Sisters Part 40

"If you must fix a name to it--yes," the widow considered thoughtfully.

"After all, 'unmiserable' does not go far enough. I AM happy. For, Debbie"--turning to look into the dark, troubled eyes--"I'm clean now--I never thought to be again--to know anything so exquisitely sweet, either in earth or heaven--I'm clean, body and soul, day and night, inside and outside, at last."

"Oh, POOR girl!" Deb moaned, with tears, when she realised what this meant.

"Rich," corrected Mary--"rich, dear, with just a roof and a crust of bread."

"Well," said Deb presently, "what about that roof and crust of bread?

Since we are telling each other everything, tell me what your resources are. Don't say it is not my business; I know it isn't, but I shall be wretched if you don't let me make it mine a little. How much have you?"

"I don't know. I don't care. I haven't given money a thought. It doesn't matter."

"But it does matter. You can't even keep clean without a bathtub and a bit of soap. But what am I thinking of?--of course, you will settle all that with Bob."

The little word of three letters brought Mrs Goldsworthy down from her clouds at once.

"Oh, no!" she cried quickly, almost fearfully. "On no account would I interfere with his arrangements, his career. He would do everything that was right and dutiful, I am sure, but I would sooner starve than take charity from my own child. But there's no need to take it from anybody. I have all I want."

"How much?"

"I couldn't tell you to a pound or two, but enough for my small wants."

"They do seem small, indeed. Where are you going to live? Won't you come to me, Molly? Redford is big enough, and it's morally yours as much as mine. You should have your own rooms--all the privacy you like--"

"No, darling--thank you all the same. I have made my plans. I am going to have a little cottage somewhere in the country, where there is no dust, or smoke, or people--where I can walk on clean earth and gra.s.s, and smell only trees and rain and the growing things. Alone? Oh, yes!

Of course, I shall see you sometimes--and my boy; but for a home--all the home I can want or wish for now--that is my dream."

"I don't think," said Deb, "that I ever heard human ambition--and happiness--expressed in such terms before." It was the final result of Mary's experiment in the business of a woman's life.

Deb drove back to her hotel, thoughtful and sad and tired. When Rosalie had left her for the night, she wrote to Claud by way of comforting herself. She told him what she had been doing--described her interviews with Rose and Mary respectively, and the impressions they had left on her.

"Of all the four of us," she concluded her letter, "I am the only one who has been fortunate in love. I found my mate in the beginning, before there was time to make mistakes--the right man, whom I could love in the right way--and we have been kept for each other through all these years, although for a long time we did not know it. And now we are together--or shall be in a few days--never to part again. It is the only love-story in the family--I don't except Rose's, because I don't call that a love-story--which has had a happy ending."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Down the middle of the big T-shaped wool-shed, in two rows of six pens each, with an aisle between them, the bleating sheep were ma.s.sed. They had been driven into that aisle and thus distributed, as a crowd of soldiers might be packed into their pews at church, and twelve little gates had then been shut upon them. Each gate had a corresponding one at the opposite end of the pen, opening upon a broad lane of floor, and facing a doorway into outside pens and the sunny paddocks of the background. Between gate and door, on his own section of the boarded lane, a sweating, bare-armed man with shears performed prodigies of strength and skill. Every few minutes he s.n.a.t.c.hed a heavy sheep from the pen beside him, flung it with a round turn into a sitting posture between his knees, and with the calm indifference to its violent objections of the spider to those of the fly that he makes into a parcel, sliced off its coat like a cook peeling a potato. The fleece gently fell upon the floor, as you may see an unnoticed shawl slip from an old lady's shoulders, and before it could realise what had happened, the poor naked animal found itself shot through the doorway, to stagger headlong down the sloping stage that was its returning path to freedom.

Twelve of these stalwart and strenuous operators, lining the long walls at regular intervals, six a side, were at it with might and main (payment by results being the rule in this department of industry), and attendant boys strolled up and down, picking the fleeces from the floor and carrying them to the sorter's table. One was the tar-boy, whose business it was to dab a brushful of tar upon any scarlet patch appearing upon a white under-coat where the shears had clipped too close. The sorter or cla.s.ser stood behind his long table, above and at right angles to the lines of sheep-pens and shearers. Near him on either hand were racks like narrow loose-boxes, built against the walls; behind him the hydraulic press cranked and creaked as its attendants fed and manipulated it, and the great bales, that others were sewing up, weighing, and branding, were mounting high in the transepts of the building--the two arms of the capital T. The air was thick with woolly particles and the smell of sheep; the floor was dark and slippery, and everything one touched humid with the impalpable grease of the silky fleeces circulating all about the shed. Strict, downright, dirty business was the order of the day.

The manager--Jim Urquhart, grey-bearded, in a battered felt hat and a slouchy old tweed suit--stood by the sorter's table, his wide-ranging, vigilant eye suddenly fixed upon it. As each fleece was brought up, shaken out, trimmed, tested with thumb and finger, rolled into a light bundle, inside out, and flung into one or another of the adjacent racks, he followed the process as if it were something new to him. The shade of difference in the texture of the staple of one fleece as compared with another appeared of more concern to him than the absolute difference, which seemed to shout for notice, between Deborah Dalzell and the other features of the scene.

A snowy, lacy petticoat all but swept the greasy floor. An equally spotless skirt, fresh from the laundry, gathered up in one strong pendant hand, gleamed like light against its background of greasy woodwork and greasy wool. The majestic figure of the lady of Redford advanced towards him. Her lord strolled behind her. Often--but not for many a long day--had the vision of her beautiful face come to Jim in this fashion, a radiance upon prosaic business that it was not allowed to interfere with; now, for the first time, his eye avoided, his heart shrank from recognising it.

Then he lifted his gaze at last, for she was close beside him. And what a ray of loving old-comradeship shone on him from those star-bright orbs of hers, undulled by the years that had lightly frosted her dark hair. She put out her hand, and held it out until he had apologised for his greasy paw, and given it to her warm grasp.

"Why haven't you been to see me--to see us?" she asked him, smiling.

"Didn't you know we came home last night?"

"I thought you might be tired--or unpacking," Jim lamely excused himself. "But whenever it is convenient to you, Deb--Mrs Dalzell--I am always close by; I can come at any time."

He looked at her husband.

"Claud, you remember Jim?"

It was so many years since the men had met that the question was not uncalled for. They nodded to each other, across the enormous gulf that separated them, while Deb explained to her husband what an invaluable manager she had. Jim had grown homelier and shabbier with his advancing years; Claud more and more exquisitely finished, until he now stood, in his carefully-careless costume--his short, pointed beard the same tone of silver-grey as his flannel suit, his finely-chiselled features the hue of old ivory--a perfect model of patrician 'form'. Only there was plenty of vigour still manifest in the bushman's bony frame, while the man of the world wore a valetudinarian air, leaning on the arm of his regal, upright wife.

"Eh, isn't it like old times!" she mused aloud, as her eyes roamed about the shed, where every sweating worker was finding time to gaze at her. "I see some of the old faces--there's Harry Fox--and old David--and isn't that Keziah's grandson? I must go and speak to them."

She left her husband at the sorter's table, that he and Jim might get reacquainted--men never learned to know each other while women were in the way--and it seemed to them both a long time before she came back.

Claud asked questions about the clip, and other matters of business; and he criticised the manager's management.

"Rather behind the times--isn't it?--for a place like Redford. I thought all the big stations sheared by machinery now."

"I've only been waiting for Miss--Mrs Dalzell's return to advise her to have the machines," said Jim, scrupulous to give Deb's husband all possible information.

"We must have them, of course. I believe in scientific methods."

Mr Dalzell did not ask Jim how his sisters were, and how his brothers were getting on--did not remember that he had any. And when Deb came back, to be gently but firmly ordered out of that dirty place by her new lord and master, the latter failed to take, although he did not fail to perceive, the hint of her eyes that Jim should be asked to dinner.

"No," said he, linking his arm in hers as they left the shed, "no outsiders, Debbie. I want you all to myself now."

And the words and tone were so sweet to her that she could not be sorry for the possible hurt to Jim's feelings. She was young again today, with her world-weary husband making love to her like this. That theory of their having come together merely to keep each other warm on the cold road to the grave was laughingly flung to the winds. She laid her strong right hand on his, limp upon her arm, and expanded her deep chest to the sunny morning air.

"Oh, Claud! Oh, isn't it wonderful, after all these years! You remember that night--that night in the garden? The seat is there still--we will go and sit on it tonight--"

"My dear, I dare not sit out after sunset, so subject as I am to bronchitis."

"No, no, of course not--I forgot your bronchitis. This is the time for you to be out--and this air will soon make another man of you, dear.

Isn't it a heavenly climate? Isn't it divine, this sun? Look here, Claud, we've got some capital horses--or we had; I'll ask Jim. What do you say to a ride--a long, lovely bush ride, like the old rides we used to have together?"

Words cannot describe the pang that went through her when he shook his head indifferently, and said he was too old for such violent exercise now.

"Stuff!" she cried angrily.--

"Besides, I haven't been on a horse for so long that I shouldn't know how to sit him," he teased her lazily. "You wouldn't like to see me tumble off at your hall door, before the servants, would you?"

"Oh, Claud! And to think how you used to ride!"

But of course she knew this was a joke, and laughed it off.

"It's nothing but sheer indolence," said she, patting the hand on her arm--that shapely ivory hand, with its polished filbert nails--"and I see that my mission in life is to cure you of it. Come, we will make a start with a real country walk."

She began to drag him away from the bowered homestead, but he planted his feet, and took his hand from her arm.

"Not now, Debbie," he objected gently, but with that subtle note of mastership that had struck so sharply into Jim's sensitiveness; "it is mail-day, and the letters will be at the house by this time."