Читать книгу Boomerang - Helen Simpson - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Man is the whole world, and teeth of God,--woman but the rib and crooked piece of man.

--Religio Medici.

I

Gustave-Félicité had, unlike most sons, been made aware of the circumstances of his father's courtship and marriage; not through Auguste-Anne's personal confidences, for he was not a personage who spoke freely to his juniors, but by way of the servants who had accompanied the wooing expedition, and later, grown dependable and grey, were sent off with the young master to France. They considered it, rightly, a romantic story, and told it often; which leaves a doubt whether the son's impetuous marriage may not have been due to vague emulation of his father's exploit. Possibly; but possibly too it was a family trait, a laziness, an unwillingness to spend much time securing women, those necessary accompaniments of a man's life. The Mortemars as a family were careless of quality. To carry the metaphor of the accompaniment further, they cared very little what was being vamped in the bass, so long as they had the tune to themselves. Their marriages appeared romantic, because they were surrounded by lucky or dramatic circumstance, but looked at closely they seemed as humdrum as their neighbours; and if they did not break asunder, that was due to laziness too. They took no trouble over women at all, win or lose, and the result was that their wives married them angrily for money or pique, and stayed with them, simmering down gradually through neglect to a passionate gratitude for not being interfered with, which served as well as love.

II

Witness the ridiculous wedding of Gustave-Félicité, which took place five weeks after he landed at Port Jackson. His bride disliked him. She could understand hardly two words in ten of what he said. She hid, in a hopeless kind of way, under her bed on the morning appointed for the wedding, and was discovered by a startled mother bent on verifying the housemaid's statement that she had swept beneath it. And there was a last minute attempt to get her younger sister to take her place.

This astounding incident occurred apropos of the wedding bonnets. That of the bride was, of course, white. She was dark, and looked sallow in white. The bridesmaid's bonnet was pink, and the bridesmaid, being fair, looked over-ripe in it. To swap headgear was unthinkable, but the bride's despair suggested an expedient.

"You have it, Harrie," said she piteously, "and the dress too."

"What next?" enquired her sister ironically.

"The Frenchman!" was the astounding reply. "Oh, do have him, do! At any rate we'd both get the bonnets we want--"

However, sanity and their mother with a dose of sal volatile prevailed. The sal volatile brought home as nothing else could have done the fact that Laura, the bride, was now grown up. Throughout her nonage the remedy for wilfulness had been castor-oil, sal volatile being reserved in a kind of tabernacle for maturer ills such as headaches and languor. With the first sip of it she felt herself inescapably a woman, and turned, sighing, to tie the strings of the white bonnet under her chin.

They were married by a hearty priest, whose address on the Marriage Feast of Cana was notable for its jolly translation of the Evangelist's material into a living and topical West of Ireland wedding fray.

"And the Mother of Jesus saith to him, they have no wine. (Some dirty fella drank more than his share, I suppose.) Ah, the Blessed Mother of God couldn't say that in this country! There's too much of it altogether at weddings here, more's the shame. No, what our Blessed Lady'd say here, she'd say, 'They have no wine, Son, and they're best off without it, so don't you go standing treat now.'"

But there was wine all the same, or rather spirits, blended together in certain nauseating but soul-stirring drinks which the ingenuity of exiles had invented. (The cocktail, for example, makes an interestingly early appearance in Australia, somewhere about 1853.) It was a grand party, for Laura's father was in government service, and "sterling" of the most ringing kind. There were officers there in stiffly frogged uniforms--War Offices being all the world over the same, and disdaining climate as an unsoldierly factor in designing military dress. There were a judge or two, and some young men from Government House; there was even a bishop. (How that fact would have delighted young Mortemar's grandmother, the lodging-house keeper!) A pleasant visiting bishop in partibus it was, of some apocryphal see such as Nineveh or Beth-Shemesh. He was present at the ceremony, but it is not known what he thought of the Reverend Aloysius Healy's address.

The festivities lasted some time, since there was no tide to hurry them, such as had bustled Auguste-Anne aboard the lugger with his bride. The inevitable post-captains and their potations were here allowed full scope, and--with the possible exception of the Bishop--no man departed altogether sober, not even the bridegroom. Still, he could carry liquor, and made a gallant enough show handing his bride in to the vehicle which was to convey them to Parramatta for the honeymoon. The bride herself, sustained only by sal volatile and a sandwich, found the whole performance impossible to credit; and as the triumphant feeling of being a cynosure wore off, she perceived with chill and mounting horror that she was in for it now, and with a perfect stranger.

Their three weeks' courtship had not taught her much. The actual proposal was on her in a flash and over before she knew where she was. It was the simplest story--a dance at Government House, and Gustave-Félicité in his dress uniform of lieutenant of chasseurs, a little out-of-date, a little tarnished, but straight out of a fairy-tale, with a great hanging sabretache and glittering boots. He looked, among the sober reds and blacks and blues, much as his father had looked in the inn at Bristol, something rich and strange, from an older and forgotten world. He had not worn it since the Te Deum in Notre Dame, and perhaps this thought saddened him; at any rate it was a Byronic figure that stood by the mantelpiece drawing the eyes of Laura Willis and her compeers in figured muslin. His attitude was a challenge which they took up in turn. They eyed him, fluttering. They lisped at him in the French which was fashionable at conversaziones, to which he smiled bewildered recognition. Then Laura had the presence of mind to feel slightly faint in the middle of a dance--nothing much, but the kind of ladylike indisposition which it is every man's first instinct to treat with air. On his arm, leaning with a dependence that was flattering, for she was taller than he, they went out into the reviving moonlight. She had the advantage of her faintness, and a full knowledge of what Sydney moons could do. But the splendour that evening was something out of the way; every object--the fringed leaves of pepper trees, the long elegant leaves of gum, the spars of distant ships--had a clear edge to it, and yet the light was kind. Laura's still and strapping beauty needed, in the ordinary way, no help; she too was black and white, foolish clothes could not spoil the lines of her body. But seen thus under the moon, she looked a goddess, and against all the cherished principles of Gustave-Félicité his braided arm went round her in a compelling grasp.

Goddess! That was one of the words, and one of the attitudes that enraged him. Women were inferiors; that a man should defer to them, save of course in trifles, or that he should seek companionship from them, was a ludicrous state of affairs, and one into which no sane man would let himself be drawn. One must desire them, one need never elect them to equality. They should not share the other, the true male hungers, for knowledge or glory or gain. Why, then, this braided arm with its convincing pressure?

It must be remembered that Gustave-Félicité had just endured a four months' voyage, out of sight, most of the time, of land or women. Remember, too, his exile; it rankled, though he laughed at it. This gesture represented a hidden spurt of determination to sigh no more for France, to bind himself body and soul to another country so that his children should care nothing, even if he himself should never get the French iron out of his soul.

"Marriage? Eternal plat du jour? After all, why not? One cannot live always a la carte," thought Gustave-Félicité as he kissed her.

They went back to the lighted rooms with decorum, but engaged, and when Laura saw the other girls' envious faces she did not repent it. When she went to bed that night she was still quite satisfied, being in a state of glamour, and beholding marriage as a triumphal procession through life, with rivals envying and making way, with a perpetual or at any rate frequent moon, and a young man in blue and gold always at her elbow but never too ardent.

Next morning came the shock. She rose late, and was lying in an oldish dressing-gown on the verandah, eating bananas in the sun, when she heard hoofs, and the click of the gate-latch. She sprang up, gave one brief sufficient look, and fled inside to collapse upon her bed, and laugh, laugh like the kookooburra that haunted the garden.

What she had seen was her admirer coming in state to demand her hand. No uniform for such an errand; instead, a costume which had been the last word in 1830 Paris, executed by an Edinburgh tailor apparently in the spirit of mockery. There was a vogue during the Romantic period for tartan, a vogue which still persists in French provinces, and lingers in the blouses and other trappings of children too young to protest. M. de Mortemar wore trousers of tartan. He wore, in the pale but deadly Australian sun, a coat of green velvet. His white cravat would have made a veil for a first Communicant; there must have been two yards of it at least, the very finest net, puffed up like a well-made meringue under his chin. On top of the whole array was a tall hat of the shape which Englishmen have decided to regard as comic, though its angles and curves are not noticeably more absurd than the angles and curves of their own stove-pipes. The horse from which M. the Marquis dismounted was a hired horse, a tired horse, a horse whose spirit flies and spurs had long since broken. It did not approach with any such proud gait as an ex-lieutenant of chasseurs might expect from his steed; it lounged along the street, stretching its ewe neck to snatch illicit grass, aware of the fact, and presuming on it, that the costume of a suitor does not include spurs. There was hardly need for a hand on the bridle to induce it to cease progress at the appointed gate; it drew up of its own accord, having reached the limits of endurance, and slumbered with bent baker-knees, ignoring the flies that crowded on its quarters.

And this, it occurred to Laura as she lay laughing on her bed, was the man she would have to live with, cat and sleep with, for the term of her natural life. The laughter abruptly ceased. It did not come to her mind that she might refuse Gustave-Félicité; the reputation of a jilt was not a desirable one, nor was it profitable to be considered a flirt. Flirts had a good time, but they did not get husbands; and in after-years no one would believe in the good time, while a husband, dead or alive, was a sure tribute to feminine prowess. She perceived that there could be no drawing back, and rising, began to look to her weapons. Off went the old wrapper, and on, after some striving and assistance from housemaids, went the new poplin. Hair-irons made their appearance, sizzling, from the kitchen range. At last, prinked and with never a crumple, she could go hatless down the steps to the garden, and stray among the flowers with as etherealan air as if bananas had never existed.

There had been voices in the study as she passed--or rather one voice, as is usually the way when two languages meet; one must take up the burden of speech, leaving to the other the nods and becks and wreathed smiles of comprehension. The voice in this case was that of Gustave-Félicité, who in the absence of any heavy male relative to do it for him, was extolling himself as a possible match. This disconcerted Mr. Willis, accustomed as he was to diffident wooers. There had been proposals before, which had run somewhat on the following lines:

"You wished to speak to me, Mr. So and So?"

"Yes, sir. The fact is--"

Pause. Attempt to assist by Mr. Willis.

"It is not business that brings you, I imagine? You would have come to my office."

"No, not business exactly. Well--I don't know--in a way. I don't suppose you'll listen to me, though."

Mr. Willis, from a listener's attitude:

"You have my full attention, on the contrary, Mr. So and So." Pause.

"Well--of course you'll say it's confounded impertinence and all that. I know it is. I know I'm not much. I had a bad year last year, what with the drought, and then Firefly not getting placed for the Cup. And it's not the place it was since we had the fire in December--"

Mr. Willis, intensifying the listening attitude to an alarming degree:

"Mr. So and So, I am pretty well aware of your prospects. Should you wish to borrow, I am not in favour of any young man starting in life with a weight round his neck."

The suitor, crimson, but seeing an opening:

"That's just what I'm after." With a burst of eloquence. "It's Laura!"

But this was not by any means the interview of which Gustave-Félicité took charge, tartan trousers, preposterous hat and all. To an astounded father he retailed at length his own desirability as a son-in-law. He traced back his ancestry, discoursed to his auditor's entire bewilderment of the marriages which had resulted in distinguished quarterings, described his own physical condition with frankness, his prospects with optimism, and at last, pausing to draw breath, couched the hat upon his thigh in a satisfied manner and awaited his answer.

All this in French, slowed down out of consideration for barbarian ignorance. Mr. Willis was intimidated. He put, in English, one or two of the orthodox questions, in which a disapproval of foreigners was veiled by concern for the future happiness of his daughter. But the answers were satisfactory, and he knew in his heart that it was no good. He was a timid man by nature. His daughter frightened him, for she was larger than he, and could be mulish. He was unaware of her feelings, but he presumed, from what this flamboyant young man had implied, that she too was set on the match. He could not know that behind her serenity her thoughts were running this way and that, like wild birds beating about a room into which they had flown.

"He felt nice last night. He--he smelt nice," Laura's thoughts were confessing as she ranged the garden. "He looked so handsome in his uniform. But he looks funny this morning. We've nothing to talk about. I don't want to be married to anyone, but everyone laughs at old maids. Here he comes! Those trousers--oh, what can I do?"

He was coming, certainly, in a brisk and satisfied way, with her father hovering behind; coming to look for her. She turned, for no reason, the loveliest pink, and stood still, waiting. She could not even pretend to be engaged with the flowers. There was nothing in that part of the garden but a loquat tree, whose fruit, too stony to be worth the eating, lay untidily on the ground. Gustave-Félicité approached and bowed with his heels together, never attempting to touch her hand. Mr. Willis made introductory, explanatory noises behind him.

"Er, Mr. de Mortemar, my dear. He has been asking me a very important question. I informed him that you alone knew the right answer to it--ahem!"

Neither of them heeded him. Laura saw that she need expect no help from that quarter. She was not aware of her father as a person easily bluffed, timid and shy. She saw him invested with the paterfamilial panoply, as something between an uncle and an ogre, and supposed that his consent meant her doom. Her father, finding her tongue-tied, was aware of relief. This young man, thought Mr. Willis, would take her away, right away, and replace her, after a suitable interval, by grandchildren, who would make the house feel young. He had never succeeded in liking his daughter after she had passed the age of seven, though he could never admit it and always agreed with people who said how proud he must be of her. He was proud, as an ordinary suburban citizen might be who had been presented by some potentate with a puma; but he was also embarrassed. He observed with gratitude how the young man's presence daunted her already; not a giggle was to be heard. He excused himself. Gustave-Félicité trumped his bow with a bow far more sophisticated in which the tall hat played its part, and forgot him with most civil ease.

"Avez-vous," said Laura, stammering, really nervous, and finding his presence more disturbing and moonlightish than she had expected, "jamais goûté un--loquat?"

Gustave-Félicité had, strangely enough, in that now nonexistent island of his birth, tasted loquats, and retained no opinion of them. He replied:

"Oui. C'est exécrable."

Conversation dropped. Laura tried again, with one hand indicating the sleepy and shimmering harbour below:

"Aimez-vous--" a comprehensive gesture--"la Nature?"

Gustave-Félicité was a disciple of the gloomier romantics, such who believed that Nature liked to have her laugh at man. Accordingly he replied:

"Non."

There was nothing left to say. They stood silent, always with the feeling of tension, of attraction, growing stronger. At last he said softly, in English:

"We marry soon, I think."

A statement, not a question. Any other man saying that to her would have been met with a flash, and a detonation:

"You think? Hadn't you better think again? Your thoughts will be getting you into trouble one of these days--"

But to Gustave-Félicité she answered, with the strangest mixture of reluctance and fascinated curiosity:

"If you want to."

She expected an outburst of proper gratitude, a declaration of unclouded happiness. What came was, if anything, a declaration of independence. He put his heels together once more, bowed; said in tones of no particular transport:

"That is very satisfactory. Mademoiselle, au revoir."

And with that clapped the hat on his head, and strode off, a fantastic figure seen against the background of the garden, with his waist like a wooden soldier, and his legs encased in swearing stripes.

The remaining interviews followed the same pattern. The suitor punctiliously came, and bowed, and ate, if food were offered, but made no attempt to endear himself. Why should he? After marriage would be time enough, when, besides, there were more facilities. Laura, who had always supposed the period of engagement to be the happiest of a girl's life--plenty of clothes and attention to look forward to, and lovemaking kept by decorum well within bounds, as most women prefer it--was disillusioned. And finally when all the guests and Father Aloysius were gathered together to tie her for life to this polite but laughable stranger, it was all she could do not to yield to the inevitable last-minute temptation and rush from the church screaming "No, no, no!" She surmounted it however, biting her lip. The presents would have to be returned, and such a display would spoil her chances of getting anyone else. With the ice-cold logic that sometimes assails women at a crisis she realised that marrying Gustave-Félicité would also spoil, with completeness, her chances of getting anyone else. Then another consideration came; standing by his side, in bridal white, she envisaged herself in weeds, and was consoled.

III

The party came next, and after the party, Parramatta, which was to the 1830's what the Blue Mountains are to the 1930's, the only place suitable for honeymoons. There were good reasons for this, though the name, which in blackfellow's language means only "Eels sit down," lacks romantic promise. Even as early as 1822 a prize poem addressed to Sydney Harbour has the lines:

"Whence she, coy wild rose on her virgin couch

Fled loath from Parramatta's am'rous touch."

And though I believe the coy wild rose in question typifies the bush retreating before civilisation the last phrase gives some notion of what might be expected in Parramatta.

Still, it served a purpose; it was unfrequented, save by other honeymooners, and such criminals as had qualified for a term in the female gaol; and there were many well-to-do villas there which friends, with a chuckle, lent. But there was nothing whatever to mitigate in any way the deadly aloneness that was de rigueur for couples. One could boat, but not in parties; one could look at the view, but arm in arm. The house-keeping, which might have provided the luckless brides with distraction, was taken off their hands by the careful orders of the aforesaid friends. As for the husbands, their lot was yet more unhappy; they could not even smoke, save in a room set apart, and wearing a specially embroidered cap; besides, their brides as a rule thought it womanly and charming to dislike the smell. In short, the full misery of honeymoons has never yet been told, and can now only be lightly touched on. Enough to say that Laura and Gustave-Félicité emerged from this seclusion at last, and returned to society's bosom with an impulsiveness and gaiety which told cynical observers just what their boredom had been. Their feelings about each other and the deathly fortnight may be crystallized in two sentences.

His:

"She is well-made and has--thank God, in this climate--dry hands."

Hers:

"None of the people who write novels about love can ever have been married."

But neither of these sentences found their way into the listening air.

IV

A month later they set off up-country, to spy out the land with which his grant endowed him. They took the road through Penrith, over the Nepean by ferry, and on to Emu Plains and the first gorges of the Blue Mountains. A wild road led them through trees that were tall pillars of charcoal with sprouting green crests, branded by bush fires but not killed; it proceeded by leaps and bounds, sometimes over steps and ledges of rock, called jumpers, sometimes through the dry beds of what in winter were mountain streams. The peculiarity of the road was its invariable, and almost conscious, choice of the greater evil; if a valley offered, this curmudgeon of a road chose rather to climb one of the neighbouring hills, and this not in zig-zag, but by direct perpendicular ascent. It crossed rivers for no evident purpose, as if to throw travellers off the scent, providing neither bridge nor ford, but only a ramshackle arrangement of tree-trunks padded with dead turf, which tilted, sagged, or fell utterly apart according to the weight of the vehicle which ventured upon them. Beside the road at frequent intervals lay the bones of oxen, stragglers or failures who had died under the yoke in the journey to Sydney from over the ranges. This road, with its too-steep gradient, its narrow ledges precipice-bounded, its unreasoning disregard for topography, was the conception of a former government surveyor, one Major Mitchell, a cross-grained personage whose delight it was to invite obvious suggestions from his subordinates, and then give orders for the opposite to be done. The perpendicular ascents were selected to annoy; the dangerous ledge-crawls rebuked all spirits less fiery than his own. His tantrums came expensive to the trade from inland to the coast.

Main road! The Frenchman, accustomed to the grand military roads of his own country, or the winding and unstrategic but smooth thoroughfares of England, found this track over which his barouche crawled and lurched a nightmare. It was no easier to ride, for the surface was pitted with holes, rocks of razor-like sharpness lay hidden under the dust. At one point, called Soldier's Pitch, was an incline cobbled with loose stones, whose foot was cluttered and almost impassable with heaps of wood; whole trees had been hooked on to drays at the top of the slope, lest, in spite of locked wheels, these should rush down and overrun their teams of bullocks. Nowhere was there an open prospect. The ranges folded in and behind each other as if they could go on till doomsday. And always the same grey leaves, the same mocking rustle that was never water, the same loneliness.

There were bushrangers about, convicts escaped from the chain gangs mostly, ugly customers; so that travellers, even the bullock teams, joined forces till they were through the passes. Gustave-Félicité, whose notions of what constituted danger and wild country were derived from his experiences in Algiers, mocked at these precautions. "One must go with an army corps," said he, thinking of the fleeting Arab bandits, "or alone." He provided himself with pistols, two menservants and a black guide called Jimmy, supposing, after the manner of fervid nationalists, himself to be a match for any three men of any other race. He had not reckoned with Major Mitchell and his opinionated road.

For just at the foot of Soldier's Pitch, that supreme practical joke of the whole engineering feat, things went wrong. The device of the tree-trunk was tried once too often. Half way down one of the chains that held it parted; the other took full strain a moment, then snapped with a sound like a shot. The coachman, in a last attempt to save the barouche, pulled the horses over across the track. A wheel heaved up on to a hidden stone, adding another three degrees or so to the vehicle's list of forty-five. It went over, laden as it was, like a brick wall falling, the pole snapped, gashing one horse badly; and bonnet boxes, crates of fowls, bottles, a ham, somersaulted down the incline from the barouche's laden roof.

No one was hurt. Laura, seeing the hill from the top, had decided to go down on foot. Gustave-Félicité, out of civility, had descended to give her his arm, though of the two she was more sensibly shod and better enabled to cope with rolling stones. The only casualty was the coachman, cut about the head, and he had the satisfaction of hearing himself damned with great heartiness in a foreign tongue.

"Oaf!" stormed his employer, "your head, you say! Who cares for your head, species of sacred unnamable camel that you are?"

To which the coachman made suitable reply, while Jimmy the black fellow, disengaging his big toe from the stirrup, kicked the already plunging horses with dispassionate comment:

"Budgeree* pfeller you, do no more work to-day."

[* lucky.]

But the fact was that there was not much more of the day left, and they were five miles still from the public-house that was to harbour them for the night. It was a question, argued out between the men in a symposium complicated by the admixture of two foreign tongues, whether to walk on in a body to the inn, or whether someone should stay by the wreck of the barouche; for if there were no bushrangers there were dingoes, starved brutes to whom the stores of food would be tempting. Things were settled at last by the determination to leave Jimmy on guard with a pistol. He protested that this particular track of country was the chosen haunt of devils, awful ones who walked with their feet turned heels first. He demanded, besides the pistol, such other aids to valour as the coachman's Wellington boots and a white pfeller's hat. These were refused, and a compromise was arranged which included a pannikin of rum and seemed to content him. The horses were disentangled, the stores piled, and the barouche righted; and the last seen of Jimmy was his face grinning above the light of a smoky fire while his fingers held strips of ham above the flames, and his toes manoeuvred the pistol.

It took no longer than fifteen minutes after that for the sun to die. It slipped down the sky with a rush, the ranges lifted above it like huge extinguishers, and there was darkness of a most satisfying blue, through which the silent party tramped, leading their horses, with only the barouche lantern to guide their steps. It was a stony and difficult five miles, with nothing much to be expected at the end. The inns were, for the most part, drink-shops only, for all they marked the stages of the road, and travellers had presumably other needs besides the drowning of care. They were, in their squalor, their insolent mishandling of food, their contempt for all custom which demanded service, an unholy revelation to Gustave-Félicité, used to the civility and infrequent drunkenness of France. Even Laura, though accustomed from earliest youth to the sight of men and women the worse for drink--the Willis's had a coachman who, when he took the family to the theatre, had orders to drive himself on to the police station, thus ensuring that he should be sober to get them home--even Laura had found the up-country publics a little too much for her. Apart from noise, there was dirt, and flat nightmarish bugs on the spotty sheets, and the foulest odours everywhere. She walked her five miles gallantly but hopelessly. There were no sounds in the bush. The wind had dropped with the sun, there was not even a rustling of grey leaves, and it suddenly came upon the Frenchman that to talk of this country as new was madness. It was not new; it was old, and worn-out, and dying. There was no generosity left in its earth. The blue-gums were sapless, the scent of the colourless bush flowers was concentrated as though by fire in an alembic, the very soil a mere sprinkling of sand upon lava. It was a country like an old courtesan, done with man, and cynical.

These reflections were, however, without effect upon that singular pioneer. His patrimony elsewhere had eluded him, sinking under the sea, or falling into other tenacious hands; these few thousand unseen acres, therefore, he was determined to possess. The sneering country woke a kind of gallant devil in him, that would not take an insult even from the ground beneath his feet. There was nothing but defiance in the look he threw upwards from time to time, through the branches to unfamiliar stars.

Lights began to show, the track widened to a clearing treacherous with stumps, and surrounded by a phalanx of ghostly trees, ring-barked, bled white. The inn known as "Blind Mick's" was before them, straggling like a small village with its out-houses and sheds. They pressed forward with relief, even while their memories of previous shelters warned them to expect little, and knocked on the door that, strangely enough, was closed. No answering movement could be heard in the house, though there were lights, one of which flitted to another room while they waited, and there was extinguished. They tried the door; it would not yield. One of the men was ready with the only too likely explanation that the household was in the after-throes of a "blind." He had not been on this road before--none of them had, except Jimmy--but pubs were and would be pubs the continent over. He proposed to get in somehow, through a window, and rouse the publican to a sense of duty; but as they stood in perplexity before this silent yet living house, steps came to the door, and the bolt shot back.

A man, the landlord presumably, stood before them with a lamp in his left hand. He was not drunk, to all appearances. He had shaved perfectly clean very recently, for his cheeks and jaws were shiny. He stood there confronting them, and seemed to be summing them up; but neither by gesture nor glance did he invite them in. There was nothing odd or ugly about him, nothing notable at all. He just stood there, and allowed the silence to continue.

It was Gustave-Félicité who broke it.

"We have an accident," said he briefly, "five miles back. My wife has walked and is tired. You will please accommodate us."

Still the man said nothing, but looked at Laura, and at the men in turn.

"This is an inn, I think?" Gustave-Félicité persisted. "It is your duty to receive travellers. It is the law."

On that the man gave a sudden sharp yelp of laughter, and an exaggerated bow. He did not let them pass him, but went before them down the entry, calling "Frank! Hey, here!"

A further man appeared at a door; his hands were covered with lather, and one held a kitchen knife like a weapon; he had the strangest look of angry apprehension.

"Frank," said the first man, "hustle up with that beauty treatment o' yours. Here's company come."

Frank's expression changed to a daze, and his eyes rested with incredulity on Laura.

"What's the sense, looking like that?" enquired the first man sharply, "this is an inn, ain't it? Aren't going to get us into trouble with the law, are you? Turning custom away--"

And on that, disregarding Frank, he opened the door of a room. Laura entered, her husband after her. Their host lit a candle, showing a bed, on whose counterpane dusty marks seemed to tell of a former occupant who had lain upon it in his boots. This was the more noticeable since the rest of the room was not merely cleanly, but almost prim. There was a toilet mirror dressed in some coarse stuff, on which the flies, which fouled clean curtains in a week, had not yet begun to make impression. There was a decent print of some historical carnage, and a text above the bed, while on the floor a rag rug, newly washed, held pride of place. It was so much more homely and kindly than the other inns along the road, that Laura could not reconcile it with the host's mocking and reluctant welcome, nor with the tumbled bed. She said, feeling her way:

"I thought it was--didn't they tell us that it was a blind man who kept this house?"

"That's right," the host agreed with a grin, "he's blind right enough."

Laura thought of the double significance of that word, and pursued her enquiries no further. She sat down thankfully, and opened her little toilet bag to cope with the dust of the road. The host brought water, but when asked for a clean counterpane looked nonplussed; he moved off, however, and she could hear him rummaging in cupboards. She changed her stockings, settled her dress, and was giving some attention to her hair, when a shouting arose, sudden as a dogfight, every word audible through the unpapered wooden partitions. It was the man called Frank, resenting some intrusion.

"Get out! Wot yer poking yer nose in 'ere for?"

The voice of the coachman, Andy:

"Where the 'ell am I to go? I want 'ay for my 'osses."

"You want yer face bloody well knocked in--"

The voice of the host, steely and quiet:

"Shut yer head, Frank. You"--to Andy--"keep where you belong."

"I got to see my 'osses gets their feed."

"That's right." A pause. "That's my business. I'll look to it, all in good time. My house, ain't it?" Pause. "Ain't it?"

"Yes, boss, I reckon so."

"That's more like. Frank, I want some candles; and where the hell's the sheets kept?"

"'Ow should I know?" With a laugh: "what's the idea? Not going to wake 'em, are yer?"

"Shut your mouth."

That was all. A minute later the host came in, after knocking, with a clean sheet to replace the soiled counterpane. The eternal up-country meal of ham and eggs would, he told them, be ready in ten minutes.

He was as good as his word. The meal came in, smoking, and the two menservants, standing awkwardly by, were bidden to sit down to it with their employers. Frank, too, made his appearance smelling of hot grease, and carrying a damper, unrisen flour cooked in ashes which served throughout the inland country as bread. It was, despite the inevitable nature of the food, an unusual meal. For instance, in such places it was not usual for the host to sit at table, nor for him to be sober, as this man was; cold-sober, and with a sobering eye that rested often and meaningly upon the sullen Frank. Then the parlour, like the bedroom, was clean, and had ribbon bows on the curtain-loops, such as a woman might have tied; but there was no sign of any woman. The lamp in the table's centre, trimmed and bright, lighted no laughter, and little conversation. The two servants were awkward, Laura was tired, Gustave-Félicité was preoccupied with the problem of mending his carriage, Frank went in awe, it seemed, of his employer, and looked to him between each mouthful. Only that personage was at his ease, and though not talkative, saw after their wants and kept order. He listened to the story of the disaster to the pole, questioned minutely as to the exact site of the accident, and promised to "have a look at it" for them in the morning. At the meal's end, when Laura stood to go, he picked up the lamp to escort her; the light, shining direct on his face from below, showed her something--but what was unusual, what was strange, in the sight of a chin shaved? Only it seemed as though a thick beard had been cut away, for the chin and lips were white, while the rest, even the eyelids, had the tan of years. It gave him an unhealthy look, as a sick dog goes white round the muzzle; and perhaps it was the contrast of this look with his brown and steady hand, the continued contrasts all through the house that set Laura's mind quivering, and made her sleep uneasy. She lay long awake after the house was quiet, save for snores; then dropped off, and started up out of an unremembered dream with a phrase in her mind.

At home, in Sydney, Laura was accustomed to be served by Catholics, men and women from Ireland. Teresa Mary McCarthy was the cook, James Kinehane was the groom. From a child she had listened to their talk, knew the ins and outs of their meaning, and the light of that knowledge threw fear into the remembered phrase. It was Frank's--"Not going to wake 'em, are you?" delivered with an ugly laugh. "To wake--" to dress up a corpse in state and hold a funeral feast, drinking round the coffin.

It frightened her so that she put out a hand to her husband and shook him by the shoulder. He was instantly alert; but when he asked "Yes? I am listening," she could find nothing to say of the play that her anxious mind had made upon some everyday words, and the feel of the house. She did ask, however, had he his pistols? One, yes; it was on the table loaded. Was he sure? Yes, yes, of what importance was it, the pistol? She said nothing more, but slipped out of bed and groped her way to the table, where, sure enough, the pistol lay. She brought it gingerly back to the bed, and thrust it under her husband's pillow, barrel turned upwards, but ready to his hand, or to hers. Gustave-Félicité laughed, and said something about these not being the kind of arms he preferred to take into bed with him. She hung awhile on her elbow, listening; there was snoring still, but no movement. She lay down, her heart thudding. Nothing stirred in the house. Slowly the heart slackened, her whole body seemed to grow heavy. She slept again, and soundly, till morning.

As a rule, in such wayside houses it was impossible to sleep after six. Drink or no drink the night before, someone had to milk the cows, who otherwise came roaring in misery to the slip-rails; an unwilling boy of twelve it was as a rule, booted out of bed with all the savagery that a six o'clock head can engender. Other travellers, stockmen and teamsters, eager to get half their mileage done before the heat of the day, had to be fed with chops and tea at dawn, and set off amid musket-cracks from their whips, and shouts to the bullock-leaders: "Git up, Bawly! Git on, you bastards!" But this house reposed like a gentleman's villa till the sun was up. Gustave-Félicité, fumbling under his pillow, found the pistol-butt with his fingers, and laughed; then his watch, and swore. It was the half-hour after seven, and he had meant to be up, and off to the wrecked barouche by that time. He got up stealthily, not to rouse his wife, put on half his clothes, and went to look for water to wash in. He had seen enough of the colony to know that water lived, not in pumps as at home, or as in Africa, in wells; but in square tanks of iron that caught all moisture from the roof. He went out through the back-door, which was open, into the level sunlight. Involuntarily his head went up, his shoulders widened to get a full draught of the air, fresh yet warm as new milk; his eyes ranged idly about the clearing which last night had seemed, with its dead trees, so sinister, and now looked a pleasant haven.

The horses, who had been turned into the back paddock the night before, came to the fence to greet him; and a parliament of cockatoos, observing him, took no notice, but continued their council, bowing gravely to each other, and gobbling with the utmost respect for decorum. Sinister! The place was full of promise. There were green flats behind the whitewashed house, and an attempt at a garden had been made outside the back door, where among the flowers pushed up sturdier growths--potatoes, and that dire English hybrid, neither fruit nor honest vegetable, detested rhubarb. He forgot, as he drank in the sunlight, his vision of the night before. The country was no longer a courtesan, sterile and weary, but an honest farmer's wife in a sunbonnet, her apron full of food.

"Ah, my dear," thought Gustave-Félicité, bending his arms to clench the muscles of his shoulders, "we shall get on together well enough, you and I."

The sentimental moment of idleness passed. The stillness of the house roused him to energy. Where were the men? The horses should have been watered, breakfast should have been prepared and eaten by now. Fresh from his sluice in a bucket he went authoritatively into the house, calling, knocking on doors.

"Hey, what the devil? Is there nobody to take orders in this place?"

Apparently not; no one answered. He thrust his way into the parlour, where his own two men had slept. Each clutched a bottle; other bottles, dead marines, were by their sides. He kicked the snorers, who opened glazed eyes, and rolled helplessly. What was all this? How had they got at the drink, with that sober-eyed man holding the keys? And where was the sober-eyed man?

This time he went back to the doors at which he had first knocked, kitchen he supposed, and the other some kind of doss-place. The kitchen was empty. The other room--

He stepped back involuntarily, and threw up a hand as a cloud of flies rose with a loud singing hiss from something on the floor; dried blood, a great pool of it, that seemed to have run out from under a cupboard that stood in one corner. He pulled open the cupboard door. A man and woman stood in it, very stiff. Their throats had been cut, and their bodies, bundled instantly into this hiding place still warm, had stiffened, propped upright by the closed door. The woman's face was comely, and she was tidy, save for the gap in her neck. The man's eyes were open, but opaque. Blind Mick, the tavern owner, with his wife, who had put bows to the curtains and tended the garden, looked out incuriously at their white-faced guest. By the side of the cupboard a text hung: "I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes. Ps. 101."

Gustave-Félicité crossed himself, banged the door to, and ran in blind haste for his pistol. He had to rouse Laura to get at it; she looked up sleepily, with a question. He snapped an order to stay quiet, and went through the house and outbuildings, pistol in hand. But the murderers, their hosts of the night before, had gone. (It is odd to have to relate that Laura, amid this panic search, turned over and went to sleep again. She had got her terror over, as is the manner of women, well before the event.)

V

These bushrangers, a pair of no particular distinction in a brotherhood which includes such spectacular figures as Thunderbolt and the Kellys, enjoyed no very long lease of dangerous life. Six months later they came before Mr. Justice Strutt at Bathurst, and Gustave-Félicité was one of the witnesses. The leader, that smooth and sober man, gave cool details in the dock. It seemed that the double murder had been done not more than twenty minutes before the traveller's arrival, and the bushrangers, taken unawares with their hands in stained soapsuds, had been afraid to tackle an armed party. They bluffed, then in the earliest dawn cleared out with their loot, having slept some hours on the bed in that room with the cupboard.