The Crooked Stick Or Pollies's Probation Part 7

How little we know of these new lands and their inhabitants, all English as they are, as if in the Midland Counties, yet of manner strangely fresh! All is high development and new material. How I am shut up with a magnificent young creature, with a face like Egeria, and a figure like the huntress maid, burning with enthusiasm, talented, cultured, full of all n.o.ble feminine attributes; dangerous with the fascinations of fresh, innocent womanhood, yet ignorant of the ways of the world, and childlike in her unsuspicious confidence!

How I wish I was young again! I do really, Charlie. Could I but blot out the years that have intervened--not so many--but what Dead-Sea fruits have I not tasted during their stormy course?

What a burnt-out volcano is this heart of mine! Could I but recall the past and be like one of our schoolboy heroes!

'The happy page who was the lord Of one soft heart and his own sword.'

What empires and kingdoms would I give--supposing them to be mine--to revert to that position, and so prove myself worthy of the fresh heart, the petals of which are about to open before my graduated advance, like a rose in June! That I shall be the favoured suitor, despite of the opposition of a good-looking, stalwart, provincial rival, my experience a.s.sures me. With women _l'inconnu_ is always the interesting, the romantic, the irresistible. In despite of myself, I can see clearly my future position of _jeune premier_ in this opera of the wilderness. It might be worse, you will say. That I grant. But you know that Helen of Troy would never control this restless, wayward heart of mine in perpetuity.

For the rest, the life is bearable enough, free, untrammelled, novel, with a tinge of adventure. My days are spent in the saddle. There's just a hint of shooting, no hunting, no fishing. We dress for dinner, and live much as at a shooting-lodge in the Highlands, with stock-riders for gillies.

So we are not altogether barbarous, as you others imagine. This letter is far too long, and imprudently confiding, so I hasten to subscribe myself yours, as of old,

BERTRAM DEVEREUX.

So much for the impression Pollie was capable of producing on a worn, world-weary heart.

It was a strange fate which had thus imprisoned this beautiful creature, so richly endowed with all the attributes which combine to form the restless, tameless, unsatisfied man, amid surroundings so uninteresting and changeless. Eager for adventure, even for danger, she was curious with a child's hungering, insatiable appet.i.te for the knowledge of wondrous lands, cities, peoples; hating the daily monotone to which the woman's household duties are necessarily attuned. Capable of the strongest, the most pa.s.sionate attachments, yet all-ignorant as yet of the subtle, sweet, o'ermastering tone of the world-conquering harmony of love. In the position to which she appeared immovably attached by circ.u.mstance, she seemed like a strayed bright-plumaged bird, a foreign captive, taken in infancy and reared in an alien land.

A chamois in a sheepfold, a leopardess in a drawing-room, a red deer in a trim and close-paled enclosure, could not have been more hopelessly at war with surroundings, more incongruously provided with food and shelter. Day after day a growing discontent, a hopeless despair of life, seemed to weigh her down, to take the savour from existence, to restrain the instinctive sportiveness of youth, to hush the spirit-song of praise with which, like the awakening bird, she should have welcomed each dawning morn.

'Why must it be thus?' she often asked herself when, restless at midnight as at noon-day, she gazed from her window across the wide star-lit plain, in which groups of melancholy, swaying, pale-hued trees seemed to be whispering secrets of past famine years or sighing weirdly over sorrows to come.

'Will it always be thus?' thought she, 'and is my life to trickle slowly along like the course of our enfeebled stream, until after long a.s.similation to this desert dreariness I become like one of the house-mothers I see around me? Ignorant, incurious, narrow, with an intelligence gradually shrivelling up to the dimensions of a childhood with which they have nothing else in common! What a hateful prospect!

What a death in life to look forward to! Were it not for my darling mother and the few friends I may call my own, I feel as if I could put an end to an existence which has so little to recommend it, so pitiably small an outlook.'

In all this outburst of capricious discontent the experienced reader of the world's page will perceive nothing more than the instinctive, unwarranted impatience of youth, which in man or woman is so utterly devoid of reason or grat.i.tude.

What! does not the vast, calm universe wait and watch, weak railer at destiny, for the completion of 'Nature's wondrous plan,' counting not the years, the aeons, as the sands of the sea, that intervene between promise and fulfilment? Hast thou not enjoyed ease, love unwearying, anxious tendance, from the dawn of thy helpless, as yet useless being; and while all creation suffers and travails, canst thou not endure the unfolding of thy fated lot?

Applying, possibly, some such remedies to her mental ailment, life appeared to go on at Corindah much as it had done, Pollie thought, since the earliest days she could remember as a tiny girl. She could almost have supposed that the same things had been said by the same people, or people very like them, since her babyhood. Wonderings whether it would rain soon, by the mildly expectant; doubts whether it would ever rain again, by the scoffers and unbelievers; a.s.sertions that the seasons had changed, by the prophets of evil; superficial, sanguine predictions that it would rain some day, by the light-minded; hope and trusting confidence in the Great Ruler, by the devout, that He would not suffer his people to be utterly cast down and forsaken, that the dumb creatures of His hand would have a bound set to their sufferings--all these things had she heard and experienced from time to time ever since she could recall herself as a conscious ent.i.ty. Then after a less or greater interval the blessed rain of heaven would fall, plenteously, excessively, perhaps superfluously, without warning, without limit, and the long agony of the drought would be over.

Something of this sort had Pollie been saying to her cousin, as they sat at breakfast one gusty, unsettled, red-clouded morning. He had been inquiring satirically whether it ever rained at Corindah.

'He had been here six months and had never seen any. Would all the sheep die? Would all the watercourses dry up? Would they all be forced to abandon the station? And was this a sample of Australia and its vaunted bush life?'

'Things are not quite so bad generally,' laughed Pollie; 'though I cannot deny that in these months, unless the weather changes, it will be what you call a "blue look-out." Poor mother is more anxious every week, and Mr. Gateward's face is becoming fixed in one expression, like that of a bronze idol.'

'It hardly seems like a laughing matter,' said he gravely. 'The loss of the labour of years, of a fortune, and then "Que faire?"'

'I am laughing in faith,' retorted Pollie; 'so that really I am in a more religious frame of mind than all the solemn-faced people who despair of G.o.d's goodness. Of course, it will rain some time or other.

It might even rain to-night, though it does not look the least like it.

Again, it might not rain for a year.'

'What a terribly incomprehensible state of matters to exist in!' said Bertram. 'I little thought, when I grumbled at a rainy week in England, what blessings in disguise I was undervaluing. And what would be the case if a small deluge took place?'

'All the rivers would be in flood. A few shepherds and mail-men, poor fellows! would be drowned, and the whole North-West country, say a thousand miles square, would be one luxuriant prairie of gra.s.s nearly as high as your head. Mr. Gateward would sing for joy as far as his musical disabilities would permit him; and poor mother's bank account would be nearly twenty thousand pounds on the right side within a few weeks.'

'And the sheep?'

'A few hundreds would die--the wet and cold would kill them, being weak.

All the rest would wax fat, and perhaps kick in a month.'

'Truly wonderful! I must take your word literally, but really I should hardly believe any one else.'

'You may always believe me,' the girl said proudly, as she stood up and faced him, with raised head and erect form, her bright blue eyes fixed steadfastly upon his, and almost emitting a flash, it seemed to him, from their steady glow. 'Promise me that every word I say shall be accepted by you as the absolute, unalterable truth, or I shall speak to you no more about my native land, or anything else.'

'I promise,' he said, taking her hand in his own and reverently bowing over it; 'and now I am going for a long ride, to the outer well; I must be off.'

'To Durbah, forty miles and more?' she said. 'Why did not you make an earlier start? What are you going to ride?'

'Wongamong,' he said. 'He is a wonderful goer, and seems quieter than he was.'

'He is a treacherous, bad-tempered brute,' she returned answer, rather quickly, 'and nothing will ever make him quiet. Besides, I think there's some break of weather coming on. The wind has changed for the third time since sunrise, and the clouds are banking up fast to the west. We might have a storm.'

'What fun!' said the Englishman; 'I should like it of all things. The climate here does not seem to have energy enough for a right down good storm.'

'You don't know what you are talking about,' she said; 'you haven't seen a storm, or a flood, or a bush-fire, or anything. Take my advice and ride a steady horse to-day. Something tells me you might want one.

Promise me that you will.'

There was an unusual earnestness in the girl's voice as she spoke, as, placing her hand on his shoulder, she looked in his face. A low muttering roll of thunder seemed to accentuate her appeal. The young man smiled, as he answered, 'My dearest Pollie, I should be sorry to refuse the slightest request so flatteringly in my interest: I will seek me a charger practised in the _menage_ in place of the erratic Wongamong.'

In a few minutes more, as she stood by the open window, she saw him ride through the outer gate on a dark bay horse, whose elastic stride and powerful frame showed him to be one of those rare combinations of strength, speed, and courage, of which the great Australian land holds no inconsiderable number.

'Dear old Guardsman! I'm so glad that he took him. I didn't know that he was in. I wonder what makes me so nervous to-day. It surely cannot be going to _rain_, or is there an earthquake imminent? I believe in presentiments, and if the day is like the others we have had this year, I never shall do so again. There goes another clap of thunder!'

That morning was spent by Pollie Devereux, it must be confessed, in a manner so aimless, so inconsistent with her mother's fixed principles on the score of regular employment for young women, that it drew forth more than one mild reproach from that kindly matron.

'My dear, I can't bear to see you going about from one room to another without settling to anything. Can you not sit down to your work, or practise, or go on with some historical reading, or your French, in which Bertram says you are making such progress? You're wasting your time sadly.'

'Mother!' said her daughter, facing round upon her with mock defiance, 'could you sit down to your work if there was going to be a shipwreck, or a cyclone, or a great battle fought on the plain? Though, really, you good old mother, I think you would, and thread your needle till the Roundheads marched in at the outer gate, as they did in "The Lay of Britomart," or took down the slip-rails, as it would be in our case. But do you know, there is an electrical current in the air, I am sure, and so I, being of a more excitable nature, do really feel so aroused and excited, that I can't keep quiet. Something is going to happen.'

'Now, my dearest Pollie, are not you letting your imagination run away with you? What can happen? There may be a little wind and rain--what the shepherds call "a nice storm"--but nothing else, I fear.'

'"Something wicked this way comes,"' chanted Pollie, putting herself into a dramatic att.i.tude. 'See how dark it is growing! Look at the lightning! Oh, dear, what a flash! And down comes the rain at last--in earnest, too.'

'The rain will have to be very earnest, my dear,' said Mrs. Devereux, 'before poor Corindah feels the benefit of it--though that certainly is a heavy shower. Early in the season too; this is only the 8th of February. There is the lunch-bell. Come along, my dear. A little lunch will do you good.'

'How wet poor Bertram will be!' said Pollie, pityingly. 'He said we couldn't have storms here.'

CHAPTER V

During the half hour bestowed on lunch the weather apparently devoted itself to falsifying Mrs. Devereux's prediction, and raising Pollie to the position of a prophetess. It is a curious fact that in Australia few people are weather-wise. No one can tell, for instance, with any certainty, when it will rain. No one can say with precision when it will not rain. All other forms of weather, be it understood, are immaterial.

Rain means everything--peace, plenty, prosperity, the potentiality of boundless wealth; the want of it losses and crosses, sin, suffering, and starvation. For nearly two years the hearts of the dwellers in that vast pastoral region had been made sick with hope deferred. Now, without warning, with no particular indication of change from the long, warm days and still, cloudless nights that seemed as if they would never end, that earth would gradually become desiccated into a grave of all living creatures, suddenly it commenced to rain as if to reproduce the Noachian deluge.

The larger creeks bore a turgid tide, level with their banks, on the surface of which tree-stems and branches, with differing samples of _debris_, whirled floating down.