Читать книгу The Happy Vagabond - Margaret Fane - Страница 3

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It was evident that, even for the highly exclusive community known as the Delamore Golf Club, something unusually important was in process. The parking paddock behind the professional’s shop was full; a number of impatient-looking saddle-horses glared from the railing of the new paddock; a couple of ornamental buggies glittered in the shade of the big gum-tree; even the Delamore motor-bus was languishing in the midday glare. The clubhouse was as full as the parking paddock; sports sweaters and jumpers of all hues of the rainbow, and plus fours of all imaginably surprising checks, diagonals, and herringbones were dotted all about the rooms and the wide veranda; and the tinkling noise of chattering light voices mingled with that other potent tinkle of glasses and cups-and-saucers.

The event that had brought all these careless, ornamental people together was obviously over. The golf-course was empty, save for three old gentlemen putting on the eighteenth green and a groundsman in the distance. The steward was trying hard to work out some way of lunching twenty tables in a room built to accommodate twelve; at the back of his harassed mind he looked forward to the end of the day with fervent gratitude that the final of the Raven Cup was not played off every day of the week. What with special morning-tea parties, special lunches—why, there’d be enough cold meat and poultry to feed every member for a week of Sundays.

In the big semicircular corner of the veranda a very special morning-tea party was being held, with the beautiful Miss Torrance as hostess. On the flower-decked table, in the place of honour, the Raven Cup twinkled out of a cloud of asparagus fern; Miss Torrance’s half-dozen guests were obviously very sensible of the honour of taking their morning-tea round the sacred cup. All save one—a young man leaning against the veranda rail a little apart from the group round the table, a distinctly bored expression in his elfin eyes. This expression was surprising; not only was the young man this year’s winner of the famous Raven Cup, but he was also the fiancé of Miss Elaine Torrance, the much more famous Melbourne beauty.

Her blue eyes rested coldly for a moment on this young man’s face. “You look bored, Michael,” she said. “Does fame pall so soon? Think of your name and prowess in all this evening’s newspapers and all to-morrow morning’s. And come over here and have a cake for being such a clever little golfer.”

Michael’s eyes smiled, a shadowy little crinkle starting into life at the corner of each; but there was a worriment, a half-puzzled listlessness behind the smile. Somehow this smile seemed to come vaguely into his voice.

“Of course I’m not bored, Elaine,” he said, standing up and walking over to the table. A very personable young man, with a nice taste in the blending semitones of tweeds and flannels, the tie and the socks and the handkerchief—almost too nice a taste, perhaps, for the Australian scene. The English precision of his speech condoned and explained this fastidiousness, however, as that slight greying of his trim hair at the temples gave an added distinction to his thin, half wistful, half confident face. The war, whose echoes were not yet stilled in the world, may have put that challenging reticence into his face; it was not six months since his discharge. The smile deepened as he looked at the plate of luscious creamy cakes beside his cup.

“Haven’t you got anything simple?” he asked. “Some plain bread and butter, or something like that?”

She glanced up at him, the beginning of a frown between her fascinating eyes. “Of course I haven’t any bread and butter, Michael. Don’t be absurd.”

A tall man at the other side of the table clicked his heels together and bowed abruptly; his effusive eyes seemed to flash defiance at Michael. “How shall there be anything but sweetness on the table, monsieur,” he said, “with all the sweetness in the world at the head of it?”

The frown became a conscious smile, and the tired look flickered into Michael’s face again.

“Perhaps you’re right, de Frontenac. You try one of the cakes, then.”

The heels clicked again, and the sudden bow followed. “With all my heart,” de Frontenac protested, taking the largest, most bilious-looking cake, while Miss Torrance’s conscious smile seemed to gurgle.

Michael glanced at the two faces and put down his tea-cup. “Do you mind walking home, Elaine?” he asked. “We can just manage it by lunch-time.”

“Yes, if you insist. But it’s hot, and there’s the car, and——”

“De Frontenac can use the car, and tell Willard about all the sweetness in the world. I’d like a word with you, if you have the time.”

She rose, a definite chill in her manner now. “Certainly. As the hero of the day I’m sure you’ve earned that. I hope you’ll like it.”

Really unconscious of the awed, admiring glances of the scattered groups of members, he waited for her by the entrance, feeling the rich sunshine soaking into him. Over by the fourteenth tee he could see that belt of white gum-trees stretching to the edge of the fairway—how many times had he thought how splendid they looked compared with the artificial excellence of the Delamore fairway and greens! Since his first sight of this sumptuous southern land he had loved it, had meant, if ever his wanderings ceased, to let them cease here in this outpost of sunshine. There was a truth, a reality, here, besides the gorgeous beauty——

She came down the steps, and he joined her, falling into step with her as they walked round the drive to the gates. The admiring glances followed them until they turned out of the gateway and vanished.

“There’s something on your mind, Michael,” she said in the road, “something which doesn’t improve your manners. Is it de Frontenac?”

A sudden vision of the over-dressed Frenchman trying to be an Australian sportsman made him laugh. “Good lord, no,” he told her.

Recording the laugh in her memory, she turned her fascinating eyes towards him, the cold smile stirring in their depths. “Is it me, then?”

“Partly you—and partly something else.”

“We’ll begin with me. Anything wrong with me?”

He looked at the rich embodiment of Australian beauty beside him, the hair like spun gold, the Viking blue eyes, the upright, heroic body. She seemed the very type of the land that had so haunted him about the world, the pallid, outer world.

“No, nothing wrong with you, of course. I was wondering if you could——”

“Yes?” she prompted in the pause. “If I could——”

“Listen, Elaine. I won the cup to-day because I wanted it for you, to balance a letter I got this morning—a letter from home.” The crinkle hovered beside his eyes as he turned and looked at her. “I don’t suppose it’s going to make any serious difference, but—well, it is, as you said, on my mind.”

Some unusual seriousness in his flippant manner made her fine face grave. “Tell me,” she said. “Have things gone wrong at home, Michael?”

“Yes. Uncle David, my trustee, has been buying dud stock in the war-time jamboree they are having over there. It’s better to tell you at once: my income from the business has vanished.”

She caught her breath and glanced at him from the corners of her eyes.

“The whole of your income?”

“Yes. There’s something like a thousand pounds of the capital left, which he has paid into my Melbourne bank by this mail. There was eight hundred or so there already....”

She waited, but he said nothing more.

“Do you mean that this £1800 is all the money you have in the world?”

“Yes, Elaine.”

He, too, waited, his ears keen for the tones of her voice and his face very grave. She stopped in the road and faced him.

“You are a beggar, then, compared with yourself last month?”

“Not entirely,” he said, ignoring the hard edge that he had expected in her voice. “Old David offers me a sort of managership of his own business—to go in and earn it, drawing a manager’s salary all the time until I can be the manager.”

“A good salary?”

“Two thousand a year.” He ignored the hard edge again, and the sudden brightness with which she turned her eyes up to his.

“That would be all right, Michael. We could have a little flat in London, and do some entertaining. Perhaps the salary would improve....” A fugitive vision of the white gum-trees marching into the Delamore fairway crossed his mind. “You are somebody, you know, with your war record, and——”

“You don’t know Uncle David, Elaine.” A certain heaviness had crept into his tones. “His letter only just apologizes for cutting the ground permanently from under my feet, and the rest of it is full of sanctimonious protest that he can’t see his dear dead sister’s boy in want or cast adrift. So he and his fellow-directors have fixed up this charity stunt for me.”

“Well? I think it was very kind of them.”

He looked at her, but made no comment on her remark. “We should get that sort of thing from him whenever we saw him, and I should get it every day and all day in the office. Besides——”

“Besides what?”

“I thought of taking this money that’s left and borrowing some more from old David and putting it into Willard’s place here—he wants a young man as partner, he said, having no sons or relations. In that way we could stay in Australia——”

“Buy a share in a small station and bury myself in Australia? I wouldn’t think of it.” There was no want of definition in her attitude now. “Why, it’s to get out of Australia that I want—that’s why I——Can’t you see, Michael, that I should be buried permanently in this twopenny-halfpenny place of Willard’s? I couldn’t——”

“Not if it were my dearest wish, saving your presence, to stay in Australia?” His voice had regained its habitual note of flippant irony, but no smile crinkled the corners of his grave eyes. “Don’t you see, my dear girl, that——”

“I see one thing very clearly, Michael. That you have made up your mind to stay here, and that that means that you are demanding your freedom. Very well. You shall have it.” She slipped off her glove and handed him her engagement ring. “Perhaps some other lady——” she said, and walked up the steps of the Willards’ veranda and through the doorway without looking back.

For a moment he stood, looking at the place where her beauty had been. So it had been all self, then. He turned at last and walked back into the Willard garden, a grey shadow on his vivid face. Far-off memories crept back to him, of wanderings before the war, the easy, pleasant softness of that old life. Was it his own fault—had everything come so easily to him that now, at this first heavy blow, everything must fall away, to teach him? He remembered his first vision of Australia—abruptly the memory of his bitter loss seized and shook him. She had been Australia, radiant and triumphant in her beauty.

He found himself at the garage door as the big gong for lunch boomed through the house behind him. Lunch ... all those faces round the table ... he stared bleakly at the man cleaning down the car that had taken them to Delamore, to his empty triumph in the Raven Cup. His motor-bike ... a long hard run, all out, under the sunshine....

“Will you see that a message is taken to Mr Willard,” he said to the man, “a message to say that I can’t face lunch—that I have a headache?”

“Very good, sir,” the man replied, thinking it was queer how a man’s face could change in a few hours.

The air was good. Its hard Australian definition braced and steadied him, as the need for keenness and concentration in driving at this terrific pace swept everything else out of his mind. Happily the road was good; mile after mile shot past him in a sort of steady rhythm which had an even sanity, an effortless quietude, that soothed and inspired. His eyes watched the road and the bends, and the engine throbbed and boomed beneath him; the clumps of trees, the outposts of the bush, showed first as shrubs, swelled suddenly, and suddenly vanished behind him. That was all—all there was in the world.

One other thing there was: a deep, hard rut in a stretch of the road running to a sharp bend in a hollow. Providence drove his front wheel into this rut, and there locked it, he going all out on a high-powered motor-bicycle. The impact of the sudden cessation of demoniacal speed swept him over the handle bars and threw him, a huddled heap, beside the deserted road. Here a swooning darkness shot with fire enveloped him on the instant, and the huddled heap was still.

Dusk had fallen when the heap stirred and rose difficultly to its feet, disclosing itself a blood-stained, haggard man, swaying gently at first, but gradually steadying enough to take stock of his whereabouts.

There was the bicycle still stuck fast in the rut in the deserted road; and here was himself, battered and shaken, cut about the head and face, but still alive. What to do? He had no least notion of his distance from a township, or even of his position on the map at all.... In this twilight, this gathering darkness, it would be hard, probably impossible, to find out——

Was that a light through the trees, that faint glimmer below the bend?

He found walking as difficult as standing, but somehow he made his way towards the flickering, beckoning gleam. It seemed to be some distance into the bush; he had stumbled to the edge of the bend and over a faint track before he came to the clearing where the light revealed itself as a fire, a comfortable-looking fire crackling merrily against the background of the dusk.

Michael paused and stood swaying vaguely on the rim of the firelit circle. How quiet and somehow real this looked.... A caravan, like the gipsies’ horse-drawn houses of childhood memory; an old horse grazing in the shadows; a man bending over a violin, crooning to it while he played “Annie Laurie” as if there were nothing in the world but sweet Annie Laurie; and a girl, a little girl of perhaps twelve, who leaned towards the fire watching a billy. The firelight caressed her hair and her watching eyes, making the clearing and the rosy circle seem like home—that was it: it was home. The father at his violin and the daughter making his tea, the day’s work or wandering done.

The old tune crept caressingly into Michael’s mind, soothing and lulling the bitterness. Presently, leaning against a gum-tree, he opened his mouth and caught up the phrase trembling on the violin. The shadows seemed to gather in to hear the radiant sound as the beautiful tenor voice flowed out into the night. The man glanced up and paused, his surprise showing vaguely in his pallid eyes; the girl caught her breath and stared into the singer’s face, watching him breathlessly until the heavenly sound had ceased. The last faint echoes faded into the silence, and the man put down his violin and stood up, the troubled pallor in his eyes changing to concern as he saw Michael’s head and face.

“You’re hurt—you’ve had an accident,” he said. “Rosa, bring me some water and a towel, quickly.” She took her eyes from Michael’s face and slipped up the steps of the caravan as he reached the fire and subsided suddenly on the rug. “You have a wonderful voice,” he heard the man say, but thinly, as if he were speaking from a distance. Suddenly the fire and the murmuring dusk vanished....

But only for a moment. As the tin dish and towel appeared beside him he came to again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You looked so happy here. I shouldn’t have disturbed you——”

“Put your head down,” the girl said. “I believe you’ve been fighting.”

“No, not fighting. My bike found a rut like a steel trap and threw me——”

“Stop talking,” she told him. “How do you think I can do your chin if it’s waggling all the time. Daddy, will you bring me the plaster and the ointment, please?”

“There, now,” she went on when the two strips of plaster were in place. “Now you can smoke or sit and think while I get your supper and go on with ours.”

Michael looked at the caravan and the old horse, at some pots and pans hanging from the back of the caravan, at the clothes of the man and this child. This was a working camp—he had no right to hospitality here. “I say, won’t you let me pay for—for things? I don’t know where I am, or I wouldn’t have bothered you. But I can——”

He felt the sudden stillness in the atmosphere, and looked from cold face to face. A light danced first in the child’s eyes, and she laughed and turned to the fire.

“But you’ve sung for your supper,” she said, “and now you shall have it.”

She took the billy off, and began a little murmuring song as she busied herself with cups and plates—a foolish, jangling song—

Here’s Tommy Tucker,

Sings for his supper—

What shall we give him?

Brown bread and butter....

Michael lit a cigarette and sat watching her hovering in and out of the firelight.

How can we marry him

Without a wife?

Here’s Tommy Tucker....

The meal over, he and the man brought his bicycle into the camp, and dried the plates and cups she had washed.

“Bring our guest a rug, Rosa, dear, please. He’ll want to sleep soon, after the shock of his spill.”

“Tommy Tucker’s rug? Certainly, Daddy.”

Michael looked into the fire and smiled his radiant smile, the shadowy crinkle coming and going beside his eyes. He was taken in, unquestioned, unauthenticated. The smile deepened; the bitterness was sleeping now. He felt that he had taken the pain and loss, and left it all in the hands of the rich Australian night beyond the rosy circle. She could deal with it, in her large, magnificent way; for him this fire and these kind hands were the escape, the escape to home, he allowed himself to add.

Daybreak had become dawn before he got the fire properly lit. He looked up from it to the man’s pale eyes watching him. “You are early, Mister——”

The crinkles flickered suddenly beside the elfin smile.

“Tucker, Thomas Tucker, I think Rosa said was my name.”

“Mr Tucker,” the man added, laughing gently; “you are early. The tinkers are not too bad at early rising, but you beat us, Mr Tucker.”

“Tinkers?”

“Yes.” He sat down, throwing twigs on the fire, and looking thoughtfully at them. “We are tinkers, you know, going from house to house—in the tradition of tinkers. Gerrard is our name.”

Tommy Tucker was lost in thought for a moment. The Raven Cup crossed his mind, and Elaine, and Willard; that balance at the bank flickered in and out. He looked at the man beside him, at the bustling fire, the quiet old horse, and the caravan. All this in the Australian dawn, on the brink of summer....

“I don’t know anything about tinkering,” he said; “but I’m a fairly good vet, and”—he paused to think for a moment—“I can tune pianos—I suppose there would be a good many pianos in the country districts. Could you put up with me for a few days, Mr Gerrard?”

“Of course we could, Mr Tucker.” Rosa brought the billy and set it on the fire.

“Good morning, Tommy Tucker,” she chanted. “How are your aches and pains?”

“Mr Tucker is joining us for a few days, my dear. He is a vet and a piano-tuner.”

“Good-oh! But that doesn’t mean that he’ll be let off singing for his supper every evening, does it?”

Tommy Tucker laughed. “Why, no. I’ll sing for my breakfast, if you like.”

“Let’s make him sing for every meal, Daddy. Then the whole camp will be working; he might not get a piano to tune or a sick animal to make well every day. Is it a go, Tommy Tucker?”

“It’s a go.” He smiled down at her brown, keen face. “My aches and pains are gone, but it’s hard to sing with a stiff face. Do you insist?”

“I insist,” she said peremptorily. “I know more about those cuts than you do. Sing.”

Presently “Bois Epais” came stealing crooning on the silence, the soft phrases filling the morning. Michael’s head voice soared up and drooped in the final silence, making an ineffable sweetness of sound like a bloom on the quietude. Rosa watched him hungrily; his voice stripped all the gallant dominating bonhomie from her, leaving the child a still, listening figure without any consciousness save that of the sounds he made. When he had done she sighed.

“Oh, Tommy Tucker, brown bread and butter will never pay for that, I’m afraid.”

A momentary gravity banished his smile.

“Plain bread and butter is the best payment for anything, I think.”

Three more dawns and dusks had gone when in a new rosy circle of firelight Mr Gerrard put down his violin and looked at Tommy Tucker.

“You like the life, don’t you, Mr Tucker?”

“Yes. I hadn’t dreamed that there was such a life.”

“Nor I, when Rosa and I began it.” He took the cigarette that Tommy offered him. “My bad health was the cause of our beginning it—that and my eyes. Rosa’s mother had been dead for some years, and I got careless about my health, with no one to look after me. I found that I couldn’t see as well, that the figures in the ledger were often blurred. So I went to the doctor, and he was very grave about me and my chances of being able to see at all soon.”

He paused and flicked the cigarette ash into the fire. Tommy waited in silence.

“Since then we have spent all my savings on doctors and oculists and hospitals, and my eyes are steadily growing worse.... Part of the general treatment is to keep out in the open air and live as much like a primitive man as I can, and so we started this. I knew enough about tinkering to make it possible, and here we are.”

“Is there no hope for your eyes?”

“Only an impossible one. You see, Mr Tucker, we are really caught here now. So much has gone in the effort of getting this life of the open air that now there is nothing else. Rosa”—he glanced over at the figure of the child sitting gravely knitting at the other side of the fire—“has had no education since she was practically a baby. This is no life for her at her age; she should be at a good boarding-school instead of roughing it about the country roads with me, living the life of a tinker. In five or six years she’ll be grown up....”

His voice faded away, and he sat staring into the fire. Tommy sat in silence for a long moment before he stirred, flicking his cigarette butt into the darkness beyond the caravan.

“What is that impossible hope for your eyes?” he asked. “You seem to be telling me that you are going blind....”

“I am going blind.... and the hope is quite impossible.”

“What is it?”

“A treatment called the Paravane Cure. It means an operation and months of observation by the specialist, and its cost will be at least two hundred and fifty pounds.” He sighed, and his pale eyes seemed to shine at the thought of an impossible boon, a lifelong blessing within sight and yet far beyond his reach. “Which is, of course, as absurd as to hope for a decent education and environment for Rosa....”

“This is urgent, this Paravane treatment?”

“Oh, yes, it’s urgent,” he said wearily; “but that doesn’t make it possible. In a year or less I shall be stone blind, Dr Savage says. Blind,” he repeated, all the weariness in the world in his voice, “blind....”

The Australian night stirred gently under a wandering breeze. So rich and full of sumptuous life, Michael thought; and here, at its heart, in a small firelit circle in the trees, a man going blind. Never to see the night or the day again. ... Tommy uncrossed his legs and smiled.

“I have some money,” he said, “and I like this life. In a fortnight you could teach me all the rough tinkering I should be likely to need. Will you sell me the caravan and horse, and the goodwill, for seven hundred and fifty pounds—half for the Paravane treatment and half for Rosa’s schooling?”

Mr Gerrard’s vague eyes opened wide in indignant amazement.

“Certainly not,” he said sharply. “The whole turnout is not worth twenty pounds. Isn’t it getting near bedtime, Rosa, my dear?”

“Not yet,” Tommy put in before she could reply. “And don’t be angry. Will you let me lend you the money?”

“Certainly not,” Mr Gerrard repeated as sharply as before. “There is no chance of your being ever repaid. Did you water Bonny to-night, Rosa?”

“I did,” Thomas Tucker told him. “If you knew what you have done for me you would know also that repayment cannot possibly come into the matter. If you accepted, I should still be in your debt. Won’t you accept?”

The veiled eyes stared coldly at him in the flickering light. “How can you think I would accept, Mr Tucker? A man can be honest, if he cannot see.”

Michael was conscious of a little softening in the rigidity of Mr Gerrard’s attitude. There was a faint, half-ashamed smile in his eyes as he went on.

“I suppose I am being ungracious, Mr Tucker. But you must see my position, as you must see also how the suggestion, the least suggestion, of charity seems to a man who is going blind.”

He sighed heavily and turned from Tommy to look round the camp once more, as if he were hungry to see all that he could before it was too late. When he turned back the smile was stronger.

“Let us find something more cheerful to think about; we’ve had enough of miseries. Rosa, bring me my good violin. I think the occasion calls for a merry tune—thank you, my dear.”

He took the violin tenderly from its case, and sat looking at it for a moment before putting it to his chin. The deep colour of the wood gleamed richly in the firelight.

“One of my dreams, one of the straws I clutched at, was this violin. It used to belong to a rich old man, an eccentric, who died suddenly; there was a sale of his property at Baloo, a little town we were passing through. And I bought this—needless to say, very cheaply. I have imagined that if I could get it to Sydney I might find that it was valuable, really valuable, as some violins are——”

Tommy held out his hand. “May I see it?” he said. “I know a little about——”

Rosa came over and stood looking down at him as he took the violin. A sudden flame in the fire shot up, showing the three intent faces and the rippling gleams on the violin. For a space Tommy turned it over, examining it in detail, his eyes growing more intent with every moment. His examination over, he sat with the violin across his knees staring into the fire. Suddenly he looked up, a new strong light in his elfin eyes.

“You were right,” he said, his voice ringing with hope and confidence, “you were right. This is a Strad, true and unmistakable. It would be cheap at a thousand pounds—probably three thousand is nearer its value.”

He stood up, towering over Mr Gerrard and Rosa, his eyes alight and all his personality at concert pitch. “Now,” he said, a triumphant laugh rippling through the word, “this is the hand of Providence. Sell me your Strad for seven hundred and fifty pounds—and I make money out of you——”

The sudden flame died down and the rosy twilight came back. Mr Gerrard sat so still that, but for the atmosphere of tension, Rosa and Tommy could imagine that he wasn’t there. She looked up into the elfin, crinkling eyes.

“Is it true?” she whispered. “Is it true?”

His great laugh pealed out in radiant triumph. “As true as the night,” he said, throwing his arms wide; “as true as the beautiful night watching us and guiding our hands to the Strad he bought for a song. Give thanks,” he commanded, “give thanks!”

His voice fell a tone as his hands dropped gently to her arm. “He will see now, child, and you can learn all the graces that you wish.” His elfin eyes peered down into hers that were filling with tears, watching, watching.

“And the joke is that I make money out of it—we all make money.” A thought struck him, or seemed to strike him. “Throw in the camp and Bonny, Mr Gerrard,” he said, turning from Rosa to her father, an irresistible power of persuasion in his manner; “then I can keep for a while the good life you’ve shown me. Teach me this tinkering, and then go down to Sydney for your eyes, your eyes back again, and the night and day to see—all the glory to see, the glory that was slipping into darkness——”

But Mr Gerrard keeled suddenly over, snapping the atmosphere of tension. Mr Gerrard had fainted, his pale eyes that were soon to be strong and vivid again closed in radiant hope.

Summer was higher in the land when a man with vague, uncertain eyes, a brown girl, and a vivid-looking stranger stood on the platform of the Quincy station, waiting for the Sydney train and the long run south. The girl looked up into the vivid man’s laughing eyes.

“Will you sometimes sing for your supper, Tommy Tucker?” she said, a little catch in her voice, “and sometimes have brown bread and butter for it?”

“Of course I will. Bread and butter will be my staple food, Rosa. And I am a tinker and a minstrel and a vet, so——”

“Yes, I know. But it’s the singing for your supper that I mean.” Her eyes left his to look along the track, the track to Sydney, for a moment, before they came back, peering intently into his again. “Of course, there will only be bandicoots and the night to hear you. But you love the night, don’t you, Tommy? You can sing to it for love of it.”

“Yes. It was my sanctuary that day my bike threw me”—he paused, remembering his stumbling towards the light flickering in the trees, his finding the rosy circle; the Australian night had done that—plucked him out of bitterness and shame, and given him work to do—“yes, I can easily sing to the Australian night, and the bandicoots if they care to hear me, Rosa.”

“Oh, they will care to hear you, Tommy.”

The train came round the bend and stopped at the platform. Presently it gathered speed again, and Thomas Tucker, tinker and vet, stood alone on the deserted station. His face was grave and sorrowful for a moment, but presently the elfin smile flashed into his eyes.

At dusk he found a clearing and drove Bonny carefully into the bush. Soon the fire was lit, flickering on the caravan in the shadows and on the man bending over the locker. A violin case filled one end, and Tommy drew it out and looked at it, the smile hovering at his lips.

“I might get a fiver for it, if I sold it carefully,” he told himself, half aloud.

He put the billy on the fire, found the brown bread and butter, and paused, sitting back on his heels. The bandicoots and the night. His head went back and his lips opened; all the noises of the night fell still, in waiting, as the splendid voice crept softly out into it, gathering its sumptuous volume as the phrases multiplied:

A wandering minstrel I,

A thing of shreds and patches....