Читать книгу Up the Country - Miles Franklin - Страница 18

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Simon Labosseer, the bridegroom of the morrow, had found favour with the master of Three Rivers long before the daughter did anything besides ridicule him for his ability to intelligently discuss all kinds of subjects, political and otherwise, with her father. There were other bonds as well between the two men. The surname Labosseer, like Mazere, was the corruption of an old Huguenot name, though the La Bossière family had taken refuge in Holland while the de Mazières had fled to England. The name of de Mazières had speedily been anglicised, but La Bossière retained the original spelling till he became domiciled in the colony.

On his mother's side he sprang from one of the great Dutch seafaring families; a remote ancestor had served as one of Dirk Hartog's lieutenants in the celebrated expedition of 1616 to the west coast of Australia. Family tradition and legend had therefore early turned his thoughts towards the continent called New Holland, but his family had long since left the sea for professional and mercantile pursuits, and it was as a surveyor that the young man had presented himself for acceptance as a colonist about eight years before the night of the great flood.

In those days, his English had been stiff and bookish, and the impossibility of pronouncing his name intelligibly to the colonials, many of them illiterate, speedily resulted in its simplification to Labosseer. But that was an infinitesimal matter compared with the complete upheaval of existence he underwent in changing not only from one hemisphere to another but from one nation to another. Nevertheless, he was a brave and resourceful man, well-suited to his calling, and his education and personality made him popular with all his superiors, from the Surveyor-General downwards.

Yet he might never have come on this roving expedition had a certain young lady of high degree in Holland accepted his proposal of marriage. But she had preferred his elder brother and certain estates he was heir to, and that was why the young man had returned to his boyish dream of going to Australia. He could have held office in the colony had he so desired, but the wound to his self-esteem had been deep and he stuck to the bush where his foreignness confirmed him in his natural self-containment.

He had been four years in the bush and was nearing the age of twenty-six when he was sent up the country to make new surveys of the country west from Mungee. He came—as all emissaries from the Surveyor-General, the Commissioner of Lands or the Bishop—to Three Rivers and was there received by the Mazeres with all the hospitality for which the place was renowned, even in that age when hospitality was an obligation as binding as ever it was to the ancient Greeks.

Upon noting the exquisite profile, the blue eyes, the wealth of brown curls of the little beauty called Rachel, he was delighted to accept the Mazeres' cordial invitation to stay over a few days.

Young Labosseer was soon in high favour with his host, with whom he found himself in agreement on a number of topics, including the conversational and other shortcomings of the native-born. They discussed many things, the quiet but observant guest with an eye all the time upon Rachel, petite and lightsome of movement but well developed for her fourteen years. She was vivacious, impetuous and radiated superabundant health.

Meanwhile, Mazere found himself so pleased with his guest that he invited him to assist with the church service which he conducted every Sunday morning for his family, servants, and any visitor that might be staying at the homestead. And all the time the magnet for Labosseer was young Rachel's beauty, and her youth that was blossoming into womanhood. But Labosseer's good standing with the parents had placed him, in the girl's estimation, as merely an old fogy for whom the best napery must be used. The other young people noticed him principally for the foreignness of his speech, which they found amusing.

On Monday morning Labosseer spied Rachel, armed with a carving knife as large as a scimitar to cut cabbages for the midday dinner, in the extensive enclosure of the vegetable garden. Alert for the opportunity, he stepped down the path after her.

She did not notice her follower and was startled by his voice as she stooped over a cabbage.

"Will you not let me do that for you?"

"Oh—no, thank you! You wouldn't know how, would you?" There was a spice of mischief in the question. It was then, without further prevarication, that he delivered himself of his determination.

"I am very sad that tomorrow I leave you."

"Are you? How funny!" replied Rachel, bursting into a peal of laughter. "Can't you come again?" Simon laughed too, infected by her youth and merriment. He was a young man come again to the country of love, after a lonely exile.

"Yes, I can come again, and while I am not here I want you to promise me something," he said seriously.

"What is it?"

"That you will think of me."

"What for?" demanded Rachel.

"Because I shall think always and only of you," said he, coming abruptly to the point. "I want that you shall regard me as more than a friend. I shall speak to your father and then one day..."

Rachel took a fleeting look at him and was alarmed by his strange agitation and the crimson which mantled his fair skin under his tan. An old man, a friend of her papa and mamma, to be talking like this! He was drunk! He was mad! He was a foreigner! Any of these strange states being equally objectionable, she flung the carving knife and corpulent cabbage towards him with all her might and with more energy than aim, and fled to her room from which she refused to appear or to give any reason for her seclusion.

Ducking out of the way of the knife as it flew past him to land in the neighbouring carrot rows, Simon picked up the great cabbage that rolled towards his feet. He was nonplussed for a moment but then gave himself up to enjoyment of the agility and beauty of the fleeing figure as it leaped over cauliflowers and rhubarb and finally disappeared behind the gooseberry bushes.

"I have startled her," he mused. "She is very young and innocent. She has not before been spoken to by a lover."

Her apparent lack of sophistication gave him a thrill of satisfaction when he thought back upon the proud coquette who had merely practised upon his adolescent emotions.

"I shall speak to her father," he decided and, proceeding to the kitchen door, knocked ceremoniously and presented the cabbage and knife to the cook with a stately bow. "Miss Rachel has cut this cabbage."

The cook thanked him, whereupon he bowed again stiffly and departed.

"There's an old-country gentleman for you, even if he's only a foreigner," remarked the cook, who was a recent arrival through the offices of Caroline Chisholm, and uncomfortably homesick. "Different from these convicts and jumped-up colonials."

The next day, as Mazere was accompanying his guest an hour or two on his way, Labosseer astonished the older man by broaching the subject of Rachel.

"Rachel!" exclaimed her father, almost as surprised as the child herself had been. "She's a child!"

"Another year or two and she will be a full-grown woman."

"It was only yesterday I was dandling her on my knee."

"But it would not be distasteful to you, that in time—"

"Wait, man, wait. It will be years before she is old enough."

"So long as the suggestion does not merit your opposition, I shall wait," said Labosseer. "I am a patient man. I am accustomed to waiting. Time runs quickly."

Mazere rode back to Three Rivers anxious for the solace of his wife. It was disappointing that Labosseer, who promised so well as to companionship, had, like the mere colonials, primarily an eye to his daughters. In any case, the thing was preposterous.

He summoned Rachel to him in his office in the Big House where he kept his accounts, books, pipes, papers and telescope, and asked her if Mr Labosseer had said anything to her.

"He started to say something queer, Papa, but I thought he was mad—or drunk."

"Mad, drunk or in love—there's much of a muchness in any of the three states," said Papa, "But they are the way of human nature and it is good if a man can escape the drunkenness and madness and suffer only the love." Dismissed, a puzzled Rachel left her father musing in his office.

By a word here and there, it leaked out that Labosseer, the Dutch surveyor, was casting glances towards Rachel and that her older sister Isabel was threatened with being left on the shelf. Mrs Mazere refused to countenance such light talk. "No daughter of mine shall marry before she is eighteen if I can help it," she reiterated firmly. "She will have all she wants of married life—and too much of it, after that age. It would be even better to wait till twenty-one."

But time, as Labosseer had observed, ran quickly, and the quiet, patient man never swerved from his purpose. From time to time, some choice present would arrive for Miss Rachel Mazere or a member of her family. A wonderful shawl or scarf from the old country for Miss Rachel, a piece of china for Miss Isabel, a chair or mirror for Mrs Mazere, a book or atlas for Mr Mazere. A year or so later, and derision had ceased. His letters and presents now aroused pleasant expectations. Rachel began to find him younger than he had seemed at first and his old-world courtesy set him apart from the more casually mannered sons of the neighbouring settlers.

Mrs Mazere remained firm on the subject of early marriage for her girls, but when Rachel reached sixteen, it had become a definite understanding that at eighteen she should change one corrupted Huguenot surname for another. Labosseer at this time started to prepare a home, having decided to go in for wool-growing. He was tired of the camp life entailed by his profession, but to enter upon a sedentary life in officialdom was also irksome to him, after the free, open-air nights and days. A station homestead offered a compromise, and his knowledge of the country was useful to him in selecting a holding. The country farther south appealed to him more than did the hot, parched regions towards the Bogan or the Namoi. He chose the cool, well-watered, flower-strewn plateau adjoining Gowandale and at one end running near to Curradoobidgee. He had not only influence but also capital, accumulated both by his steadiness and the perquisites of his profession, and a legacy from his family. Two years before his marriage he began to prepare the homestead, erecting buildings, sheepfolds and sheds, orchard, gardens and agricultural plots.

The two years had passed and it was the eve of the wedding and the big flood.