Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land Part 49

Part of the roof of the Old Humpey was torn off. The hide-house was practically blown away. The great white cedar by the lagoon was struck by lightning, and lay, a chaos of dry branches and splintered limbs, one side of the trunk standing up jagged and charred where it had been riven in two.

Upon the hurricane followed a steady deluge. For a night and a day, the heavens were opened, and poured waterspouts as though the pent rain of nine months were being discharged. The river 'came down' from the heads and filled the gully with a roaring flood. The lagoon was again almost level with its banks. The dry water-course on the plain sparkled in the distance, like a mirage--only that it was no mirage. No one who has not seen the extraordinary rapidity with which a dry river out West can be changed into a flooded one, could credit the swiftness of the transformation.

Then the heavens closed once more. The sun shone out pitilessly bright, and the surface earth looked, after a few hours, almost as dry as before. But the life-giving fluid had penetrated deep into the soil; the rivers and creeks were running; green gra.s.s was already springing up for the beasts to feed upon. The land was saved. Alas too late to save the ruined squatters. There were so few of their beasts left.

Nevertheless, the rain brought new life and energy to the humans.

Kuppi, the Malay boy fetched buckets of water from the replenished lagoon, and scoured and scrubbed with great alacrity. He came timidly to his master, and asked if he might not wash out with boiling water the closed parlour and Lady Bridget's unused bedroom. He was afraid that the white ants might have got into them.

McKeith's face frightened Kuppi. So did the imprecation which his innocent request evoked. He was bidden to go and keep himself in his own quarters, and not show his face again that day at the New House.

Since Lady Bridget's departure, McKeith had slept, eaten and worked in the Old Humpey, his original dwelling.

But Kuppi did not know that the white ants had not been given a chance to work destruction upon 'the Ladys.h.i.+p's' properties. Regularly every day, McKeith himself tended those sacred chambers. Bridget's rooms were just as she had left them.

He had done nothing yet towards dismantling that part of the New House in which she had chiefly lived. He had put off the task day after day.

But since receiving Moongarr Bill's letter, and now that the drought had broken, and the Man in Possession a prospect as certain as that there would come another thunderstorm, he knew that he must begin his preparations to quit Moongarr.

To do this meant depriving himself of the miserable comfort he found during wakeful nights and the first hour of dawn--the time he usually chose for sweeping and cleaning his wife's rooms--of roaming, ghost-like, through the New House where every object spoke to him of her. In the day time, he shrank from mounting the steps which connected the verandas, but in the evenings, he would often come and stroll along the veranda, and sit in the squatter's chair she had liked, or in the hammock where she had swung, and smoke his pipe and brood upon the irrevocable past. And then he would suddenly rush off in frantic haste to do some hard, physical work, feeling that he must go mad if he sat still any longer.

To-day however, after Kuppi had fled to the kitchen, he went into his old dressing room and stood looking at the camp bed, and thought of the day of Bridget's fever when Harris had given him her note to Maule, and he had sat here huddled on the edge of the bed wrestling dumbly with his agony. The a.s.sociation had been too painful, and in his daily tendance he had somewhat neglected this room and had usually entered the other by the French window from the veranda. Thus, he saw now that a bloated tarantula had established itself in one corner, between wall and ceiling, and an uncanny looking white lizard scuttered across the boards, and disappeared under a piece of furniture, leaving its tail behind. A phenomenon of natural history at which, he remembered now, Bridget had often wondered.

He opened the door of communication--where on that memorable night, he had knocked and received no answer--and pa.s.sed through it treading softly as though he were visiting a death chamber. And indeed, to him, it was truly a death chamber in which the bed, all covered over with a white sheet, might have been a bier, and the pillows put lengthwise down it, the shrouded form of one dearly loved and lost. He gazed about, staring at the familiar pieces of furniture, out of wide red eyes, smarting with unshed tears. In her looking gla.s.s, he seemed to see the ghost-reflection of her small pale face with its old whimsical charm. The shadowy eyes under the untidy ma.s.s of red-brown hair, in which the curls and tendrils stood out as if endowed with a magnetic life of their own; the sensitive lips; the little pointed chin; and, in the eyes and on the lips, that gently mocking, alluring smile.

There were a few poems that Colin had taught himself to say by heart, and which he would recite to himself often when he was alone in the Bush. THE ANCIENT MARINER was one, and there were some of Rudyard Kipling's and he loved THE IDYLLS OF THE KING--in especial GUINIVERE.

Three lines of that poem leaped to his memory at this moment.

'THY SHADOW STILL WOULD GLIDE FROM ROOM TO ROOM AND I SHOULD EVERMORE BE VEXT WITH THEE IN HANGING ROBE AND VACANT ORNAMENT.'

He went to the wardrobe where her dresses hung as she had left them, only that daily, he had shaken them, cared for them so that no hot climate pest should injure them. And in so doing, he had been overwhelmingly conscious of the peculiar, personal fragrance, her garments had always exhaled--an experience in which rapture and anguish blended.

How he had loved her! ... G.o.d! how he had loved her! ... And yet, latterly, how he had got to take his supreme possession of her as a matter of course; had allowed the joy of it to be blunted by depression and irritability over sordid station worries. He remembered with piercing remorse how often he had neglected the trivial courtesies to which he knew she attached importance. How he had been p.r.o.ne to sullen fits of moodiness; had been rough, even brutal, as in that episode of the Blacks.... Brutal to her--this dainty lady, his fairy princess! ...

And now he had lost her. She was gone back to her own world and to her own kin.

If only he had yielded to her then about the Blacks! If he had curbed his anger, shown sympathy with the two wild children of Nature who were better than himself, in this at least that they had known how to love and cling to each other in spite of the blows of fate! He had horse-whipped Wombo for loving Oola, and swift retribution had come upon himself.... That he should have lost Bridget because of the loves of Wombo and Oola! It was an irony--as if G.o.d were laughing at him. He set his teeth and laughed--the mirthless laugh which had startled Harris.... Well, whether it were automatic or planned retribution on the part of the High Powers, the trouble could be evened up and done with. 'I was a d.a.m.ned fool,' he said to himself; 'and I've been taught my lesson too late for me to benefit by it. Except this way--I'm not going to be DOWNED for ever. I'll go through my particular piece of h.e.l.l, on this darned old earth if I must, and then I'll wipe the slate and come out on top of something else that isn't love. There's possibilities enough along the Big Bight to satisfy most men's ambition. And it's not much odds any way, so long as SHE isn't seriously hurt.'

With that summing up of the matter, he seemed to gain stoic energy. Now he went back to his dressing room, and pulled out to the veranda a couple of worn portmanteaux. Into these he put a variety of personal belongings. Among them, pictures from the walls, and old photographs in frames that had been on the dressing table. It was significant that none of these were portraits of his wife. The portmanteaux he dragged along the veranda to the side of the steps leading down to the front garden. Then, instead of returning to Lady Bridget's room, he attacked an escritoire in the parlour in which he had kept family and private papers, and which flanked her Chippendale bureau. He brought out another collection--notebooks, papers, bundles of letters dating much further back than his occupation of Moongarr--salvage from the wreck of his old home. His mother's workbox; his father's SHAKESPEARE; the family Bible--a piteous catalogue. He looked long at the book and the photographs. These last were portraits of his father, his mother and his sisters, who had all been ma.s.sacred by the Blacks, when he was a boy. He separated all such relics from the general lot, placing them, and also two or three packets of papers upon a shelf-table in the veranda--it was that table where Lady Bridget had laid the cablegram from Lord Gaverick, which she had shown him the day before she had left Moongarr. Now it seemed to him an altar of sacred memories. He brought various other small things out of the parlour--things he had not the heart to destroy--all belonging to his youth--and placed them there. As he looked at them, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and a wave of emotion pa.s.sed over his face, softening its hardness for an instant.

But the grimness came back. He made a quick movement back to Lady Bridget's room; and when, after a minute or two, he came out again, he was carrying a curious object which he had taken out of the deep drawer beneath her hanging wardrobe. It was a dry piece of gum-tree bark, shrivelled and curled up at the sides, so that the two edges almost met. At first he put it on the heap that he had turned out of the portmanteaux for destruction. His grim thought had been to top with this strange memorial of his marriage-night, the funeral pyre he had intended to build. But again the spasm of emotion contorted his features. His shoulders shook, and a dry choking sound came from his lips. He took up the piece of bark too, and laid it with the daguerreotypes on the table. He seemed afraid to give himself time to think, but went from room to room here and in the Old Humpey, dragging one thing after another out on to the veranda. Some of the heavier articles he had to hoist over the steps connecting the two verandas, and then to drag them down the other steps into the front garden, where they strewed the gravel round the centre bed.

In spring and summer, when the Chinamen had been there to water and Lady Bridget to superintend the planting and pruning, this bed had always been gay with flowers, banking a tall shrub of scented verbena the perfume of which she had been particularly fond of. Now there were weeds--most of them withered--instead of flowers. The verbena bush had long been dead, and the dry leaves and branches, beaten down by the late storm, made a bed of kindling.

Never was there garden so desolate--the young ornamental trees and shrubs all dead; the creepers dead also; even the hardy pa.s.sion vines upon the fence, mere leafless, fruitless withes of withered stems.

McKeith paused after lugging down two squatters' chairs--the first house carpentering he had done for his wife after their arrival at the head-station, and in which, he had resolved, no future owner of Moongarr should ever sit. That was the thought fiercely possessing him.

Rough chairs and tables and such-like that had been there always, might remain. But no sacrilegious hands should touch things made for her, or with which she had been closely a.s.sociated. They should be burned out here in the deserted front garden, where not even Kuppi--the only other occupant of the head-station--would witness his preparations. He himself would lay and kindle the funeral pyre, and to-night, when there would be only the stars to see him, he would light the first holocaust.

He stood considering. Sweat dropped from his forehead. His gaunt frame was trembling after his effort, which had been heavy, and he leaned against one of the tarred piles supporting the veranda to rest. But only for a few minutes. Then, his feverish activity recommenced. He piled up the wooden furniture on the bed of withered verbena branches, filled the interstices with dead leaves that he collected from the garden, laid the smaller things--books, papers, pictures--where they would a.s.sist the conflagration, and did not stop until the pyre had reached to the level of the veranda railing. He reflected grimly that there was a chance of sparks setting fire to the house itself, and calculated the extent of the gravel between, deciding that if he was there to watch there would be no danger.

All the time, the old kangaroo dog, Veno had been nosing round him, sniffing at the objects lying round, then looking up at him with bleared, wistful eyes, and evidently unable to understand these strange proceedings. Once or twice, he had roughly pushed the dog away, but, when he had finished the work and seated himself from sheer fatigue on the veranda steps, Veno came and squatted beside him, the dog's head upon his knee. He filled his pipe and smoked ruminatively; the exertion had had one good effect; it had dulled the fierceness of his pain.

As he sat there--a faint breeze that had risen with the approach of sunset, cooling his heated body--he thought again about Moongarr Bill's letter. He looked at the great pyre in front, and caught the gleam of the lagoon below through the bare branches of the trees the little ripple on its surface, the freshening green at its marge. Then he gazed out over the vast plain towards the horizon. From his low position on the steps, the middle distance was hidden from him. Through the reddish tinge cast by the lowering sun, he could discern, far off likewise, the unmistakable signs of new-springing gra.s.s and the course of the river, for so long non-existent. From the gully he heard the sound of rus.h.i.+ng water. It had been a roaring torrent just after the storm, and he knew that a flood must have come down from the heads.

Yes, the Drought had broken. The plain would soon be green again.

Flowers would spring up as they had done for Bridget's bridal home-coming. If the rain had fallen a few months sooner the station might have been saved.

And even now, with the remnant of three or four hundred cattle, provided there were no crippling debt, no spectre of the Man in Possession, he might still hang on, and in time retrieve his losses, lie low, sink artesian wells, make the station secure for the future.

He had been so fond of the place. He had taken up the run with such high hopes; had so slaved to increase his herd, to make improvements on the head-station. He had looked upon this as the nucleus of his fortune; the pivot on which his career as one of the Empire-builders would revolve.... And now....

Well, some clever speculator no doubt would buy it at a low price during the Slump, stock it with more cattle, work it up during a good season or two, and, when cattle stations boomed once more, sell it at an immense profit. That was what he himself would have done had he been a speculator in similar conditions. Even still, he could do it with a small amount of capital to supply a sop for the Bank.... Now that the Drought had broken they would be more likely to let him go on.... He thought of the 3,000 pounds Sir Luke Tallant had made him put into settlement on his marriage. He had not wanted to do that at the time; his Scotch caution had revolted against the tying up of his resources, and his instinct was justified. If only he had command of that money now! It was his own; his wife was rich; that was the one benefit he could have taken from her.... But it was impossible to broach the question.

Suddenly the dog stirred uneasily, sniffed the air and leaped to the gravel walk where it stood giving short, uncertain barks, as though aware of something happening outside for which it could not account.

McKeith lifted his head, bent in the absorption of his thought, and looked about for the disturber of Veno's placidity. But Kuppi was nowhere in sight, nor was there sign of other intruder. Where he sat, the garden fence, overgrown with withered pa.s.sion vines, bounded his vision, and had anybody ridden or driven up the hill through the lower sliprails, he would not have seen them, probably would not have heard them. For there were no longer dogs, black boys, Chinamen or station hands to voice intimation of a new arrival. All the old sounds of evening activity were hushed. No mustering-mob being driven to the stockyard; no running up of milkers or horses for the morrow; no goats to be penned--they had been killed off long ago; no beasts grazing or calling--no audible life at all except that of the birds, who, since the rain, had found their notes again and were telling each other vociferously that it was time to go to bed. Indeed, the silence and solitariness of the once busy head-station had enticed many of the shyer kinds of birds from the lagoon and the forest. Listening, as he now was, intently, McKeith could hear the gurgling COO-ROO-ROO of the swamp pheasant, which is always found near water--and likewise rare sound--the silvery ring of the bell-bird rejoicing in the fresh-filled lagoon.

But Veno was still uneasy, and Colin got up on to the veranda. He stood there, listening all the while, strained expectancy in his eyes as if he too were vaguely conscious of something outside happening....

And now he did hear something that made him go white as with uncanny dread. It was a footstep that he heard on the veranda of the Old Humpey--very light, a soft tapping of high heels and the accompanying swish of drapery--a ghostly rustle--'a ghostly footfall echoing.'...

For surely in this place it could have no human reality.

It approached along the pa.s.sage between the two buildings, halted for a few seconds, and then mounted to the front veranda.

The man was standing with his back to the Old Humpey. He would not turn. A superst.i.tious fear fell upon him and made his knees shake and his tall, lean frame tremble.... He DARED not turn his head and look lest he should see that which would tell him Bridget was dead.

But the dead do not speak in syllables that an ordinary human ear can hear. And Colin heard his own name spoken in accents piercingly clear and sweet.

'Colin.'

To him, though, it was as a ghost-voice. He stood transfixed. And just then the dog bounded past him. It had flown up the steps barking loudly. That could be no immaterial form upon which the creature flung itself, pawing, nosing, licking with the wildest demonstrations of joy.

He heard the well-remembered tones:

'Quiet Veno.... Good dog.... Lie down Veno--Lie down.'

The dog seemed to understand that this was not a moment for effusiveness. Without another sound, it crouched upon its haunches gazing up at the new-comer.

Then Colin turned. Bridget was standing not a yard from him. A slender figure in a grey silk cloak, with bare head--she had flung back her grey sun-bonnet and shrouding gauze veil.... He saw the face he knew--the small, pale face; the shadowy eyes, wide and bright with an ecstatic determination, yet in them a certain feminine timorousness; the little pointed chin poked slightly forward; the red-brown hair--all untidy curls and tendrils, each hair seeming to have a life and magnetism of its own. It was just as he had so often pictured her in dreams of sleep and waking.

He gazed at her like one who beholds a vision from another world. And then a great sob burst from him--the pitiful sob of a strong man who is beaten, broken with emotion. The whole being of the man seemed to collapse. He staggered forward, and such a change came over the gaunt, hard face, that Bridget saw it through a rain of tears which fell down her cheeks.

'Oh, Colin--Won't you speak to me?'

'Biddy!' He went close to her and gripped her two wrists, holding her before him while his hungry eyes seemed to be devouring her.

'It's you--it's really you. You're not dead, are you?'

'Dead! Oh no--no.... I've come home.'

'Home!' He laughed.