Читать книгу Out There: A Romance Of Australia - James Edward Muddock - Страница 10

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As Harold Preston left the Club and made his way along High Street in the direction of Mary Gordon's residence his mind was in a welter, and he felt that the threads of his life had become knotted and tangled. The sun was shining with flaming radiance, the streets were filled with a flood of white light, and yet he had a curious physical feeling that there was a darkened medium before his eyes. Although the heat was great, the business of the little settlement caused a stir and bustle. Men and women, screening themselves with white umbrellas, passed and repassed, absorbed in their respective interests, and the traffic rumbled over the rough pavement with an intermittent cadence that was suggestive of sea waves breaking gently with rhythmical murmur on a sandy shore.

As he went on his way, self-absorbed and with an air of abstraction, he was only vaguely conscious of his surroundings. He was in that peculiar state of mind when memories are apt to crowd upon one, and the mental eye takes a rapid panoramic survey of the incidents and episodes of the dead and gone years. He flung his gaze back to his early childhood, passed in the wilds where the voice of Nature spoke to him and he understood and was happy. Then came four years as a student in Melbourne, when his thirst for knowledge caused him to be singled out as "a promising lad." He had powers of acquisitiveness, and a mental hungering for intellectual stimulus that might have led him to a plane of professional activity with resulting honours and the praise of his fellow-men. But he was a child of Nature, and every fibre of his being vibrated to the call of the wild. Life in a crowded city, amidst the dust and passion of struggling masses of human atoms jostling each other in the fight for existence, did not appeal to him. He lacked the imminent motive power of ambition which is indispensable to a man desirous of worldly distinction. His temperament inclined him to an Arcadian simplicity of existence, where he could breathe the free air of great spaces, and listen to the soothing undertones of Nature. His soul demanded something purer than is afforded to the toiler in a great city where the masses herd like cattle.

Besides, he felt that his destiny was to continue the work his people had begun. In the area of the inheritance that would come to him. there was scope enough to satisfy him, nor was he indifferent to the potentialities of even that outpost of civilisation. Civilisation was rapidly eating its way into the remotest corners of the great land of his birth, and he knew the time would surely dawn when the wilds would be peopled with teaming millions, and the voice of Nature be stilled by the roar and fret of humanity, and the tears and the sorrow and wrong that are concomitants of civilisation when it throws, its corroding clasp around the virgin heart of Nature. And so in the fulfilment of what he conceived to be his inevitable destiny, Harold Preston shook the dust of Melbourne from his feet, after four years of strenuous intellectual work, during which he had equipped himself more thoroughly than the average youth. He had never been in sympathy with the under-world of the ever-growing town. Its fleshiness and vulgarity had no attraction for him. He was a stranger to its haunts of vice, its sink-holes of meretricious pleasures, where men and women sought nepenthe in the hashish of vicious excitement.

He spent some months with relatives in Sydney, and derived pure joy from sailing about its wonderful harbour.

Then he learnt something of the luring spell of the sea by sailing in a coasting schooner as far north as Cooktown, thence he made his way overland through the jungles and planes, to dear Glenbar, where amidst its restfulness, and repose, and the siren song of the wilds ringing in his attuned ears, he found the life he longed for.

This is an epitome of his experience of the world, not a very wide experience, and it had left him with all the freshness and joyousness of youth. In due course he came into his inheritance, and when his soul's love for Mary Gordon found a response his happiness and contentment were complete.

Now as he made his way through the sun-smitten township, his heart was tortured with the cruelty of disillusionment. The two years' drought had ruined him financially, but that concerned him far less than the discovery that the friend in whom he had had such unbounded faith was made of the commonest clay, and had been guilty of a crime for which there could hardly be any atonement. To a man of Harold's simple nature this falling of his idol was an appalling calamity: it shocked and stunned him; it had taken something out of his life that could never be replaced. As he entered the house Mary met him with a sweet smile and cordial welcome that heartened him a little, but she was quick to notice his changed appearance. His troubled thoughts were reflected in his face, which wore a gloom she had never seen before. He had such an optimistic nature, such boyish enthusiasm, that he was almost invariably bright and cheerful, but now it seemed as if he had actually aged, and there was a look of despair in the depths of his dark eyes.

"Whatever has happened, dear?" Mary asked as she passed her soft hand soothingly over his broad forehead. There was a note of concern in her voice.

His first impulse was to tell her what he had heard about Gordon, but a feeling he could not quite understand restrained him. While he could not doubt Doctor Blain's statements, which were too circumstantial to be a mere fabrication, was it not possible that his informant had exaggerated the details? Was it not possible, also, that there were some redeeming features in the horrible story? It was so hard to think of Oliver Gordon as a black-hearted, depraved wretch whose soul was steeped in vice.

"I am tired, dear, and worried," he answered prevaricatingly, as he dropped into a chair, and, leaning back, put his hand to his forehead. She went behind the chair, and encircling his neck with her arms, she laid her face against his head.

"It is not like you, Harold, to worry; why should you? You have such resource within yourself, such youth and splendid energy, that you cannot fail to overcome your difficulties."

He grasped her wrist, and looked up wistfully at her sweet face with its ineffable expression of sympathy and love. He smiled sadly.

"Yes, Mary, I have youth and energy, but at times it seems as if nothing on earth could compensate us for ruined hopes and misplaced confidence."

"Misplaced confidence!"

She drew away, and seated herself in a chair facing him.

"What I mean is, when you put your trust in somebody and you find you've been deceived."

She clasped her hands about her knee and assumed a very thoughtful expression; there was a pause. Then still in the same position, but fixing her soft brown eyes that were pathetic, upon him:

"Harold, is it possible that some wretch in the town has been poisoning your mind against—me?"

"What a fool I am, Mary, to have given you such an impression as that," he exclaimed, starting up with a burst of energy. "Surely you cannot think that I am such a poor weak creature as to allow any silly, flippant gossip to shake my faith in you?"

"I hope you are not," she said softly.

"Indeed I am not. I should hate and despise myself if I thought I was capable of such baseness. No, my dear girl. If the time should ever come when you feel that you have made a mistake in giving me your love, all you will have to do is to tell me honestly, and I will release you and never again let the shadow of my presence fall upon you."

"If the time should ever come," she answered with an impressive solemnity, "I 'will tell you, Harold. Whatever the fate of the years may be, my heart will remain true to you unless you should at any time feel you had made a mistake and told me so."

In an instant he was on his knees at her feet, and taking her face in his hands, he kissed her on the lips: "Mary my beloved," he said with reawakened cheerfulness, "don't let us spoil the harmony of our love by suggesting even the possibility that either of us has made a mistake. I have told you before, and I tell you again, that you are the only woman in the world for me. We are not girl and boy. My love for you has grown and matured with the years. Your pure, gentle soul is more precious to me than all the wealth this country may be capable of producing. My poor life will be a sapless, meaningless thing without your companionship. I am a simple-minded man, with no greed for wealth, no aspiration beyond that of desiring to live a clean and useful life, and of doing my duty to all as an honest and earnest man should."

"Harold, every word you say, every sentiment you express finds a response in my own breast," she answered sweetly. "I judge you with a woman's eyes, and woman's instinct, and seeing the goodness that is in you, my soul clings to your soul. Human life can be idealised, purified, glorified by human love. Let us get all that is sweet and beautiful and idyllic out of our joint lives by mutual love, at the same time never forgetting that we are only mortal, and when we quit this earth it will be to reunite somewhere beyond the stars where love is eternal."

It was a true woman's soul that spoke, and there was a light in her eyes that almost seemed as if her whole being pulsed with a divine inspiration.

From Harold's mind passed all thoughts of Gordon. He was filled with a spiritual happiness that lifted him above the world. He had no thought for anything else but this dear woman whose womanhood was purified by the hand of God. He raised her up, he held her in his arms for some moments, her heart beating in rhythm against his. He kissed her with a kiss that was free from all grossness, and said, "If it be true, Mary, that angels walk the earth you are one of them."

A tender smile dimpled her beautiful face, and a ray of sunlight lighted up her hair with a ha-lo of gold.

"Well now, we must not forget that we are of the earth earthy," she said in a tone that was like the breathing of a lute. "A little sentiment at times is delicious when love fills the heart; it is like the joy that comes from an entrancing dream, but we awaken from dreams to the world that is real and practical. See, the sun is setting, let us go into the garden. This room is very hot."

They passed through the open doorway on to the veranda. The air was heavy with the strong scent exhaled from the long trumpet blooms of masses of Funkia Sieboldiana that grew in a circular bed close to the house. The sun was dipping below the horizon. A nimbus of fleecy clouds hung just above it, glowing with living colours of amber and crimson. Great bars of golden light spread up fanwise to the zenith, and over the whole landscape was the gleam of shimmering gold. The translucent atmosphere glowed as if from the reflection of intangible fire that imparted to it a transparent amber light. As the upper rim of the sun disappeared the colour in the west deepened, and the gold on the landscape gradually dissolved to crimson, and this again dispersed, giving place to a velvety purple that deepened and deepened as the stars began to scintillate in the eastern heavens, while the west still glowed with horizontal lines of dark red, orange-yellow and sea-green. These faded almost imperceptibly as the robe of night slowly spread over the earth, and the whole canopy of heaven was studded with myriads of glittering points of light.

Harold and Mary strolled arm in arm along the garden walks. A warm wind came up from the river and sighed languorously through the palms and tree ferns, and fire-flies flashed their tiny lamps until the air seemed to drip with a rain of molten silver.

"The world is very beautiful," whispered Mary, deeply impressed with the poetry of the night.

"And love makes of it a paradise," was Harold's response. "I feel it is good to be with you. You always raise me to a higher plane, and I see with clear eyes the nobler things that are worth the striving for."

"You must not idealise me too much, Harold," she remarked with a musical laugh. "After all, I am very human, you know."

"Yes, you are very human, but it seems to me that you embody some of the highest attributes of human nature."

The glory of the stars and the spell of her beauty, held him, and he felt it was good to be alive.