Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land by Rosa Praed (page 5)

thanks to those murderous brutes keeping back the drays–and the muster has to be stopped for the same reason. I won’t answer for when I can be back.’ . . . As she made no answer, he asked sharply: ‘Do you understand, Biddy?’

‘Yes, of course. I have no doubt, Colin, that you’ll find it all highly stimulating. And perhaps you will be able to shoot somebody with a clear conscience, which will be more stimulating still. Really Mr Maule, you are lucky to have come in for a civil war–I heard that in South America that was your particular interest. Do you carry civil wars about with you? Only, there’s nothing very romantic in fighting for mere freedom of contract–it seems so obvious that people should be free to make or decline a contract. I wonder which side you would take.’

Her levity called forth an impatient ejaculation from McKeith.

‘I’m afraid in my wars it’s generally been what your husband would consider the wrong side,’ said Maule with a laugh. ‘I’ve usually fought with the rebels.’

‘Then you’d better not go to Breeza Downs. You’d better stop and fight for me,’ exclaimed Bridget.

‘That’s just what I was about to propose your friend should do,’ said McKeith in hard deliberate tones. He looked straight at his wife– shoulders and jaws squared, eyes like flashing steel under the grim brows. The expression of his face gave Bridget a little sense of shock. She raised herself abruptly, and her eyes flashed pride and defiance too.

‘How very considerate of you, Colin–if Mr Maule LIKES to be disposed of in that way. HE is to be allowed freedom of contract I presume, though the shearers are not.’

‘You needn’t be afraid that I shall strike, Lady Bridget,’ laughed Maule. ‘It will suit my general principles to keep out of the scrimmage. I don’t know anything about the rights and wrongs of your labour question, but I confess that, speaking broadly, my sympathies are usually rather with Labour than with Capital.’

‘Capital!’ echoed McKeith derisively. ‘It’s blithering irony to talk of us Leura squatters as representing capital. We’re all playing a sort of battledore and shuttlecock game–tossed about between drought and plenty–boom and slump. A kick in the beam and one end is up and the other end down. There’s Windeatt, who will be ruined if his wool-shed is destroyed and his shearing spoiled. No rain, and the banks would foreclose on most of us. Take myself. Two years ago the skies were all smiling on my fortunes. This last year, it’s as if the hosts of heaven had a down on me.’

‘The stars in their courses fought against Sisera,’ murmured Lady Bridget.

‘I’m Sisera, am I?’ He gave her a fierce look and crossed to the veranda-railing, where he began cutting tobacco into the palm of his hand. ‘Well, there is something in that. But the stars have never licked me yet. Sisera was a coward, or they wouldn’t have DOWNED him.’

‘Ah, but there was Jael to be reckoned with,’ put in Maule softly.

‘Jael!’ McKeith plugged his pipe energetically. ‘The more fool Sisera for not giving Jael a wide berth. He should have gone his way and kept her out of his affairs.’

A hard little laugh rang from the depths of the squatter’s chair. Maule got up and strolled into the sitting-room, where he seemed engrossed in the pictures on the wall. Just then Cudgee, the black boy, hailed McKeith from the foot of the steps.

‘That fellow pollis man want’ing Massa. He sit down long-a Old Humpey.’

‘All right.’

McKeith looked into the parlour. ‘My wife will entertain you, Maule. I daresay you’ve got plenty to talk about. I’ll see you later.’

Presently they heard him outside speaking to the Police Inspector. ‘Come into the office, Harris, and have a smoke and a glass of grog.’

CHAPTER 16

Lady Bridget and Willoughby Maule were alone again. She got up from the long chair, and as she did so her cigarette case dropped from her lap. He picked it up and it lay on his open palm, the diamonds and rubies of her maiden initials glistening on the gold lid. They looked at each other across it.

‘I gave you this,’ he said, ‘and you have kept it–used it?’

He seemed to gloat over the bauble.

Her fingers touched his hand as she took the case from him, and he gave a little shiver of pleasure.

‘Let me have it; I want another cigarette.’ She selected two and gave him one of them.

They moved to the divan near the fireplace, where some red embers remained of the log of sandalwood. Its perfume lingered faintly in the atmosphere.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘It’s like you; the only thing in the god-forsaken desert that IS like you.’

‘Oh, you don’t know me–now.’

‘Don’t I! Well, your husband has given me the chance of knowing you– better–and I warn you that I shall not scruple to avail myself of the opportunity.’

She shook her head dubiously. ‘Give me a light.’

He stooped and lit his own cigarette, then, bending, held its tip to her. They both inhaled a few whiffs in silence. Presently, he said:

‘I find it difficult to understand McKeith.’

‘Don’t try. You wouldn’t succeed. I observe,’ she added, ‘that you must have become rather friendly at Tunumburra?’

‘Oh, yes. I can generally get on with open-air men. Besides, I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to ask me here.’

‘Well–and what do you thing of it, now that you are here?’

‘Great heavens! What do you imagine that I should think of it! The whole thing seems to me the most ghastly blunder–the most horrible anomaly. You–in these surroundings! Married to a man so entirely beneath you, and with whom you don’t get on at all.’

‘You have no right to say that.’

‘The thing is obvious; though you tried to carry it off before dinner. Your manner to each other; the lack of courtesy and consideration in him; his leaving you. . . .’

‘Stop,’ she interrupted. ‘There’s one thing you MUST understand. I don’t mind what you say about yourself–I want to hear that–but I can’t allow you to criticise my husband.’

‘I beg your pardon. It isn’t easy in the conditions to preserve the social conventions. I will try to obey you. At any rate, you allow me to be frank about myself. . . . It was sweet of you to keep this–more than I could have dared hope for.’

He fingered tenderly the cigarette case on her lap.

‘I suppose I ought to have sent it back to you. But I didn’t want to. You see it was not like an engagement ring.’

‘No, worse luck.’

‘Why, worse luck?’

‘The ring would have been the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond. If you had been really engaged to me–formally, officially engaged, you couldn’t have thrown me over so easily.’

‘I–throw you over! Is it quite fair to put it that way?’

‘No, I admit that. Let us be honest with each other–this once.’

‘This once–very well–but not at this moment. I daresay there will be time for a talk by and by.’

‘I wait your pleasure.’

‘There are some things I should like to understand,’ she went on, ‘–about you–about me, it doesn’t matter which. And, after all, I only want to know about you out of a sort of perverse curiosity.’

‘That’s so like you. You always managed to infuse a bitter drop into your sweetness. And you COULD be so adorably sweet. . . If only I could ever have felt sure of you.’

‘Where would have been the use? We never could spend an hour together without hurting or annoying each other. It’s a very good thing for us both that neither cared enough to make any real sacrifice for the other.’

‘There you wrong me,’ he exclaimed. ‘I did care–I cared intensely. The touch of your hand–the very sweep of your dress thrilled every nerve in me. I never in all my life loved a woman as I loved you. That last day when you walked out of my rooms. . . .’

‘Where I never ought to have gone. Fancy the properly brought-up English girl you used to hold up to me doing such a shocking thing as to visit you alone in your chambers! . . . Oh! Is that Colin back again?’

For Maule had started visibly at the sound of quick steps mounting to the veranda, and McKeith’s towering figure appeared in the doorway, looking at them.

Lady Bridget turned her head, her cigarette in her hand, and glanced up at his face. What she saw in it might have made a less reckless or less innocent woman feel uneasy. She was sure that he must have heard that last speech of hers about visiting Maule in his chambers. Well, she didn’t care. Besides Colin hadn’t the smallest right to resent any action of hers before her marriage. . . She did not turn a hair. Maule admired her composure.

‘BON SANG NE PEUT MENTIR,’ he thought to himself, and wished they had been talking in French.

‘You look as grim as the statue of the Commander,’ said Lady Bridget. ‘What is the matter?’

‘Lady Bridget and I have been exchanging unconventional reminiscences,’ put it Maule with forced lightness.

McKeith took no notice of either remark, but strode across the room to the roll-top escritoire, where he usually wrote his letters when in his wife’s company. He extracted a bundle of papers from one of the pigeon holes.

‘This is what I came for. Sorry to have interrupted your reminiscences,’ and he went out again, passing along the back veranda.

Maule had got up and was standing at the fireplace. Lady Bridget rose too.

‘I’m going to bed. We keep early hours in the Bush.’

‘What! Already!’ he exclaimed in dismay.

‘I was up at six this morning. Well, I hope you won’t be too uncomfortable with the white ants in the Old Humpey–they are perfectly harmless. Your room is next to the office, as I daresay you’ve discovered. And you’ll find Colin there I suppose, with your friend the Police-Inspector.’

‘Don’t call that man Harris my friend. We’ve had one or two scraps at each other already. He was pleased to take it for granted that I’m what he calls a “new chum,” and didn’t like my shewing him that I knew rather better than he does what police administration should be in out-of-the-way districts.’

Lady Bridget nodded. ‘Then we’re both under ban of the Law. I DETEST Harris. . . . Good-night.’ And she flitted through the French window without giving him her hand.

The station seemed in a state of unquietude till late into the night. The lowing of the tailing-mob in the yard was more prolonged than usual. And the horses were whinnying and answering each other down by the lagoon as though there were strangers about. Lady Bridget, lying awake and watching through her uncurtained windows the descent of the Southern Cross towards the horizon, and the westward travelling of a moon just out of its first quarter, could hear the men’s voices on the veranda of the Old Humpey–that of Ninnis and the Police Inspector; Maule seemed to have retired to his own room.

McKeith was evidently busy upon preparations for his absence from the station. He must have been cleaning guns and pistols. There were two or three shots–which startled and kept her in a state of tension. At last she heard the interchange of good-nights, and the withdrawal of Ninnis and Harris to the Bachelor’s Quarters. Finally, her husband came to his dressing-room–not along the front veranda, as would have been usual, but by the back one, through the bathroom. Even this deviation from habit seemed significant of his mood–he would not pass her window. He moved about for a time as if he were busy packing. Then came silence. She imagined him on the edge of the camp bed, so seldom used, smoking and ruminating.

Whiffs from his pipe came through the cracks of the door between the two rooms, and were an offence to her irritated nerves. She had grown accustomed to his tobacco, but, as a rule, he did not smoke the last thing at night. He had seemed to regard his wife’s chamber as a tabernacle, enshrining that which he held most sacred, and would never enter it until he was cleansed from the grime and dust of the stockyard and cattle camp, and had laid aside the associations of his working day. That attitude had appealed to all that was idealistic in both their natures, and had kept green the memory of their honeymoon. It angered her that to-night, of all nights, he should disregard it.

In personal details, she was intensely fastidious, and at some trouble and cost had maintained in her intimate surroundings a daintiness almost unknown out-back. Her room was large, and much of its furnishings symptomatic of the woman of her class–the array of monogrammed, tortoise-shell backed brushes and silver and gold topped boxes and bottles, the embroidered coverlet of the bed, the flowered chintz and soft pink wall paper, the laced cambric garments and silk-frilled dressing gown hanging over a chair. When service lacked, and there was no one to wash and iron her cambric and fine linen, she contrived somehow that the supply should not fail, and brought upon herself some ill-natured ridiculed in consequence. The wives of the Leura squatters thought her ‘stuck-up’ and apart from their kind. If they had known how much she wanted sometimes to throw herself into their lives–as she had thrown herself into the lives of her East-End socialistic friends! But the stations were few and far between, and the neighbours–such as they were–left her alone.

Letting her mind drift along side-tracks, she resented now there having come no suggestion from the Breeza Downs women that she should accompany her husband and share the benefits of police protection, or– which appealed to her far more–the excitement of what might be going on there. Of course, though, there was nothing for her to be nervous about here–she wished there might have been. Any touch of dramatic adventure would be welcome in the crude monotony of her life.

But the adventure promised to be of a more personal kind.

Suddenly, she jumped out of bed and softly slipped the bolt of the door into her husband’s dressing room. She did it on a wild impulse. She felt that she could not bear him near her to-night. He should see that she was not his chattel. . . . But, perhaps, he did not want to come. . . . Well, so much the better. In any case, she wanted to show him that she did not want him. She wondered if he would venture. . . . She wondered if he did really care. . . .

He appeared in no hurry to test her capacity for forgiveness. . . . Or it might be that the minutes went slowly–laden as they were with momentous thought. She lay in a tumult of agitation, her heart beating painfully under the lawn of her nightgown. She had a sense of gasping wonderment. She felt, as Colin had felt, that something tremendous had happened–and with such bewildering suddenness–altering all the conditions between them.

Yet, through the pain and bewilderment, her whole being thrilled with an excitement that was almost intoxicating–like the effect of an insidious drug, or the fumes of heady wine. She knew it was the old craving for sensation, the fatal O’Hara temperament awake and clamouring. Try as she would–and she did try in a futile fashion– she could not shut off the impression of Willoughby Maule–the sombre ardour in his eyes, the note of suppressed passion in his voice. There was no doubt that this unexpected meeting had restarted vibrations, and that his influence was a force to be reckoned with still.

If Colin had acted differently–if he had not behaved so brutally to those poor blacks–if his manner to her had not been so hard and overbearing. And then his leaving her alone like that with Willoughby Maule! Of course, he was jealous. He had jumped at conclusions. What right had he to do so? What could he know? He must suspect her of horrible things. His questions had been insultingly dictatorial. Now, he wanted to shew her that he flung her off. He would not put out a finger to hold her to him. Had he not said something like that before their marriage! . . . It was abominable.

The whiffs of tobacco smoke came no more. He was moving about again. She heard him in the bathroom. After a minute or two he came to the door and tried to open it.

‘Biddy,’ he said. Then in a deep-toned eager whisper, ‘Mate!’

She sat up in bed; she had the impulse to go and open the door, but some demon held her back. She lay down again on her pillow. . . . The bed had creaked. . . . He must have known that she was awake. . . . He waited a minute or two without speaking . . . knocked very softly. . . . She was silent. . . . Again she heard him moving about in his dressing-room, and, after a little while, she heard him go out, passing along the back veranda. He did not return. It was dawn before Bridget dropped into the heavy morning slumber, which follows a night of weeping.

BOOK III

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF COLIN MCKEITH AND OTHERS

CHAPTER 1

When Lady Bridget awoke, it was then near the hour at which they ordinarily breakfasted. Finding, when she had dressed, that all was silent in the next room, she looked in.

It was empty, the bed had not been slept in, but there were signs that McKeith had got into his riding clothes and that he had packed a valise.

Maule was waiting in the dining-room, and Maggie, the serving maid, gave a message from McKeith that he had had his breakfast at the Bachelors’ Quarters with Mr Harris and that they were both going to start for Breeza Downs immediately.

Bridget made no pretence of breakfasting. She told Maule to forage for himself, and, after swallowing a cup of coffee, made the excuse of household business–to see if the Chinaman had put up his master’s lunch–if the water-bags were filled–what were to be the proceedings of the day. She had a hope that McKeith might say something conciliatory to her before he left. The remembrance of that disregarded appeal–the word ‘Mate’ to which she had given no response, weighed, a guilty load, upon her heart.

But she was sore and angry–in no mood to make any advance or stoop to self-justification. He was outside the store, where Ninnis was weighing rations for Harris, and McKeith’s and the Police Inspector’s horses, ready saddled, with valises strapped on, were hitched to the paling.

Harris sulkily touched his helmet to Lady Bridget, but McKeith had his back to her and seemed wholly absorbed in some directions he was giving.

‘You’ll see to it, Ninnis, that six saddle-horses are kept ready to run up, in case the Pastoralist Executive sends along any message that’s got to be carried down the river–there’s that lot of colts Zack Duppo broke in, they’ll do. And you can get in Alexander and Roxalana from the Bore pasture, in case the buggy should be wanted–and one or two of the old hacks that are spelling out there. Of course, her ladyship’s horse mustn’t be touched, and you’ll see Mr Maule has a proper mount if he wants it–the gentleman who’ll be here for a bit–a friend of her ladyship’s from England–you understand. You’ll keep on those new men for the tailing mob, though I’m not sure they mightn’t be Unionists in disguise. Anyway, Moongarr Bill is a match for them. . . . And you’ll just mind–the lot of you–that it’s my orders to stockwhip blacks off the place, and that if any Unionist delegates show their faces through the sliprails they’re not allowed to stop five minutes inside the paddock fence.’

‘Right you are, Boss,’ responded Ninnis, and there was a change of grouping, and McKeith strode out to the yard to look into some other matter, all without sending a glance to his wife.

Presently Moongarr Bill came up, chuckling mysteriously, ‘Say, Boss, I believe there’s one of them dashed organising chaps coming down now from the top sliprails.’ And as he spoke, a man rode to the fence, harmless enough looking, of the ordinary bush type.

He was about to get off his horse in the assured manner of a bushman claiming the usual hospitality, but McKeith–big and grimly menacing– advanced and held up his hand.

‘No, wait a bit. Don’t unsaddle. I’d like first to know your business.’

‘I’m an Organiser,’ said the man defiantly, ‘and I’m not ashamed of my job. Trades Unions are lawful combinations, and I’ve come to have a talk with your men. . . .’ He ran on with professional volubility. ‘My object in going round your district is to bring about a peaceful compromise between employers and employed–Do you see. . . .?’

‘Stop,’ thundered McKeith. ‘I’d have you understand that there’s an organiser on this station already. I’M the Organiser here, and I’m not taking stock in Trades Unions at present.’

‘But you’ll let me have a talk with your men?–No harm in that.’

‘No, you don’t,’ said McKeith.

‘Well, I can spell my horse an hour or two, can’t I?’

‘No, you can’t. You’ll ride off my station straight away.’

‘I’ve been off tucker since yesterday,’ said the man, who seemed a poor-spirited creature. ‘Anyhow, Boss, you’ll give me something to eat.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ The laws of bush hospitality may not be violated. Food must be given even to an enemy–provided he be white. McKeith called to the Chinaman to bring out beef and bread. A lump of salt junk and a hunk of bread were handed to the traveller.

‘Now you be off, and eat that outside my paddock,’ said McKeith. ‘See those gum trees over there?–You can go and organise the gum trees.’

The man scowled, and weakly threatened as he half turned his horse’s head.

‘Look here, Boss, you’ll find yourself the worse for this.’

‘Shall I. In what way, can you tell me?’

‘You’ll find that your grass is burned, I daresay.’

‘I’m obliged to you for the hint. I’ll take precautions, and I’ll begin by shepherding you straight off my run,’ said McKeith. ‘Harris, if you’re ready now, come along here.’

The Police Inspector stepped off the store veranda, where he had been standing, a majestic and interested onlooker. The Organiser–after all, a mere man of straw, crumpled under his baneful stare.

‘You can’t give me in charge–you’ve got no warrant–I’ve done nothing to be given in charge for.’

‘Some of your people have, though, and here’s a bit of information for any skunk among your cowardly lot,’ said McKeith. ‘I’ve offered one hundred pounds reward for the scoundrels who cut my horses’ throats and robbed my drays on the road to Tunumburra. There’s a chance for you, if you’re mean enough to turn informer.’

‘I know nothing about that,’ said the Organiser.

‘Eh? Well, if my grass is burned, I shall know who did it, and so will this Police Inspector. And I am a magistrate, and will have you arrested. Get on your horse, Harris, we’ll start at once, and ride alongside this chap till he’s over my boundaries.’

Harris unhitched his horse and mounted, but not sooner than McKeith was he in the saddle. Then McKeith looked at last towards the veranda where Bridget stood, white, defiant, with Maule at the French window of the dining-room just behind her.

McKeith took off his hat, made her a sweeping bow, which might have included his guest, turned his horse’s head and rode in the direction of the sliprails, Harris and the sulky Organiser slightly at his rear.

Bridget never forgot that impression of him–the dogged slouch of his broad shoulders–the grim set of his head, the square, unyielding look of his figure, as he sat his horse with the easy poise of a bushman who is one with the animal under him–in this case, a powerfully made, nasty tempered roan, one of Colin’s best saddle-horses–which seemed as dogged tempered as its master.

Maule showed tact in tacitly assuming the unexpected necessity for McKeith’s abrupt departure–also that he had already bidden good-bye to his wife.

Lady Bridget made no comment upon her husband’s scant courtesy to his guest when she rejoined Maule after an hour or two spent in housewifely business. They strolled about the garden, smoked cigarettes in the veranda, she played and sang to him, and he brought out his cornet, which he had carried in his valise, being something of a performer on that instrument.

A demon of reckless gaiety seemed to have entered into Lady Bridget. Watching McKeith disappear behind the gum trees, she had said to herself:–‘I can be determined, too. I have as strong a will as he has. He did not choose to say one regretful word. He was too stubborn to own himself in the wrong. He left me in what–if he believed his suspicion to be true–must be a dangerous position for a woman–only it shall not be dangerous to ME. I know exactly how far I am going– exactly the amount of excitement I shall get out of it all. Neither Willoughby nor he deserve an iota of consideration. I shall amuse myself. So! No more . . . . But he can’t know that. He has never thought about ME. He has thought of nothing but his own cross-grained pride and selfish egoism. No man of ordinary breeding or SAVOIR-FAIRE would have gone off like that!’

She forgot in her condemnation of Colin to make allowance for the primal nature of the man; for a certain kinship in him with the loftier type of savage, whose woman must be his wholly, or else deliberately relinquished to the successful rival, and into whose calculation the subtleties of social jurisprudence would not naturally enter.

Nor did she remember at the moment that Maule had been described by her own relatives as a person of neither birth nor breeding–a fortune-hunter–not by any means a modern Bayard. He at least was a man of the world, she thought, and would appreciate the situation. He had lost that touch of unaccustomedness–she hardly knew how to describe it–which had often irritated her in their former relation. In their talk that day he seemed much more at home than she was in the world she had once belonged to. He spoke of ‘personages’ with the ease of familiar acquaintance. Apparently, he had got into quite the right set–a rather political set, she gathered. He told her that he had been pressed to stand for a well-nursed Liberal Constituency, and implied that but for the catastrophe of his wife’s death he would now be seated in Parliament, with a fair prospect in the future of place and distinction. Of course, it was the money which had done it, she told herself, though he had undoubted cleverness, she knew, and, as he pointed out, his experience in a particular South American republic– very much to the fore just now in European diplomacy–stood to his advantage. His marriage had given him opportunity. He alluded without bad taste to his dead wife’s generosity. She had left him her entire fortune unfettered. He was now a rich man. He explained that she had had none but very distant relations and that, otherwise, charitable institutions would have benefited. She had been a very good woman, he said–a woman with whom nine hundred out of a thousand decent men would have been perfectly happy. He let it be inferred that he was the thousandth man. His eyes, not his lips told her the reason why.

Their talk skimmed the surface of vital things–the new awakening in England; the threatenings of a socialistic upheaval; his individual aims and ideas–she recognised her own inspirations. He spoke of his political ambitions. Suddenly she said:

‘I wonder why you made the break of coming out to Australia–why you did not stay in England and follow on your career?’

‘There are bonds stronger than cart ropes which may drag a man by force from the path he has marked out for himself. Surely you must understand?’

‘Really, Mr Maule.’

‘Why will you be so formal!’ he interrupted impetuously. ‘It is absurd. Women nowadays always call men they know well by a PETIT NOM.’

‘Do I know you well! I often think I never knew you at all.’

‘That is what Lady Tallant used to say to me, latterly, about you and myself–that we never really knew each other.’

‘Oh, poor Rosamond! It makes me miserable to think of her. You became friends, then–latterly?’

‘She was very nice to me when she came back from Leichardt’s Land. And besides, she was anxious for me to come out to Luke and help him a bit. . . . She told me about your marriage. She knew I could settle to nothing–of course, the world in general thought it was because of that tragedy–my wife’s death–and the child–you understand?’

Bridget nodded slowly.

‘Lady Tallant knew the truth–that I was tormented by one ceaseless longing–after the impossible. I fancy she thought that if I could realise the impossibility, I might get over the longing. . . . But– Bridget, it’s no use pretending–I did try to do my duty. I think I succeeded, to a certain extent, in making my wife happy–but there was always the same gnawing regret. . . .’

‘You must put all that out of your head,’ she interrupted curtly.

‘I cannot. A man doesn’t love a woman like you, and, because she is married to another man, put her out of his head–in two years or ten– or Eternity, for that matter.’

She laughed joylessly. ‘Eternity!’ she scoffed.

They were in the veranda after luncheon, she swinging slowly in the hammock, playing with a cigarette, he smoking likewise, scarcely attempting to suppress the stormy feeling in his face and voice. For her, the crude brown-grey landscape rose and fell with the motion of the hammock, and jarred with the exotic memories he evoked. She had been called back to the varied emotional interests of her girlhood, and realised, in a rush, how deadly dull was life in the arid wastes of the Never-Never. Nothing more exciting than to watch the great parched plain, with the dry heat-haze upon it, getting browner every day, and the shrinking lagoon and its ever widening border of mud. Nothing, when she turned her eyes to right and left, but ragged gum trees and black gidia forest. What a dead blank wilderness it was!’

She gave a little gasp as if for breath. He seemed to read her thoughts.

‘Do you remember Rome–and the Campagna, that first day we went to Albano?–And our walk through the woods down to Lake Nei?–It was then I first knew that I loved you.’

‘Will–if you are going to stay here you mustn’t talk like that. It’s not playing the game.’ She spoke pleadingly.

‘Does your husband play the game?’ Maule retorted. ‘Is it playing the game to leave you here alone with me, when he must know–or at least, guess–how things have been between us?–Do you think I didn’t notice yesterday that he suspected me–suspected us both? I should have been a blind mole not to see by his face and manner how he felt. Upon my soul, he would have no defence–if. . . .’

She stopped him with a gesture.

‘I must ask you again not to discuss my relations with my husband; they do not concern you.’

‘Do they not!’ And as she rose abruptly from the hammock, ‘I beg your pardon,’ he added humbly, ‘I will do my best not to offend again.’

He got up too and stood, his back against the veranda railings.

‘Lady Bridget, you mustn’t be angry with me. I suppose I am a little off my balance, you must remember that this is–for me, a rather staggering experience.’

‘Shall we go for a ride?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I don’t suppose you have much idea of what a wild western station is like.’

‘Oh, I’m fairly well acquainted with life on big pastures,’ he answered lightly, taking her cue. ‘You would be surprised, perhaps, at the list of my qualifications as an “out-back squatter.”–I’m a bit of a rancher–had one in the Argentine–a bit of a doctor–a bit of a policeman–I was in charge once of a constabulary force out in British Guiana. That’s where I got a rise off Harris–a bit of a law breaker, too–in fact a bit of everything. Yes, I should enjoy a ride round here with you immensely.’

‘Then do you mind looking for Mr Ninnis, the overseer, you know.’

‘Yes, I know Ninnis. Had a yarn–as he’d say–with him last night while your husband was talking to Harris. Ninnis doesn’t get on well with Harris–another point of sympathy. We’re quite friends already. Ninnis and I–he’s been in South America, too.’

‘You’ll find him somewhere about the Bachelors’ Quarters, and I’ll go and put on my habit,’ she said.

Lady Bridget appeared as Maule and Ninnis were finishing saddling the horses. Ninnis had stayed near the head station, and was keeping a sharp look-out for bush fires, he said. Otherwise, there appeared to be no elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual attitude towards strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South America, and also to Maule’s undoubted knack of managing men.

CHAPTER 2

They rounded the lagoon and skirted the gidia scrub. Maule was on a Moongarr horse, Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already had opportunity to admire the famous O’Hara seat. They had hunted together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty, however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost tragic hardships of life on the Leura–how she had been left servantless–until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura– when the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush. She described the chivalrous SUNDOWNER who had on one occasion helped her through a week’s washing; and Zack Duppo the horsebreaker, whose Christmas pudding had been a culinary triumph, and the loyalty of faithful Wombo, who had done violence to all his savage instincts in acting as house-servant until the advent of the Malay boy Kuppi. She told of her first experience of a summer out West. The frying of eggs in the sun on a sheet of corrugated zinc, so intense was the heat. The terror of snakes, centipedes, scorpions. The plagues of flies and white ants. Then how, during the servantless period, in utter loneliness and Colin’s enforced absence at the furthest out-station she had had an attack of dengue fever, and no woman within forty miles of her.

‘And your husband allowed this? But where was that barmaid-looking person who seems to keep house here for stray gentlemen–and, who has the yellow-headed and blue-eyed little boy?’

Bridget’s lip curled.

‘Mrs Hensor had accepted a temporary situation at an hotel in Fig Tree Mount–the only time I’ve regretted her absence,’ and the musical laugh seemed to Maule to have acquired a note of exceeding bitterness. ‘Perhaps you don’t know,’ she went on, ‘that Mrs Hensor is a sort of Helen of the Upper Leura–though unfortunately as yet no Paris has carried her off–I wish there was one bold enough to do it. She had to be asked to take a change of air because there was rivalry about her between the buyer of a Meat Preserving Establishment and the chief butcher at Tunumburra. Fair Helen scorned them both. Result: The two buyers bought beasts elsewhere and, as you would understand, on a cattle station, butchers may not be flouted. Though I daresay,’ Lady Bridget added with a shrug, ‘if I could have had the butchers in the house–I draw the line only at Harris–and had sung to them and played up generally, I might have scored even off Mrs Hensor. But they wouldn’t come until after she had gone and there was no further danger of a duel taking place outside the Bachelors’ Quarters.’

Maule took her cue again and laughed as if the matter were one to jest about. But as he looked round, his face did not suggest merriment. Nor for that matter did the landscape. They were riding at the edge of the immense sandy plain, patched with brown jaggled grass and parched brambles and prickly lignum vitae–nothing to break the barren monotony but clumps of stunted brigalow and gidia, a wind-mill marking the site of an empty well with the few hungry-looking cattle near it.

Now they dipped into a scrub of dismal gidia.

‘This is the most depressing country I have ever ridden through,’ he said.

‘You don’t know what a difference three inches of rain makes,’ she answered. ‘Then the grass is green, the creeks are running, and at this time the dead brambles are covered with white flowers. But it doesn’t rain. There’s the tragedy.’

‘The tragedy is that you–you of all women should be wasting your youth and beauty in this wilderness. How long is it going to last?’

She shrugged again, and for an instant turned her face up towards the sky. ‘You must ask the heavens?’

‘Meaning, I presume, that like most of the Australian squatters, your husband hasn’t capital enough at his back to stand up against continued drought?’

‘Precisely.’ She looked at him, with her puzzling smile.

‘But you couldn’t have understood his position when you married him?’

‘No, I didn’t–altogether. But I should really like to remind you that I am not in the witness box.’

‘I think you owe me the truth!’ he said, passionately.

‘What do you call the truth?’ she asked, reining in her horse and meeting his eyes straight.

But she had to turn hers away before he answered, and he as well as herself was conscious of the compelling effect his gaze had upon her.

‘I could have made you marry me if I had been strong enough to persist,’ he said.

‘Cannot any man do what he is strong enough to do–if he wishes it enough to persist?’

‘I should have put it this way. If I had thought less of you and more of myself. But after what you said that day, when you jeered so contemptuously at the kind of environment in which, THEN, I should have had to place my wife–what could I do–except withdraw? But you suffered, Bridget,’ he went on vehemently. ‘Not so much as I did–but still you suffered. You thought of me–I felt it, and you must have felt too, how continually I thought of you. I used to try and make you think of me–dream of me. And I succeeded. Isn’t that true?’

‘Yes, it is true,’ she answered in a low voice.

‘Only lately, since I have been in the district, it has seemed to me that the invisible wires have been set working afresh. Isn’t that true also?’

‘Yes, it is true,’ she said again, as if forced to the acknowledgment.

‘Then, can there be any question of the bond between us? You see, it’s independent of time and space! for you WERE sorry–you DID care. That’s the truth you owe me. If after–after we parted in that dreadful way, I had gone back, had thrown up everything, had said to you, “Come with me ANYWHERE, let us be all in all to each other–on the slopes of the Andes, on an island in the South Seas–you would have come?” ‘

‘I always told you,’ she said with her puzzling smile, ‘that the slopes of the Andes appealed to me.’

‘Peru would have been more picturesque than this, anyway. Is that all I can get out of you–that grudging admission? Well, never mind, I am satisfied. You have owned up to enough. I won’t tease you now for more admissions.’

‘I have admitted too much,’ she said gloomily. ‘The curse of the O’Hara’s is upon me. Almost all of them have gambled with their lives, and most of them have lost.’

She gave her horse the rein as she spoke, and they cantered on over the plain. After that, she resolutely forbade sentiment.

Mr Ninnis was gratified by an invitation that evening to dine at the Home, and came down in his best dark suit and his most genial mood.

Bridget sang. She had not been singing much lately. Colin’s gloom over the evil prospects of squatting on the Leura re-acted upon her spirits. And besides, the piano had been attacked by white ants, and the tuner had not been so far up the river for a long time. It was inspiring to learn that Maule added to his gifts that of getting a piano into tune. Ninnis promised to rummage among the tools for a key that would serve.

Ninnis had never admired Lady Bridget so much as he did this evening. Certainly he thought her more flighty and incomprehensible than ever, but he could not deny her fascination. It seemed quite natural to him that she should be in high spirits at seeing an old friend from England, who appeared to know all her people. Ninnis had taken immensely to Maule. Beside Maule knew parts of the world where Ninnis had been. It was curious to see the American-isms crop out. Ninnis considered Maule a person of parts and of practical experience. He said to himself that the Boss had done wisely in leaving Maule at the head-station while they were short-handed. Maule showed great interest in Bush matters–said he wanted to learn all he could about the management of cattle–thought it not improbable that he might invest money in Leichardt’s Land. Ninnis agreed to show him round, and Maule begged that he might be made useful–even offered to take a turn with the tailing-mob, so that Moongarr Bill and the other stockmen might be free to muster more cattle.

Nothing was heard of the Blacks during the next day or two, but one morning Ninnis discovered that an old gun, which the station hands and the black-boys were allowed to use on Sundays for shooting game in the lagoon, had disappeared in the night. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Wombo as the thief. Cudgee owned to having seen him skulking among the Gully rocks. A deserted gunya was found near a lonely, half-dry waterhole in the scrub, and there were rumours of a tribe of wild blacks having passed towards the outlying country in the Breeza Downs direction.

No news came, however, of either racial or labour warfare. McKeith sent not a word of his doings, and Harry the Blower was not due yet on his postal, fortnightly round.

McKeith had been gone a week, and the time of his absence seemed like that sinister lull which comes after the sudden shock of an earthquake and the tornado that follows upon it. Then, one day, something happened.

All the men except the Chinamen were out. Moongarr Bill, Ninnis, and the stockmen on the run, while Maule–a book and a sandwich in his pocket–had gone herding with Joey Case and one of the extra hands.

A sense of mutual embarrassment had that day driven them apart. He had been afraid of himself, and she too had felt afraid. During these seven days she had rushed recklessly on as though impelled by a fatality, never pausing to consider how near she might be to a precipice. Whenever possible, she had ridden out with Maule and Ninnis, or with Maule alone. She found relief from painful thoughts of Colin in the excitement and emotion with which Maule’s society provided her. She went with him on several occasions behind the tailing-mob, though ordinarily, she could not endure being at close quarters with cattle. But it interested her to see Maule ride after and round up the wild ones that escaped; to watch his splendid horsemanship which had the flamboyant South-American touch–the suggestion of lariat and lasso and ornate equipment, the picturesque element lacking in the Bush–all harmonizing with his deep dark eyes and Southern type of good looks.

To-day, she had preferred to remain at home alone. She had been pulled up with a startled sense of shock. Last evening when they were walking together on the veranda he had begun again to make love to her, and in still more passionate earnest–had held her hands–had tried to kiss her. She had found herself giving way to the old romantic intoxication –then had wrenched herself from him only just before the meeting of lips.

At last, she had realized the strength of the glamour. She fought against it; nevertheless, in imagination gave herself up to it, as the opium-smoker or haschisch-eater gives himself up to the insidious FANTASIA of his drug.

Yes, Bridget thought it was like what she had read of the effects of some unholy drug–some uncanny form of hypnotism.

For she knew that she did not really love Maule–that her feeling for him was unwholesome.

There was poison in it acting upon her affection for and trust in her husband. Maule made subtle insinuations to McKeith’s detriment, injected doubts that rankled. There were no definite charges, though he would hint sometimes at gossip he had heard in Tunumburra. But he would convey to her in half words, looks, and tones that he had reason to believe Colin unworthy of her–that her husband had led the life of an ordinary bushman, and had fully availed himself of such material pleasures as might have come to his hand. The veiled questions he asked about Mrs Hensor and her boy, brought back a startled remembrance of the scene outside the Fig Tree Mount Hotel and Steadbolt’s vague accusation. She had almost forgotten it–had never seriously thought about it. Yet now she knew the midge-bite had festered.

Could it be that there was a chapter in Colin’s life of which she knew nothing? Was it not too much to believe that he had always been faithful to his ideal of the camp fire? Ah! Maule would have jeered at that–would have been totally incapable of understanding the romance of that dream-drive–a dream in truth. But how beautiful, how sane, how uplifting it seemed, compared with the feverish haschisch dream in which she was now living. Restless under the obsession, she wandered up the gully and, as she sat among the rocks, wrestled with her black angel–and conquered. Clearly there was but one thing to do. She must send Maule away at once before Colin came back. As for Colin, that trouble must be faced separately. Maule must ride back to Tunumburra– he knew the track. Or, should he wish to explore the district further, Harry the Blower was due with the mail to-morrow, and could guide him to any station on the post-man’s route which might appear to Maule desirable.

Bridget knew that Maule would leave the tailing-mob before the other men that afternoon, and would probably come to look for her here. So having arrived at her decision and wishing to put off the inevitable scene as long as possible, she set forth by another route for the head-station.

CHAPTER 3

But she had only gone a few steps, when out of the gidia scrub, came Oola the half-caste, her comely face bruised, her eyes wild with grief and terror, her head tied up in a blood-stained strip torn from Lady Bridget’s lacy undergarment, the gaily-flowered kimono hanging in dirty shreds upon her brown bosom.

‘White Mary! Lathy-chap!’ she cried. ‘Plenty poor feller Oola. Plenty quick me run. Me want ’em catch Lathy-chap before pollis-man come. That feller pollis-man take Wombo long-a gaol. Mithsis’–the gin implored. ‘BUJERI you!–Mithis tell pollis-man Wombo plenty good blackfellow. No take Wombo long-a gaol.’

‘What has Wombo been doing?’ asked Lady Bridget. ‘Did he steal the gun?’

‘YOWI (yes). Wombo plenty frightened long-a ole husband belonging to me.’ And Oola dropped and knocked her head upon the ground, wailing the ear-piercing death-wail of the Australian native women.

‘Oola, you must stop howling!’ said Bridget, alive to the seriousness of the situation. ‘Has Wombo shot your husband with our gun?’

‘YOWI, Mithis. That feller husband altogether BONG ‘ (dead).

From Oola’s broken revelations Bridget pieced the story. It appeared that the tribe had followed in hot pursuit of the fugitives, and, knowing his peril, Wombo had sneaked up to the head-station in the darkness, possessed himself of an effectual weapon, and fled away with the gun. The offended blacks had discovered the guilty pair on the outskirts of Breeza Downs, and Oola’s husband, with a company of braves, had attacked their gunya. Then–to quote Oola–‘that feller husband throw spear at Wombo–hit Oola long-a COBRA (head) with NULLA NULLA. Him close-up carry off Oola. My word! Wombo catch him PHO PHO. Plenty quick husband belonging to me TUMBLE DOWN.’ And Oola wailed anew.

‘Where’s Wombo now?’ Bridget asked.

‘Blackfeller YAN (run) along-a pollis-man. Pollis-man close-up black’s camp. That feller Harris catch ‘im Wombo–fetch um long-a Tunumburra gaol. Mine think it stop to-night Moongarr. Close-up station now.’

Lady Bridget at once saw through the affair. Here was Harris taking a legitimized revenge on Wombo, and doubtless also on herself. Clearly, he had been patrolling the Breeza Downs boundaries in search of Unionist incendiaries, and seizing Wombo instead, had acted promptly without waiting for a warrant or consulting McKeith. Wombo would be charged at the township with theft of the gun and murder of Oola’s husband. To a certainty he would be hanged if the matter ran its ordinary course. That it should not do, Bridget declared within herself –if she could by any possibility prevent it.

The half-caste woman and the white lady went swiftly through the gidia scrub towards the head-station. At the gully crossing, Maule, on his way back from the tailing-mob, overtook them, and dismounting, walked with Lady Bridget to the house. She forgot then all the scene of last evening, told him the black’s story, begged him to help her in the rescue of Wombo.

He reflected for a minute or two.

‘We’re up against Harris,’ he said, ‘and Harris has a grudge against all of us. But Harris feels some respect for my knowledge of constabulary law, which, I take it, is pretty much the same in most countries where there are white settlers and native races.’

She looked up at him, letting him feel that she was relying on his astuteness and his strength. He went on:

‘Ninnis is mustering with Moongarr Bill and the others, a good way off, and they’re camping out to-night. . . . That leaves only Joe Casey and the other extra hand. Ninnis put me in authority here. Somebody has got to take command, and it must be either you, Lady Bridget, or myself. Perhaps I’m the best qualified of the two. . . .’

She laughed shakily in assent.

‘Anyway, I fancy that I know how to deal with this sort of affair better than you do,’ he said. ‘Will you let me manage it my own way?’

She nodded.

‘I suppose I may assume that your husband left me in a position of some responsibility. And if I seem to be taking too much on myself–or, on the other hand, deferring too much to Harris, you’ll trust me and not interfere?’

There was no time for discussion, had she wished to go against him. Oola was shrieking and pointing frantically to the track down from the upper slip rails, along which Harris and his prisoner were to be seen riding.

The Police Inspector, uniformed, burly, triumphant, exhaled the Majesty of the Law as he rode slightly in advance leading the black-boy. Now, as they pulled up at the fence, Wombo presented a sorry spectacle–a spear wound in his left shoulder, a spear graze on his leg, his wrists handcuffed and his feet tied to the stirrup-iron with cords so tight that they cut into his tough, black flesh.

Harris dismounted, tied Wombo’s horse securely to the veranda post and then made his statement which coincided with Bridget’s idea of what had happened. It was too late to push on to Tunumburra. He proposed to lock up his prisoner at Moongarr for the night. Could he have the hide-house?

Not long before, the Police Inspector had locked up a horse stealer, whom he had in charge, in the hide-house for a few hours while he took a meal.

To Bridget it seemed an irony that Wombo should be imprisoned in the very room he had so lately shared with his stolen gin.

She was quivering with indignant pity at sight of the sores on the black boy’s legs made by the raw hide thongs, and Oola, who had crept up the off side of the black-boy’s horse, was wailing anew. Maule checked with a look the angry protest on Lady Bridget’s lip and answered the Police Sergeant in her stead.

‘Why, certainly. I’m sure her Ladyship won’t object. You’ll let me see to that for you, Lady Bridget,’ and, as she bowed her head, he addressed Harris again. ‘Mr Ninnis and most of the others are camping out to-night on the run, and I seem to be the only responsible man in the place–of course you know that Mr McKeith asked me to stop and help look after things for Lady Bridget if necessary.’ Then he complimented Harris genially upon his zeal. ‘You’ve got your warrant, I suppose,’ he asked incidentally.

The Police Sergeant looked a little uncomfortable.

‘Well, fact is, I wouldn’t waste time going back to Breeza Downs head-station for that. Mr McKeith’s there and they had a bit of an alarm. Those Unionist skunks tried to fire the shed one night, but no particular damage was done, and they’ve dispersed. But Windeatt is in such a fright of their making another attempt on his head-station that he’s pushing the imported shearers on with the shearing for all he’s worth, and keeps any man he can get hold of on guard night and day round the house and sheds, while I and my lot have been doing a bit of riding after Unionists. . . . Now, if you please, we’ll have the key of the hide-house,’ concluded Harris. ‘I’d like to get my prisoner stowed away safe before I take an hour’s spell myself. I’m pretty well knocked up, I can tell you. No sleep at all last night watching that nigger who was tied up to a gum tree, and I’ve been in the saddle all day.’

Maule proffered the usual refreshment with a deprecatory reference to Lady Bridget, who stood stonily apart. Then on pretext of getting the key of the hide-house, he had a few words with her in the office.

‘I’m going to take care of this,’ he said, as she gave him the key of the padlock which secured the hide-house door, and he forthwith fastened it to the ring of his watch-chain. ‘Of course you want the black-boy to escape?’

‘I shall let him out myself,’ she answered.

‘That would only make McKeith more angry. I have a better plan, in which you need not be implicated.’

‘I would rather do it myself,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid. If it had been possible, I would have cut those horrible thongs straight away and let the poor wretch get into the bush. He’ll be safe at the head of the gully in the gidia scrub.’

‘I promise you that he shall be safe in the gidia scrub before sunrise to-morrow. Trust me.’

She shook her head. ‘But I can’t take services from you, after. . . .’ she began hastily and then stopped.

‘You call that a service! Yes–to humanity, if you like. Oh, I know. After yesterday evening. NOW, you blame me for being true to myself. . . . All that has got to be settled between us, Bridget–for good and all. I thought it out as I rode behind the tailing-mob to-day. But for the moment,’ he fingered the key agitatedly, ‘Bridget, you MUST let me do this thing for you. Don’t refuse me that small privilege, even if you deny me all others.’

She wavered–yielded. ‘Very well. You can manage it better than I could. So I will accept this last favour.’

‘The first, not the last. What have I done but cause you pain? . . . If you knew the torture I have been going through. . . .’ He checked himself. She was staring at him, half frightened, half fascinated.

‘No, no. There must be an end.’

‘Yes. There must be an end. Later on, we’ll decide what the end is to be.’

He went out to the veranda carrying the key. Bridget did not follow him. She had no power either to resent or to compel him. She sat waiting. When, after about a quarter of an hour, he came back, she was still in the office as he had left her, seated by the rough table on which were the station log, the store book, and branding tallies.

He came in triumphantly, exhibiting the key.

‘Harris wanted to take possession of this. It was lucky I had put it on my chain. However, he’s satisfied that Wombo is securely locked up and an extra glass of grog and a hint that, as he hasn’t provided himself with a warrant there’s no obligation on him to stand over his prisoner with a loaded gun, eased his mind of responsibility. The man is in a beast of a temper though, he evidently expected to be entertained down here. I hope Mrs Hensor will give him a good dinner. He insists on sleeping in the little room off the store veranda where he says he can keep watch on the hide house. I suppose it’s all right?’

Bridget nodded. ‘I’ll tell Maggie.’ Maule asked for ointment with which to dress the black-boy’s wounds and abrasions, and she gave it and left him.

The afternoon was drawing in. Then came the sound of the herded beasts being driven to the yard at sundown and, by-and-by, of Joe Casey’s stockwhip as he got up the milkers. The shorthandedness and disturbance of Harris’ arrival made everything late, and the goats which should have been penned by now, were busy nibbling at the passion vines on the garden fence. But all this made little impression on Bridget’s preoccupied brain. She had the thought of that coming interview with Maule before her. Oola’s continuous wailing was an affliction, and she gave the half-caste a blanket and some food and told her to camp on the further side of the hide house where, with eyes and ears glued by turns against the largest chink between the slabs, she might see and speak to the prisoner.

CHAPTER 4

Maule’s and Lady Bridget’s TETE­TETE dinner was an embarrassed meal, with Kuppi and Maggie hovering about the table. The man’s eyes said more than his lips, and the woman sat, strained and silent, or else uttered forced commonplaces.

They were alone at last on the veranda, with night and the vast distances enfolding them. The air was close and hot, the sky banked with storm clouds, and, occasionally, there were flashes of sheet lightning and low growls of thunder. Before long the head-station was very quiet. Harris had inspected the hide-house and, having assured himself of the safety of his prisoner, had retired to the veranda room, making a great parade of keeping his door open, his gun loaded, and his clothes on, ready for any emergency. Joe Casey had gone to his hut, the Chinaman and the Malay boy to theirs, and Maggie, the woman servant, to her own tiny room wedged in between the new house and the kitchen wing.

But it was all early. At that hour, Maule laughingly reminded Lady Bridget, the dining world of London would scarcely have reached the dessert stage.

She would not waste time on banalities.

‘I’ve been waiting to tell you something. My mind is quite made up. I can’t go on like this any longer. You must go away to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow!’ he echoed in dismay.

‘Yes. I’ve thought it out. You don’t know the country, but the mailman will be here to-morrow, and he can show you the road.’

‘You are very kind. . . . Why are you so anxious to get rid of me?’

‘Surely you understand. You made me a scene yesterday. You’d go on making me scenes.’

‘And you?’

She gave a hard little laugh. ‘Oh! I–don’t want to play any more.’

‘You call it play! To me it’s deadly earnest. I let you go once. I do not mean to let you go again.’

‘But you are talking wildly. Don’t you see that it is impossible we can be friends.’

‘Oh! that I grant you. We must be everything to each other–or nothing.’

In spite of her cold peremptoriness he could see that she was deeply agitated. That fact gave him courage. His voice dropped to the tender persuasive note which had always affected her like a spell.

‘My dear–my very dearest. . . . We made a great mistake once. Let us forget that. Death has opened the gate of freedom–for me, at least– and I can only feel remorseful thankfulness. We have again a chance of happiness. We will not throw it away a second time.’

‘You seem to forget that if you are free I am married.’

‘What a marriage? Call it a mad adventure.’

‘That may be,’ she said bitterly. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that I did care very much for my husband.’ She brought out the last words with difficulty.

‘DID care. You put it in the past tense. You don’t care for him any longer. It would be astonishing if you did. One has only to see you together. . . . Oh, Biddy, it was so like you to rush off to the other side of the world, and ruin your life for the sake of some strange impracticable idea! I can follow it all. . . .’

‘You are mistaken,’ she put in.

‘I think not. You married in a fit of revulsion against the conditions in which you were living–the hollow shams of an effete civilisation– that’s the correct phrase, isn’t it? And–well, perhaps there was another reason for the revulsion. . . . And you thought you had found the remedy for it all. Oh! I admit that he is very good looking, and, of course, he worshipped you–until he had you secure, and then he reverted to the ways of his kind. “Nature’s gentlemen” usually do. . . .’

‘Be silent, Will,’ she exclaimed vehemently. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘My dear, your very anger tells me that I do understand. Why! naturally your imagination was set on fire. The Bush was painted to you in its most glowing colours. No doubt, as you said, it’s a Garden of Eden in good seasons. Wonderful vegetation, glorious liberty–no galling conventions–vast spaces–romance–and the will o’ the wisp wealth of the Wild. Confess now . . . are not my guesses correct?’

‘Yes–partly.’ She spoke with reluctance. ‘But I remember that YOU used to talk to me about the joys of the Wild,’ she added with sharp irony.

‘Oh, yes, I know it all. I’ve been there myself. And it’s only when El Dorado proves a delusion that one begins to hanker–I did before I met you–for the advantages of civilised existence.’

‘Well, you have secured those. Why not go and enjoy them as I’m asking you to do.’

‘They have no value for me, unless I may share them with you. Bridget, I can give you everything now that you once asked for.’

‘With your wife’s money?’

He drew back sharply. ‘Ah! You CAN hit a man!’ and there was silence for a few minutes. Then he leaned closer to her, and his fingers touched the gold cigarette case which lay on the arm of the squatter’s chair in which she was sitting. He went on in a changed manner.

‘Poor Evelyn left her fortune to me, knowing the truth. She was a noble-souled woman. I was not worthy of her. But unworthy as I may have been, Bridget, I deserved better of my wife than your husband deserves of you. At least, I did not deceive her.’

‘What do you mean? Colin did not deceive me. That, at all events, is not one of his faults towards me.’

‘Has he told you, then, why he keeps on his station that insolent woman and her yellow-haired blue-eyed boy?’

Bridget started visibly. He saw that his shaft had struck the mark. But she answered calmly:

‘I don’t know what you want to imply. I thought you knew that Mrs Hensor’s husband was killed on one of Colin’s expeditions, and that he looked after her and her boy on that account.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard that story. But it seemed common gossip at Tunumburra that there was another–less creditable–explanation.’

She turned fiercely upon him. ‘You have no right to make such an abominable accusation.’

‘I only mention what I heard. I went about a good deal there in bar saloons, and to men’s gatherings. Naturally, I was interested in the district where, by the way, McKeith does not appear to be over popular. Of course, I attached no great importance to the gossip then. It only made me wonder. Oddly enough, to-day when I was out with the tailing mob, one of the men repeated it–I need not say that I stopped him. He said he’d had it as a fact from a man who was a long time in your husband’s employ–a man called Steadbolt.’

Again the scene in front of Fig Tree Mount Hotel flashed before Lady Bridget, and Demon Doubt rose up clothed now in more material substance. Her voice shook as she answered, though she tried to be loyal:

‘Steadbolt was discharged from my husband’s employment. He is another of Mrs Hensor’s rejected suitors. That speaks for itself.’

‘Strange that Mrs Hensor should reject so many suitors without apparent reason,’ said Maule.

Bridget did not seem able to bear any more. Her head drooped upon her hands, her shoulders heaved convulsively.

‘I don’t know what to do–I am alone. It’s an insult to talk to me in this way.’

‘I want to protect you from insult–I want to take you out of these miserable conditions–and there’s only one way to do that,’ he pleaded.

He took her hands in his and kissed them passionately. ‘Oh, I love you. There’s nothing in the world I would not do to make you my wife. Why should you hesitate? It breaks my heart to see you unappreciated, neglected, living the sort of rough life that might suit a labourer’s daughter, but which is sacrilege for Lady Bridget O’Hara. A man had no right to condemn a beautiful, refined woman like you to such a fate. . . . Well there’ as she murmured incoherently, ‘I’ll not say any more about that since it hurts you. You see, I respect your wishes. I’ll even go away at once, if you command it, and leave you to form your own judgment. I will stay in Leichardt’s Town–in Sydney–anywhere– until you have decided for yourself–as I know you must do–how impossible it is for you to remain here. Then I will meet you wherever you please, and we will go to Europe together–bury ourselves abroad– wait in any part of the world you may choose, until the divorce proceedings are over, and we are free to marry. You need not be afraid of scandal, the thing can be kept out of the English papers. It’s so far away that nobody will remember you were married to an Australian. Besides, anything of the sort is so easily got over nowadays. My darling, why do you look at me with those tragic eyes? It is not like the old Biddy to be a slave to Mrs Grundy.’

She had been listening, sitting rigid in her chair, her hands still in his, looking at him in a strange fixed manner, almost like a person in the first stage of hypnotism. Now she snatched her hands away and gave a sobbing cry.

‘Oh, I’m not the old Biddy. I never can be again.’

‘Dear love–believe me, when I promise you that you shall never have cause for regret.’

He would have taken her into his arms, but she drew herself back.

‘Will, you don’t understand. And I don’t understand myself, I can’t see things clearly. It’s all been so sudden–Colin going away–you– everything. . . . I want to be alone. I want to find myself.’

He moved aside with a slight inclination of his head as if to let her pass. ‘I told you that I would do anything you wish.’

‘You mean that–really? Then I wish you to go away at once. You said you would leave me to decide for myself. I take you at your word, and I shall write to you, by-and-by. Promise me that you will go.’

‘I have no choice. Your will is law to me. But understand, dearest–I am only waiting.’

‘It’s good of you not to want to worry and argue. . . . Don’t you understand?–I couldn’t bear you to be here when Colin comes back. You must go to Tunumburra to-morrow.’

‘Go to Tunumburra to-morrow?’ he repeated blankly.

‘It’s on the way to Leuraville, and you can take the steamer from there. I will write to you in Leichardt’s Town. Oh, it’s quite simple. The mailman will be here early. You can leave a letter saying that you are recalled.’

‘I understand.’ Her definite planning gave him hope that she had already made up her mind, and that she would join him in Leuraville or Leichardt’s Town. After all, that might be best. ‘But I shall see you again. The mailman is not here yet. I have still a few hours respite.’

She made no answer at first. Then ‘Good-night,’ she said abruptly, and flitted like a small white ghost along the dim veranda.

‘Lady Bridget!’ His voice stopped her. It shook a little, but the manner was conventional, and she gained confidence from that and turned irresolutely.

‘Lady Bridget. While we’ve been talking about ourselves, we’ve forgotten that unfortunate black-boy. I only want to tell you, that you may depend on your wishes being carried out. I shall go to my room and watch my opportunity. Trust me, that’s all–in everything.’

‘Thank you,’ she answered simply. ‘I do trust you.’

She came back a few steps, and he met her in the middle of the veranda. In one of her swift transitions of mood a humorous element in the situation seemed to appeal to her, and she said with a laugh:–‘It’s comical, isn’t it? The two tragedies, black and white–we two here– those two out there!’

Just then the black curtain of cloud, that had been rising slowly and obscuring the stars, was torn by a strong flash of chain lightning. It threw up her face in startling clearness and he saw, in strange blend with the conflicting emotions upon it, the wraith of her old whimsical smile.

He did not answer her laugh. In truth, the man’s nature was stirred to a more deep-reaching extent perhaps than ever in his life before. It may have been the flash of lightning recalling a momentary flash of illumination that had once shone upon his own soul.

That had been when he was kneeling by the bedside of his dying wife, and her last words revealed to him a magnanimity of devotion for which he had been wholly unprepared. He had thought her merely amiable and stupid–except in her love for him–and his sentiments towards her had been a mixture of boredom, and the tolerant consideration due to the bestower of substantial benefits. Nevertheless, she had awakened, during a spasm of remorseful self-abasement, some nobler quality latent in the man.

And now–as that flash of lightning illuminated Bridget’s face and made him keenly sensitive to the charm of her personality–her wayward fascination, her inconsistencies, her weakness, her temperamental craving for dramatic contrast, her reckless toying with emotion–by a curious law of paradox, there came back upon Willoughby Maule that scene with his dying wife, and he had again the flashing perception of something sacred, unexplainable, to which his own nature could not reach.

It sobered him. He had had the impulse to snatch her to his breast, to seal the half-compact with a lover’s kiss, so passionate that the memory of it must for ever bind her to him.

But the impulse was past. They stood perfectly silent, stiff, in the interval–it seemed a very long one–between the lightning flash, and the distant reverberation of thunder which followed it.

Then he said mechanically, like one walking out of a dream? ‘There’s going to be a storm. Are you frightened?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I’m never frightened of storms!’ and added, ‘besides, Colin would be so glad of rain.’

Before he could reply, she had glided away again and he was alone.

He thought it strange that she should be thinking of her husband and his material interests just then.

CHAPTER 5

It must have been a little while after midnight when Bridget was awakened by more thunder and lightning and a confused tornado of sound. She had been dreaming that Harris was throwing her from the gully cliffs on to the boulders in its bed–only it seemed to her bewildered senses that the boulders rose towards her instead of her descending to meet them. Next she discovered that rain was pattering on the zinc roof, and that the violent concussions she felt beneath her must be due to the horns of goats knocking up against the boards of her bedroom. Ah! she thought, the men had forgotten to pen the goats, and they were sheltering from the rain in the open space under the floor of the house. There could be no more sleep for her that night, unless they were dislodged.

She waited through the din until there came a lull in the storm, then got up and put on her shoes and a waterproof coat over her nightdress. It was not the first time by any means that, when sleeping alone, she had been obliged to rise and drive away stray animals that had been inadvertently allowed means of entrance.

She went out to the back veranda, which was connected by steps with the verandas of the other two wings. The moon was full and shed occasional pale gleams through the scudding clouds. The close heat had given place to a chill wind and the rain came down intermittently but in no volume –it could not make much difference to the parched earth. There was not a light visible anywhere. The goats were still making a noise under the house.

Lady Bridget got a stick from a heap of sandal-wood boughs stacked against the veranda, and passing to the front, where the piles supporting the house were higher, proceeded to belabour an elderly nanny, who, with her mate, was now nibbling twigs of the creepers. But she was surprised to see only two or three goats, she had thought there must be many more. The animals were refractory, and her beatings of no avail. Now, suddenly, she was seized with a fit of nervous shivering and realised that she felt physically ill. It was of no use for her to try and drive off the goats. She sank down on the veranda steps of the Old Humpey, and afterwards thought she must have fainted.

The sound of Maule’s approaching footsteps and his alarmed ejaculation seemed to bring her to herself. He appeared to have come round the back of the Old Humpey. He was horrified at the sight of her convulsive shivering.

‘You mustn’t stop here,’ he exclaimed. ‘I was afraid the goats would disturb you, and I’ve been getting them out as quietly as I could. Most of them are shut up in their fold.’

She saw that he was almost fully dressed. With an effort she controlled her terror, and asked:

‘You’ve not been asleep.’

‘Oh! off and on. I’ve been keeping my eye on Harris’ room,’ he pointed across the yard to the kitchen and store-building opposite–at the end of which Harris had installed himself–to the squat outline of the slab and back hide house. ‘My ear, too,’ he went on, ‘for Harris’ slumbers are neither silent nor peaceful. When he’s not snoring, he groans and stirs, and the worst of it is that he’s got his door wide open on to the veranda and his bed right across the window that looks straight at the door of the hide house. I thought I’d take advantage of the thunder, but it was no good. He was awake and looking out. Now he has lain down again, and as soon as I hear him snoring I shall try once more.’

A fresh fit of shivering seized Bridget.

‘This won’t do,’ he said, and went hurriedly into his own room which opened a few doors down on to the veranda, and coming back with an opossum rug on his arm and a glass of brandy and water in his hand, he made her drink the spirits and wrapped the rug round her. Presently the shivering ceased.

A moon-gleam between two clouds closing on each other showed her his eyes glowing with sombre passion. She saw that he was holding himself under stern restraint. Though where they were, the veranda running between the end of the Old Humpey and the new house, made a kind of passage so that they were in shadow, there was a possibility of watchful eyes discovering their whereabouts.

‘Will you go back to your room, and I’ll get rid of these goats,’ he said, trying to speak in a matter-of-fact way. ‘I supose there isn’t a yard where I could put them, nearer than their own by the lagoon.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she answered dully, and without stirring from where she crouched upon the steps. When he urged her anew to go back to bed, she answered petulantly:

‘Oh, do let me be. I like the wind and the rain–they’re soothing. And I couldn’t sleep now until I know that Wombo is safe in the scrub.’

He made no further protest, but set to work shepherding the goats. She watched him drive them out of the gate till his dark form and the piebald shapes he was driving before him were lost in the night. She knew that it would take some little time to pen them all securely in their fold. But the night was young yet.

From shivering, the fire of the brandy and the warmth of the fur rug had turned her temperature to fever heat. She felt keenly excited; the blood in her veins seemed boiling, and the occasional raindrops and moist wind were pleasant on her face. She had gone to the end of the veranda and stood there with long withes of the native cucumber vine that grew over the Old Humpey swaying around her in the breeze. There was not a light in the place. Even moon and stars were now veiled. Her brain raced round desperate and futile schemes for eluding the vigilance of the Police Inspector. She wished now that she had thought of asking him to dinner and putting opium into his coffee–that was the sort of thing they did in novels. She did not know that a less developed brain than her own was working at this moment to the same end, on an inspiration from the bush DEBIL-DEBIL, or such savage divinity as watches over the loves of the Blacks.

She saw what at first she had thought part of the shadow of a neighbouring gum tree cast on the strip of grass that ran at the back of the Old Humpey. But the lesser shadow moved, halted, and the greater shadow was stationary and grew denser as the moon sailed again across a clear patch of sky.

Then Bridget realised that the moving shadow was the half-caste Oola, shrouded in the dark blue blanket she had given her, and that the gin had halted at the casement window of Maule’s bedroom. Now, Oola, with her hands on the sill, curved her lithe body, drew her bare feet to the window ledge and dropped within.

Bridget ran along the grass to the window, and from there watched Oola move about the room and in the almost darkness fumble among the objects on the dressing-table. Then Bridget could hear the little click of the tongue and the guttural note of exultation a black tracker gives when he comes upon a trail. Bridget drew aside against the wall, so that Oola, again springing over the window sill, did not observe her. But Bridget saw the watch and chain with the iron key attached to it which the gin had stolen, and seized Oola’s arm as the dark form crouched upon the grass again. The gin uttered a smothered shriek. Bridget took the watch from her hand, detached the key from the chain, and slipped watch and chain into the pocket of her coat, while Oola, clutching Lady Bridget’s knees, pleaded chokily:

‘Mithsis–you gib me key–no make im noise. No tell pollis-man me let out Wombo. My word! plenty quick he YAN long-a scrub. BA-AL pollis-man catch Wombo. Mithsis–BUJERI White Mary! You gib it key to Oola.’

The key was in Oola’s hand. ‘BA-AL me tell,’ whispered Bridget. ‘you go quick.’

She, too, bent her body and followed Oola, who sped like a hunted hare round the comer of the Old Humpey. Now she wriggled in the shadow of the yard railings. Now she crept stealthily past Harris’ window–and– oh! DEBIL–DEBIL be praised! the Police sergeant’s stertorous snoring was clearly audible.

Blessed, likewise, be the retiring moon and the sweeping clouds! Lady Bridget, every nerve a-quiver and the rushing blood throbbing in her temples, also crept noiselessly beneath the window in the wake of Oola, crawling like Oola, but more to the back of the hide-house into the shelter of its drooping bark eaves.

Bending cautiously round the slabs, she watched, as the gin, with a swift wriggling motion like that of a snake, drew herself along the sunken earth floor beneath the eaves and then, softly raising herself to the level of the padlock, put in the key. There was a muffled grating of iron under the gin’s hand, as the padlock unclosed and the hasp dropped, then a creak of the door on its hinges, while it opened and shut behind the undulating shape in the aperture. Then a low throaty ejaculation–the black’s call of warning. And now with a quickness incredible, the wriggling movement of two blanket-shrouded serpentine shapes round the hide-house–in and out among the grass tussocks and the low herbage, now hidden for a moment by friendly gum shadows in the dimness, now dark moving blurrs upon the lesser darkness, and now altogether invisible. . . .

Lady Bridget knew that in five minutes, once they could be upright again, the fugitives would have reached the gully, and after that the gidia scrub. Then security from the terrors of a white man’s gaol would be almost assured to them.

Lady Bridget waited–waited, it seemed to her an eternity, in reality it was barely over the five minutes she had mentally given the two blacks for their escape. That five minutes had been full of alarms, and she could feel her heart thumping, so tense was the strain. She had to consider the possibility of Harris being awakened; also, of Maule’s return and an attempt on his part to free the hide-house prisoner. Also there was the danger of the clouds breaking before she had done her work.

She heard a movement of the sleeper in his bed below the open window opposite. Harris might have been aroused, and perhaps have stirred without awakening. . . . But the snoring had ceased. . . . She did not think, however, that he could be fully awake. . . . Presently the snoring recommenced.

She crept very slowly along the earthen floor, drawing her hands along the slabs as she went. A splinter from one of them ran into her finger –but that did not matter. Now she touched the door, which lay back towards her, for the blacks had not waited to close it. She pushed it very softly, holding her breath at the creak of the hinge and listening intently for the recurrent snore which sounded through the window only three paces from her.

At last the thing was done–the padlock fastened, the key turned in the lock, and now in her pocket. She dropped flat on the earth, her cloak drawn lightly between her knees, and wriggled snake-like, as Oola had done past Harris’ windows, then pushed herself on hands and knees along the ground, squeezing her body against the palings of the yard, till she reached the Old Humpey on the opposite side. Once round that corner, she got on to her feet, feeling sick and giddy but intensely relieved. She leaned against the gum tree which had protected Oola, and now realised that it had been raining in a driving gust and that she was wet to the skin.

The bleating of a kid, which had been left under the house and had found its way into the yard, startled her anew. She thought that she heard sounds in the wing near the hide-house–steps on the veranda. Was Harris stirring? Had he discovered the flight of his prisoner?

She waited again till all was quiet. By this time, there was a watery radiance just overhead. She looked towards the lagoon, but there was no sign of Maule. She felt the shivering begin again, though her head seemed burning, and she could hardly think collectedly. Her chief idea was to get back to bed.

But she was able to reason to herself that Maule must somehow be informed of the escape. She did not think he could have got back yet to the spot where he had left her. Or he might come straight to his room and miss the key and his watch. In any case, these must be restored to the place from which Oola had taken them.

She lifted herself to the window-sill as Oola had done, and in a moment was inside the room. It had been an easy enough business, only that in clutching the window frame, the jagged end of the splinter she had run into her hand caught and tore her flesh. The room was of course empty.

She lifted a candle–which, with matches, stood on the dressing table –and put back the watch and chain, and the key now separate from them. That fact would show Maule that it had been tampered with. But she must find some more exact means of conveying what had happened. Premature action on his part might give the alarm. Her brain worked in flashes. She had vivid ideas, which in her fevered state she could not hold properly. She must write to Maule. A notebook that he must have taken from his pocket lay on the table also. She tore out a leaf–paused– She must write so that only he would understand. An accident might happen to the paper.

There must be no definite statement to implicate him or herself. Some words in French occurred to her. She wrote them down and continued the note in that language. At the close she begged him to act so that there should be no ground for suspicion–reminded him of his promise to go away on the morrow–said she would write to him at the Post Office at Leuraville. She did not sign the sheet, but folded it across– addressed it to Maule and laid it under the watch on the table.

A fresh spasm of shivering seized her. Suddenly she remembered the opossum rug she had left. She opened the door leading from Maule’s room into the veranda, and went out. She stood bewilderedly, looking across the faint-lit yard to the dim veranda of the kitchen wing opposite, as she fought against the sick faintness that threatened to overcome her. Then she walked along the veranda to the place where she had parted from Maule. The rug was lying there, and she threw it round her, and waited on the steps with chattering teeth and shaking limbs.

In a minute or two, he joined her. She saw by the fitful moonbeams that he was wet and muddy–truly in a worse plight than herself. She could hardly speak for the rigor. Seeing her condition, he took her up in his arms, and carried her along the veranda towards her own room. The clasp of his arms, the warmth of his body, even through his wet clothing helped her to steady herself. She continued to tell him of the great achievement.

‘Wombo has escaped–I saw Oola taking the key out of your room. Harris was asleep–snoring. She let Wombo out, and I locked the door of the hide-house again afterwards, and put the key back in your room. It’s all right–nothing can be found out till the morning. They’re safe in the scrub by now.’

‘Well, I’m thankful for that at any rate,’ he answered. ‘But at this moment I cannot think of anything or anyone but you. My dearest–I’m so afraid of your being ill–what can I do?’

‘Nothing. I have sal volatile in my room–stuff to take for a cold. I only want to get off my wet things and go to bed–I can sleep now. Don’t be frightened about me.’

She staggered when he put her gently down inside her own door, but recovered herself courageously, lighted her candles, laughed at her own disordered appearance, bade him go at once and look after himself.

He kissed her hand reluctantly.

‘Till to-morrow.’

She looked at him alarmedly. ‘Will! But you have promised me. You are going away to-morrow.’

He did not reply. His eyes were roving round the chamber, dimly lighted by the two candles. He was observing the feminine details the untidinesses so characteristic of her; the daintinesses, equally characteristic–all in such odd contrast with inevitable bush roughnesses. He noticed the silver and ivory on the dressing-table; the large silver-framed photographs–an autographed one of the Queen of Wartenburg–Molly Gaverick and Rosamond Tallant in Court veil and feathers, Joan Gildea at her type-writer–the confusion of books, the embroidered coverlet on the large bed, the bush-made couch at its foot upholstered in rose-patterned chintz on which she had seated herself.

‘You have GOT to go,’ she urged. ‘WHATEVER happens, you are leaving here with the mailman to-morrow. . . . Promise–on your word of honour –that NOTHING shall hinder you.’

‘Of course, I shall keep my promise, though it breaks my heart to leave you like this. But I know–I feel that the parting will not be for long. . . . Yes. . . .’ as she slowly shook her head and a strange fateful look shadowed the feverish brightness of her eyes. ‘I COULDN’T leave you if I didn’t feel certain of that.’

‘Oh, I’m tired out. I’m tired–dead tired–‘ Her face was ghastly, her lips like burning coals. ‘I can’t argue any more. And now it’s good-night–good-bye.’

‘Not good-bye. At least there will be time to-morrow for that.’

‘You MUST go–Good-night.’

He left her, but waited in the veranda, reassuring himself by the sound of movements on the other side of the closed door. When all was silent, and the candles extinguished, he went back to his own room.

He saw on the dressing-table his watch and chain with the key detached beside them–a confirmnation of the truth of what Lady Bridget had told him. But she had forgotten to tell him of the note she had left also, and, naturally, he did not look for it. Had he known and looked he would have discovered that the note was gone.

CHAPTER 6

Lady Bridget always looked back upon the next few days as a confused nightmare. She awoke in the grip of fever–that malarial kind which is common in Australia–tried to get up as usual, but fell back upon her bed, faint and dizzy. Her brows ached. She had alternations of burning heat and icy coldness. There came active periods in the dull lethargy which is often a phase of fever, and from which she only roused herself at the spur of some urgent call on her faculties. One of these was Willoughby Maule’s anxious message of enquiry conveyed by Maggie, to which she had the presence of mind to return the answer that she had caught cold, and was staying in bed for the present, but would no doubt be quite well shortly. Also that she was sorry not to bid him good-bye, but begged that he would not think of postponing his departure.

She heard as in a dream the sound of the mailman’s arrival, and presently, of the saddling of horses in the yard, and then the CLOP-CLOP of their feet as they were ridden past her end of the house to the Gully crossing. There were two horses. So Maule had left the head-station with Harry the Blower, as she had bidden him do. She was conscious of relief.

She realised in bewildered fashion, that Maule was gone out of her life at Moongarr, and connected the sound of his horses’ departing feet with the thud of Sir Luke Tallant’s hall door, when he had left her at the first interview which had led to their final quarrel.

From that effort of memory she sank again into mental coma. Maggie took it to be natural sleep, and laid the mailbag just brought by Harry the Blower, on her mistress’ bed to await her awakening. Much later in the day, on the return of Mr Ninnis and the other men from their cattle-muster, finding the bag still untouched, Maggie broke the seals at her mistress’ dazed order, and having sorted out Lady Bridget’s letters, carried away the bag for Ninnis to take his own mail.

But Lady Bridget paid no heed to her letters, and thus it happened that for the time being, she was quite unaware of an event which was of great importance to her.

She had been scarcely even distantly conscious of the hue and cry, and general excitement at the head-station, when it was discovered that the prisoner had escaped. Harris had his own suspicions–it might be said, his certainties, but the man’s crafty nature bade him keep his accusations for an opportunity when he ran less risk of being worsted. He meant to wait until McKeith’s return. Meanwhile what he had not been prepared for was Willoughby Maule’s departure with the mailman before he himself came back from an unsuccessful hunt after the fugitives. That move had lain outside his calculations. He had gleaned enough from Mrs Hensor, as well as from his own observation, to feel sure that Maule and Lady Bridget were in love with each other, and he had never supposed that they would part so abruptly.

The head-station was very shorthanded in the absence of Ninnis and the stockmen, and Harris had been obliged to go out by himself on the man-hunt. He did not know the country at the head of the gully, where he concluded that Wombo was hiding, and lost himself in the gidia scrub. Thus, he was in a very disagreeable temper, when he at last arrived at the Bachelors’ Quarters.

To Lady Bridget the day passed, and all the seemingly distant noises of it, like a phantasmagoria of vision, sound, impressions–the echoes of station activity; the Chinamen’s pidgin English as they weeded the front garden; Tommy Hensor’s voice when he brought the cook a nestful of eggs some vagrant hen had laid in the grass-tussocks, the men going forth with the tailing-mob–and at intervals the scorching recollection of that hinted scandal concerning Colin and Mrs Hensor of which Maule had told her. . . . Horrible. . . unbelievable. . . and yet. . . .

Then, after a long while, with lucid breaks in the dreamy stupor, she heard the roar of Ninnis’ incoming mob of wild cattle from the range. She could even wonder whether he had been able to muster that herd of five hundred or so for the sale-yards. She knew that her husband was counting upon the sale of these beasts–probably at 6 pounds a head–to enable him to fight the drought, by a speedy sinking of artesian bores. She felt herself reasoning quite collectedly on this subject, until the roar of beasts turned into the roar of the mighty Atlantic, breaking against the cliffs below Castle Gaverick. . . . She saw the green waves –real as the heaving backs of the cattle–alive, leaping. . . . And she herself seemed tossed on their crest. . . she saw and felt the cool embrace of the wave-fairies she had once tried to paint for Joan Gildea’s book. . . . Oh! she had never fully appreciated the strength of that now inappeasable longing for the Celtic home, the Celtic traditions which had been born in her. She had never known how much she loved Castle Gaverick. . . how much she loathed the muggy heat, the flies and the mosquitoes now brought by last night’s rain, the fierce glare beating upon the veranda, the sun-motes dancing on the boards. . . .

The appearance late that evening of Mrs Hensor, who having heard the mistress was ill, had come down partly from curiosity, partly from genuine humanity to see what might be amiss, was the next thing that roused Lady Bridget from her fever-lethargy.

‘Maggie told me you’d been out in the rain last night, and had caught cold, and I thought Mr McKeith would wish me to ask if I could do anything,’ Mrs Hensor said.

Lady Bridget sat up in bed, for the moment her most haughty self.

‘Thank you; but there’s no occasion for you to trouble, Mrs Hensor. I would have sent for you if I had required your services.’

‘And I’m not aware that I was engaged to give them,’ snorted Mrs Hensor. ‘It was out of consideration for Mr McKeith that I came. I’ve got quite enough to do at the Quarters, and I’m really glad not to have to trouble myself down here–what with Mr Ninnis wanting extra cooking, and Mr Harris in such a rage over Wombo’s getting away–I’m wondering if you heard anything last night, of that, Lady Bridget? And Harris is put out, too, over Mr Maule going off with Harry the Blower, while he was hunting for the black-boy. However,’ Mrs Hensor concluded, ‘the master will be here tomorrow to see into the rights of things.’

‘How do you know that the master will be here to-morrow?’ asked Bridget sharply.

‘Harry the Blower brought me a letter from Mr McKeith,’ replied Mrs Hensor with malign triumph. ‘I suppose he thought you’d be too busy doing things with Mr Maule to bother over the station affairs, and that Mr Ninnis might be out on the run–and so he wrote to tell me what he wanted done as he often used to before.’

Lady Bridget closed her eyes, and leaned back against the pillows trying hard to control the muscles of her face, and not to betray her mortification. Moreover, she was certain that Mrs Hensor had stated the exact truth.

‘I should prefer to be alone,’ she said, feeling the woman’s eyes upon her.

‘Then I’ll go, as you don’t want me,’ returned Mrs Hensor. ‘But if I was you, Lady Bridget, I’d take a dose of laudanum, and get myself into a perspiration, for I believe it’s a touch of dengue fever you’ve got the matter with you.’

A touch of dengue in tropical Australia may be serious or the reverse– sharp and short and critical, or tedious and less dangerous. Lady Bridget’s case was the sharp, short kind demanding prompt treatment. When McKeith came home the following day, he found her delirious, and incapable of recognizing him.

Worn out as was the strong man’s frame–not only with wild jealousy and tortured love, but with sleepless nights of patrol work, days in the shearing-shed, sharp fighting with a second conflagration– fortunately put out before much damage had been done–and a final dispersion of Unionist forces, Colin never for one instant relaxed his watch by Bridget’s bedside.

All night he tended her, fighting the fever as he had fought the fire at Breeza Downs, plying her with continued fomentations, dosing her with quinine, laudanum and the various medicines he had found efficacious. For never was a better doctor for malarial fever than Colin McKeith–he had had so much experience of it. When towards morning she fell into a profuse sweating, and he had to change and wring out the blankets in which he had wrapped her, he knew that the fever danger was past.

She awoke at mid-day from a deep, health-restoring sleep, so weak however, that her bones felt like water and her face looked as white as the pillow case. But her brain was clear.

She saw that there was no one else in the room, which was still in great disorder. The blankets, hot and heavy, were almost unbearable, but she had not strength to fling them off. It felt frightfully warm for the time of year and the air that came in through the open French window seemed to be blowing from an oven. The sky, as she glimpsed it