now.

"See her?" he shrieked.

"Ne'er a sign," Bill Hardacre shouted. "But we'll catch her when she
rises. Take a turn o' the line round you, sir, so's we can haul you in--"

But there was not even time for that in the frightful race of these
vital moments. She was gone, and she must be found, and there was but
her husband to look for her. The two other men were few enough for the
safety of the launch as she was then situated; and besides, Hardacre
could be more useful to Lily above water than below. The neighbouring
ships lay undisturbed, putting off no boats to help. In all that
band of lights ringing the black welter of the bay, like stars out of
the Infinite, shining calmly upon an abandoned world, not one was
moving.

Guthrie Carey gave a last look round, identified the window of what was
to have been his home, where the fire was burning brightly, the little
supper spread, good Mrs Hardacre watching for them at the door--heard
the landlady's cousin wailing, "Lil! Lil!"--and again plunged under,
arms wide and eyes staring, and heart bursting with despair. Everything
in him seemed bursting--an agonising sensation--as his overstrained
lungs collapsed, and the power of his strong limbs failed him; then
everything seemed to break away and let in the floods of Lethe with a
rush--confusion and forgetfulness and a whirl of dreams, settling to a
strange peace, an irresistible sleep, as if he had swallowed a magic
opiate. The sea took him, as a nurse takes a helpless child, and
floated him up from the place where he had been savagely groping;
something met him half-way, floating down upon him, and his arms went
round it of their own accord. But they were powerless to clasp or hold
it. It passed him, sinking gently, and lay where it sank, under all the
turmoil, as still as the rocking tide would let it.

The launch sounded her steam whistle furiously. From both sides of the
bay it was heard, screeching through the windy night like a fiend
possessed, and men got up hastily to ask what was the matter. Another
launch put out from Williamstown, and a police boat from Sandridge, and
the anchored ships awoke and hailed them. Soon half-a-dozen boats were
tossing about the spot; they tossed for two hours, and Bill Hardacre
dived seven times with a rope round his waist, while the widowed
young husband lay on the cabin floor between two doctors, the baby and
the landlady's cousin keening over him.

"Well," said Dugald Finlayson, as at last they headed for Williamstown
through the now lessening storm, with a bundle in tarpaulin beside
them, "it do seem as if the Powers above take a pleasure in tripping us
up when we least expect it."

"Aye," said Bill Hardacre, sitting crying in his wet clothes, "he said
as we were starting he'd got all he wanted now. I thinks to myself at
the time, thinks I, 'That's an unlucky thing to say.'" But who is to
judge luck in this world? Poor little Lily Harrison was a helpless
creature, and had almost 'nothing in her' except vanity.




CHAPTER II.



Sincerely he believed, when he was on his feet again, that his life was
wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his splendid
sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant
insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy
function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine
stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them.
The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to be
borne as best he could. At one time he even questioned the right of the
Moral Law to ask him to bear it, under the circumstances. He used to
look at the blue water beneath him, and long to be beneath it, sharing
the fate of his loved and lost. He did not want to live without her--
he wanted to die. At twenty-one!

At twenty-three he was a man again, physically and mentally sound,
doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife--a flawless angel
in the retrospect--while finding natural solace in the company of
living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much
in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from
trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a
fist to fell an ox--that was just the kind of man to call for
coddling, apart from the fact that he was a widower--had been
married for as long as five weeks altogether--with his heart in his
wife's grave, and with that pathetic adjunct, a baby. When he would
consent to recognise the world of affairs again, and the claims of
youth and manhood against it, he found--but of course there is no need
to specify all the things he found.

One was a batch of invitations awaiting each arrival of his ship in
port--first two, then four, then half-a-dozen women's notes, begging
him to come to as many hospitable houses for change and rest, and to
"bring the baby". He could not bring the baby, for reasons which he did
not honestly present, as a rule, but which he reluctantly disclosed to
Alice Urquhart one night at Five Creeks. Alice had written one of the
six notes (they were six because it was Christmas time), for she was
the sister of Jim Urquhart, who was the friend of an ex-squatter down
on his luck through droughts, and reduced to balancing ledgers in a
Melbourne office, who was the friend of one of those doctors of
Williamstown whose skill had brought Guthrie Carey to life after he had
been drowned. Jim, having made the acquaintance of the latter, took his
sister to inspect the ship, and to have tea in the mate's cabin; hence
the return visit, which the captain, who loved his chief officer,
stretched a point to sanction.

There were at Five Creeks station, besides Jim, a Mrs Urquhart and
several children; but Alice, the eldest of the family, was the general
manager of her household, ever struggling with her brother, who
maintained it, to lift it and herself out of the ruts in which her
father had left it stuck. She was close on thirty, sad to say, and
there were three girls below her; and nothing happened from year
to year, and she was weary of the monotony. "Do come and see us," she
wrote to Guthrie Carey--one of the finest-looking men she had ever
known, not excepting the splendid Claud Dalzell--"do come and see us,
and bring the baby. Country air will do it good, and the house is full
of nurses for it."

He went himself, out of friendship for Jim, and after dinner sat in the
verandah with Alice, and explained why he had not brought the baby. Jim
had then gone off to doctor a sick horse, and Mrs Urquhart was putting
children to bed.

"I believe," Alice rallied him, "that you thought it INFRA DIG."

He protested earnestly that she was wrong. No, it was not that--not
THAT.

Ignorant of the details of the tragedy of his life, she scented a
mystery about the child. Was it, perhaps, not right in its head, she
wondered--or afflicted with a hare lip?

"Son or daughter?" she ventured cautiously. "A boy," said Guthrie
Carey, still with that unfatherly air of discontent. "Sometimes I wish
it was a girl. She could look after me by-and-by; I could have her
trained to be my housekeeper, and sew my buttons on--that sort of
thing, you know."

"You would have to wait a long time," said Alice, turning admiring eyes
upon his comely person, noting with regret that he could not be within
several years of her own age. "It is quite a young infant, isn't it?"

"Yes; that is--let me see--fifteen months and a little over. Yes, it
will be fifteen months on Thursday since he lost his mother." Time had
done so much for him that he could now speak of her to a
stranger. "And he was then only a few weeks old."

"Poor, poor little thing!" sighed Alice Urquhart.

It was, by the way, a particularly sympathetic night--soft, still,
solitary, with a full moon. They both felt it. Besides, he had had an
excellent dinner. Five Creeks was poor, but it lived well.

"Oh," laughed the guest, without merriment in his laugh, "you needn't
waste pity on HIM, Miss Urquhart; he's all right. Rolls in fat--never
ailed a thing in his life--might take the prize at a baby show. So
they tell me. I have not seen him myself for a good while."

"What! Why, he's in Melbourne, isn't he?"

"Not far out."

"And you haven't been home to see him?"

"I haven't got a home. I gave it up when--you know. I knew I should
never be there, and you can't leave a house and a young child to
servants. The little time that I did try to carry on by myself, I made
a dismal mess of it. The woman I trusted to'--he meant Mrs Hardacre--
'started feeding it with thick arrowroot. She'd have killed it to a
certainty."

"Indeed, yes. The idea! But it is incredible what some fools of women
can do in the way of mismanaging a baby." The remark implied expert
knowledge on the speaker's part.

"A mother of children herself, too," said Guthrie reflectively, "and
looking it, if ever a woman did. While a girl, who'd never had any,
took to the job like a duck to water--knew just what to do and how to
do it. I will say that for her." "Instinct," Miss Urquhart remarked to
the man in the moon, who seemed to survey the couple with his
tongue in his cheek. "I'm sure, though I say it, that I could give many
a mother points myself."

"I've no doubt you could. I heard somebody say, the other day, that
mothers are born, not made. Very true, too. You see it in the little
girls nursing their dolls. I don't think anything of a she-child that
doesn't want a doll as soon as it can speak." "I always loved them,"
declared Alice casually.

He leaned forward to look at a spider's web that the silver light had
just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves
and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate
thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation.
Wherefore the young lady hastened to inquire what had become of his
little son.

"I suppose," she said, "he is with his mother's people?"

Slowly resuming his attitude of repose, the guest considered the
question.

"No-o--not exactly. With a friend of his mother's, not her family.
Unfortunately, she had no family to speak of--and mine is in England.
Neither of us had a soul here who really belonged to us. That was just
the difficulty."

"It must have been a great difficulty," murmured Alice, in a feeling
tone.

"I believe you," assented Guthrie, with emphasis. "In fact, it put me
into the most ridiculous hole, the most confounded fix--one that I
can't for the life of me see my way out of; one that--However, I
mustn't talk about it to you. It's not a thing that one ought to talk
about to anybody."

And yet he yearned to talk about it, and now, and to this particularly
sympathetic woman, who was not young and giddy, but, like
himself, experienced in the troubles of life, such as weighed him down.
There was "something about her" that irresistibly appealed to him, and
he did not know what; but an author, who knows everything, knows
exactly what it was. It was the moonlight night.

A few words from her, backed by the nameless influences of the hour,
unloosed his tongue.

"You mustn't think me an unnatural parent," he said. "It's not that at
all. I'm awfully fond of him. I've got his photograph in my pocket--
I'll show it to you when we go in--the last one for the time being. I
get a new one about every other mail, in all sorts of get-up, clothes
and no clothes; but all as fat as butter, and grinning from ear to ear
with the joy of life. You never saw such a fetching little cuss. I'd
give anything to get hold of him--if I could."

"But surely--his own father--"

"No. It sounds absurd to you, naturally; but that's because you don't
understand the situation."

"I can't conceive of any situation--"

"Of course not. It's a preposterous situation. And I just drifted into
it--I don't know how. Oh, I do know--it was for the child's own sake;
so that you really mustn't call me a heartless parent any more, Miss
Urquhart. Nobody would do that who knew what I'd suffered for him." Mr
Carey made a gesture, and sighed deeply. "Even in the beginning it
would have been difficult to get out of it, having once got in," he
continued, after a pause; "but it has been going on so long, getting
worse and worse every day and every hour, till now I'm all tangled up
like that moth in that spider's web"--pointing to a little insect
tragedy going on beside them.

Miss Urquhart leaned forward, resting her arms on her knees, and
spreading her hands in the enchanting moonlight, which made them look
white as pearls--and made her rather worn face look as if finely
carved in ivory. It was a graceful, thoughtful, confidential pose, and
her eyes, uplifted, soft and kind, gleamed just under his eyes.

"I'm so sorry!" she murmured. "But if I don't know what the trouble is
--oh, don't tell me if you'd rather not!--I can't help you, can I? And
I do wish I could!"

"So do I. But I'm afraid nobody can help me. And yet, perhaps a fresh
eye--a woman's clearer insight--" He paused irresolute, then
succumbed to temptation. "Look here, Miss Urquhart, I'll just tell you
how it is, if you'll promise not to speak of it again. You are no
gossip, I know"--how did he know?--"and it will be such a blessed
relief to tell somebody. And perhaps you could advise me, after all--"

"Let me try," she broke in encouragingly. For an instant her pearly
hand touched his sleeve. "You may trust me," she said.

"I'm sure of it--I'm sure of it," he responded warmly. He drew his
chair closer, took a moment to collect himself, and plunged headlong.

"You see, she was related to the people my poor wife lived with when we
were first married, and she was a lot with her--it was lonesome for
her, with me away at sea--and they got to be sort of chums. She was
with us the night I lost my poor girl--I can't talk about that now,
but some day I'll tell you--and I know she was awfully fond of her.
That was just the difficulty."

"You are speaking," queried Alice gently, "of the person who has
the baby?"

"Exactly. I see you begin to understand."

"I think so," said Alice, with a smile broad enough to be visible in
moonlight. "But what was the difficulty?"

"Well, you know, being so really fond of her, and all that--wishing to
do it for the sake of her dear friend--what could I say, especially as
those women were killing the unfortunate brat between them? She was not
so very young, and was evidently clever at managing--"

"Yes," interposed Alice, smiling still.

"And peculiarly situated for undertaking the job, having a good home,
and only an old mother, who let her do what she liked. And awfully set
on the baby from the first, and wanting an object in life, as she said.
But chiefly it was for Lily's sake. To see Lily's child messed about by
just anybody, and killed with arrowroot and stuff, was more than she
could stand--to tell the truth, I couldn't stand it either--and she
begged me to let her have it to look after, as there was no female
friend or relative nearer to it than she was. What COULD I do? She
lived in a nice, healthy spot, and there was the old mother with her
experience, and I was obliged to go to sea; and--and--well, I just
had to say "yes", and be thankful to say it. We got the--the doctor
found a--we engaged the sort of nurse that does everything, you know--
a fine, strapping young woman, in the pink of condition; and--and--
well, there it was. And at the first blush the worst of the trouble
seemed over, instead of just beginning. I gave up my house, and went
off to sea, miserable enough, as you may suppose, but at least
with an easy mind about the boy. As far as he was concerned--as far as
my poor Lily was concerned, I felt I had acted for the best. Indeed, I
don't for the life of me understand how any man could have acted
otherwise, under the circumstances."

The listener, listening intently, here put a quiet question--"Did you
pay her?"--which caused the narrator to wince like a galled horse.

"Ah, there you hit the weak spot, Miss Urquhart, right in the
bull's-eye," he declared, sighing furiously. "If I could have paid her,
of course there'd have been no difficulty at all. But she wouldn't be
paid."

"You ought to have insisted on it," said Alice severely.

"I did insist. I insisted all I knew. But she said it was a labour of
love for her friend, and seemed so hurt at the idea of money being
brought into the question, that I was ashamed to press her beyond a
certain point. She let me pay for the nurse's board, and that was all.
The baby didn't eat anything, you see, and they were comfortably off,
with lots of spare room in their house, and I just looked on it as a
sort of temporary visit--until I came back--until I should be able to
turn round a bit. But"--with another sigh--"he's there yet."

Miss Urquhart nodded, with an air of utter wisdom.

"Of course you went to see the child?"

"Three times--whenever I was in port. And found him always the same--
so beautifully cared for that, upon my soul, I never saw a baby in my
life so sweet and clean and wholesome-looking; jolly as a little
sandboy all the time, too."

"That means that he had a perfect constitution--inherited from
you evidently--and that you were fortunate in the nurse."

"Very fortunate. But it appeared that beyond--beyond running the
commissariat department, so to speak, she did next to nothing for him.
Miss--the lady I spoke of--did everything. Made herself a perfect
slave to him."

"Bought his clothes?"

"Oh," groaned the wretched man, "I suppose so. What did I know about a
baby's clothes? And she wouldn't answer my questions--said he was all
right, and didn't want for anything, as I could see with my own eyes. I
tried making presents--used to bring her curios and things--found out
her birthday, and sent her a jewel--took every chance I could see to
work off the obligation. But it was no use. She gave ME a birthday
present after I'd given her one."

"Well, if moths will go into spiders' webs," laughed his companion,
"they must take the consequences."

"Sometimes they get helped out," he replied. "Some beneficent, godlike
being puts out an omnipotent finger--"

He looked at her, and she looked at him. At this moment they seemed to
have known one another intimately for years. The moon again.

"Tell me everything," she said, "and I'll help you out."

So then he told her that he had not "this time" visited his son. He
might have added that he had come to Five Creeks partly to avoid being
visited by him. Cowardly and weak he frankly confessed himself. "But
the thing was too confoundedly awkward--too embarrassing altogether."

"But she writes--she writes continually. Tells me what he
weighs, and when he's got a fresh tooth, and how he crawls about the
carpet and into her bed of a morning, and imitates the cat mewing, and
drinks I don't know how many pints of new milk a day, and all that sort
of thing. I believe the rascal has the appetite of a young tiger--and
yet I can't pay for what he eats! The nurse was long ago dispensed
with, so that I've not even her board to send a cheque for, that they
might by chance make a trifle of profit out of. It seems too late now
to simply take the child away, and there leave it. I haven't the shabby
courage to do such a thing; and besides, he might come to any sort of
grief, poor little chap, in that case. There's no doubt in the world
that her taking of him and doing for him have been the salvation of his
health, and perhaps his life. And I know, by what she tells me, that he
regularly dotes on her--as so he ought--and would howl his very head
off if I took him from her. What could I do with him if I did take him?
I've no home, and nobody to look after it if I had; and hired servants
are the deuce with a lone man at their mercy. It would be worse now
than it was at first. And so'--with another heavy sigh--'you see the
situation. I'm just swallowed up, body and bones, drowned fathoms deep
in a sea of debt and obligation that I can never by any possibility
struggle out of, except--"

"Except," continued Alice, with the candid air of a kind and sensible
sister--"except by marrying her, you mean? Yes, I see the situation. I
appreciate your point of view. I should understand it if it were not
that she unquestionably laid the trap for you deliberately--just as
that spider laid his for moths and flies. And marriage by capture has
gone out."

"Oh, don't say that!" the man protested, in haste. "I would not
for a moment accuse her of that. She was Lily's friend; it was for her
--it was out of pure womanly compassion for the motherless child; at
any rate, in the beginning. And even now I have no right whatever to
suppose--"

"But you know it, all the same. Every word you have said to me tells me
that you know it. You may as well be frank."

He squirmed a little in his chair, but confessed as required.

"Well--but it's a caddish thing to say--I think she does expect it.
And hasn't she the right to expect it? However, that's neither here nor
there. The point is that, in common honesty and manliness, I should
repay her if I can; and there's no other way--at least, I can't see
any other way. It is my fault, and not hers, that I don't take to the
notion; for a better woman never walked, nor one that would make a
better mother to the boy. But, somehow, you DO like to have your free
choice, don't you?" He had come as far as this--that he could
entertain the idea of choice, which meant a second choice.

"It would be utterly wrong, absolutely immoral, downright wicked, to
forego it," Alice declaimed, with energy. "It would be nothing short of
criminal, Mr Carey."

She argued the point with eloquence, even excitedly; and when she had
brought him to reason--very willing to be brought--leaned back in her
chair with a joyous air.

"Oh, we will arrange it!" she reassured him. "There are plenty of ways.
I'll tell you"--bending forward again and gazing earnestly into eyes
from which something that had been looking out of them seemed to
have drawn back hastily--"you shall introduce me to her, and I will
bring him away up here for a visit. He ought to be in the country in
summer, and he will come with me, I know, and won't miss her after a
couple of days. I can get you a nurse cheap from some of the selectors,
and one more or less makes not the slightest difference in a house like
this; and I will take care of him for you until you come back next
voyage, or for just as long as you will trust him to me. So the
difficulty will solve itself without any fuss. Do you see?"

Guthrie Carey felt unable to reply. He could only murmur again and
again: "You are awfully good, Miss Urquhart. 'Pon my word, you are too
good altogether." Later, he declared more firmly that he could not
think of troubling her.

"Nonsense!" she returned lightly. "It is all settled."




CHAPTER III.



Decidedly he was a coward, with all his brawn and inches; for he dared
not protest straight-forwardly that all was not settled. He certainly
told himself that he did not know what to do, but he also told himself
that he would be a fool to do practically the same thing that he had
done before. He passed a sleepless night, poor fellow, cogitating the
matter; and in the morning, when the moon was gone, saw clearly himself
where the path of prudence lay. Still he lacked courage to make it
clear to Miss Urquhart, even while he saw her laying out, with
enthusiasm, that road of her own which his terrified imagination
pictured her marching along presently, bearing the baby aloft in her
arms, and dragging him on a dog-chain behind her. It was not until
mid-day that he suddenly became a brave man--about five minutes after
the arrival of Deborah Pennycuick.

She rode over from Redford, all by herself, as her frequent custom was,
to see how Five Creeks was getting on, and to talk over plans for
Christmas. She wore a brown holland habit over the most beautifully
moulded form, and, entering the house, tossed aside a shady hat from
the most beautiful face that ever delighted eyes of man and virile
heart of three-and-twenty. It is in such plain terms that one
must describe this noble creature; words in half-tones are unworthy of
the theme. Being introduced by Alice Urquhart, Guthrie Carey, in a
sense, expanded on the spot into a fresh stage, a larger scope of
being, with his unleaping recognition of her inspiring greatness. It
seemed to him that he had never looked upon a woman before. Lily, of
course, had been an angel. "I thought I should just strike lunch," she
said, as she came like a sunbeam into the dim, low-ceiled, threadbare,
comfortable room where the meal was ready. "I'm as hungry as a hunter,
Mrs Urquhart."

The homely old woman uttered a cry of joy, and spread her arms. The
visitor, incarnate dignity, bent to the maternal caress with willing
affection, yet with the tolerant air of good-nature that does not run
to gush. The children gathered round her, and hung upon her, undeterred
by the fact that she had no kisses or fondlings for them. Jim stood
motionless, glowing at the back of his fixed eyes.

When the family had done greeting her, Guthrie was brought forward.

"This is Mr Carey, Deb, who--"

"Oh, yes, I know"--and the frank hand, large, strong and beautiful,
like every bit of her, went out to him as if she had really known him--
"it is on Mr Carey's account that I have come, to tell you that you
must bring him over to Redford at once."

"We were going to," said Alice; for it was the natural thing to take
every Five Creeks visitor to Redford as soon as possible. "I was
writing to you only this morning."

"Well, we just wanted to make sure. My father--you will excuse him for
not calling on you; he is not able to get about as he used, poor
old man--hears that you belong to a family at home which was very
intimate with his family when he was young. Do you come from Norfolk?"

"No," replied the sailor, still in his dream.

"Oh, dear, what a pity! He will be so disappointed. We have been
hearing about the Careys of Wellwood all our lives--never were such
people, apparently--and when he heard your name, and got the idea that
you were of the clan, nothing would do but that you must be fetched at
once, to talk to him about them. Aren't you even a second cousin, or
something?"

"My grandfather was born at Wellwood--"

"Ah, that's right! That's all we want. That makes you a Carey of
Wellwood, of course. I hope you know the place?" "I have seen it. But
my grandfather was a younger son and a ne'er-do-weel; he was kicked out
--he quite broke off--"

"Never mind. You needn't go into inconvenient particulars. Try and
remember all you know that's nice about the Hall and the family. Did
you ever hear of a Mary Carey? But no--she would be before your time,
of course."

"There was an old Mary Carey; she married a Spencer. She was pointed
out to me last time I was at home--the nut-cracker type, nose and chin
together--"

"Goodness! Keep that dark too, for mercy's sake! She is his ideal
woman. It is for her sake he wants you to talk Wellwood with. If you
spoil his pleasure with that hint of nut-crackers, I'll never forgive
you."

"I hope I know better," Guthrie smiled, coming to himself a
little.

"I am sure you do," said she, and turned from him to take her chair at
table.

"Then we'll bring him tomorrow," Alice said, seating herself.

"This afternoon," said the visitor commandingly.

Alice wanted another moonlight talk about the baby, and knew the small
chance of getting it where Deborah Pennycuick was, and she raised
obstacles, fighting for delay. Deborah calmly turned to Jim.

"Anything to hinder your coming this afternoon, Jim?"

"Nothing," said Mr Urquhart promptly.

The matter was evidently settled.

They sat down to lunch, and the talk was brisk. It was almost confined
to the visitor and Alice, although the former carefully avoided the
shutting out of the hostess from the conversation, in which she was
incapable of taking a brilliant part. Jim, in the host's place, sat
dumb and still, except for his alertness in anticipating his guest's
little wants. Guthrie Carey, on her other hand, was equally silent.
Neither of the two men heard what she talked about for listening to the
mere notes of her charming voice.

After luncheon she put on her sensible straw hat.

"You must drive Mr Carey," she said to Jim. "I'll just ride ahead, and
let them know you are coming."

"Let us all go together," said Alice. "I'll drive Mr Carey, and Jim can
escort you."

But there was no gainsaying Deborah Pennycuick when she had expressed
her views.

"You have to get ready," she pointed out, "and you'll do it
quicker if I'm not here. Besides, I can't wait."

They all went out with her to the gate, where her superb, high-tempered
horse pawed the gravel, and champed upon his bit. Jim sent her
springing to the saddle from his horny palm like a bird let out of it,
and they watched in silence while she crossed two paddocks, leaped two
sets of slip-rails, and disappeared as a small dot of white
handkerchief from the sun-suffused landscape.

"What riding!" Guthrie Carey ejaculated, under his breath.

"She's the best horsewoman in the country," Jim Urquhart commented
slowly, after a still pause.

He was a slow--to some people a dull and heavy--man, who talked
little, and less of Deborah Pennycuick than of any subject in the world
--his world.

"And what a howling beauty!" the sailor added, in the same whisper of
awe.

Again the bushman spoke, muttering deeply in his beard: "She is as good
as she is beautiful."

Mrs Urquhart took her levelled hand from her eyes, and turned to
contribute her testimony.

"There, Mr Carey, goes the flower of the Western District. You won't
find her match amongst the best in England. I was with her mother when
she was born--not a soul else--and put her into her first clothes,
that I helped to make; and a bonny one she was, even then, with her
black eyes, that stared up at me as much as to say: 'Who are you, I'd
like to know?' Dear, it seems like yesterday, and it's nigh twenty
years ago. All poor Sally Pennycuick's girls are good girls, and the
youngest is going to be handsome too. Rose, the third, is not at all
bad-looking; poor Mary--I don't know who she takes after. The
father was the one with the good looks; but Sally was a fine woman too.
Poor dear old Sally! I wish she was here to see that girl."

Mrs Urquhart and Mrs Pennycuick, plain, brave, working women of the
rough old times, wives of high-born husbands, incapable of companioning
them as they companioned each other, had been great friends. On them
had devolved the drudgery of the pioneer home-making without its
romance; they had had, year in, year out, the task of 'shepherding' two
headstrong and unthrifty men, who neither owned their help nor thanked
them for it--the inglorious life-work of so many obscure women--and
had strengthened each other's hands and hearts that had had so little
other support.

"Mrs. Pennycuick--she is not living, I presume?" Guthrie enticed the
garrulous lady to proceed.

"Dear, no. She died when Francie was a baby," and Mrs Urquhart gave the
details of her friend's last illness in full. "Deb was just a little
trot of a thing--her father's idol; he wouldn't allow her mother to
correct her the least bit, though she was a wilful puss, with a temper
of her own; ruled the house, she did, just as she does now. If she
hadn't had such a good heart, she'd have grown up unbearable. There
never was a child in this world so spoiled. But spoiling's good for
her, she says. It's to be hoped so, for spoiling she'll have to the end
of the chapter. She's born to get the best of everything, is Debbie
Pennycuick. Fortunately, her father's rich, though not so rich as he
used to be; and when she leaves her beautiful home, it'll be to go to
another as good, or better. She's got to marry well, that girl;
she'd never get along as a poor woman, with her extravagant ways. It'd
never do"--Mrs Urquhart's voice had, subtly changed, and something in
it made the blood rise to the cheeks of the listeners "it'd never do to
put her into an ordinary bush-house, where often she couldn't get
servants for love or money, because of the dull life, and might have to
cook for station hands herself, and even do the washing at a pinch--"

Jim wheeled round suddenly, and strode back to the house--the house,
as he was quite aware, which his mother alluded to. She, agitated by
the movement, and without completing her sentence, turned and trotted
after him. Alice was left leaning over the gate, at Guthrie Carey's
side.

"You will enjoy this visit," she remarked calmly, ignoring the little
scene. "Redford is a beautiful place--quite one of the show-places of
the district--and they do things very well there. Mary is ostensibly
the housekeeper; she really does all the hard work, but it is Deb who
makes the house what it is. After she came home from school she got her
father to build the new part. Since then they have had much more
company than they used to have. Mary, who had been out for some years,
didn't care for gaieties. She is a dear girl--we are all awfully fond
of her--but she has a most curious complexion--quite bright red, as
if her skin had something the matter with it, although it hasn't. Of
course, that goes against her."

"Miss Deborah's complexion is wonderful."

"Yes. But oh, Deb isn't to be compared with Mary in anything except
looks. She is eaten up with vanity--one can't be surprised--and is
very dictatorial and overbearing; you could see that at lunch.
But Mary is so gentle, so unselfish--her father's right hand, and
everybody's stand-by."

"I don't think Miss Deborah seemed--"

"Because you don't know her. I do. She simply loathes children, while
Mary would mother all the orphan asylums in the world, if she could. I
always tell her that her mission in life is to run a creche--or should
be. Lawks! How she will envy me when I get that boy of yours to look
after!"

Guthrie's feet seemed to take tight hold of the ground. "Really, Miss
Urquhart--er--I can't thank you for your goodness in--in asking him
up here--but I've been thinking--I've made up my mind that the best
thing I can do is to take him home to my own people." The idea was an
inspiration of the desperate moment. How to put it into practice he
knew not, and she tried to show him that it was impracticable; but he
stuck to it as to a life-buoy. He would write to his sister--all the
'people' he owned apparently--and find somebody who was going home;
and "Isn't it time to be putting our things together? Miss Pennycuick
told us we were to be there for tea at four o'clock, if possible."




CHAPTER IV



Behold him at Redford, with his tea-cup in his hand. He was safe now
from talk about the baby; but he was also cut off from the lovely
Deborah, now wandering about her extensive grounds with another young
man. Old Father Pennycuick had him fast. They sat together under a
verandah of the great house.

"There were no pilots then," said the old man, puffing comfortably at
his pipe--"there were no pilots then, and we had to feel our way along
with the cast 'o the lead. We got ashore at Williamstown, on sailors'
backs, and walked to Melbourne. Crossed the Yarra on a punt, not far
from where Prince's Bridge now is--"

"Yes," said Guthrie Carey.

He seemed to be listening attentively, his strong, square face set like
a mask; but his eyes roamed here and there.

"Bread two-and-six the small loaf," Mr Pennycuick dribbled into his
dreaming ears. "Eggs sixpence apiece. Cheap enough, too, compared with
the gold prices. But gold was not thought of for ten years after that.
I tell you, sir, those were the times--before the gold brought all the
riff-raff in."

The sailor murmured something to the effect that he supposed they were.

"We'd got our club, and a couple of branch banks, and a
post-office, and Governor La Trobe, and Bishop Perry, and the nicest
lot of fellows that ever came together to make a new country. We were
as happy as kings. All young men. I was barely twenty-three when I took
up Redford--named after our place at home. You know our place at home,
of course?"

"I have seen it from the road," answered the guest, arrested in his
mental wanderings by the mention of his own age.

"You must have seen it often, living so close."

"I never lived close myself; I am a Londoner."

"It's all the same--your people do. The Pennycuicks and the Careys
have been neighbours for generations."

"I am only distantly related to that family."

"A Carey is a Carey," persisted the old man, who had determined to have
it so from the first, and he would listen to no disclaimers.

He had already referred darkly to that Mary Carey of the hooked nose
and pointed chin. His eldest daughter, he said, had been named after
her. This eldest daughter, with her too-ruddy face, had shyly drawn
near, and taken a chair at her father's elbow, where she sat very
quietly, busily tatting. Plain though her face was, she had beautiful
hands. Her play with thread and shuttle, just under Guthrie's eyes,
held them watchful for a time--the time during which no sign of
Deborah's white gown was to be perceived upon the landscape.

"My brother and I, we never hit it off, somehow. So when my father died
I cleared. You don't remember his funeral, I suppose? No, no--that was
before your time. They hung the church all over with black
broadcloth of the best. That was the way in those days, and the cloth
was the parson's perquisite. The funeral hangings used to keep him in
coats and trousers. And they used to deal out long silk hat-scarves to
all the mourners--silk that would stand alone, as they say--and the
wives made mantles and aprons of them. They went down from mother to
daughter, like the best china and family spoons. That's how women took
care of their clothes when I was young. They didn't want new frocks and
fallals every week, like some folks I could name." And he pinched his
daughter's ear.

"Talk to Deb, father," said Mary. "I have not had a new frock for a
great many weeks."

"Aye, Deb's the one! That girl's got to marry a millionaire, or I don't
know where she'll be."

Almost Mrs Urquhart's words! And, like hers, they pricked sharply into
the feelings of our young man. His eyes went a-roaming once more, to
discover the white gown afar off, trailing unheeded along a dusty
garden path. The old man saw it too, and his genial countenance clouded
over.

"Well," he continued, after a thoughtful pause, "poor old Billy Dalzell
and I, we emigrated together. He had a devil of a stepfather, and no
home to speak of. We were mates at school, and we made up our minds to
start out for ourselves. You remember the Dalzells of the Grange, of
course?"

"I can't say that I do, sir."

"Well, they're gone now. Billy's father went the pace, and the
mortgagees sold him up; and if his mother hadn't given him a bit when
we started, Billy wouldn't have had a penny. She pawned all she
could lay her hands on for him, we found out afterwards--Billy was cut
up about that--and got ill-used by Heggarty for it when he found it
out. She was a fool, that woman. Everybody could see what Heggarty was,
except her. Old Dalzell was a gentleman, anyhow, with all his faults."

The white dress drew nearer, and its grey tweed companion. The host was
once more wasting his story on deaf ears. "So we started off; and when
we got here we went in together. He had enough to buy a mob of cattle
and a dray and team, and so had I. We loaded up with all the
necessaries, and hired three good men, and travelled till we found
country. Took us about five months. At last we came here, and put our
pegs in, and I started off to Melbourne for the license--ten pounds,
and leave to renew at the end of the year--and here I've stuck ever
since. Billy, he took up other land, and got married, and died, poor
chap! And that's his boy over there," pointing with his pipe--"and
he'll never be the man his father was, if he lives to a hundred."

The person referred to was he in the grey tweed, who sauntered with
such assurance at white-robed Deborah's side. He was a tall, graceful
and most distinguished-looking young fellow; but Guthrie Carey was
prepared to believe heartily the statement that Dalzell junior would
never be the man his father was.

"You shall see the identical hut," Mr Pennycuick kindly promised. "Down
by the creek, where those big willows are--I planted them myself. Not
good enough for a dog-kennel, my daughters say; but the best thing I
can wish for them is that they may be as happy in their good
houses as I was in that old shanty--aye, in spite of many a hard time
I had there, with blacks and what not. We cut the stuff, Billy and I,
and set the whole thing up; and all our furniture was our
sleeping-bunks and a few stools and a table. We washed in a tin bowl on
a block outside the door. Not so particular about tubbing and clean
shirts in those days. Our windows were holes of a handy size for gun
barrels, and the shutters we put up o' nights were squares of bark hung
on to nails by strips of green hide. Many's the time I've woke to see
one of 'em tilted up, and a pair of eyes looking in--sometimes
friends, sometimes foes; we were ready for either. When Billy went, and
I thought I'd get married too, then I built a better house--brick this
time, and workmen from Melbourne to do it; that's it over there, now
the kitchens and store-rooms--and imported furniture--er--I am not
boring you, I hope?"

"Oh, dear, no! I am deeply interested."

"Well, Billy and I"--the tale seemed interminable--"Billy and I, we
gave sixty pounds apiece for our stock horses, and the same for a ton
of flour; and went right over Ballarat without knowing it. Camped
there, sir, and didn't see the gold we must actually have crunched
under our boot heels. And Billy had misfortunes, and died poor as a
rat. It was in the family. Mrs D. was all right, though. She used to
send a brother of hers to Melbourne market with her cattle, and cash
being scarce, he would sometimes have to take land deeds for them, and
she'd be wild with him for it. But what was the consequence? Those bits
of paper that she thought so worthless that it's a wonder she
took the trouble to save them, gave her city lots that turned out as
good as gold mines. She sold too soon, or she'd have made millions--
and died of a broken heart, they say, when she found out that mistake.
Still, she left a lot more than it's good for a young fellow to start
life with. That boy has been to Cambridge, and now he loafs about the
club, pretends to be a judge of wine, gets every stitch of clothes from
London--pah!" Mr Pennycuick spat neatly and with precision over the
verandah floor into a flower-bed. "But these mother's darlings--you
know them. If Mrs Dalzell could see him now, I daresay she'd be
bursting with pride, for there's no denying that he's a smart-looking
chap. But his father would be ashamed of him."

"Daddy dear!" Mary gently expostulated.

"So he would. An idle, finicking scamp, that'll never do an honest
stroke of work as long as he lives. And I wish Deb wouldn't waste her
time listening to his nonsense. Isn't it about time to be getting ready
for dinner, Moll?"

Mary looked through a window at a clock indoors, and said it was.
Guthrie hailed the news, and rose to his feet.

But not yet did he escape. His host, hoisting himself heavily out of
his big cane chair, hollowed like a basin under his vast weight,
extended a detaining hand.

"Come with me to my office a minute," he half whispered. "I'd like to
show you something."

With apparent alertness, but sighing inwardly, Guthrie followed his
host to the room in the old part of the house which he called his
office. Mr Pennycuick carefully shut the door, opened a desk
full of drawers and pigeon-holes, and brought forth a bit of cardboard
with a shy air. He had never shown it to his family, and doubtless
would not have shown it now if he had not been growing old and soft and
sentimental. It was a prim and niggling little water-colour drawing of
English Redford--a flat facade, with swallows as big as condors flying
over the roofs, and dogs that could never have got through any doorway
gambolling on the lawn in front. A tiny 'Mary Carey' in one corner was
just, and only just, visible to the naked eye.

"This was done for me, when we were both young, by her--your aunt,"
said Mr Pennycuick, gloating upon his treasure over Guthrie's shoulder.

"Not my aunt," explained Guthrie. "I don't know what relation, but a
long way farther off than that. I am only a very small Carey, you know,
sir."

Mr Pennycuick testily intimated, as before, that to be a Carey at all
was enough for him. It was his excuse for these confidences, of which
he was half ashamed.

While Guthrie studied the poor picture, trying to look as interested as
he was expected to be, his host turned and stared down into the drawer
that had held it for so many years. Other things were there--the usual
dead flowers, still holding together, still fusty to the nose; the
usual yellowing ball glove, the usual dance and invitation cards, and
faded letters, with their edges frayed; a book-marker with an
embroidered 'Friendship', mixed up with forget-me-nots, in coloured
silks upon perforated card, backed by a still gleaming red satin ribbon
looped at one end and fringed out at the other; the book that it
was tucked into ("The Language of Flowers"), a large valentine in a
wrapper with many broken seals, some newspaper cuttings, half a
sixpence, with a hole in it, and a daguerreotype in a leather case.

This last he took up, opened and gazed at steadily, until his companion
was compelled to interrupt him with an inquiring eye. Then he passed it
over, and Guthrie turned it this way and that, until he caught the
outlines of a long aquiline face between bunched ringlets, and a long
bodice with a deep point, which he understood to have belonged to his
distant relative at some period before he was born.

"And this?" he murmured politely.

"Yes," said Mr Pennycuick; "that's her. And I've never shown it to a
soul before--not even to my wife."

"A--a sweet expression. Fair, was she?"

"Fair as a lily, and as pure, and as beautiful. Gentle as a dove. With
blue eyes."

Guthrie did not care for this type just now. He liked them dark and
flashing and spirited, like Miss Deborah. But he murmured "Hm-m-m"
sympathetically.

"The loveliest woman in England," the old man maundered on. "Surely you
must have heard of her, in the family?"

Guthrie had not only heard of her, as we know, he had seen her; but he
shook a denying head, and dropped another hint of his own position in
the family--outside the royal enclosure, as it were.

"Well, now, I'll just tell you what happened," said Mr Pennycuick,
turning to the open drawer again. "Strictly between ourselves, of
course--and only because you are a Carey, you understand--
somehow you bring it all back--"

He was fumbling with the big valentine, getting it out of its case.

"Yes?" Guthrie encouraged him, while inwardly chafing to be gone.

"You see this?" It was an exquisite structure of foamy paper lace,
silver doves, gauzed-winged Cupids, transfixed hearts and wreaths of
flowers, miraculously delicate. How it had kept its frail form intact
for the many years of its age was a wonder to behold. "You see this?"
said the old man. "Well, when I was a young fellow, the 14th of
February was a time, I can tell you! You fellows nowadays, you don't
know what fun is, nor how to go a-courting, nor anything. . . .I was at
old Redford that year, and she was at Wellwood, and all through the
sleet and snow I rode there after dark, tied my horse to a tree, crept
up that nut-walk--you know it?--and round by the east terrace to the
porch, and laid my valentine on the door-step, and clanged the bell,
and hid behind the yew-fence till the man came out to get it. Then I
went home. And last thing at night there was a clatter-clatter at the
door at Redford, and I dashed out to catch whoever it was--her brother
she sent--but wasn't quite smart enough. If only I'd seen him. I
should have known--as I ought to have, without that; but I didn't. It
never occurred to me that she'd send the answer so soon, and she had
disguised her writing in the address, and there was another girl--name
of Myrtle Vining--who used to have myrtle on her note-paper, and all
over the place--and here these flowers looked to me as if they were
meant for myrtle, and these two crossed arrows are like capital
V--and how I came to be such an egregious dolt, Lord only knows! Well,
I've paid for it--that I have--I've paid for it. Look here--don't
touch! I'll show you what I found out when it was too late--after
she'd played shy with me till I got angry and left her, and it was all
over--my eyes aren't good enough to see it now, but I suppose it's
there still--"

With infinite care and the small blade of his pocket-knife, he lifted
the tiny tip of a tiny Cupid's wing. With bent head and puckered
eyelids, Guthrie peered under, and read: "Yours, M. C.," written on a
space of paper hardly larger than a pin's head.

"In my valentine that night," said Mr Pennycuick, "I'd asked her to
have me. I didn't hide it up in this way; I knew, while I wondered that
she took no notice, that she must have seen it. This was her answer.
And I never got it, sir, till she was married to another man--and then
by the merest accident. Then I couldn't even have the satisfaction of
telling her that I'd got it, and how it was I hadn't got it before. Of
course, I wasn't going to upset her after she was married to another
man. I've had to let her think what she liked of me."

Guthrie was certainly interested now, but not as interested as he would
have been the day before. The day before, this story would have moved
him to pour out the tale of his own untimely and irreparable loss. He
and old Mr Pennycuick would--metaphorically speaking--have mingled
their tears together.

"You forget, off and on," said Mr Pennycuick, as he wrapped up his
treasure with shaking hands and excessive care--"perhaps for
years at a time, while you are at work and full of affairs; but it
comes back--especially when you are old and lonely, and you think how
different your life might have been. You don't know anything about
these things yet. Perhaps, when you are an old man like me, you will."

Guthrie did know--no one better, he believed. But he did not say.
Unknown to himself, he had reached that stage which Mr Pennycuick came
to when he began courting Sally Dimsdale, who had made him such a good
and faithful (and uninteresting) wife.

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,"
says the old proverb. True enough. But one might write it this way,
with even more truth: "It is better to love and lose than to love and
gain." One means by love, romantic love, of course.




CHAPTER V.



Dinner was over. They had all gone up to the big drawing-room, which
was the feature of the 'new part'--the third house of the series which
now made one. The new part was incongruously solid and modern, with a
storey (comprising the drawing-room and its staircase only) which
overtopped the adjacent roofs. Below it was a corresponding
dining-room, and both apartments were furnished richly in the fashion
of the time--tons of solid mahogany in the latter, and a pasture of
grass-green carpet and brocade upholsterings in the former, lit up with
gilded wall-paper and curtain-cornices as by rays of a pale sun. Curly
rosewood sofas and arm-chairs, and marbled and mirrored chiffonniers,
and the like, were in such profusion upstairs as to do away with the
air of bleakness common to a right-angled chamber of large size and
middle-class arrangement. A fine grand piano stood open in a prominent
place. Four large shaded lamps and four piano candles pleasantly
irradiated the whole; while three French windows, opening on a balcony,
still stood wide to the summer night.

By the great white marble mantelpiece, under the great gilt-framed
pier-glass, filling the huge chair specially dedicated to his use,
Father Pennycuick sat in comfortable gossip with his old friend,
Thornycroft of Bundaboo. It irked him to separate himself from
pipe and newspaper, baggy coat and slouchy slippers, and his corpulent
frame objected to stairs; but when he had guests he considered it his
duty to toil up after them, in patent shoes and dining costume, and sit
amongst them until music or card games were on the way, when he would
retire as unobtrusively as his size and heavy footstep permitted. It
was the custom to pretend not to see or hear him go, and it would have
annoyed him exceedingly had anyone bidden him good-night.

The pair talked shop, after the manner of old squatters when they sit
apart; but the tall, spare, grey man with the thoughtful face--more
like a soldier than a sheep-farmer--was not thinking much of his
flocks and herds. His thoughts followed the direction of his quiet
eyes, focussed upon an amber silk gown and its immediate surroundings.
Mr Thornycroft was Deborah's godfather, and at forty-seven was to all
the sisters quite an elderly man, a sort of bachelor uncle to the
family, one with no concern in such youthful pastimes as love-making
and marrying, except as a benevolent onlooker and present-giver; and so
the veiled vigilance of his regard was not noticed, as it would not
have been understood, by anybody.

But other eyes, similarly occupied, were plainer to read.

Jim Urquhart's, of course. Jim--as ineligible for the most coveted
post in the Western District as he well could be, by reason of the
family already depending upon him, together with the load of debt left
along with it by his deceased father, a "pal" of Mr Pennycuick's in the
gay and good old times--still contrived to bring himself within
the radius of Deborah's observation whenever occasion served. And being
there, although silent and keeping to the background, his gaze followed
her as the gaze of an opossum follows a light on a dark night, with the
same still absorption. Nothing but her returning gaze could divert it
from its mark. It was so natural, so calmly customary, so unobtrusive,
that nobody cared to attach importance to it.

He sat now, far back against the green brocade hangings of a corner
window, where he could see the beloved profile in the middle of the
room. His big, work-roughened hands clasped his big, bony knees, and
his long, loose body hung forward out of the little chair that was
never built for such as he; and he seemed given over to Rose
Pennycuick's tale of the pony that had corns, and the cat that had been
mangled in a cruel rabbit trap. He gave her wise counsel regarding the
treatment of these poor things, his deep, drawling voice an unnoticed
instrument in the orchestra of tongues; but his crude-featured,
sunburnt face held itself steadily in the one direction. From the day
that he came to manhood his soul had kept the same attitude towards the
woman to whom the profile belonged. But he never alluded to the fact,
save in this silent way.

Then there was the Reverend Bennet Goldsworthy, "Church of England
minister", as his style and title ran. Privately, Mr Pennycuick did not
like him; but for the sake of the priestly office, and as being a
parishioner, he gave him the freedom of the house, and much besides.
The parson's buggy never went empty away. Redford hams, vegetables,
poultry, butter and eggs, etc., kept his larder supplied. His
horse-feed was derived therefrom; also his horse; also his cow. When
his cow began to fail, he promptly mentioned the fact--he was
mentioning it now to Mary Pennycuick. "Yes," he was saying, A PROPOS of
his motherless little girl--whom he often brought to Redford for
change of air, leaving her to the care of the sisters until convenient
to him to reclaim her--"yes, it will mean much to my child in after
life to have had the refining influences of this house at the most
impressionable age." Truth was, that Ruby was growing a little old for
her Kindergarten, and he wanted Redford to offer her (gratis, of
course) a share in Francie's governess. "I could not endure to see her
grow up like the daughters of so many of my brother clergy, ignorant of
the very rudiments of decent life"--meaning not decent life in the
ordinary acceptation of the term, but the life that included evening
dress and finger-glasses. "She has caught the colonial accent already
at that horrid school. 'When is the new keeow coming?' says she. And,
by the way, that reminds me--your good father promised me the cow a
fortnight ago. The one we have gives us hardly enough milk for the
table; we have had no butter from her for months."

"I am so sorry," grieved Mary, as if Redford had failed in its sacred
duty of hospitality. "I will tell him about it. The men have all been
so busy with the shearing."

She was also distressed that she could not definitely invite Ruby for
the impending holidays. But Deb had issued her commands that Redford
was not to be saddled with a nurseless child at Christmas, when
everybody's hands would be full.

Mary was Ruby's willing foster-mother when Redford had her in
charge; she was also the kindest hostess of them all to Ruby's father.
To her was left the task of entertaining him, and she never neglected
it. Naturally, he gave her no thanks. When he said that what Ruby
needed was a mother's tender care, it was at Deborah he looked, who
never turned a hair's-breadth in his direction at any time, except when
good manners obliged her, and who was not tender to Ruby, whom she
called "that brat", and had smartly spanked on several occasions.

A beautiful woman cannot help having objectionable lovers any more than
a king can help a cat looking at him. This man--a most well-meaning,
good-hearted, useful little underbred person, typical of so large a
class in the Colonial Church--was Deb's pet aversion, and did not know
it. He was not made to see his own deficiencies as she saw them. When
first she flashed upon his dazzled vision, splendid in a scarlet dinner
gown, and carrying her regal head as if the earth belonged to her, he
really saw no reason why he, with his qualifications of comparative
youth, good looks (his sort of good looks), and notorious pulpit
eloquence, should not aspire to rush in where so many feared to tread.
His rush had been checked at the outset, but he was still unaware of
the nature of the barrier that Deb held rigid between them. He
continued to gaze at her with his ardent little black eyes as if no
barrier were there. And it was because he did so that Deb, who could
not slap him for it, slapped Ruby sometimes, and called her a brat, and
would not have her asked to Redford for the holidays; thereby giving
occasion to envious Alice Urquhart for that warning to Guthrie
Carey not to trust his baby to her.

There was still another lover present--the favoured lover. He sat with
Alice near the piano where Francie and her governess were playing
duets, listening without listening to his companion's jerky talk--
those pathetic attempts to attract him which so many second-rate girls
were not too proud to make obvious to his keen apprehension. Claud
Dalzell's distinction was that he was the most polished young man of
his social circle. He had had all the advantages that money could give
and in addition, was naturally refined and handsome. To hear Claud
Dalzell read poetry, or sing German folk-songs to his own graceful
accompaniment, was to make a poet of the listener; to dance with him
was pure enchantment (to another good dancer); he was the best horseman
in the land; and if his present host could not appreciate his many
charms--except perhaps the last named--others did. The whole race of
girls, more or less, fell down and worshipped him.

He sat with Alice Urquhart because he could not sit with Deborah; or
rather, because he would not condescend to share her with that
"t'penny-ha'penny mate of a tramp cargo boat", as he styled Guthrie
Carey, whom she had made happy at last. She had rescued him from her
father's clutches; she had called him to a chair beside her, where
there was no room for a third chair. Her glistening skirt flowed over
his modest toes. Her firm, round arm, flung along the chair arm between
them, made him feel like Peter Ibbotson before the Venus of Milo--it
was so perfect a piece of human sculpture. She lay back, slowly fanning
herself, and smiling, her eyes wandering all the time in
Dalzell's neighbourhood, without actually touching him--a tall,
deep-bosomed, dark-eyed, dignified as well as beautiful young woman,
knowing herself to be such, and unspoiled by the knowledge. She wore
her crown with the air of feeling herself entitled to it; but it was an
unconscious air, without a trace of petty vanity behind it. Everything
about her was large and generous and incorruptibly wholesome, even her
undoubted high temper. And this was her charm to every man who knew her
--not less than her lovely face.

Guthrie Carey--and who shall blame him?--basked in his good luck. But
every now and then he looked up and met the glower of Claud Dalzell
with a steely eye. These two men, each so fine of his kind, met with
the sentiments of rival stags in the mating season; the impulse to
fight 'on sight' and assure the non-survival of the unfittest came just
as naturally to them as to the less civilised animals. Each recognised
in the other not merely a personal rival, but an opposing type.

It amused Deborah, who grasped the situation as surely as they did, to
note the bristling antipathy behind the careful politeness of their
mutual regard. If it did not bristle under her immediate eye, it
crawled.

"Look out for the articles of virtue," Claud had warned her earlier in
the evening. "That big sailor of yours is rather like a bull in a china
shop; he nearly had the carved table over just now. He doesn't know
just how to judge distance in relation to his bulk. I'd like to know
his fighting weight. When he plants his hoof you can feel the floor
shake."

"He IS a fine figure of a man," Deb commented, with a smile.

"I can't," yawned Mr Dalzell casually, "stand a person who eats curry
with a knife and fork."

"It was pretty tough, that curry. I expect he couldn't get it to pieces
with a spoon."

"He did not try to."

"I never noticed. I shouldn't remember to notice a little trifle like
that."

"My dear girl, it is the little trifle that marks the man."

"Oh!" said Deb. And then she sought Guthrie Carey, and brought him to
sit beside her.

"That gentleman sings well," remarked Guthrie tepidly, at the
conclusion of a finely rendered song. "I often wish I could do those
ornamental things. Unfortunately, a man who has his work--if he sticks
to it properly--gets no time to qualify. I'm afraid I shall never
shine at drawing-room tricks."

"Tell me about your work," said clever Deb, smiling behind her waving
fan.

At once she had him quite happy, talking about himself. No effort was
necessary to draw him out; that she deigned to listen to him was
enough. His struggles as boy--blue-nose boy; his tough battle for the
first certificate; his complicated trials as second mate, holding
theoretically an authority that was practically none; his rise to be
qualified master and actual mate--no "t'penny-ha'penny" position in
his eyes evidently; his anticipation of the "master extra" and the pass
in steam, which might lead to anything--the whole tale was told her in
terse, straightforward fashion, but with an art new to the modest
sailor-man, who hated brag as much as cowardice. He bragged in
self-defence, in challenge of the formidable equipment of his rival.
And how interested she was! How well she understood his case--that it
was better than the swellest training-ship to make your own way by your
own exertions, and splendid to have done so much while still on the
right side of thirty.

So much! He had done more than that--he had been a husband and father
at twenty-one. But this, his most distinguished exploit, was not
mentioned.




CHAPTER VI.



He mentioned it next day, however. He had to; for after breakfast a
letter, forwarded from Five Creeks, reached him from the baby's
caretaker--the lady of whom he stood in such undignified dread. The
sight of her handwriting paled his brown face and set his stout heart
fluttering. What did she want of him? He kept the letter unopened for
some time, because he was afraid to know, although convinced beforehand
that he did know--that, of course, it was the visit he should have
paid before coming up country. When at last he drew the sheet from its
envelope, as if it had come from an infected house, and had not been
fumigated, and cast a hurried glance over the contents, he found that
the unexpected had happened once more--the wildly unexpected.

She was going to be married. He was a "general merchant" in prosperous
business, and there was nothing to wait for--except Mr Carey's
instructions as to what was to be done with the dear little boy. She
would feel acutely the parting from him, after he had been from his
birth like a child of her own, but Mr Carey would understand that she
could not now continue her labour of love on his behalf--that she had
others to consider. But she knew of a most excellent substitute--a
dear friend of her own, who had long taken the deepest interest
in darling Harry, and with whom she was sure he would be as safe and
happy as with herself. She had expected to see Mr Carey when he
arrived, to arrange matters; she hoped he would come as soon as
possible.

In the bewilderment of his mingled elation and anxieties, the young
father did not know what to do for the moment, while recognising the
urgent need for action. He must go as soon as possible, of course; but
he could not depart suddenly without a reason, and to give the reason
would be to give himself away to Alice Urquhart. Besides, a day's
outing had been planned on purpose for him; the possibilities in
connection with it were enormous; and five days of his leave were
unexpended still. He must think it over. He must have advice. So, as a
first instalment of duty, he scrawled a recklessly affectionate letter,
full of gratitude to her who had been his good genius and the guardian
angel of his boy. He did not disguise his envy of the general merchant,
whose vows of love could not have excelled in fervent expression the
good wishes of the writer for the happiness of the betrothed pair. He
hoped to have the pleasure of seeing his dear old friend on the
following day, or the day after that at latest; and he promised himself
the satisfaction of squandering his saved pay on such a wedding present
as would at least cover the cost of the bread and milk the boy had
devoured at her expense. Guthrie dropped his letter in the post-bag
while they were calling to him that it was time to start. And he turned
the key of silence upon his secret until he could pour it into the
right ear.

It was a wonder he did not pour it into Mary's, for she drove
him to Bundaboo, and nobody could have been more sympathetic than she.
She was the virtual mother of the family, who loved children, and she
was not--she could not be--a husband-hunter; a sensible man in
domestic difficulties could not have sought a wiser confidante. Yet he
resisted stubbornly all her gentle invitations to confide. In the first
place, he did not want to go with her in the pony-carriage, while Deb
and Dalzell rode. He did not like to see it taken for granted, as it
seemed to be by all, that a sailor on horseback must necessarily make a
fool of himself; the slight to his self-respect was enough to dull the
edge of his joy in the general merchant's proceedings--for, as the
reader will remember, he was still but three-and-twenty.

He had to weigh down the springs of a little basket thing no better
than an invalid's wheel-chair, and see the young exquisite, whom he
could have tossed over his shoulder with one hand, show off feats of
fancy horsemanship to make Deb's dark eyes kindle. Mr Pennycuick had
carelessly asked Billy's degenerate son to "school a bit" a creature
which for weeks had not allowed a man upon his back, and had had no
exercise beyond his voluntary scamperings about the paddock from which
he had been brought, dancing with excitement and indignation. All the
stablemen had been required to get his bridle and saddle on; he now
wheeled round and round in the large space left for him, while Claud
Dalzell, in his London riding clothes, and with his air of a reigning
prince, warily turned with him. Guthrie Carey, in the waiting
pony-carriage, had but one interest in the performance--his hopeful
anticipation of a fatal, or at least a ridiculous, result.

But there was no fear of that, and evidently Deb knew it.
Sitting her own dancing chestnut, how her beautiful eyes glowed! She
gloried in the ring of breathless witnesses to the prowess of her
knight. Many a time did she scoff and scowl at the dandyisms which she
deemed effeminate; this was one of the moments which showed the man as
she desired him. Through those fine fingers, with the polished filbert
nails, the shortened reins were drawn and held as by clamps of steel;
so was the wild-eyed head by the lock of mane in the same hand. When no
one was looking--although every eye believed itself fixed upon him--
his left foot found its stirrup, his right gave a hop, and like
lightning he had sprung up and round, without touching the horse until
fairly down in the saddle; so that the animal was robbed of his best
chance of getting the rider off, which is at the moment before he is
quite on. No other chance was offered to the baffled one, although he
kicked like a demon for nearly ten minutes.

"I wish," Guthrie Carey ground through his strong teeth, "that the
cranky beast would break his neck." It was not the beast's neck he
meant.

But Deb called: "Bravo! Well done, indeed!" and when the battle was
over called the victor to her with her lovely face of pride and joy.
Right willingly he went, and they sailed away together like the wind,
and were lost to view. Yes, this was Dalzell's hour. She knew nothing
of the brave deeds of sailor-men--common and constant as eating and
drinking, and performed to no audience and for no reward.

Alice Urquhart and Rose Pennycuick, also on horseback, followed the
flying pair; then a buggy containing Jim and schoolgirl Francie
(her governess gone home for holidays today), and a load of ironwork
for a blacksmith on the route; last of all, Mary and the sailor, for
all the world like the old father and mother of the party. Mr
Pennycuick excused himself from excursions nowadays, and so did Miss
Keene, the elderly and quite uninfluential duenna of the house, when
one was needed (she "did the flowers" and knitted singlets for
everybody).

The Shetlands pattered along at a great rate, but did not come up with
the riders until they were nearly at Bundaboo. And all the way--a long
way--Guthrie Carey had to make efforts not to bore his hostess. They
talked about the clear air and the dun-coloured land--the richest
sheep-country in the colony, but now without a blade of green upon it--
and made comments upon three bullock drays piled with wool bales, and
two camping sundowners, and one Chinaman hawker's cart, which they
encountered on the way. And that was about all.

The home-coming was a different affair.

Tea had been served in Mr Thornycroft's cool drawing-room, hats and
gloves had been collected, orders sent to the stables; and the young
sailor, panting to emulate the prowess of his rival, and thereby compel
Miss Deborah to respect him, was asking one and another what were the
arrangements for the return journey.

"I," said Rose, who hugged a puppy in her arms--a puppy long
possessed, but only now old enough to leave its mother--"I am going in
the buggy with Jim."

"Wouldn't you rather go in the pony-carriage?" inquired Carey
anxiously. "You could make a better lap on the lower seat. I
could ride your horse home for you if they'll lend me a saddle; yours
could be put in the buggy--"

Even as he spoke, Deb came round the corner from somewhere, with swift
steps and a brilliant complexion, Dalzell hurrying after her.

"Mr Carey," she called, while the sailor was still yards away from her,
"Molly and I are going to change skirts. I am tired with my ride this
morning, and am going to drive home. Will you trust your neck to me?"

Would he not, indeed? He was but a pawn in the game, but what did that
matter? Eighteen miles absolutely alone with her! And possibly half of
them in the dark! No saddle horse in the world could have tempted him
now. He could hardly speak his gratitude and joy.

"Delighted, Miss Deborah!--delighted!--delighted!"

But Dalzell, black as thunder, swung aside, muttering in his teeth.

"Oh, oh!" Francie's loud whisper followed. "DID you hear what he said?
He said 'damn'. That's because--"

"You cut along," Jim's drawl broke in, "and get ready if you want to
ride."

Mr Thornycroft tucked Deb into the pony-carriage with the solicitude of
a mother fixing up a young baby going out with its nurse. He insisted
that she should wear a shawl over her linen jacket, and brought forth
an armful of softest WOOL, Indian wove.

"Where did you get this?" she asked, fondling it, for she loved fine
fabrics.

"Never mind," said he. "Put it on."

"I am suspicious of these shawls and fallals that Bundaboo seems
full of. Who is the hidden lady?"

He only smiled at her.

"Ah, godpapa, you spoil me!"

She drew the wrap about her, and he assisted to adjust it, with gentle
skill. Then he turned abruptly to Carey, as to a groom.

"See that she doesn't throw that off. It will be chilly presently. No,
she'd better drive--she knows the road. But take care of her.
Good-night."

"Isn't he an old dear?" said Deb to Carey, as they drove off. "He has
been a second father to me ever since I was a child."

She did not hurry the ponies, being anxious not to appear to be tearing
after her offended swain.

"The evening is the pleasantest time to be out, this weather," she
said, lolling back in her seat. "And I'm sure I don't want to look at
dinner after such a lunch as I have eaten. I don't know how you feel."

"I feel the same," he assured her, with truth.

So, for her own purposes, she made their drive half as long again as it
need have been. And was so friendly, so free, so intimate!--leading
that poor innocent to the belief that his great rival was already
virtually out of his way. He was an unsophisticated sailor-lad, who,
with that rival's help, had reached a certain stage and crisis--
another one--of his man's life; and--let us be honest in our
diagnosis--the bubbles of Mr Thornycroft's fine champagne still ran in
his blood and brightened his brain, lifting him above the prosaic
ground-level where a craven timidity would have smothered him. Not
touching the balance of his wits, be it understood; just
heartening him--no more.

Twice and thrice she branched off from the road to show him something
that could well have waited for another day. She was imprudent enough
to introduce him to so sentimental a spot as the family cemetery--
established at a time when there were only Dalzells and Pennycuicks to
feed it. "Their shepherds were killed by the blacks," said Deb, as she
pushed the ponies up to the wall, and he rose in the carriage to look
over the top, "and they buried them here, marking the place with a pile
of stones. There were other deaths, and they enclosed the piece of
land. Then a brother of Mr Dalzell's, and a girl; and Mr Dalzell
himself wished to be put here, beside his brother. Not his wife, she
wouldn't; she lies in the Melbourne cemetery. Then some of our babies,
then mother. She was the last. I don't suppose there will be any more
now. The State will insist on taking charge of us."

Real English churchyard elms crowded about the wall and blightingly
overshadowed the lonely group of graves. English ivy, instead of neatly
clothing the wall, as it had been meant to do, straggled wildly over
the part of the enclosure which had once been a garden around them. Out
of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up,
and ragged things that had gone to seed. The turf was parched away,
like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked;
the head-stones--several of them ornate and costly--stained with the
drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the
perpendicular.

"It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It
ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from
the dam. But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn't think--or care.
Poor dead people! How out of it they are! And we shall be the same some
day--neglected and abandoned, just like this."

"DON'T!" muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering. The ghost of his sweet Lily
seemed to reproach him with Deb's voice. But the ghost-woman fifteen
months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life
but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if
one can look at the thing dispassionately and with an unbiased mind.

"Let us go and see the dam," Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies'
heads. "You haven't seen our big dam, have you? Everybody that comes to
Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why.
'Pennycuick's Folly' some people call it, because he spent so much
money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen'orth of
paint. He likes to do things thoroughly. So do I."

And soon they halted on the embankment of a mile-wide sheet of water,
shining like a mirror in a setting of soft-bosomed hills, their dun day
colour changed to a heavenly rose-purple under the poetic evening sky.

"Why, it is a lake," said Guthrie Carey. "You could hold regattas on
it." "We do, now and then, with our little boats. We have three over
there"--pointing with her whip to a white shed on the farther shore.
"And swimming matches. We used sometimes, when we were younger, to come
down on hot nights and be mermaids. Once we moored ourselves out
in the middle, away from the mosquitoes, and slept in the bottom of the
boat, under the stars."

"How charming!"

"It was holiday time, and our parents were away. We took cushions and
things, and it was great fun; but Keziah reported us, and we were never
allowed to do it again."

They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A
flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a
wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to
make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The
purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless
shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the
moon swam up--the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden
and Alice Urquhart last night.

He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick.

First, it was only the story of the baby--the story he had told Alice,
with some omissions and additions. He took advantage of the opportunity
to ask Deb's invaluable advice.

Deb, well aware of the influence of a summer night and certain
accessories, tried her best to be practical. She asked straight
questions about the baby.

"Where have you got him? Where does this friend live who has been
recommended to you?"

"In Sandridge--all at Sandridge--"

"That dirty, low part! That's no place to rear a boy in. Bring him into
the bush, to clean air, if you want to make a man of him. I know a
dear, nice woman--she is our overseer's wife--who has no
children, and is dying to get hold of one somehow or other. We might
make some arrangement with her, I am sure; and, if so, the little
fellow would be in clover. We'd all look after him, of course, while
you were at sea--"

"Oh! oh! oh!" The young father's heart simply exhaled itself in
gratitude too vast for words. Ah! there was no hanging back now! Not
the baby only, but the dog-chain, was laid at Deborah's feet.

"You go and fetch him tomorrow," said she, "and I'll talk to Mrs Kelsey
while you are away. Then I'll meet you at the station on your return,
to help you with him, and tell you what Mrs Kelsey says--though I have
no doubt of what it will be. But we'll keep him at Redford for a bit,
till he gets used to everybody; and you must stay with him all you can
until your ship sails. . . ."

His eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand on her shawl again. He
leaned to her. It was no use--the moon and his feelings were too much
for him. They were talking of the baby, and the word "love" had not
been, and was not going to be, mentioned; but there the thing was,
unmistakable to her keen intelligence, looming like a frontier
custom-house on the road ahead.

She grasped his big, trembling hand, and with it held him back, meeting
his adoring gaze with steady eyes and mouth.

"My dear boy, don't--don't! Don't spoil this nice evening--"

It was all that was necessary. And still so kind, so gentle with him!
No scorn, no offended dignity, no displeasure even. She, who could
punish insolence with anybody, was never hard upon the humble
admirer--only too soft, in fact, with all her basic firmness, and
incapable of the hard-hearted coquetry that so commonly makes beauty
vile. "Face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast"--that was not
Deborah Pennycuick.

A sob broke from him.

"I am a damned fool!" he muttered savagely, and by a violent effort
collected himself. "I beg your pardon."

"That's all right," she said, turning the ponies from the embankment
and whipping them to a gallop.




CHAPTER VII.



There was a moon the next night also. It did not appreciably affect him
this time--down in dirty Sandridge, hobnobbing with the baby's
caretaker and the general merchant, who, shutting his shop at six, was
free to make the sailor's acquaintance, and help him to spend a
pleasant evening. But it turned Redford garden, with its fine old trees
and lawns, into the usual bit of fairyland for those who strayed
therein.

Redford was packed with Christmas guests. The waggonette that had taken
Guthrie Carey to the train had returned full of them, and batches had
been arriving at intervals through the day. At bed-time the sisters
were sharing rooms; Rose had come to Deb's, Frances to Mary's; and the
unmarried men were all at the bachelors' quarters.

It was a hot night, and Deb, under the circumstances, was disinclined
for sleep. She paid visits to one guest chamber and another, for
private gossips and good-nights; when she returned to her own, where
placid Rose had long composed herself, she roamed the floor like a
caged animal.

"It is no use my coming to bed yet," she addressed her sister. "I could
not sleep. I should only kick about and disturb you. I'll sit down and
read a bit."

She found a novel and an easy-chair, and made deliberate efforts
to tranquillise herself. Soon Rose heard sighs and phews, and sudden
rustlings and slappings, and then the bang of a book upon the floor.

"I can't read! and the light brings the mosquitoes. It's too hot in
here. I'm going out to get cool, Rosie."

"A'right," mumbled drowsy Rose. And the light was extinguished, and the
blind of the French window rattled up.

Deb flung both leaves wide--like all the Redford doors, they were
never locked or barred--and drifting over the verandah, sat down on
the edge of it, with her feet on the gravel. She had tossed off her
pearl necklace and a breast-knot of wilted roses; otherwise, she sat in
full evening dress, and the night air bathed her bare neck and arms.
Also the mosquitoes found them--a delicious morsel!--so that she had
to turn her lacy skirt up over her head to be quite comfortable. From
under this hood the dark lamps of her eyes shone forth, gazing steadily
into the dim world--into the bit of future that she thought she saw
unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the
open spaces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green
sky, the rising moon--these things made the picture, but were to all
intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until
suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a
hedge of laurels, and fixed itself in the neighbourhood of a distant
garden-seat. Then at once she stiffened like a cat that has heard a
mouse squeak or a bird's wing rustle; she was alert on the
instant, concentrated upon the phenomenon. Instinct recognised the tip
of a cigar which had the handsome face of Claud Dalzell behind it.

"What is he doing out of doors at this time of night?" she wondered;
and the little star began to draw her like a magnet. The world becomes
another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws--
or rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad
day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in
this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of
her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the
moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent
lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts
cultivated for her guidance by generations of wise men, now, all in a
moment, came this moon-born impulse to give herself to him unasked. She
could not resist it.

Like Deb, Claud had not been inclined to sleep, and for much the same
reason. The guest chamber usually allotted to him being needed for a
lady, he had been sent to the bachelors' quarters--a barrack-like
dormitory amongst the outbuildings, very useful for the accommodation
of the occasional 'vet' or cattle-buyer, and to take the overflow of
company on festive occasions. Jim Urquhart, when at Redford, always
slept there; he preferred it, particularly when he had companions with
whom to smoke and talk sheep, and perhaps play cards, at liberty; for
the bachelors' quarters had its own wood-stack and supplies, and one
could sit by a blazing hearth all night, if so disposed, without
incommoding anybody.

Generally four bachelor beds were made up, and a screened end of
the room stacked with the material for twice as many more. At Christmas
all were in use, and lined the two long walls--which Dalzell called
"herding", and disliked extremely, while recognising that it was a
necessary arrangement to which it was his duty to conform.

The herd was undressing itself in a miscellaneous manner--yawning,
chaffing, cutting stupid jokes, some of them at his expense; until the
process was at an end, and he could reasonably assume the fellows to be
asleep, he preferred the gardens to the bachelors' quarters.

And the free night enfolded him--the rising moon uplifted him--in the
usual way, he being, like Deb, like Guthrie Carey, an instrument fitted
to respond to their mute appeals. Perhaps even more finely fitted than
Guthrie or Deb; for he had what are called "gifts" of intellect and
imagination transcending theirs--faculties of mind which, lacking
worthy use, bred in him a sort of chronic melancholy, the poetic
discontent of the unappreciated and misunderstood--a mood to which
moonlight ministers as wine to the drinking fever, at once an exquisite
exasperation and a divine appeasement. He was a poet, a painter, a
musician--possibly a soldier, or a king--possibly anything--spoiled,
blighted by that misnamed good fortune which the lucky workers who had
to work so naturally and stupidly envied him. The proper stimulus to
the worthy development of the manhood latent in him had been taken from
him at the start. And now he wandered amongst his dilettantisms,
dissatisfied and ineffectual. He lived beneath himself in his common
intercourse with others; he ate his heart when he was alone.

Unconsciously, by force of habit, he selected the most
comfortable and cleanly of the garden-seats, and made sure that the
best of cigars was drawing perfectly, before he gave himself to his
meditations on this particular moonlight night. Then he began to think
of Deb--in the same new way that Carey had begun to think of her after
discovering a dangerous rival in the field. To Claud, Guthrie was
dangerous in his rude bulk and strength, the knitted brute power that
the sea and his hard life had given him; to Guthrie, Claud was
dangerous in the highbred beauty and finish of his person, clothes and
manners, and in the astounding "cleverness" that he displayed. Each man
feared the force of those qualities which he lacked himself, and was
secretly ashamed of lacking.

Claud Dalzell considered this matter of the rival--not a probable but
a possible rival--seriously, for the first time. Hitherto he had had
an easy mind in his relations with the beauty of the countryside. She
was his for all he wanted of her. And feeling this, he had taken no
steps to register his claim; he had not even yet proposed to her.
Matrimony was not a fashionable institution--it was, indeed, a jest--
in his set. A young man with a heap of money was not expected to tie
himself down as if he were a poor clerk on a hundred a year. The
conditions of club life, with as many domestic hearths to visit as he
wished, and to stay away from when he chose, the luxury and freedom of
pampered bachelorhood, had not only been deemed appropriate, but
necessary to his peculiar needs and organisation. He had not considered
himself a marrying man. But now the new idea came to him--to make his
rights in Deb secure.

Certainly he could not contemplate the possibility of doing
without her. He had loved her that much for years. Within the last day
or two he had loved her twice that much. And now the moonlight showed
him his love enthroned above all his lesser loves--a thing of heaven,
where they were of the earth--consecrated a great passion, to lift him
out of himself. He sat and smoked, spiritually bemused, his brain
running like a fountain with melodies of music and poetry, notes and
words that sang in his ears and murmured on his lips without his
hearing them. So a distant curlew thrilled him to a more ecstatic
melancholy with its call through the moon-transfigured world, and he
did not notice it. All the influences of the gentle night contributed
to his inspired mood, but Love was the first violin in that orchestra
under Nature's conductorship--Nature, whose hour it was, walking, a
god, in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day.

And here came Deb, gliding towards him by a path that he could not see,
holding her lace skirts tightly bunched in her nervous hands. Youth to
youth, beauty to beauty, man to woman, woman to man, the magnet to the
steel--they were just elements of the elements, for once in their
lives.

"How fortunate that I put on black tonight," thought Deb, as she
pursued her stealthy way at the back of bushes--"and something that
does not rustle!"

"How beautiful she was tonight!" thought Claud. "How a dark dress
throws up that superb neck of hers! I'll take her to Europe, and show
her to the sculptors and painters; but where's the hand that could
carve that shape, or the paint that could give her colour? I'll
have a London season with her, and see her snuff out the milk-and-water
debutantes. No milk-and-water about Deb--wine and fire!--and withal
so proud and unapproachable. That hulking brute imagines--but he'll
find his mistake if he attempts to cross the line. Beauty, passion,
purity--what a blend! She's a woman alone--the blue rose of women--
and she is mine." He murmured, to some cadence of a Schubert serenade:
"My Deb! My love! My love! My queen!" and suddenly stopped short in his
musings.

Her foot crunched the gravel behind him. Without turning his head, he
sat alertly motionless for several minutes, listening, holding his
breath. Then he dropped his cigar gently.

"Fine night, Deb," he remarked aloud.

There was no immediate answer, but presently a low chuckle from the
laurel bushes.

"How did you know it was me?" she asked, imitating his casual tone.

"Couldn't explain, I'm sure. It was borne in on me, somehow."

"You did not see me."

"I don't want to see, in your case. I feel you."

There was another brief silence, and then she rustled off a step or
two.

"Well, good-night! I just came out to look for a book I left here
somewhere."

"What book?" "It doesn't matter. It is too late to read tonight,
anyhow."

"It spoils books to leave them out all night. I will help you to find
it." He got up, and pretended to look about. "It is not on this seat--"

"Perhaps Miss Keene has taken it in. She is always after me to
pick up my litters. It won't rain, anyway, so it doesn't matter."

"No, it won't rain tonight. Awfully nice night, isn't it? I came over
here to get a quiet smoke and let those fellows subside a bit. I could
not stand their noise, and the place is stifling."

"I'm afraid so. I'm so sorry we have to put you there; but you know--"

"Oh, of course! I don't mind a bit. It is hot indoors, wherever you
are. If it were not for the mosquitoes, it would be nice to sleep in
hammocks under the trees this weather." "I have often thought so. I
can't breathe shut up. Rose is in my room tonight, and she seems like a
whole crowd. I had to come out to cool myself." "And to get your book.
What book was it?" "The--er--Clough's poems." "How many copies have
you?--because one of them has been in my pocket for two days."

"Well, I don't want it. Good-night!"

She put out her hand. He took it and held it. The moonlight now was
very bright, but not bright enough to reveal his smile or her blush.
However, neither could be hidden from the second sight of love. "Don't
go yet, Debbie. I never get a word with you these days, you are so
taken up with all sorts of people. And you haven't had time to get cool
yet. I know you haven't--by the feel of your hand."

She tried to withdraw it, but did not try very hard.

"My dear boy," she trembled, "do you know what time it is? It must be
simply ALL hours."

"What does that matter? We are not keeping anybody up." "And
there's tomorrow to be considered. Christmas Eve is always such a busy,
tiring--"

"Sufficient for the day. Let us take things as we can get them.
Besides, you will sleep all the better for it. Five minutes more or
less--"

He pulled gently but firmly at the imprisoned hand. "Well, just five
minutes--although it's really--"

She was drawn down to the bench beside him, and the man in the moon, as
he looked into their shining, happy eyes, seemed to wink knowingly.

"Oh, Debbie, isn't it a heavenly night? Oh, Debbie!" His arms went
round her, and she simply melted into them. "Oh, my love!..."

Five minutes! It ran to an hour and a half before she scudded across
the lawn to bed.

And it was Mary, the busy housekeeper, who, on her busiest day, drove
to the station to meet Guthrie Carey and the baby, and the baby's cheap
and temporary child-nurse.

Mary, though she was not Deb, was too sweet and good for words. She put
the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the
body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his
child. There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on
his. Little Harry fused them. She had remembered to bring fresh milk
and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed
him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, and seemed to
forget that any other foster-mother had ever existed. His father's
relieved and astonished pleasure in the sight was only equalled by
Mary's pleasure in seeing his pleasure. "Isn't he a jolly little
cuss, Miss Pennycuick?" "He is a perfect darling," crooned Mary,
kissing him.

And, in fact, Harry Carey was a fine, clean, wholesome child, as worthy
of his old family as any born under the ancestral roof.

Mary shouldered him as if he belonged to her when they arrived at
Redford, shortly before the dinner hour.

"Now, Mr Carey, you must go to the bachelors' quarters, I am sorry to
say; but he will not miss you, since you have been away from him for so
long. He knows me now," said Mary proudly, "and I will take charge of
him. You may safely leave him to us now."

"Indeed, yes, I know that," said the thankful parent, and hastened to
his new quarters to receive the greetings and chaffings of the young
bachelors, and to dress himself for dinner, while Mary carried the baby
into the house, calling on Keziah Moon to come to her, the inadequate
nurse-girl trailing at her heels.

The house party gathered in the glazed corridor of the "middle part"--
a long, narrow room, that had once been a verandah, and that led to the
new big dining-room--to await the summons to the meal. Here Deb,
beautiful in limp white silk that showed up the lovely carmine of her
cheeks, came forward to welcome the returned guest with an eager warmth
that sadly misled him. He sat down to his dinner a few minutes later
with his head in a whirl and his appetite nowhere, as an effect of that
cordial pressure of the hand, those tender eyes, and that deep-hued
blush upon him.

Then, as he came to himself, there crept into his mind a sense
that things had been happening while he was away. All the eyes around
the table seemed continually to turn either towards Deb, who, still
flushed, and bestowing absent-minded smiles upon anybody and anything,
was certainly different from her usual stately self; or upon Claud
Dalzell, who sat beside her, and seemed to have appropriated some of
her lost dignity; or upon Mr Pennycuick, who fumbled oddly with carving
knife and gravy spoon, and gave other evidences, Guthrie thought, of
having been upset and shaken. The young man was still fumbling himself
for light upon these mysteries, when they were dispelled by a shock
that for the moment stunned him.

Mr Pennycuick called for a certain brand of wine long famous at his
board. When it came, and the bottles were being sent round, he stood
up, with a trembling goblet in his hand. The eyes round the table
dropped--all but Guthrie's, which stared at the old man.

"There's no time like the present," began the host, "if a thing has to
be done." He repeated this strange and embarrassing introductory
remark, and then spent some time in clearing his throat and blowing his
nose, and trying to wipe up the wine he was shaking over. When the
fidgets had seized upon the whole company, he rushed his fence. "Ahem!
I must ask you, my friends, to fill your glasses in honour of an event
--an event--that has just transpired in our midst--that--that I am
sure will interest you all--that--in short, my dear daughter Deborah
--and the man of her choice--who knows, I hope, what a lucky dog he is--"

"He does!" Claud interjected; and there was eager dumb-show all
round the table, everyone--again excepting Guthrie--leaning forward
to cast wreathed smiles at the seated couple. "I have given my
consent," said Mr Pennycuick--"I have given my consent. My daughter
shall be happy in her own way--and I hope he'll see to it that she
gets all she bargains for. He is the son of my oldest friend, a man
that was better than a brother to me--the whitest, straightest--But
there's no words to say what he was. Only, the son of such a man--
anybody with Billy Dalzell's blood in him--ought to be--if he isn't--"

"He is!" sang Deb, in her rich, ringing voice. "Oh, please, don't say
any more, father!"

"Well, my dear, I know I am no hand at speech-making, but I can wish
you luck, both of you, and I do. And I want our friends here--old
friends of the family--to do the same. Good wishes mayn't bring good
fortune, but for all we know they may do something towards it; and
anyway, she may as well have all her chances. Ladies and gentlemen,
long life and happiness to Deborah Pennycuick and her husband that is
to be!"

A general turmoil broke out, glass-clinkings, cheers, handshakings;
kissings, with a sob or two from the overwrought. And Guthrie, with no
heart upon his sleeve, bowed and drank with the rest. When the
demonstration was over, and the company back in its chairs, Dalzell was
left standing. His bride-elect sat beside him, her elbow on the table,
her face shaded by her hand.

"On behalf of my dear wife that is to be," said Claud, with a quiet
mastery of himself that was in striking contrast to the old man's
agitation, "and as a grateful duty of my own, I beg to thank you
all, and especially Mr Pennycuick, for this great kindness--for your
generous sympathy with us in our present happiness. Mr Pennycuick seems
to have a doubt--natural to anyone in the circumstances, but
inevitable in a father--the father of such a daughter--as to my being
qualified to appreciate the gift he has just bestowed upon me; I can
assure him, and all of you, that I am overwhelmed with the sense of my
good fortune, and of my unworthiness of it. I am unworthy--I admit it;
but it shall be the business of my life to correct that fault--if it
is a fault, and not merely a misfortune that I cannot help. To the best
of my power I will prove--by deeds, not words--that I do know her
value." Deb's hand under the table here stole towards his that hung at
his side, and he stood holding it until he finished speaking. "Fortune
has been kind in granting me the means to surround her with material
comfort--to give so rare a jewel the setting appropriate to it; for
the rest, I must trust to her generosity. I feel quite safe in trusting
to it. We have known each other--I believe we have loved each other--
from childhood; I hope Mr Pennycuick will take that as some guarantee
that his little misgivings are unnecessary." The orator twisted his
moustache, and glanced down at the bowed head beside him. "She seems to
be a little taken aback by the suddenness of this public announcement,
but I can say that it does not come a moment too soon for me. Mr
Pennycuick has made me a proud man. I glory in my position as his
daughter's affianced husband; I wish to parade it as openly as
possible. However, to spare her, I will say no more just now. Ladies
and gentlemen"--bowing to right and left--"I thank you again."

He sat down amid thunders of applause; and leaning back in his chair,
he looked straight and full at Guthrie Carey. Guthrie Carey, erect,
calm as a stone image, returned the look steadily. There was absolutely
no expression in his eyes.




CHAPTER VIII.



Carey junior joined the Christmas party after breakfast, and was handed
round. Mary introduced him. He was spick-and-span, with shining cheeks
and a damp and glossy top-knot, and his blue eyes stared at the strange
crowd stolidly for several minutes before he suddenly crumpled up his
face and uttered a howl of terror.

"What is it?" queried Dalzell, with raised brows, pretending that he
had never seen such a thing before.

"It's a baby," Frances explained, dancing round it. "Baby! Baby!"--
shaking the new rattle that was one of its Christmas gifts--"look at
me, baby! It is Mr Carey's baby. Oh, come and speak to him, Mr Carey!
He is frightened of so many strangers."

The stalwart father in the background glowered upon the son disgracing
him. Red as beetroot, embarrassed and annoyed, he strode forward. The
yelling infant cast one glance at him, and yelled louder than before.
"I shouldn't have let him come," the sailor growled. He had got up from
the wrong side of the bed that morning, and was in the mood to regret
everything, even that he had been born. "I don't know what possessed me
to let you be bothered with the brat. I'll ring for his nurse."

This was unanimously objected to. The ladies gathered round,
with honeyed words and tinkling baubles to pacify the little guest.
Deborah snatched him from her sister's arms, and ran with him into the
garden, where she tossed him, still writhing and wailing, up and down,
and dipped his face into flowers, and played other pranks calculated to
enchant the average baby. This baby turned on her for her pains, and
having slapped her cheeks, grabbed her beautiful hair and tore it down
about her ears. The next instant he felt the weight of the hand from
which his own had derived its strength.

"You brute!" cried Deb, shielding the offending little arm from a
second blow. "A great big man like you, to strike a tender mite like
this!"

"'Tender' is hardly the word," the irate parent sneered. "And mite as
he is, he is not to do things of that sort." Guthrie glared at her
sacred locks, dishevelled. "I'm awfully sorry. He shan't do it again.
I'll take him away tomorrow."

"You will do nothing of the sort," flashed Deb. "You are not fit to
have the care of him. He shall stay here, where he will be treated as a
baby ought to be--not smacked and knocked about for nothing at all."

"I admire his pluck," quoth Dalzell, sauntering up.

"So do I," said Deb; but she handed her sobbing burden to Mary. "Here,
take him, Moll, while I put my hair up. POOR little fellow!"

She need not have been so severe. She might have known that it was
because the cheeks and hair were hers that the baby had been punished
for his assault on them. She could have seen that she was wringing the
culprit's heart. Perhaps she did, and had no room in her own to
care. She stood on the sunny garden path and lifted her hands to her
head--a lovely pose.

"Here, let me," said Claud Dalzell.

She let him--which was cruellest of all. Guthrie turned his murderous
eyes from the group and sauntered away, out of the garden, out of their
sight, unrecalled, apparently unnoticed. Mary carried the crying child
into the house.

Then for an hour the silly fellow walked alone in the most solitary
places that he could find, revelling in the thought that it was
Christmas Day, and he singled out by Fate to have no share in its happy
circumstances: no home, no friends, no love, like other men--nothing
to make life worth living, save only the baby son that he had ill-used.
Apart from the sting of Deb's comment on it, he repented him of that
blow. A great big man like him, to strike a tender mite like this--a
motherless babe, his precious Lily's bequest to him--aye, indeed! It
was the act of a brute, whatever the provocation. The mite was a waif
too, alone in the world when his father was at sea, pathetically
helpless, with no defence against blows and unkindness. The reflection
brought dimness to the man's hard blue eyes, and turned his steps
houseward.

He arrived to find a large four-horsed brake at the door. The body was
filling with other persons--the sailor knew not, cared not whom. He
looked up at the radiant figure in front. She looked down on him with
heart-melting kindness, as if nothing had happened.

"Why, Mr Carey, aren't you coming to church?" she called to him.
"Not--not today, I think," he answered, without premeditation.

"Christmas Day," she hinted invitingly. "You don't always get the
chance, you know."

"I know. But--thanks--I'd rather not," he bluntly persisted, hating
himself for the churlish response, and all the time wanting to go--
certain to have gone if he had given himself time to think. Soldiers
and sailors, with their habit of unquestioning obedience to authority,
are almost always "good" churchmen, and, as she had pointed out, this
offer of Christian privileges did not come to him every year. He had
not anticipated it on this occasion, knowing Redford to be situated at
least ten miles from a church.

"Oh, well," said Deborah, scenting spite, "I daresay it IS more
comfortable in the cool house."

And then she left him, in the position of a self-indulgent idler,
preferring comfort to duty, a foil to his more conscientious rival.
When the dust of the departure had cleared away, he sat on, not in the
cool house, but on the hot verandah