“Hey—take a hat, Jane!” Steve called urgently from the office window, but the slim figure was running down the path leading to the river as if pursued by demons.
CHAPTER FOUR
STEVE sighed. That fool Stewart had let him in for a packet of trouble, dumping a couple of English girls on him ... one of them a cripple, a lively pretty girl who would be bored to tears by life in the Outback; the other so ignorant that she went flying out into the Queensland sunshine without wearing a hat...
He glared at the transceiver set, switched-off and silent; talking to Jane had made him miss the morning schedules for farmers and the weather report, and Mrs. Newbery was missing her station-to-station open session.
He grinned suddenly. Judging by her reception of the Lesleys she would not mind that—two live visitors to the homestead would be more use to her than the daily natter session with neighbours who might be anything up to a couple of hundred miles away. He unlocked the old-fashioned office safe and put away the cheque and the airmail letters and Stewart’s cables to Jane carefully. Until this morning he had been slowly coming to the boil with anger against his cousin and this English girl he had persuaded to join in a ridiculous, embarrassing practical joke; a cruel joke since it involved her crippled sister. Knowing Stewart’s foxy mind and how it worked, he thought that his cousin not only wanted to put him in an embarrassing, idiotic situation by bombarding him with love-letters from a girl he had never set eyes on, but sooner or later there would be a request to pay off the Lesleys ... to prevent them coming out.
Steve realised suddenly that if Jane was speaking the truth—and he was beginning to believe her—Stewart had no means of knowing yet that Jane had actually sold her home and arrived at Blue River. A slow mile touched the corners of his mouth. He went out to the north veranda to the row of pegs where they all hung their hats, put on his own and selected another before leaning in at the open kitchen window.
“Jane’s gone galloping off to explore without a hat, Mrs. Newbery. Mind if I borrow one of yours for her?” he asked casually.
“Och, the puir silly lass! Of course you can take that thing, but it’s no’ suitable for an attractive wee thing like Miss Lesley, forbye it’s better than a bare head with the temperature in the eighties.”
“Much better than sunstroke,” he agreed lightly, and they smiled at each other with the ease of old friends. Steve asked with faint surprise in his deep voice, “You think she’s attractive, Nubby?”
She laughed up at him, switching off the cake mixer, her faded blue eyes wide with astonishment. “I guess you must have thought so, Steve, to invite them to Blue River! Aye, she’s a nice wee body, Miss Lesley, and I reckon sensible too.”
For a moment she considered the man framed in her kitchen window; Steve had called her Nubby when she had first come to Blue River—after Jock had died in the lumber camp. To the little boy “Mrs. Newbery” had been too much of a mouthful, and Nubby she had been ever since to the family, though the station hands were careful to give her her correct title.
Steve had been a tough little boy, more interested in horses and droving than in girls, but he had been gentle with Nubby’s small daughter Betty. The Forrests, she thought, looking back over the years, had always provided a home and a welcome for anyone in trouble—even before the fat wool and beef cheques began to come in after the war. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to stay on at Blue River after their death, mothering Steve and later Alison and Stewart...
She added drily, “I ken she’s no’ a raving beauty like Alison, Stevie—she’s no’ as pretty as her little sister—but, aye, she’s attractive, and I imagine she’s kind and capable. She’d mak’ any mon a guid wife, she’s sensible.”
Steve knew that “sensible” was high praise from Nubby. It was his turn to be astonished. “Made up your mind fast, haven’t you?” he asked lazily.
Nubby smiled, her hands busy greasing and flouring a cake tin. She said equably, “Aye. It doesn’t take me long tae size up a body. I always knew Alison was a townie, forbye she was born in the scrub—she would niver have been happy in the Outback, Steve.”
He laughed shortly. “That’s not the same, is it? You’ve known Alison since she was a kid.”
Nubby nodded with her back to him, putting the cake in the oven. “Time will tell,” she said equably, but her eyes were smiling. She went to one of the big refrigerators and took out a glass jug of fruit juice and poured some into one of the Thermos flasks arrayed above the sink. “You’d better take Miss Lesley a cold drink. She’ll be feeling the heat for a while until she gets used to it. Pommies always do.”
He grinned at her, reaching in for the flask. “That sounds funny from you, you old Scot! Thanks.”
She followed him out on to the veranda and stood for a moment watching him striding down towards the river, her homely face thoughtful. She knew Steve Forrest very well indeed, and his moods for the past few weeks had puzzled her—but she knew better than to poke and pry into his private affairs. Even as a little boy he had been one for keeping his troubles to himself. At ten, when his parents died in England on their first trip home, Steve had been away at school in Brisbane; when he came home he had got over the first shock and seemed strangely adult, almost a grown man. Joel’s father, Ed, had been manager of the property then—a good reliable man, absolutely trustworthy, as Joel was now. But after Steve left school he had stayed home to take his share of the work at Blue River.
All that was twenty years ago, Nubby thought, sighing a little. How quickly the years had flown!
Steve was thirty-five now, and it was high time he got married and had some children to inherit the vast acres of Blue River.
Nubby thought it was natural that he should have been upset by that bad business last June, but she was glad he had got rid of Stewart. Stewart had been crook from the start; even as a boy he had used his good looks and charm to get what he wanted out of everybody, and what he and Alison had wanted was expensive schooling in the cities, then college and swanky cars, clothes, the gay life. As for Alison, Nubby thought that she was good riddance, too.
The Finches had a bad streak in them, inherited from their lazy, good-for-nothing father, Nubby thought. When Alison and Stewart had come to live at Blue River, she had tried her best to put some backbone into them, to make them realise what a good life Blue River provided—if you were willing to work hard. But it had been too late even then.
What puzzled Nubby most was Steve’s abstracted manner when those heavy air-mail letters came from England. He’d only told her on Wednesday when he got back from Oonga that the Lesleys would be arriving today, which looked as if he’d only known it himself when he collected the mail from the post office. It had put her in a bit of a flap to get all ready for visitors at short notice, even though Steve had been thoughtful enough to collect some extra groceries from the store ... it was funny, she thought, that there’d been no cables from England.
Funnier still, that Steve had never mentioned meeting the Lesleys while he was in the old country in August, when he’d flown over for the funeral of his great-uncle John Forrest, who’d died at the great age of ninety-eight.
Strangest of all, his manner when he’d told her to expect the girls had been oddly impatient, as if he was restraining some strong emotion. But to Nubby the emotion had been an angry one, and when he went out to the utility this morning he had certainly not been lover-like with Jane. Surely, she thought now, as he disappeared into the thick bush beside the winding path down to the river, he hadn’t fallen in love with little Lisa...? She was a cripple, and so young...
Steve wasn’t the sort of man to get two English girls to come twelve thousand miles unless he was seriously interested in one of them. Nubby shook her head as she returned to the kitchen and switched on her transistor radio. Doubtless he would tell her in his own good time, and not before. Maybe, after Alison, he wanted to make sure they would settle down happily at Blue River.
As the melodies from her favo
urite musical. The Sound of Music, flooded the white-and-yellow kitchen Nubby crooned happily along with Julie Andrews, her hands busy all the time preparing lunch. At this time of the year they had cold meat and a huge crisp salad in the middle of the day and the roast at night, when it was cooler for cooking.
She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been curious, she thought. Steve was as dear to her as a son, and though there were several nice girls he could marry tomorrow, on the neighbouring stations and in the Curry, she was glad he was interested in an English girl. She had been very young—younger than Lisa—when she first came to Australia, but her parents had never let her forget Scotland and she had been home several times.
On Wednesday she had asked Steve, “Did you meet these Lesleys when you were home in August?” and he had answered, almost curtly, “They come from Devon, yes,” and ramming his floppy old hat on the back of his head he had gone off down to the stockyards as if he didn’t want to talk about the matter any more.
Reserve was one thing, Nubby thought as she arranged a big bowl of peaches, grapes and apples like a still life, but Steve needn’t have been so cagey about the Lesleys. They were nice girls and she was pleased they had come to Blue River.
Steve slowed his pace and entered the thick bush onthe river bank with the caution and noiselessness he had learned from the Aborigine trackers as a boy. There were not usually snakes in this section of the property, but he did not want to startle Jane. Searching, he soon found the disarranged creepers and signs on the ground where she had left the narrow path and entered the bush—and very soon he heard the sounds of muffled sobbing.
He found her crouched on a fallen log in a small clearing beside the river. She looked very small and young, her head in her hands resting on her knees, quietly crying her eyes out in this peaceful solitude.
Steve went back a few paces and approached with more noise to warn her of his coming, and smiled down at her when she lifted a ravaged face to him. He put the Thermos carefully down by the log and sat beside her, throwing the cotton hat on the ferns that carpeted the glade.
“Nubby—Mrs. Newbery—sent me after you with that, and a cold drink,” he said awkwardly. The girl had properly messed up her face—not even Nubby would call her attractive now—and her rag of a handkerchief was sodden. Steve offered his own clean one tentatively, as if she might turn and bite him.
“We don’t go out without wearing a hat in these parts, while the sun is up,” he said severely.
The severity seemed to help Jane pull herself together. She accepted the big handkerchief and began mopping herself up, gulping once or twice, smiling at last rather wanly.
“I’m sorry—you don’t want a—a case of sunstroke on your hands as well as everything else, do you?” she said with a hint of irony. Then she added simply, “I haven’t howled like this since my father died. I’m not a weepy person. I’m better now.”
“I’m sorry, too—for tearing a strip off you before asking a lot more questions,” he said gravely, and put an arm about her shoulders as she sat up. “Now look, Jane—if you really want Stewart, I’ll get him for you.”
She turned her head and stared at him, startled. “Want him? Do you think I want him—now?” she demanded.
“If it went deep, if you really loved him, you’d want him whatever he did,” Stewart answered quietly, his smile a little wry. “If you really love a person, I guess you can take an awful lot of punishment.”
“Is—is that how you loved—how you love Alison?” Jane asked, temporarily diverted from her own troubles. This Steve Forrest was a strange man.
He removed his arm from her shoulders, still gently, and clasped his hands loosely between his knees. “No. I guess it was just propinquity with Alison and me. She’d been around a long time, you see. But not all the time. She went away to school and college—that made her homecomings exciting, I suppose.” He opened and shut his big brown hands with an expressive gesture. “When she went back to Sydney to open her boutique I missed her. Like you, I was—I’d been too busy running the station to go chasing after women in the towns—I was lonely after Alison went away finally. I stopped thinking of her as a sort of sister.”
He grinned faintly at Jane. “Stupid, isn’t it, but men seem to get interested in a woman when she’s running away.”
She smiled back ruefully. “Alison had the sense to play hard-to-get. St-Stewart must have thought me a perfect fool, falling into his arms. I could hate him for that.”
It was Steve’s turn to shake his head. Sensible! he thought ruefully, wondering what Nubby would think if she knew the whole story. He said thoughtfully,
“Somehow I don’t think either of us is very good at hating! but if you still want Stewart I could get him for you. Give him a share in Blue River. The property is big enough for two families.”
Jane stared at him, amazement in her big brown eyes. “After all this—you’d buy him for me?” she demanded incredulously.
He laughed suddenly. “Don’t be so shocked, Jane. It has been done over and over again, all through history. Arranged marriages don’t always turn out so badly, and I think you’d be good for Master Stewart. You might even make him grow up.”
“It sounds corny, but I wouldn’t marry him now if he was the last bachelor left on earth!” Jane said decisively.
“Not even to please Lisa?” he asked curiously.
“No. I’d have to trust the man I married, for Lisa’s sake too. I could never trust Stewart now.”
“Do you want him punished, then? Most women would. He could get a pretty heavy sentence for fraud, forgery, and impersonation, I guess. You’d get heavy damages.”
“Which you would have to pay?” she answered drily. “No, Steve. We’ve cost you quite enough as it is—it was kind to send that charter plane for us.”
He shrugged, plucking a blade of grass and chewing it. “I didn’t believe you were coming, at first. I got on to that airport at Darwin and checked the passenger list for that flight,” he grinned again and suddenly looked ten years younger. “My goodness! I got a surprise all right when they said there were two Miss Lesleys arriving this morning! And one of them a special passenger in a wheel chair. I had to get cracking to contact Jack for his charter plane. I couldn’t very well leave you stuck up at Darwin to make your own arrangements, could I?”
“I didn’t realise it was eight hundred miles,” Jane said in a small voice, “we wouldn’t have had enough money.” She shivered suddenly though it was warm even in the shady glade, staring down at the river glinting blue through the trees on the bank. The smell of the bush was pungent and sweet all about them. Jane was beginning to realise just how embarrassing their arrival at Darwin could have been, with a hundred pounds and a forged cheque in her handbag.
“It was good of you, when you thought—when you knew Stewart was playing a dirty trick on you,” she said again, ruefully, “especially when you thought I was a party to it.”
“There was Lisa. I never thought your kid sister was a party to anything, her letters rang true.”
The girl whose face was beginning to regain its composure flushed a little. “And mine didn’t? I’m not very good at putting my feelings into letters.”
“On the contrary—” he began, and stopped abruptly, remembering the passionate outpourings in those flimsy letters. For a few minutes there was an embarrassed silence between them, then he said awkwardly, almost shyly, “I thought they were too good to be true, Jane. Especially from a complete stranger. It never occurred to me that even Stewart could take things so far—especially when Lisa—I could thrash him for that, let alone what he did to you. And in my name!”
“So could I!” she answered wholeheartedly, and turned to look at Steve steadily. “I’m sorry you’ve been let in for all this trouble and expense, Steve. I—I’m an independent person really. We’ve paid our way ever since Dad died—”
Watching the tilt of her small stubborn chin he could believe that. He put one hand
over hers for a moment as she added angrily, “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life! Lisa has been so excited and happy.”
“Yet you don’t want him punished?” Steve said curiously. Alison, the only young woman he knew really well, would have been vindictive in Jane’s Situation. He wondered just how deep her love for his cousin had gone, during those two weeks in Melcoombe.
“N-no...” she said slowly, “I think I want to try and—and forget the whole thing.” Her smile was wan, a little bitter. “No woman wants the whole world to know she has been completely fooled—the fewer people who know about this, the better.”
“Too right,” he agreed soberly. “I dare say Stewart was gambling on that. He’s a compulsive gambler. He’d realise I wouldn’t want to publicise the fact that I’ve been made to look a proper fool, too. I’m pretty well known in the district, Jane—and a bachelor grazier doesn’t usually invite a couple of attractive English girls out to visit him unless there’s a wedding in the offing. You see, I was in England last winter—back I in August—” he told her about his great-uncle John’s death. “It’s odd, but he lived not far from you, at a place called Haytor. I guess that’s why Stewart was visiting the area—he wanted to find out whether John Forrest left me anything worth while, so that he could ask for his share. As it happens, he didn’t.”
Jane pulled a face. “Are you so rich that everyone tries to screw money out of you?” she asked simply.
He laughed, and reached for the Thermos, and poured her a drink of fruit juice. It was frosty-cold and tasted of lemon and oranges and grapefruit and some other heavenly flavour that was unfamiliar to her. When she asked about it Steve smiled again. “That’s passion-fruit. A small wrinkled brown fruit that looks like a deformed potato, but the juice tastes good.”
He added without emphasis, “I guess Blue River brings in more money than I can use. A lot goes in taxes, of course—but once the wages are paid, the machinery serviced, the pastures kept clear and fertilised, there’s not much to spend money on in the Outback.” He grinned again fleetingly at her expression, “Oh, there’s the bores for water in the northern section—they cost anything up to four thousand dollars apiece, depending on the depth. But worth it, when you can water the stock in the dry.”
Wedding at Blue River Page 5
