Captivity Part 48

Over the roof-tops, through the moon haze streaming about the chimneys came a vision of the spaewife riding to Flodden after her man, riding from Flodden with the twin children wrapt in the Southrons' pennants.

Marcella smiled a little. Louis frowned and fell in with her way of thinking. He suddenly felt flabby again. She felt taut as a steel spring.

The next day she wrote to her uncle for money, telling him the truth. It was not pleasant, but it had to be done. As soon as he saw that she was quite decided on going, and showed no signs whatever of falling in dead faints about the house, Louis entered into the spirit of the adventure.

The lure of wild places got into his feet. As he wrote down a careful list of the things they were to take in their swags he looked up and actually suggested that she should wire to her uncle for the money so that they need not waste a day more. As for the prospect of work, that worried him not at all.

"You're always sure of a meal, anyway, if you're a sun-downer," he said. "And usually there's a job of sorts that'll keep you in grub. I say, old girl, we'll have to live on damper and billy-tea. It's the finest stuff going!"

He argued long with himself about how many blankets to take, how much tea and flour; he talked about the kind of boots best fitted for walking on unmade roads: one day when they went out together he discovered a patent "swaggie's friend"--a knife at one end of a composition handle and a fork at the other.

"It's a good thing to take a fork," he said reflectively, "you needn't eat with your fingers if you do. Fried sheep eaten with the fingers is rather messy at times."

They arranged for Mrs. King to collect and forward their letters from home as soon as they gave her an address; Marcella did not mention the chief reason for getting away from Sydney now. She had an instinctive feeling that Mrs. King would think she was raving mad to run away into the Bush with an unborn child.

"I hope you'll be happy, kid," she said, as they talked over plans. "But I doubt it, with him. You want more than I do--"

"I want everything," said Marcella, decidedly.

"I don't care so long's my back isn't too bad, and he scrubs down for me, and I can pay my way. I've got this house paying proper now, and the young chaps treat me as if I was their mother."

Marcella felt it was well that she was getting away from this atmosphere of dull acceptance of misery, of the worst in life. Anyway, she told herself, she would make a quick end to things with fire or knife before she got like that. Expediently keeping a drunken man quiet; expediently kissing him and fondling him for fear he would get drunk again to-morrow in spite or pique: content with a man who would scrub floors for a "livener"! It was better, far, to be homeless wanderers in the Bush where there was no need to be expedient for the sake of others, where they would have to stand up on their own intrinsic strength or fall; where they need not be respectable and where she could, if he were weak, alternately shake him up and soothe him without spectators. She would never, never, never allow herself to get into this cringing habit of being thankful for the small mercies of life when the big justices of life were there, so very big and shining.

"Of course," went on Mrs. King in a flat voice, "I've always one mercy I thank G.o.d for on my bended knees every night. That is, not having any drunkard's children to bring up and be a curse to me when their father's left off breaking my heart."

"Oh--no, no!" cried Marcella, staring at her with horror.

"Yes, kid, just you keep that in mind! You ta' care, my dear. It's on'y natural, if you have kids, they'll take after their father. And I'd sooner see them laying dead before me than bring up drunkards to be a curse to some other poor devil. They'll not escape it. It's in their blood."

Marcella burst in pa.s.sionately:

"Why, Mrs. King, that's the rottenest, wickedest heresy that was ever invented to tell anyone! If you believe a cruel thing like that, it means that the whole scheme of things is wrong. Why should children take after a bad parent more than a good one? Why should they be weak rather than strong? If you're logical, what you say means that the world is getting worse and worse. And everyone knows it's getting better every minute--"

"I'd like to see it," said Mrs. King.

"Besides," went on Marcella, "besides, if I had a baby I'd build him so strong, I'd make him so good his father would simply get strong and good because he couldn't fight the strength and goodness all round him! I'd build a wall of strength round the child--I'd pull down the pillars of the heavens to make him strong--I'd clothe him in fires--There, I do talk rubbish, don't I?" she added, quietly as she turned away. But Mrs.

King's words stuck: she pushed them forcibly away from her mind: they would not go, and sank deep down; they came back in dreams, tormenting.

She dreamed often of a little child starving and cold out in the Domain, while the southerly winds lashed rain at him--dreams of a little boy with Louis's brown eyes--a little boy who gnawed his nails--and stammered--and grew old--and wavered--and shook in drink delirium.

She refused the dreams house-room in her conscious thoughts. She looked at the shining billy and big enamelled mugs they had bought that day, at the bright brown leather straps that smelt so pleasantly new, fastened round two grey and two brown blankets. Louis came in and made her strap the two blankets on her back to see if they tired her. In spite of the heat of the day she scarcely felt them.

"This is what they call Matilda," he told her, weighing the swag in his hand.

"I can carry you both if you get tired," said she, looking from Matilda to him.

She had asked her uncle for ten pounds. He characteristically made no comments about her omission to mention a husband when she saw him at Melbourne, and remarked that they would be very pleased to see her and her husband any time at Wooratonga. When he proved his unquestioning kindness she wished she had not had to ask him for money.

That night they packed. There was a new lodger downstairs who proved very helpful. He had come from the Never-Never Land to knock down a cheque in Sydney; in the ordinary course of things he would have been blind to the world till the cheques were all spent. The night of his arrival, when he was only softened by a few drinks after six months'

abstinence, the Salvation Army had got him. He had saved his soul, his liver and his money at the same time. And he was bursting with information.

"You take the train to Cook's Wall, chum," he said, spitting on his hands and trying the strength of the good leather straps. He had tapped the billy and the mugs with a wise finger, giving them advice about soaking their boots in linseed oil for a few days.

"Yous ought to buy your tea and baccy and flour in Sydney. It's dear and poor the further yous get," he told them. And--

"Cook's Wall is the rail-head, chum," he said. "It's in the Lower Warrilow. There's a bit o' manganese down there, and they're clearing land. Plenty of work waiting. Lot of new squatters--small squatters without two fardens to rub together and make a c.h.i.n.k. Them a.s.sisted lot.

They're always glad of help, clearing scrub. They get a loand off of the Gov'ment for tools and seeds and stock, but they've got to clear the land--within three years, I think it is. Hard work, chum."

Marcella and Louis looked at each other with shining eyes.

"That's the place for us, old lady!" he said. "I've done clearing in New Zealand, and gorse grubbing. Makes you as black as your hat, and you sleep like a million tops and eat half a sheep at a sitting--"

"You'll get a job there, ma," he went on, turning the spigot of his information before her now. "They're always glad of cooks for the huts where the men live. And they don't pay so bad, either. You get your rations, of course. It's rotten hard for lads that have been working fourteen hours in the open air to come in and start cooking."

Marcella felt thrilled with the excitement of it all, but doubted her powers of cooking.

"You needn't worry, old lady," said Louis. "It's fried sheep for breakfast, dinner and tea unless a cow breaks its leg and has to be slaughtered. And then it's fried cow. And damper and flapjacks. I can do that much cooking in a southerly buster with three sticks for firing, standing on my head."

But she decided to be on the safe side and scoured Sydney for a cookery book. She found a very fat and flushed and comfortable Mrs. Beeton. It apparently weighed about two pounds. A week later Marcella decided that its weight was at least two stone, but the pretty picture of cooked foods, and the kindly advice it gave about answering doors, folding table napkins and serving truffles were all very rea.s.suring.

They had a tremendous argument about books. Louis flatly refused to take any. Marcella refused to go without some. Finally she packed the New Testament, "Parsifal" and the cookery book inside her swag. Later, opening all her books to write her name in them before leaving them on the shelf downstairs for the use of Mrs. King's "boys," she noticed the gipsy woman's prophecy in the t.i.tle page of "Questing Cells" and took that along too.

For the last time, they slept on the roof; as soon as Louis was asleep and Marcella lying quiet beside him, she had a visitation of her dreams about drunkards' children. Creeping from under the blankets silently, she walked right along the roof in the moonlight to have the matter out with herself once and for all. She did not want to take bad dreams away to a new life with her.

"I won't believe it. What's more, I _don't_ believe it," she said decidedly. "Louis may be a drunkard. Father was. So were all the Lashcairns for ages. But I'm not. And my child is not going to be. After all--_is_ he our child--? I mean--Jesus was not Joseph's child--only--"

She stopped, waiting. This was an immense, breathtaking thought.

"Just his body is made by Louis and me--and all the rest of him comes--new--quite new. The spirit--the quickening spirit--"

She felt, once more, as if her feet were taking wings with the hopefulness of this thought.

"Why that's what the Catholics mean by Immaculate Conception! Of course it is! Why--it's all Immaculate Conception! How on earth could it, logically, be anything else?"

She went back, then, and lay down very still. Louis lay white and quiet in the moonlight.

"You may hurt him, Louis, if I happen to die. Not that I intend to, for one small instant! You may let him be hungry and cold. But you won't hurt him inside. I'll see to it that there's strength in him--the quickening spirit."

Her last sleep in Sydney was dreamless.

CHAPTER XXI

Even the two days' journey in the most uncomfortable train on earth could not damp their ardour. Most of the time Louis was gay and unusually chivalrous; at night, tiredness and heat cracked his nerves a little, making him cross and cynical until, sitting bolt upright on the wooden seat, she drew his head on her knee and stroked his eyes with softened fingers till he fell asleep. At the stations where they alighted to stretch cramped limbs she stayed beside him all the time.

Once, by a specious excuse, he tried to get rid of her, but she saw through it and stayed beside him. He resented it bitterly.

"d.a.m.ned schoolmistress," he growled. "Always round me, like a limpet."

In his eyes she read a flash of hate.