Materfamilias Part 6

"I am sure they didn't mean it," I protested, laying my hand on Harry's shoulder, which felt as rigid as iron under it. "We can overlook it this time, father, dear."

"The one thing I will never overlook," he replied, "is misconduct towards you when I leave you unprotected. If they don't know the first rudiments of manliness--at their age--I must try to teach them."

"But _that_ is not the way to teach them!" I cried--almost shrieked--as he signed to them to pa.s.s out of the room before him. "Oh, Tom, don't!

don't! It is all my fault!"

Harry turned and looked at me with an ice-cold smile, as if his face were galvanised, and said calmly, "It is all right, mother. It is _quite_ right." And then the three of them left me, Tom himself sternly keeping me back when I tried to follow; and presently, with my head buried in the torn pillow and my hands over my ears, I heard an agonised wail from poor little Bob. Not from Harry, of course; he would be cut to pieces before he would deign to cry out. Oh, what _brutes_ men are! I hated Tom--though he was Tom--with a hatred that was perfectly murderous while it lasted.

We had our tea together alone--a thing that had never happened before, on his first evening, since we had had a child old enough to sit up at table. I had sent the little girls to bed--Phyllis for punishment, Lily for her throat, and because I felt I could not stand her chatter--and he had sent the boys. There were the usual first-night delicacies--sweetbreads, wild ducks, honey in the combs--and for once they were uneaten and unnoticed. All my preparations for his home-coming were thrown away. He was glum and silent, evidently as upset as I was, with no appet.i.te for anything. As for me, I felt as if a crumb of bread would choke me. And I would not speak to him--I could not--with that shriek of Bobby's in my ears.

"I suppose," he said, in a heavy voice--"I suppose I'd better resign my billet and come home, Polly. They're getting pretty old now for you to struggle with them single-handed. It's not fair to you, my dear."

I treated this remark as if I had not heard it, and he soon rose from his seat and left the room. He went into his little smoking den, shut the door behind him, and locked it.

When I thought him safely out of the way I stole off to see and comfort my poor boys. They shared the same room, their beds standing side by side, with a chair between them. When I crept in they were talking in a low voice together; as soon as they heard me they fell silent and pretended to be asleep. A smell of moist dog and an otherwise unaccountable protuberance implied the presence of a third culprit--and a flat contravention of one of the strict rules of the house--but I took no notice, although terrified lest Bobby's shirt and sheets should be dampened, and sickened by the thought of the fleas that would infest him. Oh, how thankful I am now that I took no notice, and did not s.n.a.t.c.h his bit of comfort from his arms!

I sat down on the chair and leaned over Harry, smoothed his hair from his brow, and kissed him. I might as well have kissed the bed-post. He is a peculiar boy--a little hard-natured and perverse--and he can never bear anybody to pity him. I was not surprised that he repulsed me, though I felt dreadfully hurt. My beloved Bobby--my angel, whom I never rightly appreciated until I had lost him--he was quite different. He kissed me back again, and whimpered when I talked to him, and told me he had never meant to be as naughty as father thought. Bless him! I knew he never did. I told him so. But even then he was just a little reserved with me, as if he could not quite forgive me for what I had brought upon him--which was bitter enough at the time, but an agony to think of afterwards, as it is to this day. So I went away to my room and cried in the dark, utterly miserable. And I thought to myself, "If this is how they feel towards me, how will they regard their father, who has treated them so brutally? Why, they will never have an atom of affection for him again!"

But when I went back to them, hoping for a warmer welcome, and anxious about their poor empty stomachs, there was Tom, sitting on the chair between their beds, chatting to them, and they to him, as if nothing had occurred--aye, although Waif had been deposed and banished. Another chair had been dragged up, and a tray stood on it--a tray piled with food, duck and sweetbread, cold beef and tongue, all mixed together--which he was serving out in lavish helpings, with plenty of bread-and-b.u.t.ter. Harry, leaning on his elbow, rested his head on his father's arm; Bob, crouched at his knees on the floor, looked up at him with his dear merry eyes, that bore no malice--not even a reproach. They did not see me at the door, where I stood a minute to watch them, suffocated by the sense of being shut out.

I did not think it was quite right of Tom. But I did not say so. When he called to me to come in and be apologised to--the boys did it handsomely, but still rather perfunctorily, I fancied--I was glad to let bygones be bygones, and to feel we were a united family once more.

And I thought the incident ended there. Nothing more was said about it while Tom remained at home, and he went away as usual, giving me--even me--not the faintest indication of what was in his mind. So that I was completely dumfoundered when, on his next return, he said, in a tremulous tone of voice and with quite a tragic air generally:

"Well, Polly, I've done it."

"_What?_" I cried, guessing his meaning in an instant, for I remembered his remark at tea that night when we were all so unhappy. "You _don't_ mean to say you have thrown up your command--thrown away everything--just _now_, when we want so badly to increase our income and not to lessen it--without a word of warning?"

"No warning?" quoth he. "Why, haven't you been at me every day for the last dozen years to do it? And quite right too. It's bad for boys to grow up without a father to look after them, and their welfare is of more importance than anything else."

"You say that, and at the same time take away all chance of their having a decent education and a fair start in the world! How am I to keep them at the Grammar School, and have a governess for the girls, and support the house and all, on my poor three hundred a year?"

I should not have said it, and could have cut my tongue out before the words were half uttered, but somehow the first news of the shock that we were to lose half our income, on which we already found it no easy matter to make ends meet, was overwhelming. And we were so accustomed to speak freely whatever was in our minds that I never antic.i.p.ated he would take a chance remark so ill. I suppose his interview with the owners had agitated him; as I heard afterwards, the whole office had expressed regrets at his leaving the service, and said all kinds of nice and flattering things about him; otherwise I am sure he would not have given way as he did. He just turned from me, put his arms on the mantelpiece, and, dropping his head down, gave a sob under his breath. My own good husband! That ever I should have been the cause--however innocently--of bringing a tear to his dear eyes, a moment's pang to his faithful heart!

Of course he forgave me at once--he always does; and in a few minutes we were talking things over in peace and comfort, while I sat on his knee--for the children were in school, happily.

"As for income, Polly, you don't suppose I am going to live on you?" he said--and a very unkind thing it was to say, as I told him. "You don't imagine I intend to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs, while you take the whole burden on your little shoulders--do you?"

"I don't see why you shouldn't," I replied. "At any rate for a long while to come. I'm sure if any one ever earned the right to a thorough rest, you have. And, oh, Tom, no burden can be a burden with you here to help me!"

"Thanks, old girl. That's good hearing."

"As if you wanted to be told that! And by and by, when you have had a nice long spell, there are sure to be posts offered to you about the ports----"

"No, Polly; don't delude yourself with that idea. There are no posts for a sailor who leaves sea--that is, one or two, perhaps, and a hundred fellows wanting them. I should be no good at office work, among the smart hands, and the life would kill me. No, I've a better notion than that--it's been in my mind a long time, and I've been talking it over with experts, men who thoroughly understand the matter----"

"And not with me!" I interposed reproachfully.

"Well, I didn't see the use of disturbing your mind until one could do something. But now the time has come." He was quite bright and excited.

"Look here, Polly--listen, dear, till I have explained fully--my idea is to take a little farm place on the outskirts of Melbourne----"

"A farm!" I broke in. "Are _you_ one of those who think that farming comes by instinct and doesn't have to be learned like other trades?"

"I don't mean that kind of farm, but just a few acres of good land--more on the edge of the country than in it, you understand--near enough for the boys to get to the Grammar School by train or on ponies--and breed pigs----"

"Oh, pigs!" I echoed, sniffing.

"Well, if you objected to pigs, there's poultry. With a few incubators we could rear fowls enough to supply all Melbourne. Or bees. There's a great trade to be done in honey if you know how to set about it. Bees feed themselves, and flowers cost nothing--I particularly want us to live among plenty of flowers--and I could make the boxes myself. But pigs are the thing, Polly. I've gone into the question thoroughly, and there's no doubt about it. You see, we should be able to keep cows--think how splendid to give the children fresh milk from our own dairy, as much as they can drink!--and we could send the rest to a factory and get the b.u.t.termilk back for the pigs. And vegetables--of course we'd have a big garden--and they'd eat all the surplus that would otherwise go to waste, and the fallen fruit, and the refuse from the kitchen; so that really the cost of feed would be next to nothing. The pork would be first-cla.s.s on such a diet, given the right breed to begin with, and what Melbourne markets couldn't absorb we might ship frozen to England."

And so on.

Well, it was a fascinating picture, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

I, too, thought it would be lovely to live amongst cows and flowers, and at the same time be making a fortune out of our Arcadian surroundings.

So I went in for the little farm, and all the three cla.s.ses of profitable stock--pigs, fowls, bees--in short, everything. What would have happened to us if Tom had not made a few unexpected thousands by the purest accident, I don't know. He did a little deal in mining shares, under the direction of a strangely disinterested friend who was expert at that business, and so saved us all from ruin. I may add that it was his sole exploit of the kind. I would not let him gamble any more--beyond putting an annual pound or two in Tattersall's Sweeps--because, although he thought he had been very smart, he was as ignorant as a confiding infant of the ways of money dealers, and never could have experienced such another stroke of luck. He was easily persuaded to let well alone, as always to defer to and see the reasonableness of any wish of mine.

It was before we had fairly plunged into our messes and muddles--in the very beginning, when the _couleur de rose_ was over all--when the dilapidations of our country cottage were all repaired, and everything in the most beautiful order--when the fields were rich with spring gra.s.s and the scent of wattle-blossom, and the sleek cows had calved, and the hens were clucking about with thriving families of chicks--when the bee boxes were still a-making, and the two first pigs only in their smart new sty--when the children, released from the schoolroom, were scampering everywhere with their father, who was more of a child than any of them, and growing fat and rosy on the sweet air and the pure milk--when we were telling one another all day that we never were so happy and so well off--it was then that the calamity of our lives befell us.

A small creek touched the borders of the two paddocks that we called our farm, and, like all creeks, was fringed with wild vegetation, bushes and trees that interposed a romantic screen between its little bed and the world of prosaic agriculture. It so happened that the children--like many thousands of native Australians, far older than they--had never seen the bush. When they had wanted change of air Tom had taken them to sea; and as he had never had holidays himself, and I had never cared to go away from home without him, we were nearly in the same case. That strip of scrub was true bush, as far as it went, and we were delighted in it.

We were too busy just then to go thither in daytime, and would not allow the children to ramble there alone, for fear of snakes--although it was much too early and too cool for them; besides which, there were none--but we would take the fascinating walk about sundown in a family party, and sometimes have our tea there, returning after dark with strange treasures of leaf and insect, clear pebbles that we made sure were topazes in the rough, and stones with mica specks in them that we thought were gold. And once we went there in moonlight--the full moon of our first October--when it was mild and balmy, and we could easily imagine ourselves in forests primeval untrodden by a human foot except our own! How well I remember it--as if it were yesterday!--the enormous look of the trees in that beautiful, deceptive light, and how we stood in an ecstatic group under one of them to look up at an oppossum sitting in the fork of a dead branch.

Many people think that oppossums, like snakes and laughing jacka.s.ses, are common objects of the country in all its parts; but that is not the case nowadays with any of the three, and none of our family had beheld the dear little furry animal, except dead in a museum or torpid in the Zoological Gardens, while it had been one of the great ambitions of our lives to do so. And here he was, alive, alert, and unmistakable, his ears sticking up and his bushy tail hanging down, sitting against the moon, as I had seen roosting pheasants in the woods at home, looking down at us with the intense interest that an oppossum is able to take in things at that hour. The excitement was tremendous. The boys literally danced round and round the tree, and Waif was beside himself; he made frantic leaps upward, turning somersaults in the rebound, wildly tore at the bark of the tree and the earth at its roots, and filled the quiet night with his impa.s.sioned yaps and squeaks. He also, to the best of our belief, had never seen an oppossum before; yet he was as keen as a foxhound after a fox to get at and destroy it.

The little animal did not seem to mind. It sat still and gazed at us, as is the way of an oppossum, even when you have no camp-fire or lantern to mesmerise and paralyse it; we could almost fancy that we saw its fixed eyes, large and liquid, in the light of the moon. And suddenly Bobby e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, from the depths of his heart, "Oh--_oh_--if _only_ I'd got my gun!"

We took no notice--never heeded the warning given us--but only laughed to hear the little chap talking of his gun as if he were an old sportsman. It was a small single barrel, presented to him on his going to the country by his G.o.dfather, Captain Briggs (much to my dismay at the time, and the natural chagrin of the elder brother, who should have been the first to possess one), and Tom had given the child but two lessons in the use of it--shooting bottles from the top of the paddock fence.

Being without a gun, the boys flung aloft such missiles as came to hand, and, when a stick of wood touched the branch it sat on, the 'possum ran along it to a place where it was lost in leaves. Then we bethought ourselves of the late hour, called off Waif, and went home to bed--to bed, and to sleep as tranquil and unforeboding as the sleep of other nights.

The next day was exceptionally full of business. Recreation was not thought of. It was nine o'clock when we left off work--Tom and I.

Lily was long in bed, but the other children had no proper hour for retiring at this unsettled time. I went to the sitting-room to look for them, and found only Phyllis there. The lamp was not lit, nor the blinds drawn. I noticed that the moon was up, and by its light saw her crouched at one of the windows, pressing her face against the gla.s.s. I asked her what she was doing there, and she did not hear me; on my repeating the question, she sprang up with such a start of fright that I at once divined mischief somewhere.

"Where is Harry?" I cried sharply. Somehow it was always Harry, my handsome first-born, that I expected things to happen to.

Phyllis stammered and shuffled, and then said that Harry had gone to look for Bobby.

"And where is Bobby?"

She seemed still more reluctant to reply, but suddenly exclaimed, with an air of joyful relief, "Oh, there he is! There he is! There's Waif--he can't be far off!"

She followed me to the verandah, whither I went to meet and reproach my poor little fellow for having strayed without leave, and there was no boy visible--only the dear, ugly, faithful dog for whose sake all dogs are beloved and sacred for ever and ever. Waif ran to my feet, pawed them and my skirts, squirmed and jumped, yelped and whined, all the time looking up at me with eyes that were full of desire and supplication--trying to tell me something that at first I could not understand. I took a few steps into the garden, and he scampered down a pathway to the gate; seeing I did not follow so far, he ran back, seized a bit of my frock in his teeth, and tried to drag me with him.

"What does he want?" I called to Tom, as he sauntered towards me, pipe in mouth. "Tom, Tom, _what_ does it mean?"

"Where's Bob?" was his instant question.

"Harry has gone after him--Harry is with him--Harry will bring him home," piped Phyllis, trembling like a leaf. Then she burst into tears.

"Oh, mother--oh, father--I heard the gun such a long, long time ago!"