A SOUTH-AUSTRALIAN STORY.

Towards the end of November, about two years ago, I received the following curt note from my brother Donald, who like myself is a sheep-farmer in South Australia. ‘My dear Jerry, Lizzie sends her love, and hopes to see you when your shearing is over, as usual. If you’ll say what day, I’ll fetch you from Ballarat.—Yours affectionately,

Don Gardiner.’

‘N.B.—Just begun to wash the wool. Lizzie’s sister says she has seen my apparatus at Conolly’s, but I don’t think it. Ask Conolly.’

Conolly was a neighbour of mine, and he chanced to have brought me Don’s letter, and to be lighting his pipe at my elbow while I read it.

‘Conolly,’ said I, ‘do you know any of Mrs Gardiner’s sisters? She has an unlimited number, I believe, for I have met a fresh one—sometimes two fresh ones—every Christmas for about half-a-dozen years, and here is still another I never heard of. She appears to be acquainted with you and this neighbourhood’——

‘O yes; that’s Cinderella,’ interrupted Conolly, as he abstracted a bundle of newspapers from our joint post-bag and began to rip the wrapping from them. ‘Haven’t you seen Cinderella? She was never out of Tasmania, I suppose, until last spring, when she was staying up here with the Macdonalds. The Macdonald girls called her Cinderella because she had always been the one to stay at home and keep house while the others went about. Her proper name is Rachel. O Jerry, Jerry!’ he broke out suddenly, laughing in what seemed to me a very offensive manner (my proper name I may mention being Gerald), ‘your sister-in-law Lizzie will be too many for you. She won’t let you escape this time. She has kept Rachel as her last card.’

‘If ever I marry a woman with such a name as that, I hope I shall be a henpecked husband for the rest of my life!’ I retorted angrily, seizing a paper-knife and beginning to tear away at the Australasian, so as to drown further conversation upon what was a very sore subject.

My brother Donald’s wife Lizzie was as good and kind a little woman as ever breathed, but like many young wives in happy circumstances, she was a matchmaker. And being impulsive, effusive, and not quite—what shall I call it? I don’t like to say she was not quite a lady, but that would suggest my meaning—she did not pursue her calling with that tact and judgment which its delicate nature required. I need not say more, except that she had a number of spinster sisters, and one only bachelor relative, who lived all by himself in single-blessedness on his own fine and thriving property, and that I was that male victim. I beg pardon of all the Misses Lindsay for using such a term; I was not a victim as far as they were concerned. But I did feel it hard that I should be laughed at wherever I went as the captive knight of half-a-dozen fair ones, when I had never had the choosing of one of them.

When I received the above letter I had just seen my last wool-bale packed on the last bullock-dray and started on its slow journey to Melbourne; and the day after I set off myself on my yearly visit to Don. He was less fortunate in respect of sheep-shearing than I, for living in an exceptionally cool district, where an exceptionally wet and wintry spring had kept everything behindhand, he had still all his troubles to come. I thought of that as I buttoned myself into my Ulster, which I was glad of that cold morning, though Christmas was only a month off; and I reflected that I should be the only unemployed man at the disposal of the household until the shearing was over, and foresaw (as I thought) the consequences. I made up my mind, however, that I would defy Lizzie’s machinations in a more systematic manner than heretofore. May I be forgiven for so priggish a determination.

It was midnight before I reached Ballarat, where Don usually met me; but upon this occasion I found a telegram stating that he was too busy to leave his farm, and would send for me next day. So I had one game of pool at the club and went to bed; and next morning enjoyed an hour or two over newly arrived English papers and periodicals, and a solitary lunch; and then the familiar old ramshackle buggy and the beautiful horses Don was famed for made their appearance, and I set off on the last stage of my journey. When I arrived at my destination it was dark and raining heavily; and the groom who opened the stable-gate told me that my brother had not long come up from the wash-place and was interviewing shearers at the hut. I was wet and muddy, so I went straight to my room without even asking for my sister-in-law, who was usually in her nursery at that hour, and proceeded to make myself respectable for dinner. Presently I heard Don about the passages (the house was ‘weather-board’ and the partitions extremely thin) asking the servants where I was; and then his head and a half-bared neck appeared in the narrow aperture between my door and the door-post.

‘Glad to see you, old boy; but I’m too dirty to come in,’ said he. ‘Seen Lizzie?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Seen Rachel?’

‘Not yet. But I say, old man, would you mind telling me how many more sisters you’ve got?’

‘No more,’ said Don with a grin. ‘She’s the last one, and she’s the best of them all.’

‘Then I hope I may be allowed for once to enjoy the society of one of Lizzie’s sisters, in a friendly way,’ I grumblingly responded (for I may as well admit that Don and I had had confidences of old on this subject). ‘Don’t you think you could give Lizzie a notion that I don’t mean to get married, or that I’ve a sweetheart up the country, or something of that sort?’

‘Not I,’ rejoined my brother, laughing. ‘I’m not going to spoil her fun, poor little soul; you’re old enough to take care of yourself.’ And with that he went off, whistling cheerfully, to his dressing-room.

When I had completed my toilet, I gathered up some boxes of choice cigars that I had been purchasing in town, and carried them to the door of the adjoining apartment, which had been Don’s smoking-room ever since I had known it. To my surprise, the bolt shot sharply as I touched the handle, and I heard a rustle of drapery inside. A housemaid coming along with lamps for the dinner-table called out hastily: ‘O sir, that is Miss Rachel’s room now. The smoking-room is at the end of the verandah, where Miss Carry slept last year. Mrs Gardiner wished it to be changed because she didn’t like the smell of tobacco so near the bedrooms.’

I took back my boxes, thinking no more about it, and went on to the drawing-room, which was full of light and warmth and comfort, as usual, and where I found two of my little nieces sitting demurely on a sofa in their best frocks, ready to rush into my arms. Lizzie came hurrying in after me, rosy and radiant, and with plenty of flounces and colours about her, and gave me her own enthusiastic welcome; and then Don, spruce and perfumed, joined us. Don in his early years had been a dandy, and a little youthful weakness remained in him still. He never came to dinner without rings on his fingers and subtle odours in his clothes; and he was at great pains to keep a pair of Dundreary whiskers accurately adjusted on each side of a closely shaven chin. He had been ten years in the Bush, and had never objected to ‘roughing it’ in a general way; but he persisted in shaving himself every morning, let what would, happen; which singular habit in an Australian country gentleman very much puzzled his bearded friends. I for one, used to quiz him as well as I knew how, when I saw him swathe his neck in a handkerchief, before going out to his work, if the sun shone too strongly; but I respect his little vanities nowadays, and hope he will keep his white throat and his Dundreary whiskers as long as he lives, bless him. He took one of his little girls on his knee, and questioned me about my station matters and about Conolly’s sheep-wash (which was not so well furnished with improvements as his own, much to his satisfaction); and Lizzie gave me an account of the development of her respective children since I had seen them last, including the cutting of the baby’s teeth; and then the dinner-bell rang.

‘Where’s Rachel?’ inquired Don.

I turned a languid eye upon the door when we heard the sound of a distant rustle, expecting to see one of the smart and smiling damsels I was so used to, and wondering whether this one would be dark or fair. With a slow and quiet step she came along the hall and entered the room, and my heart began suddenly to beat in a very unpleasant manner. She had a delicate, thoughtful, but piquant face, wavy brown hair modestly and becomingly set, and a slight figure daintily dressed in pale blue silk, with a little white lace about throat and arms; and yet she was the image of Marie Antoinette in Delaroche’s picture, only with a more majestic dignity of carriage, if that could be, and a more cold and calm disdain upon her face. As soon as I saw her, and felt the exceedingly faint acknowledgment she vouchsafed when we were formally introduced, I intuitively guessed—with a horrible sense of shame and mortification—that she had overheard what I said to Don in my bedroom through those card-paper walls!

I never thought I should feel so concerned at standing ill with one of Lizzie’s sisters as I felt before that evening came to an end. All through dinner I saw, without looking, offended dignity in the poise of her head and the studied repose of her manner, and heard the ring of it in every inflection of her voice, though it was so subtle and delicate that only a guilty conscience could detect it. It was a great deal worse in the evening, when Lizzie began her fussy little contrivances for throwing us together. The poor little woman never had so impracticable and aggravating a sister to manage; and I never met one who attempted to treat me with such open indifference and thinly-veiled contempt. It is unnecessary for me to state the consequences. I began to interest myself in this Miss Lindsay as I had never interested myself in the others. I began to hanker for her good opinion, as I had never hankered for theirs. I longed to set myself straight with her, and beg her forgiveness for a thoughtless insult that I would have given worlds to recall, and to feel that the way was open between us to meet and associate as friends. This longing grew apace as the evening wore on, but the prospect of its gratification grew less and less. Until the little ones were taken away by their nurse she devoted herself to them, telling them stories most of the time in a dark corner, whence merry chatter and ripples of subdued laughter came flowing out to us; but when they were gone, the bright vivacity that was her true characteristic went too, and she became Marie Antoinette again.

With an amiable wish to make things pleasant, Lizzie asked her to pour out the tea; but she merely stood in front of me at the tea-table, with her little nose in the air, and asked me whether I took sugar and cream, in a high clear tone that brought a puzzled wonder into her sister’s face and a slow smile to Don’s. I came and stood beside her, to take the cups from her hand (her pretty head was about level with the flower in my button-hole), and she tried to ignore me, but could not. Her hands shook slightly and a little angry flush came and went in her face; but I preferred that to having no notice at all. Later on she went to the piano, and sung song after song for the delectation of Lizzie and Don, neither of whom had the hearing ear and the understanding heart to appreciate the pure quality and poetic sweetness of her voice. By this time I was very low-spirited, and I drew away from my host, who was growing sleepy after his hard day’s work, and took a chair near her—which of course was a signal to Lizzie to leave the room. As she sung on, forgetful of me and of everything but the poetry awaking in her, and as I studied the pose of her slight figure and half-bent head, and the now dreamy happiness in her face, and listened for the first time after many years to the true translation of a language that I loved, a vague perception dawned in me that there was some latent fellowship between us. And then I felt that Fate had indeed been hard.

The silence of the room was presently brought into strong relief by a deep snore from Don, whereupon she suddenly rose from the piano and saw that we were virtually alone. ‘Good-night, Mr Gardiner,’ she said promptly, holding out a somewhat reluctant hand and stiffening back into her unnatural stateliness.

I took it and held it and looked into her face; and I tried to tell her, as well as plain ‘good-night’ would do it, that I knew what had happened and wanted her to forgive me. I think she guessed what my look meant, by the sudden crimson flame in her face; but she walked out of the room with as much dignity as she had first walked into it, without another word.

The early days of December were cold and wet, and the shearing was a protracted and troublesome affair. Don hovered about restlessly, whether in or out of the house, always bothered and anxious, and paying frequent visits to the barometer. The ladies clung to their fireside as if they had been in England; and I tied myself to Lizzie’s apron-string with an abject alacrity that puzzled and charmed her. My opportunities for ‘improving the occasion’ were many, but somehow I could never turn them to account. The pride of that little maiden was quite beyond my management. Lizzie threw us together; she left us alone; she did all that in her lay to further my desires for a reconciliation and an understanding; but the implacable resentment of the last of the Lindsays towards me for that wretched slip of the tongue was a stone wall I could not climb over. The worst of it was, she did and said nothing tangibly offensive; and I was precluded by all sorts of considerations from mentioning the subject we were both (and that we both knew we were) thinking of. So matters went on day after day. And before a great many days were past I was over head and ears in love—I may as well say it and have done with it—and began to feel desperate and dangerous. She walked about the house with her grand air, my Queen Marie Antoinette, my little tyrant that I could almost have demolished with a finger and thumb; and I, standing six feet three in my stockings, had to acknowledge that she was invincible as well as unmerciful. Unregenerate savage as I was, I had faint longings now and then to take her by those slender shoulders, and shake her.

There were times when she became her sweet self, and could not help it though she tried; and these times were born of music. She and I both loved music with that special love that nature permits to a few people; but to no one else in the house did the ‘heaven-born maid’ present attractions. Don, hard at work all day, could go to sleep after dinner in his arm-chair; and Lizzie, after her manner, could go out of the room in the middle of the most charming song. Then, when we were singing together, or when she was gentle and gracious with the spirit of melody in her, then was the oil thrown upon my troubled waters. At times such as these it flashed across me that she was aware of it.

At length on one of these occasions I made a dash at her guarded citadel; I will not say in what words, but with the blundering foolishness that I suppose characterises all implied aspirations; albeit with sufficient plainness to leave no chance of being misunderstood; and then I had indeed to bite the dust for once in my life. She had been singing Ruth with the most touching pathos and abandonment—‘Where thou goest I will go, and there will I be buried’—and I could not stand it. Don was in the room, but snoring in that comfortable undertone which denoted a sound and quiet slumber. She stood with her back to the piano, and the sheet of music trembling and rustling in her hands, watching his nodding head in the distance, and turning her delicate profile to my view.

‘No; I will not,’ she half whispered with haughty rapidity. ‘You should have known I would not. I do not particularly want to marry anybody,’ she added, flashing round upon me with her crimson face; ‘but I will never marry you. I made up my mind to that long ago.’

Everybody knows how, in the supremely solemn moments of one’s life, one is apt to be assailed with most incongruously ludicrous ideas. In spite of my bitter mortification at her reply, an absurd rhyme that I had heard somewhere, flashed into my head:

I believe she saw the ghost of a smile that might have hovered round my eyes when I begged to know why she had made up her mind never to marry me; and that made her savage.

‘Because you think I came here to be made love to,’ she retorted, with all the concentrated contempt that her sweet face and voice could hold. ‘You think Lizzie and I have been plotting to catch you—you think we wanted to inveigle you into marrying me! I know what you are going to say’—as I rose and seized her hands, to stop her—‘but it is not the truth. I heard you’—lifting her angry eyes, now wet with unshed tears, to mine—‘I heard you, with my own ears, tell Don to warn Lizzie beforehand that you did not want to be married.’

‘I know you did,’ I replied, tightening my hold of her hands, while she made feeble efforts to get away; ‘and I wish my tongue had been cut out before I could have insulted you and her like that. Forgive me, Rachel; I have been punished enough.’

‘I cannot,’ she answered, still panting with her excitement. ‘I should be ashamed of myself if I could take a man who had even thought of me like that.’

Two tears began to trickle from her eyes, and a little hysterical catch in her breath betrayed to me that her defiant courage was failing her. I would not let her go. Love and shame and a resentful disappointment made me a little savage too.

‘I never did think of you like that,’ I said sternly; ‘and you know it. I must hold you till I clear myself—I cannot bear it’——

A log tumbled in the grate, and Don woke up. She caught away her hands and sped out of the room; and I walked through a French window into the cool summer night, too full of wrath and love to speak to anybody.

This was how we stood when at last (on Saturday, the 18th of December) the true Christmas weather came, and we found ourselves in the hot afternoon alone on the croquet-lawn—alone for the first time since my stormy wooing was interrupted. Don being still busy in the sheep-yards and shearing-shed, I had been playing singly against Lizzie and her; and now Lizzie had been called away to the nursery to consult with a needlewoman who was at work there. We were both anxious (though for very different reasons) to leave off playing when our chaperon had departed; but it was not easy to do so in the middle of a game, especially as she had instructed her partner to play for both of them until she returned. So we knocked the balls about for a few minutes in embarrassed silence, and then had an altercation as to which hoop Lizzie had been through; and then we both got a little huffy, and played, first with indifference, and then with a malicious energy, which resulted at last in my sending her partner’s ball into the thickest Portugal laurels in the shrubbery.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ I exclaimed with compunction, as she solemnly marched off to look for it. ‘Let me find it for you.’

‘Do not trouble yourself,’ she replied sharply; and immediately dashed in between the laurel and a very prickly rose-bush, whose long sprays caught her muslin dress and tore it. I saw her straw-hat amongst the big dark branches, and her little hand searching under them for a moment or two; then she started up suddenly with a quick cry, and bounded into the path again.

‘What is the matter? Have you hurt yourself,’ I asked anxiously.

Her hat fell to the ground, and she stood before me with the blazing sun on her pretty head, and a wide-eyed horror in her face. ‘Wait a minute for me!’ she panted breathlessly; ‘I want you to help me—I have been bitten.’ Before I could collect my senses to understand what she meant, she had sped like a flash of light into the house; and dashing into the laurel bush, I saw what had happened. A big black snake was gliding away from the spot where she had been kneeling.

What was to be done? I stood still for a moment paralysed; then I sent up a hurried prayer for help, and simultaneously ‘cooeyed’ three or four times with all the force of a powerful pair of lungs, for Don at the wool-shed. Then I hurried after her, and met her coming through the door of my brother’s dressing-room with one of his razors in her hand. Her face was white and set as she seized my hand and hurried me into the smoking-room, which was near us, and turned the key in the lock. I knew what she wanted; and I set my teeth in an agony that no words could express, and which I can never think of now without a shudder.

‘Look!’ she said piteously, with a little sob in her throat; and I looked, and saw one of the fingers of her left hand tied round tightly with a piece of string below the first joint, and the end of it already livid and swollen and shewing the unmistakable punctures of the snake’s fangs. She laid her other hand on my arm, and looked up at me with a beseeching face that nearly unmanned me.

‘Help me!’ she whispered eagerly; ‘now—now; before the others come!’ And she held out the razor, open and shining. ‘It is no use to suck it—it only wastes time,’ as I seized her finger and put it in my mouth. ‘Don’t, don’t! I want to be on the safe side. I don’t want to die! O pray, pray help me!’—now sobbing passionately—’or else I must try to do it myself. I won’t cry out; I won’t mind it. I will turn my head away.’ She laid her finger on the edge of the table, and I took the razor from her, and with all the courage I could muster, excised the wounded part. She bore the cruel operation without a murmur.

An hour afterwards the commotion in the house was over, but the shadow of death was on it. Rachel was in her bed, white and faint and breathing heavily, twitching with weak fingers at the bedclothes, and staring with dull eyes into the sad faces around her. I knelt in my room close by with my head on my outspread arms, weeping like a child as if my heart would break, and listening to the creaking of the doctor’s boots and the whisking of skirts and whispering of awed voices on the other side of the thin wall. There was nothing else that I was privileged to do, now that I had done that dreadful thing which they told me might be the saving of her precious life.

As the twilight fell, the voices in the sick-room took a louder and more cheerful tone; and presently one of them called softly: ‘Jerry, I want you.’ Lizzie met me in the passage with a tremulous tear-stained smiling face. ‘The doctor says she will be all right now, and that she has to thank you for it,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t stay here any longer; go and have a cigar with Don.’

I seized her hand and kissed it, and looked at her with my wet eyes full of foolish emotion, too glad for speech; and the brightening intelligence of her countenance was curious to note. ‘I thought you didn’t care for each other,’ she said archly; ‘but,’ she added drily, ‘I suppose I was mistaken.’

‘Don’t suppose anything, Lizzie, there’s a good girl. But let me know when I may see her,’ I replied earnestly.

‘All right—I understand—I’ll let you know,’ she said, nodding her head vigorously with an air of mystery and importance; and then I went, not to have a cigar with Don, but to walk about the dark garden alleys, alone with my thoughts.

Our patient improved steadily all night, so much so that the family assembled at breakfast as usual. Then a great hunt was made for the snake (at Lizzie’s instigation, on the children’s behalf), which lasted a long while and was wholly unsuccessful. Then church-time came, and the buggy was ordered to take the servants and the little girls to church; and the hot day wore on. Towards evening, as I was loafing about the garden, Lizzie came running across the croquet lawn—where the balls and mallets were still lying about as we had left them, though it was Sunday—and told me that Rachel was up and dressed, and that she chanced to be alone in the drawing-room.

I stole in to her in the twilight with my heart beating fast; and for a few moments she did not notice me. She was standing by the open piano, small and white and weak, with a shawl wrapped round her, gazing at the silent key-board, with tears running down her face. No one could look less like Delaroche’s Marie Antoinette than she looked then.

I took three long steps and reached her side; she gave a great start and turned round to meet me. ‘I shall not again be able to play to you for a long while!’ she said, looking up at me for sympathy in this new trouble with her soft wet eyes.

When she said that—instead of making me the little speech I had expected, thanking me for saving her life—I put out my arms. And though we said no word, we forgave one another.

And how pleased Lizzie was when she saw the last of the Lindsays transferred to my unworthy self.