Over the Blue Mountains

by Mary Burchell

  There was an awkward quarter of an hour or so while they all tried to get on terms with each other. Then it became obvious that Martin knew quite as much as the Ormathons about what needed doing in a neglected and shabby house. Not only that, his quiet willingness to take on any job, however dull or disagreeable, could not but commend him even to Max. In a case where any assistance was welcome, it was evident that Martin would be invaluable.

  They made a start on the actual clearing of the house during the light hours of the early evening, and it was not until the sun had gone down and night was coming on that they finally drove back into Borralung for supper.

  Since it was obvious that sleeping in the house would at present be an uncomfortable business, it was decided to seek quarters for the night in the town itself. The woman in charge of the cafe undertook to put up the girls. But as, according to herself, “she didn’t reckon to cater for gents,” Martin and Max sought—and with some difficulty found—accommodation elsewhere.

  It was a pity, Juliet could not help thinking, that they had to be thrown quite so much together. But in a day or two Max would be returning to Bathurst. And, in any case, the more he saw of Martin, the more he might realize that there was much to be said for him in his unhappiness and self-reproach.

  Carol and Juliet shared a room and inevitably, as soon as they retired to it, they began to talk with a candor that could not be shown in front of the two men. Particularly did Carol want to know details about her brother’s engagement.

  “Well, it just materialized,” Juliet explained. “I suppose Verity got rid of the other man—or he never committed himself—whichever was the case. And, of course, as soon as Max walked into the general scene of disaster in my uncle and aunt’s house, Verity simply accepted him as her fiancé.”

  “As a matter of course?” inquired Carol, drumming her fingers discontentedly on the cheap dressing-table top.

  “Yes. But that was his attitude, too, Carol,” Juliet said, in all fairness.

  “Well, of course, I knew that as soon as she was in trouble he’d consider himself doubly bound to her.”

  “He seems perfectly satisfied with things as they are.”

  “You think so?” Carol looked at Juliet’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know, Juliet—I don’t know.” Carol sighed impatiently. “I can’t say there is anything he’s said or done to show the contrary, except—” she bit her underlip thoughtfully “—he’s restless, in a way I’ve never known before.”

  “He has a good deal on his mind, one way and another,” Juliet felt bound to point out.

  “No doubt you’re right, and perhaps I’m only looking for trouble.”

  “You may like Verity very much when you see her,” Juliet said.

  “Did you like her any better when you saw more of her?”

  “Well—” Juliet laughed reluctantly “—at least I had no unpleasantness with her, Carol. And I certainly think that this trouble has shown some stiffening in her. She’s perfectly prepared to go to work and contribute to the family income, so long as she doesn’t have to do it in Melbourne, where she’s known and where her friends are used to seeing her in very different circumstances. I must say that I see her objection to that.”

  “Yes, I think I do, too. At least, I can see that to some girls it would be a nightmare to parade changed circumstances before people one knew. Was it her own idea that she should go to work?”

  Juliet hesitated before this shrewd inquiry. But there was no reason why she should not give Verity the benefit of the doubt.

  “I think she and Max worked it out together.”

  “She didn’t talk it over with you?”

  “Oh, no, Carol! We aren’t on those terms.”

  “Well, there you are! That’s half why I am prejudiced against her, I think,” Carol said. “I can’t imagine why a nice girl shouldn’t welcome you as a cousin and be on friendly terms at once.”

  Juliet laughed.

  “Come, Carol, you know as well as I do that you can’t explain personal likes and dislikes as simply as that. I told you—we just never ‘clicked’.”

  Carol looked speculatively at Juliet.

  “I suppose something happened on the journey over.”

  That was a statement, not a question, so that it was not incumbent on Juliet to take it up. But she flushed slightly, and after a moment, she said, “Well, yes, it did, as a matter of fact. But it was all so silly and—and—baseless. She thought I had designs on Max and—”

  “Had you?” inquired Carol with great interest.

  “Certainly not! I was engaged to Martin at the time.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I forgot that for a moment,” Carol said contritely. “Only, I almost hoped you had designs on him. You’d be just my choice for a sister-in-law.”

  “Carol, dear! You really do say the most outrageous things. Your brother is engaged to the girl that he has chosen. It’s quite useless for you to start looking around at other applicants as potentially satisfactory or unsatisfactory sisters-in-law.”

  “I was only speaking theoretically,” Carol murmured defensively.

  “Well, it’s all passed beyond the theoretical stage now,” Juliet said rather sharply, and suddenly she found that she was feeling tired and quite extraordinarily depressed.

  “Yes, I know. I’m really quite prepared to make the best of things,” Carol said in a placatory way. “And I wouldn’t talk to anyone else like this.”

  “Except Henry,” suggested Juliet with a smile.

  “Oh, no. Henry would say I was a mischief-making female if I talked to him like this. And maybe he’d be right,” added Carol thoughtfully. “It’s only to another girl—and a very special kind of girl—that one can let down one’s hair to this extent.”

  “Well—” Juliet smiled “—of course I can’t resist that bit of subtle flattery. And, in any case, I know what you mean. I suppose the truth is that both of us feel Verity isn’t what we would consider good enough for Max, and we’re both sufficiently fond—At least—” she stopped and looked faintly surprised “—you are sufficiently fond of him and I like and respect him enough for us to wish he’d chosen someone else. But he hasn’t—and so we’re prepared to make the best of it.”

  Carol gave Juliet a long, thoughtful look, as though something about her friend interested her enormously. Then she said, “Very well put. Juliet, would it hurt you if I asked if you’re still very much in love with Martin?”

  “Oh—” Juliet made an impatient, half-distressed little movement of her hands. “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose I am. One doesn’t get over that sort of thing in a matter of weeks.”

  “Not even after such a shock? If he hadn’t come back...”

  “What’s the use of saying that, Carol? He has come back. Although, of course, so much has happened in between that it’s impossible to think of him in quite the same light. One can’t put back the clock. I don’t know that either of us would even want to. After all, he belongs to that poor girl in a way he never belonged to me. One can’t just write that off.”

  Carol looked at her compassionately.

  “It was all so—short though, wasn’t it? I don’t mean just the marriage, though that was tragically short, in all conscience. But his falling in love with her and wanting to marry her. The whole episode seems so—rootless, so unrelated to anything else.”

  “Are you trying to matchmake for me in that direction, too?” inquired Juliet, half annoyed, half amused. “It isn’t any good, you know. Too much has happened, as I said.”

  “No. I think I was just trying to make you clarify your own thoughts. It’s rather a dangerous situation, if you don’t know just where you’re going.”

  “Perhaps I’m not going anywhere,” Juliet protested impatiently.

  “Nonsense. None of us ever stands still,” Carol declared with energy. “I know the whole tragedy is so fresh in his mind just now that he couldn
’t start thinking about any other girl—even one he’d been in love with before. And you couldn’t decently think along those lines, either. But here he is on the spot, Juliet, with every reason for your adding pity to your original love for him. It’s going to be pretty hard on you if all your old feeling for him revives, and all the time all he wants is heartfelt sympathy from an old flame during a difficult period.”

  “You’ve got him wrong! I’m sure he isn’t just heartlessly out for that. He—”

  “Dear, it isn’t a question of being heartless. It’s a question of being thoughtless and selfish. And your Martin has shown he can be both of those. I’ve said more than I meant to,” Carol admitted ruefully. “But I don’t want you hurt again.”

  “You needn’t worry. I’ll be ... careful this time,” Juliet said earnestly.

  “Very well. But it wasn’t very careful to let him stay on here, when you’re both in an emotional and confused state.”

  “I couldn’t refuse him,” Juliet urged. “He is so unhappy, and I do see that there’s some sort of comfort for him in—having things right between us again, and in helping me in this emergency. It even gives him something to do, Carol, which takes his mind off what has happened. I couldn’t have refused him that amount of relief.”

  “Very well,” Carol said again. “I’ve made my protest—given my warning—or whatever you like to call it. It mightn’t be a bad idea if we went to sleep now, I suppose. We’ll have to make an early start and get in a full day on that house.”

  But long after Carol’s even breathing indicated that she was tranquilly asleep, Juliet lay awake following her troubled thoughts to the most fantastic limits.

  It was not only what Carol had said about Martin that troubled her. It was what she had said about Max, too. There was no question now, of course, of his marrying anyone but Verity. And yet, could one really suppose that she was a girl to make any generous, imaginative, warmhearted man happy?

  And Max was all of those. Angry though she had been with him that afternoon, Juliet was in no doubt of that. She knew him so much better now. During the past week or two, while they discussed and contrived for the future well-being of her family, she had seen a great deal of him.

  Except Martin, she added conscientiously. And then her thoughts went off at a tangent about poor Martin and the terrible thing that had happened to him.

  A great deal of what Carol had said had been sheer common sense, of course. She knew from her own disturbed feelings—the way her heart stopped a beat when he looked so wretched, the way she had felt when she touched him for the first time since the break—that she could not give him impersonal sympathy and leave it at that. There had been too much between them in the old days. He had meant too much to her ever to be regarded in anything but a special light.

  And yet, as she had said to Carol, how could she, of all people, refuse him the one thing that seemed to promise him comfort at such a time?

  It was all very well for Max to judge harshly. He had never been in love...

  She stopped and reconsidered that statement. But she saw no reason to alter it. She was perfectly sure he was not passionately in love with Verity. He liked her, admired her, was sorry for her, but in love with her he was not.

  Perhaps he was right when he said he was not capable of being deeply in love.

  But that did not seem to go with the rest of his nature, And, for no reason whatever, Juliet suddenly remembered the way he had looked at her, under the stars, outside the hotel in Melbourne on their first night there. And she remembered, too, how she had felt at the time—puzzled, excited and shaken to the core.

  Yet he had just become engaged to Verity that evening, hadn’t he? And what was she thinking of, anyway? If Carol had not said some ridiculous, ill-judged things alongside the common sense, she would never have pursued such an absurd line of thought.

  It was late before Juliet fell asleep. And then almost immediately it seemed to be morning.

  After a hearty breakfast—described by their good-natured landlady as “something you can really work on”—they all drove out to the house once more, and during the whole of that day there was so much to do that there was little time to brood or examine motives or reactions.

  It had become painfully obvious that anything they wanted done quickly they would have to do themselves.

  “Unless you get an army of workmen out for a mixed job of this sort, you can wait days for the right one to knock in a nail or move a ladder,” Max explained. “And by then it’s Friday evening, and in the land of the forty-hour-week you can just whistle until Monday morning.”

  “Is that really how it is?” Juliet was a good deal shocked.

  Martin smiled. “Why else do you suppose that the price of houses here is the highest in the world, and that in the greatest dairy country imaginable, butter is sometimes rationed? Unfortunately cows don’t believe in a forty-hour week, so it’s easier to keep sheep, who never notice the time anyway.”

  Juliet looked doubtfully at Max, who nodded and said, “Right, I’m afraid. We’re not proud of it. But there it is.” And he added teasingly, “Don’t keep a cow unless you’re willing to look after it personally, Juliet.”

  “I’ll start with chickens,” Juliet said soberly.

  But Carol laughed and declared blithely, “I’ll teach you how to milk, if you want to keep a cow. Don’t let them scare you off your own cream and butter.”

  This day varied little in pattern from the next three or four. But if, at the end of that time, they all felt somewhat exhausted, at least the change to the house amply repaid them.

  The fallen posts of the veranda had been replaced and the cracked windows repaired. All the doors, window frames and gutters had been painted a gay, bold scarlet (Carol’s choice), which, by contrast, made the seasoned weatherboard of the house look almost silvery.

  Every inch of floor inside the house had been swept and scrubbed, and the woodwork here was picked out in a good, rich cream color.

  For the whole of one day, Juliet sat at the sewing machine that she and Max had brought along in the car, and made frilled ivory muslin curtains for all the windows. And any of the furniture that would not fit in with a modified Aunt Katherine scheme of living—and that meant most of it—was carted away to be sold in Borralung.

  On the very first day, Juliet had sent her aunt the first list of furniture that it would be advisable to have sent from Melbourne, and to this she added a couple of supplementary lists as further consideration, offering fresh ideas. Already in imagination she could see some of the best and simplest of her aunt’s furniture in the bare but spacious rooms of the house, and she could not help thinking that even the most fastidious taste would find the total result pleasing.

  Over supper on the fourth day they discussed future plans.

  There was still a great deal to be done while they waited for the furniture to arrive, but Carol said she thought she should return to her own family now, and Max said it was time he went back to Bathurst to see how Verity was and report progress.

  “You’d better come with me, Juliet,” they both said simultaneously.

  But Juliet shook her head.

  “No. There are a whole heap of things I can get on with by myself. I don’t want to waste time now.”

  “You can’t sleep in the house alone—” Max frowned “—It’s a bit isolated for that.”

  “No. I’ll sleep in Borralung still and come out each day.”

  “I’ll drive her out each morning and take her back at night,” Martin said, as though the prospect pleased him. “And there’s plenty I can do here during the daytime, too.”

  The plan was unexceptionable, of course, though Max looked unexpectedly dark and annoyed.

  “If you both like to come back to Bakandi with me for a day or two, you’re very welcome,” Carol offered.

  But again Juliet refused, though she thanked her. There was too much to be done in the house, which she already called home.

/>   “I might drive Verity up here on Sunday,” Max said rather disagreeably. “She’ll probably like to see the place.”

  “Yes, do. That’s a splendid idea,” Juliet agreed. And she could not help reflecting—not for the first time—how much better she concealed annoyance than Max did.

  The next morning she said goodbye to Carol with the greatest regret, though the latter promised warmly to return before very long, if only for one day’s visit.

  But when it came to waving Max on his way, her heart sank in the most ridiculous and inexplicable manner. It would, she realized, be the very first time she had been completely out of his care since he first undertook to drive her from Sydney to Tyrville.

  He had, in fact, become to her an essential part of life in Australia, and she was curiously frightened to find how forlorn she felt at the mere thought of being without him. It was an attitude she could not possibly allow herself, she knew. And yet the feeling was so strong within her that she had an impulse to cling to him and cry, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me! Or, if you must go, take me, too.”

  But instead she stood by the car in the sunshine, smiling at him and assuring him that she would be all right while he was away.

  “Well, I’ll be back on Sunday.”

  “With Verity.” For some reason she felt she ought to remind him of Verity.

  “Of course.”

  He started the car then and, as it moved away, he raised his hand in farewell.

  “Goodbye,” she said, “goodbye.” And suddenly the word seemed to her to take on the most melancholy significance. He was going away now, back to Verity to whom he belonged, and when next he came, she would be with him.

  It was all very right and proper that this should be so, and Juliet could find no excuse whatever for the unexpected tears that came into her eyes as she stood watching his car grow fainter in the distance.

  Then she turned away at last and, as she did so, she realized that Martin was standing only a few yards away watching the scene.