Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land Part 50

'Oh don't--don't,' she cried. 'Don't laugh like that.'

'Home!' he repeated, grimly. 'Look round you. A nice sort of home. Eh?'

'I don't care. It's the only real home I've ever had.'

'But look--look!'

She followed his eyes to the great pyre in the garden, with the dead leaves, and the pieces of furniture, the squatters' chairs, the little tables he and she had covered together, the hammock that he had cut down leaving the ropes dangling--many other things that she recognised also. Then her gaze came back to the veranda. To the open portmanteaux; the different objects still strewing the ground; and then to the shelf-table against the wall near the hammock, and, there, to his most cherished possessions. She knew at once his mother's work-box, the shabby SHAKESPEARE--the portraits, and, on top of all, the piece of gum-tree bark.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed her wrists from his grasp, darted to the shelf, seized the shrivelled pice of bark, and pressed it against her bosom as though it had been a living thing.

'Oh, you COULDN'T burn this! ... You were going to burn it with the rest--but you COULDN'T--any more than you could have burned your mother's things.... I thought of it all the way--I knew that if you could burn this, too, there would be no hope for me any more. I PRAYED that you might not burn it.'

'But how--how did you know I was going to burn the things?' he stammered bewilderedly.

'I saw it all--I saw you--just like this, on the veranda--so thin and hard and miserable--and so proud, yet--and stubborn--I saw it all--saw the bonfire ready--And I saw this piece of bark--And then something made you stop and you put it with your mother's things instead. You remembered--Oh! Mate, you DID understand? You DID remember--that first night by the camp fire--and we two--just we two'--she broke off sobbing.

'You saw--you saw--' he kept saying. 'But how--how did you know? Tell me, Mate.'

'I saw it all in a dream--at Castle Gaverick. Three times I dreamed the same dream; and I felt, inside me, that it was a prophetic warning.

We're like that, you know, we Irish Celts. And you--though you're a Scotchman--you used to laugh at such things! But they're true; they're true--I've had glints of second sight before. Joan Gildea understood.

When I told her, she believed it was a warning G.o.d had sent me, and she said I must go to you--go at once lest it should be too late. She wanted to come with me, but it would have been difficult for her to leave her work, and I didn't want her--I wanted to come to you all on my own.'

'And then?--then?' he asked breathlessly.

'Oh, then I left Castle Gaverick at once, and, in London, I took my pa.s.sage--there was an E. and A. boat just going to start. Of course I knew the route. I got out of the steamer at Leuraville, and came straight on by train--I didn't wait anywhere. I thought I'd get out at Crocodile Creek and pay somebody to drive me up here. But you've got the railway brought nearer, and when I got out at Kangaroo Flat there was a most extraordinary thing--Then, I knew why the voice inside had been urging me on so quickly.'

'An extraordinary thing--? What was it?' he said in the same breathless, broken way.

'It was Mr Ninnis. He was there, standing on the platform just off his droving trip--he was going to take the next train to Leuraville. If I had stayed there as Captain Halliwell wanted me to, I should have missed him. He'd got a letter from Moongarr Bill--Oh, I know all about that. But it doesn't matter--it doesn't matter in the least. You can go if you like and find the gold--I'll stop at Joan Gildea's cottage in Leichardt's Town and wait for you--I don't care about ANYTHING if you'll only let me be your Mate again. But Colin--' she rushed on, for he could not speak, and the sight of a great man struggling with his tears is one that a woman who loves him can scarcely bear to see. And yet the sight made Bridget happy for all its pain--'Colin, when I first saw Ninnis, do you know what I thought--? That you had sent him to meet me. That you, too, had been warned in a dream?'

'No, I wish I had been--My G.o.d, I wish I had been.'

'What would you have done, Colin?'

'I'd have been there myself,' he said simply. 'It would have been me, not Ninnis, that you saw at Kangaroo Flat Station.'

She held out her arms. The roll of bark dropped on the boards of the veranda. In a moment he was pressing her fiercely to his breast, and his lips were on hers.

And in that kiss, by the divine alchemy of true wedded love, all the past pride and bitterness were trans.m.u.ted into a great abiding Peace.