“What?” said Sarah once more. “That handsome young fellow engaged to one of those vulgar creatures?”
“Oh, Sarah. . . .not really vulgar. It isn’t their fault they didn’t have a better education. They lived right up-country, where there were no schools. Tilly never saw a town till she was sixteen; but she can sit any horse.—Yes, we hope very much Purdy will soon settle down now and marry her—though he left the Hotel again without proposing.” And Polly sighed.
“There he shows his good taste, my dear.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s fond of Tilly. It’s only that his life is so unsettled. He’s been a barman at Euroa since then; and the last we heard of him, he was shearing somewhere on the Goulburn. He doesn’t seem able to stick to anything.”
“And a rolling stone gathers no moss!” gave back Sarah sententiously—and in fancy Mahony saw the cut-and-dried nod with which she accompanied the words.
Here Hempel passed through the store, clad in his Sunday best, his hair plastered flat with bear’s-grease.
“Going out for a stroll?” asked his master.
“That was my h’intention, sir. I don’t think you’ll find I’ve left any of my dooties undone.”
“Oh, go, by all means!” said Mahony curtly, nettled at having his harmless query misconstrued. It pointed a suspicion he had had, of late, that a change was coming over Hempel. The model employee was a shade less prompt than heretofore to fly at his word, and once or twice seemed actually to be studying his own convenience. Without knowing what the matter was, Mahony felt it politic not to be over-exacting—even mildly to conciliate his assistant. It would put him in an awkward fix, now that he was on the verge of winding up affairs, should Hempel take it in his head to leave him in the lurch.
The lean figure moved on and blocked the doorway. Now there was a sudden babble of cheepy voices, and simultaneously Sarah cried: “Where have you been, my little cherubs? Come to your aunt, and let her kiss you!”
But the children, who had frankly no great liking for Aunt Sarah, would, Mahony knew, turn a deaf ear to this display of opportunism and make a rush for his wife. Laying down his book he ran out. “Polly. . . .cautious!”
“It’s all right, Richard, I’m being careful.” Polly had let her mending fall, and with each hand held a flaxen-haired child at arm’s length. “Johnny, dirty boy! what have you been up to?”
“He played he was a digger and sat down in a pool— I couldn’t get him to budge,” answered Jerry, and drew his sleeve over his perspiring forehead.
“Oh fy, for shame!”
“Don’ care!” said John, unabashed.
“Don’ tare!” echoed his roly-poly sister, who existed but as his shadow.
“Don’t-care was made to care, don’t-care was hung!” quoted Aunt Sarah in her severest copybook tones.
Turning his head in his aunt’s direction young John thrust forth a bright pink tongue. Little Emma was not behindhand.
Polly jumped up, dropping her work to the ground. “Johnny, I shall punish you if ever I see you do that again. Now, Ellen shall put you to bed instead of Auntie.”—Ellen was Mrs. Hemmerde’s eldest, and Polly’s first regular maidservant.
“Don’ care,” repeated Johnny. “Ellen plays pillers.”
“Edn pays pidders,” said the echo.
Seizing two hot, pudgy hands Polly dragged the pair indoors—though they held back mainly on principle. They were not affectionate children; they were too strong of will and set of purpose for that; but if they had a fondness for anyone it was for their Aunt Polly: she was ruler over a drawerful of sugar-sticks, and though she scolded she never slapped.
While this was going on Hempel stood, the picture of indecision, and eased now one foot, now the other, as if his boots pinched him.
At length he blurted out: “I was wondering, ma’am—ahem! Miss Turnham—if, since it is an agreeable h’evening, you would care to take a walk to that ’ill I told you of?”
“Me take a walk? La, no! Whatever put such an idea as that into your head?” cried Sarah; and tatted and tatted, keeping time with a pretty little foot.
“I thought per’aps . . .” said Hempel meekly.
“I didn’t make your thoughts, Mr. Hempel,” retorted Sarah, laying stress on the aspirate.
“Oh no, ma’am. I ’ope I didn’t presume to suggest such a thing”; and with a hangdog air Hempel prepared to slink away.
“Well, well!” said Sarah double-quick; and ceasing to jerk her crochet-needle in and out, she nimbly rolled up her ball of thread. “Since you’re so insistent. . . .and since, mind you, there’s no society worth calling such, on these diggings. . . .” The truth was, Sarah saw that she was about to be left alone with Mahony—Jerry had sauntered off to meet Ned— and this tête-à-tête was by no means to her mind. She still bore her brother-in-law a grudge for his high-handed treatment of her at the time of John’s bereavement. “As if I had been one of the domestics, my dear—a paid domestic! Ordered me off to the butcher’s in language that fairly shocked me.”
Mahony turned his back and strolled down to the river. He did not know which was more painful to witness: Hempel’s unmanly cringing, or the air of fatuous satisfaction that succeeded it. When he returned, the pair was just setting out; he watched Sarah, on Hempel’s arm, picking short steps in dainty latchet-shoes.
As soon as they were well away he called to Polly.
“The coast’s clear. Come for a stroll.”
Polly emerged, tying her bonnet-strings. “Why, where’s Sarah? Oh. . . .I see. Oh, Richard, I hope she didn’t put on that——”
“She did, my dear!” said Mahony grimly, and tucked his wife’s hand under his arm.
“Oh, how I wish she wouldn’t!” said Polly in a tone of concern. “She does get so stared at—especially of an evening, when there are so many rude men about. But I really don’t think she minds. For she has a bonnet in her box all the time.” Miss Sarah was giving Ballarat food for talk, by appearing on her promenades in a hat: a large, flat, mushroom hat.
“I trust my little woman will never put such a ridiculous object on her head!”
“No, never. . . .at least, not unless they become quite the fashion,” answered Polly. “And I don’t think they will. They look too odd.”
“Another thing, love,” continued Mahony, on whom a sudden light had dawned as he stood listening to Sarah’s trumpery. “I fear your sister is trifling with the feelings of our worthy Hempel.”
Polly, who had kept her own counsel on this matter, went crimson. “Oh, do you really think so, Richard?” she asked evasively. “I hope not. For of course nothing could come of it. Sarah has refused the most eligible offers.”
“Ah, but there are none here to refuse. And if you don’t mind my saying so, Poll, anything in trousers seems fish to her net!”
On one of their pacings they found Mr. Ocock come out to smoke an evening pipe. The old man had just returned from a flying visit to Melbourne. He looked glum and careworn, but livened up at the sight of Polly, and cracked one of the mouldy jokes he believed beneficial to a young woman in her condition. Still, the leading-note in his mood was melancholy; and this, although his dearest wish was on the point of being fulfilled.
“Yes, I’ve got the very crib for ’Enry at last, doc., Billy de la Poer’s liv’ry-stable, top o’ Lydiard Street. We sol’ poor Billy up yesterday. The third smash in two days that makes. Lord! I dunno where it’ll end.”
“Things are going a bit quick over there. There’s been too much building.”
“They’re at me to build, too—’Enry is. But I says no. This place is good enough for me. If ’e’s goin’ to be ashamed of ’ow ’is father lives, ’e’d better stop away. I’m an ol’ man now, an’ a poor one. What should I want with a fine noo ’ouse? An’ oo should I build it for, even if I ’ad
the tin? For them two good-for-nothin’s in there? Not if I know it!”
“Mr. Ocock, you wouldn’t believe how kind and clever Tom’s been at helping with the children,” said Polly warmly.
“Yes, an’ at bottle-washin’ and sweepin’ and cookin’ a pasty. But a female ’ud do it just as well,” returned Tom’s father with a snort of contempt.
“Poor old chap!” said Mahony, as they passed out of earshot. “So even the great Henry’s arrival is not to be without its drop of gall.”
“Surely he’ll never be ashamed of his father?”
“Who knows! But it’s plain he suspects the old boy has made his pile and intends him to fork out,” said Mahony carelessly; and, with this, dismissed the subject. Now that his own days in the colony were numbered, he no longer felt constrained to pump up a spurious interest in local affairs. He consigned them wholesale to that limbo in which, for him, they had always belonged.
The two brothers came striding over the slope. Ned, clad in blue serge shirt and corduroys, laid an affectionate arm round Polly’s shoulder, and tossed his hat into the air on hearing that the “Salamander,” as he called Sarah, was not at home.
“For I’ve tons to tell you, Poll old girl. And when milady sits there turning up her nose at everything a chap says, somehow the spunk goes out of one.”
Polly had baked a large cake for her darling, and served out generous slices. Then, drawing up a chair she sat down beside him, to drink in his news.
From his place at the farther end of the table Mahony studied the trio—these three young faces which were so much alike that they might have been different readings of one and the same face. Polly, by reason of her woman’s lot, looked considerably the oldest. Still, the lamplight wiped out some of the shadows, and she was never more girlishly vivacious than with Ned, entering as she did with zest into his plans and ideas—more sister now than wife. And Ned showed at his best with Polly: he laid himself out to divert her; forgot to brag or to swear; and so natural did it seem for brother to open his heart to sister that even his egoistic chatter passed muster. As for young Jerry, who in a couple of days was to begin work in the same claim as Ned, he sat round-eyed, his thoughts writ large on his forehead. Mahony translated them thus: how in the world I could ever have sat prim and proper on the school-bench, when all this—change, adventure, romance—was awaiting me? Jerry was only, Mahony knew, to push a wheelbarrow from hole to water and back again for many a week to come; but for him it would certainly be a golden barrow, and laden with gold, so greatly had Ned’s tales fired his imagination.
The onlooker felt odd man out, debarred as he was by his profounder experience from sharing in the young people’s light-legged dreams. He took up his book. But his reading was cut into by Ned’s sprightly account of the Magpie rush; by his description of an engine at work on the Eureka, and of the wooden airpipes that were being used to ventilate deep-sinkings. There was nothing Ned did not know, and could not make entertaining. One was forced, almost against one’s will, to listen to him; and on this particular evening, when he was neither sponging, nor acting the Big Gun, Mahony toned down his first sweeping judgment of his young relative. Ned was all talk; and what impressed one so unfavourably—his grumbling, his extravagant boastfulness—was the mere thistledown of the moment, puffed off into space. It mattered little that he harped continually on “chucking up” his job. Two years had passed since he came to Ballarat, and he was still working for hire in somebody else’s hole. He still groaned over the hardships of the life, and still toiled on—and all the rest was just the froth and braggadocio of aimless youth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Not twenty-four hours later, Sarah had an accident to her machoire and returned post-haste to Melbourne.
“A most opportune breakage!” said Mahony, and laughed.
That day at the dinner-table he had given his sister-in-law a piece of his mind. Sarah had always resented the name bestowed on her by her parents, and was at present engaged in altering it, in giving it, so to speak, a foreign tang: henceforth she was to be not Sarah, but Sara (spoken Sahra). As often as Polly’s tongue tripped over the unfamiliar syllable, Sara gently but firmly put her right; and Polly corrected herself, even begged pardon for her stupidity, till Mahony could bear it no longer. Throwing politeness to the winds, he twitted Sara with her finical affectations, her old-maidish ways, the morning sloth that expected Polly, in her delicate state of health, to carry a breakfast-tray to the bedside: cast up at her, in short, all that had made him champ and fret in silence. Sara might, after a fitting period of the huff, have overlooked the rest; but the “old-maidish” she could not forgive. And directly dinner was over, the mishap to her mouthpiece was made known.
Too much in awe of Mahony to stand up to him—for when he was angry, he was very angry—Sara retaliated by abusing him to Polly as she packed her trunk.
“Manners, indeed! To turn and insult a visitor at his own table! And who and what is he, I should like to know, to speak to me so? Nothing but a common storekeeper. My dear, you have my deepest sympathy. It’s a dreadful life for you. Of course you keep everything as nice as possible, under the circumstances. But the surroundings, Polly!. . . .and the store. . . .and the want of society. I couldn’t put up with it, not for a week!”
Polly, sitting on the side of the tester-bed and feeling very cast down at Sara’s unfriendly departure, shed a few tears at this. For part of what her sister said was true: it had been wrong of Richard to be rude to Sara while the latter was a guest in his house. But she defended him warmly. “I couldn’t be happier than I am; Richard’s the best husband in the world. As for his being common, Sara, you know he comes of a much better family than we do.”
“My dear, common is as common does; and a vulgar calling ends by vulgarising those who have the misfortune to pursue it. But there’s another reason, Polly, why it is better for me to leave you. There are certain circumstances, my dear, in which, to put it mildly, it is awkward for two people of opposite sexes to go on living under the same roof.”
“Sarah!—I mean Sara—do you really mean to say Hempel has made you a proposal?” cried Polly, wide-eyed in her tears.
“I won’t say, my dear, that he has so far forgotten himself as to actually offer marriage. But he has let me see only too plainly what his feelings are. Of course, I’ve kept him in his place—the preposterous creature! But all the same it’s not comme il faut any longer for me to be here.”
“Did she say where she was going, or what she intended to do?” Mahony inquired of his wife that night as she bound the strings of her nightcap.
No, she hadn’t, Polly admitted, rather out of countenance. But then Sara was like that—very close about her own affairs. “I think she’s perhaps gone back to her last situation. She had several letters while she was here, in that lady’s hand. People are always glad to get her back. Not many finishing governesses can teach all she can”—and Polly checked off Sara’s attainments on the fingers of both hands. “She won’t go anywhere under two hundred a year.”
“A most accomplished person, your sister!” said Mahony sleepily. “Still, it’s very pleasant to be by ourselves again—eh, wife?”
An even more blessed peace shortly descended on the house; for the time was now come to get rid of the children as well. Since nothing had been heard of John, they were to be boarded out over Polly’s illness. Through the butcher’s lady, arrangements were made with a trooper’s wife, who lived outside the racket and dust of the township, and had a whole posse of little ones of her own.—“Bless you! half-a-dozen more wouldn’t make any difference to me. There’s the paddock for ’em to run wild in.” This was the best that could be done for the children. Polly packed their little kit, dealt out a parting bribe of barley-sugar, and saw them hoisted into the dray that would pass the door of their destination.
Once more husband and wife sat alone to
gether, as in the days before John’s domestic catastrophe. And now Mahony said tentatively: ‘Don’t you think, love, we could manage to get on without that old Beamish woman? I’ll guarantee to nurse you as well as any female alive.”
The question did not come as a surprise to Polly; she had already put it to herself. After the affair with Sara she awaited her new visitor in fear and trembling. Sara had at least stood in awe of Richard and held her tongue before him; Mrs. Beamish prided herself on being afraid of nobody, and on always speaking her mind. And yet, even while agreeing that it would be well to put “mother” off, Polly drooped her wings. At a time like this a woman was a woman. It seemed as if even the best of husbands did not quite understand.
“Just give her the hint we don’t want her,” said Mahony airily.
But “mother” was not the person to take a hint, no matter how broad. It was necessary to be blunt to the point of rudeness; and Polly spent a difficult hour over the composition of her letter. She might have saved her pains. Mrs. Beamish replied that she knew her darling little Polly’s unwillingness to give trouble; but it was not likely she would now go back on her word: she had been packed and ready to start for the past week. Polly handed the letter to her husband, and did not say what she thought she read out of it, namely that “mother,” who so seldom could be spared from home, was looking forward with pleasure to her trip to Ballarat.
“I suppose it’s a case of making the best of a bad job,” sighed Mahony; and having one day drawn Mrs. Beamish, at melting point, from the inside of a crowded coach, he loaded Long Jim with her bags and bundles.
His aversion was not lightened by his subsequently coming on his wife in the act of unpacking a hamper, which contained half a ham, a stone jar of butter, some home-made loaves of bread, a bag of vegetables and a plum pudding. “Good God! does the woman think we can’t give her enough to eat?” he asked testily. He had all the poor Irishman’s distrust of a gift.
“She means it kindly, dear. She probably thought things were still scarce here; and she knew I wouldn’t be able to do much cooking,” pleaded Polly. And going out to the kitchen she untied the last parcel, in which was a big round cheese, by stealth.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Page 19
