[p i]
IN THE MIST OF THE MOUNTAINS

[p ii]
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
(Uniform with this volume)

SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS

THE FAMILY AT MISRULE

THE LITTLE LARRIKIN

MISS BOBBIE

THE CAMP AT WANDINONG

THREE LITTLE MAIDS

THE STORY OF A BABY

LITTLE MOTHER MEG

BETTY AND CO.

MOTHER’S LITTLE GIRL

THE WHITE-ROOF TREE

THE STOLEN VOYAGE

[p2]

“‘I’m so sorry, chickies,’ she said kindly.” ([Page 19].)

[p3]
IN THE MIST OF
THE MOUNTAINS

By
ETHEL TURNER
(Mrs. H. R. Curlewis)
Author of “Seven Little Australians,” “The Little Larrikin,” “Miss Bobbie,” etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. MACFARLANE

LONDON
WARD LOCK & CO. LIMITED
1908

[p5]

TO
H. R. C.

“They that have heard the overword

Know life’s a dream worth dreaming.”

Henley.

[p7]
CONTENTS

[Back to [Contents]]

[p9]
CHAPTER I

SOMEWHAT CONTAGIOUS

It is October and the mountains are waking from their short winter sleep.

It is October, the month of the moving mists.

Come and let us take a walk, not down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson, but up a mountain side with Nature,—nay, with God Himself. There is nothing to see, absolutely nothing at all. You know that there are trees on either hand of you, and that the undergrowth is bursting into the stars and delicate bells of its springtime bloom. But your knowledge of this is merely one of the services your memory does for you, for the mist has covered it all away from sight.

You look behind you and your world is blotted out.

You look in front of you,—nay, you cannot look in front of you, for the mist lies as a veil, actually on your face.

“I breathed up a whole cloud this morning,” Lynn remarked once.

[p10]
“I eated one—and it was nasty,” said Max.

Still you continue to look in front of you as far as may be.

And the next moment the veil lifts,—clean up over your head perhaps, and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges catching in the trees.

And now your gaze leaps and lingers, and lingers and leaps for miles in front of you. You look downward and the ball of the earth has split at your feet and the huge fissure has widened and widened till a limitless valley lies there. You look down hundreds of feet and see like sprouting seedlings the tops of gum trees,—gum trees two hundred feet high.

The far side of the valley shows a rolling mountain chain washed in in tender shades of purple, paling nearer at hand to blue, the tender indescribable mountain blue. Great jagged headlands hang perilously over the deep, and the silver thread of a distant waterfall gleams here and there down the face of the gorges of whose wonderful beauty the tourist has heard and comes thousands of miles to see.

A billowy cloud, soft and dazzling as snow, has fallen from the sky or risen with the mist, you are not sure which, and lies bewilderingly [p11] low and lovely on the purple hills. Then there comes that damp, delicate sensation on your face and all is mist again.

It is just as if a lovely girl now playfully hid her exquisite face with the gauzy scarf twined round her head, and now showed it, each fresh glimpse revealing a newer and tenderer beauty.

Lynn, who, though but eight, is given to quaint and delicate turns of thought, calls it all “God’s kaleidoscope.”

Nearer to the station cluster the weatherboard business places of the little township of Burunda. The butcher does a trade of perhaps two sheep a week during the winter, but leaps to many a score of them when “the strangers” begin to come up from the moist city at the first touch of November’s heat. The bakers—there are two of them—fight bitterly for “the strangers’” custom.

All the winter a few decrepit-looking tarts and buns form the shop window display of each. But when signs of life begin in the cottages the battle starts.

“Seven for sixpence,” Benson writes in red letters on a card in the midst of his “drop” cakes.

“Eight for sixpence,” Dunks retorts in larger type in the midst of his heap of the popular confectionery.

“Nine for sixpence,” is Benson’s desperate [p12] challenge,—the cakes of course shrinking somewhat in size.

The baker does not live who can afford to give ten for sixpence.

Benson has now to create new signs. “No second-class flour used in the cakes of this establishment,” is one of his efforts.

Dunks caps it.

“No miserable counting out of currants in cakes baked here. Visitors are invited to sample.” And on his counter is a very fruity specimen cut across. As a result of this competition “the strangers” may count on quite respectable cakes for their tea.

There are two grocers—brothers, oddly enough, though not connected in trade; steady, peaceable old men with whom brotherly love continues despite trade rivalry.

But they possess a live young assistant each, and it is war to the knife between these lads.

They fall on the startled stranger before he is fairly out of the train and thrust before him the merits of their respective establishments.

Howie, the boy of Septimus Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself right into the midst of your mountain of [p13] luggage and children and porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he, Larkin, will bring your letters with him from the post office every morning when he calls for orders.

It is said that the loser invariably fights the winner after these contests unless there falls to his lot another passenger by the same train. But if it happens that the luck is to neither,—that is, if all are hotel or boarding-house visitors, or (an unforgivable thing in the eyes of both) if the newcomers are people who bring their own groceries from the metropolis, then the two go off almost friends and help each other up with any boxes the train may have brought for them.

The Lomax children took a keen interest in the warfare, and always asked Larkin, when he came for orders in the morning, how many of the new people’s custom he had secured.

For it was Larkin’s trick of insinuating himself among the portmanteaus and confused servants and children, and then talking rapidly of bacon and letters, that had gained him Mrs. Lomax’s custom when the family first came to Burunda. That bewildered lady simply had to consent that he might call to get him out of the knot of seemingly [p14] inextricable confusion with which she had to deal.

There are two photographers, two shoe-menders, two house agents, two visiting doctors.

It is conceivable that if a third man of any trade come along the character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have the quiet monotony of the place broken up by a civil war.

Not far from the station stand the hotels and the more modest boarding-houses.

And then begin the cottages and villas—nearly all of them weatherboard—of people who like to have a foothold a few thousand feet in the air when summer’s shroud of damp enwraps the Harbour city.

The Lomax children swung disconsolately on the gate of their summer home. All they could see was the road in front of them, now clear, now filled with flying mist, and their senses were wearied of it.

Might they go down the gully?

No, they might not go down the gully. Who had time on a busy day like this, and Miss Bibby writing to New Zealand, to go trapesing down all those rough places with them?

Couldn’t they go alone?

[p15]
No, they could not go alone. A nice thing it would be for the Judge’s children to be lost down a gully and sleeping out all night.

Well, might they go down to the waterfall? They couldn’t get lost on made paths and with picnickers everywhere.

No, they might not go down to the waterfall. What would the Judge say if he heard his children had been down a dangerous place like that and no one with them!

“Well, let us go up to the shops and the station. We’ve got twopence between us, and we want to spend it, and besides——” But Pauline broke off, recognizing it was worse than useless to explain to a person like Anna the pleasure they could obtain from watching to see whether Howie or their own Larkin got most of the customers by the excursion train. But Anna was horrified at the idea.

“In those dusty clothes and with your sandals off! A nice condition for the shopkeepers to see a Judge’s children in!”

“Oh, hang a Judge’s children,” muttered Pauline, but not until Anna had returned to the house.

“Wish daddy was a butcher,” said Muffie.

“Not a butcher,” said Lynn, who was sensitive and never could pass the shop of hanging carcases without a shudder,—“but a baker would be very nice, and make drop [p16] cakes seven for sixpence. Oh, I could eat a drop cake,—couldn’t you?”

“A Benson’s one,” said Pauline dreamily; “they’re the sweetest.”

“But there are more currants in Dunks’s,” said Muffie. “I shall spend my penny there.”

“You won’t,” said Lynn, who was subject to fits of pessimism, “you’ll never spend it. Anna will never have finished washing up. Miss Bibby will never have finished writing to mamma. We’ll never get up to the shops. We’ll have to stop shut up here for ever.”

“But why,” said Muffie, who was only six, and easily bewildered by words, “why can’t we do like always and ever when we come up here?”

“Why, indeed!” said Pauline with much bitterness.

Max, the only son of the Judge and aged just four, had a clear way of his own of arriving at the cause of various effects.

“Wish a late big lecipice would fall on Anna,” he said.

“Really, Max,” said Lynn, whose unspent penny was burning a hole in her temper, “you are getting too big to talk like that. Late big lecipice! Say, great big precipice.”

“I did,” said Max indignantly,—“I’ll push you off the gate in a minute.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, wouldn’t I?”

[p17]
“If you move your foot I’ll jerk you off.”

“Now, don’t begin that,” said Pauline, “you’ll make him cough again,—let him alone, Lynn.”

“Well, he mustn’t say he’ll push me off,” said Lynn. “I’m only trying to teach him to talk prop’ly. This morning he asked Larkin to come and look at his lee lowing in the lound. And I had to explain that he meant ‘tree growing in the ground.’”

Max was red with anger.

“I didn’t say that,” he shouted, “I said plain’s anything lee lowing in the lound.”

He sent each of the difficult words from his mouth with a snap, as if he were discharging them from a pistol that jammed.

But Lynn jeered again.

He could not jerk her from the gate, though he tried hard; eight years old can effect a much firmer lodgment than four years. He sheltered himself behind his weakness.

“You’ll make me cough in a minute,” he said, and began to draw in his breath.

“You’ll make me cough,” said Lynn.

“I cough worser than you,” insisted Max.

“You don’t,—I get much redder,” said Lynn.

“I go purple, Miss Bibby says so,” said Muffie complacently.

“I go nearly lack in the face,” said Max.

It was possible that Pauline, who being ten was always superior, would have laid claim [p18] herself to some still darker shade of complexion but that a diversion occurred at the moment.

One or two people carrying golf clubs had passed along the monotonous road during the morning and Max had longed to be a caddie. Once a woodcutter had gone along with his axe over his shoulder and Lynn had been moved to recite—to the disgust of the others—“Woodman, spare that tree.” And once Larkin had flashed past on horseback, Howie tearing along not far behind, it having come to their ears five minutes before that a cottage far away through the bush was opened, its occupants having come up by the night train.

“When I grow up,” said Muffie enviously, “I’ll be a grocer’s boy.”

“An’ I’ll be the other one,” said Max, so filled with glorious visions suddenly that he forgot his original intention of coughing.

But now there came briskly round the corner one of the big Burunda wagonettes, overflowing with ladies and children and picnic baskets and plainly bound for the waterfall.

“Why,” said Lynn excitedly, “there are Effie and Florence.”

“And Frank,” cried Muffie joyously.

“Why,” said one of the ladies in the wagonette, “there are the little Lomaxes,—I didn’t know they were up.” She stopped the driver.

[p19]
Lynn and Muffie and Max were for rushing out and charging bodily into the vehicle, and indeed one of the ladies was beckoning encouragingly to them all.

Lynn’s swift imagination saw themselves borne joyously off to the loved waterfall; she felt the very water of the cool delicious pools on her hot feet.

But Pauline, with a look of absolute tragedy on her fair little face, banged the gate and kept her brothers and sisters on the hither side of it.

“We’re contagious,” she shouted.

“Wha-a-at?” said the lady.

“Whooping cough,” said Pauline with extreme dejection in her tone, and as if for a guarantee of her veracity Max was seized with a paroxysm then and there, and Muffie followed suit.

“Oh, drive on!” cried the lady hastily to her man, and gave an alarmed look at her own little flock. But she pulled up again fifty yards away and came back on foot and stood a very respectable distance away from the infected spot.

“I’m so sorry, chickies,” she said kindly; “that’s a wretched visitor for the holidays. Have you been very bad?”

“I go nearly lack in the face,” said Max, not without pride.

“Is mother with you?” said the lady, [p20] Mrs. Gowan by name, somewhat anxiously, “and your father?”

“No,” said Pauline sadly, “they’ve gone to New Zealand,—mamma got quite ill with nursing us, and daddie got it too, and he wouldn’t come up here.”

Muffie giggled. “People’s laugh ’cause daddie’s got it,” she volunteered.

“But in New Zealand, you see,” explained Pauline gravely, “no one will know him.”

Mrs. Gowan smiled a little—as others had done. For indeed the thought of a dignified Judge drawing in his breath and whooping on the bench like a frightened child was not without its humorous side.

The poor Judge had become quite sensitive about the ridiculous complaint his children had given to him, and after struggling with it pettishly for some time, and the vacation coming along, he had finally proposed the New Zealand trip to his wife, the children being sent to complete their cure to the summer home he had long since built on the mountains.

“Well,” said Mrs. Gowan, “I am really sorry, dears, for we could have had such fun, all of us up here at the same time, couldn’t we? But you won’t speak to Effie and Florence if you meet them anywhere, will you? Even if they try to speak to you? I have such a dread of whooping cough.”

[p21]
“Paul told you straight away off that we were contagerous,” said Lynn, a little hurt that after her sister’s magnificent honesty such admonition should be deemed necessary.

“Yes, I know, dear,” said the lady, “and indeed I thank Pauline very much for being so considerate. It is Effie and Florence I am thinking of; they are so thoughtless, I am afraid they will try to come over to you.”

“You’d better not let them come down to this part of the road then,” said Pauline sagely.

“But that’s the difficulty,” said Mrs. Gowan, “their uncle has taken ‘Tenby’”—she waved her hand to the cottage opposite that had stood irksomely monotonous with closed shutters and chained gate ever since the Lomaxes had come to Burunda this year, “and of course they will often want to come down to him to listen to his stories. He is Hugh Kinross, you know.”

They did not know, and even now the name was a name to them and nothing more. Mrs. Gowan evidently took it for granted that even children must have heard of her brother, the famous author.

“So you will help me, won’t you, Pauline?” she said appealingly,—“you won’t let Max and Muffie run out and talk to them! And if they try to come here you will send them away, won’t you, dear?”

[p22]
Pauline promised her co-operation, though indeed her heart sank at the prospect of seeing her merry little friend Effie day after day as close as the opposite fence and never as much as exchanging chocolates with her.

“When is he coming?” she said heavily.

“To-morrow,” said Mrs. Gowan—then she laughed—“but I think he would be afraid to come, don’t you, if he knew he was going to have four little rackets like you for such near neighbours. He has come all this way to be perfectly quiet and write his new book.”

Lynn looked quite impressed.

“I think we’d better stop in the orchard,” she said soberly.

Mrs. Gowan kissed her hand to them and went off laughing to her wagonette.

[Back to [Contents]]

[p23]
CHAPTER II

TREATING OF LARKIN AND HIS COMMISSION

“Well,” said Lynn, looking across at “Tenby,” “I’m glad it’s going to be lived in at last, poor thing. It makes me quite mis’rable to see it standing there in the sun with its eyes shut up tight as if it wanted to wake up on’y it darerunt.”

“Like the Sleeping Beauty,” said Pauline.

Lynn, in whose composition had run from babyhood a marked vein of poetry, shook her hair back from her face.

“I made a song about it down at the waterfall the other day,” she said. “Only mamma wasn’t here to write it down, and I didn’t know if you could spell all the words, Paul.”

“What nonsense!” said Paul, “as if I couldn’t spell any word a child like you could think of.”

“Well, write it then,” urged Lynn, “and I can send it in my next letter to mamma; the rhyums in it came quite right this time.”

So Pauline, having nothing better to do, [p24] and anxious to display her spelling prowess, fished out of her pocket a bit of pencil and one of Octavius Smith’s trade cards that drew attention to his prime line of bacon. This last Larkin had pressed upon her that very morning, and urged her to put it on the mantelpiece, where their visitors could see it. They owed him a return. Morning after morning did he, after receiving his orders from Miss Bibby at the kitchen door, ride his horse to the road at one side of the house, where some well-grown pines made a kindly screen, and there let the children, one after the other, have all the delights of a stolen ride. The ever-present dread of Miss Bibby’s discovery naturally added a fearful joy to the proceedings “A judge’s eldest daughter astride a grocer’s horse!” Pauline could readily imagine the lady’s tone of horror.

It seemed very easy repayment for the happiest moment of the dull day to promise to put this advertisement in evidence. But at present it was only the white back of the card that was pressed into service.

Lynn’s eyes grew round and solemn, as they always did when she was delivering herself of a “song.” She stared hard at the shuttered house.

“Call it ‘The Very Sad House,’” she said.

“‘The Very Sad House,’” wrote Pauline obediently.

[p25]
“No, cross that out,” said Lynn; “I remember I thought of a better name. It’s called ‘Forsaked.’”

Pauline grumbled at this. “You mustn’t alter any more,” she said; “even writing very small I can’t get much in.”

“Well,” said Lynn, “write this down.” And she dictated slowly. And slowly and a little painfully, for the space was cramped, Pauline wrote:—

“‘Silent and sad it wates by the road,

And it’s eyes are shut with tears.

Oh, Tenby, my heart is so greavous for you,

You haven’t woked up for years.

Why don’t you open your eyelids up wide

And laugh and dance and frolick outside?

And why don’t—’”

“There can’t be any more,” said Pauline inexorably; “I’m at the bottom of the card.”

“Oh,” said the little poetess piteously, “you must put in the end lines,—can’t you turn over?”

“Well, go on,” said Pauline—“but it’s very silly. As if a house could frolic outside of itself! Mother will laugh like anything.”

But Lynn’s face was trustfully serene. Mother never laughed.

“Go on,” she said,—“the next line is, ‘Out on the grass.’”

“I won’t write stories,” said Pauline [p26] decisively. “There’s not a bit of grass in that garden, and you know there isn’t.”

Lynn looked distressed.

“But there ought to be,” she said.

“But there isn’t,” repeated Pauline; “and I tell you I won’t write untruths.”

“Very well,” said Lynn meekly, “it can be earth, only it doesn’t sound so green. Say,

‘Out on the earth where the fairies play;

Come and play with us, oh, come and play.’”

“‘Out on the earth where the fairies play,’” wrote Pauline, and the next line said, “Prime middle cuts at Octavius Smith’s, Elevenpence a pound.”

“Here’s Larkin,” called Muffie excitedly, “an’ he’s coming very slowly, so he can’t be in a hurry. Let’s ask him for another ride.”

The four clambered on to the gate again.

Larkin was riding back with lowered crest.

He was a thin lad, small for fourteen, with sharp features and blue eyes, and a head of hair nearer in shade to an orange than to the lowly carrot to which red hair is popularly likened. He wore a khaki coat a size too small for him, and an old Panama hat some big-headed “stranger” had left behind. Round this latter dangled a string veil that he had manufactured for himself against the ubiquitous and famous mountain fly.

[p27]
But the flamboyant head drooped wretchedly just at present.

He pulled up at the gate, seeing Miss Bibby was not on guard, and poured out a graphic account of the ride between himself and Howie. Browning’s “Ghent to Aix” was nothing to it, and “How we beat the Favourite” was colourless narrative to the early part of Larkin’s recital. But then the tragedy happened. Larkin’s horse got a pebble in its foot, and went dead lame. Howie shot ahead and caught the lady of the house just as she was reluctantly sallying forth to find one of his trade and leave her order.

“An’ she’s got a baby—patent foods and biscuits,” said Larkin in a choked voice, “and I saw quite four boys,—oatmeal, tins of jam, bacon, butter,—I wouldn’t have lost her for anything. An’ only for giving you kids a ride this morning I’d have heard sooner, an’ got the start of Howie.”

The children felt quite crushed to think they were the cause of Larkin’s great loss. For a loss it was indeed; both boys received commissions on the accounts of the new customers they obtained, and a lady with a baby and four hungry boys, not to mention a maid or two, and possible visitors, was not to be picked up every day.

Then Pauline had a brilliant thought.

“We know of another new one,” she cried.

[p28]
“‘Tenby’ is taken; a man’s coming up by to-night’s train. Howie doesn’t know, no one knows but ourselves,—that will make up to you, Larkin. Men eat more than babies.”

Larkin was greatly excited. He made rapid plans: he would slip his cards under the door to-night; he would present himself at the house the moment it was unlocked in the morning. He would take butter, eggs, sugar, with him, so that breakfast at least would be comfortable, and the wife or housekeeper, or maiden sister, whichever the “man” brought with him, would bless his thoughtfulness, and promptly promise her custom.

Then his jaw dropped with a sudden recollection.

To-morrow was his holiday—the only whole week-day holiday he received in six months. He had arranged to go home, as he always did, catching the 11 o’clock train that night, and travelling through the midnight to the highest point of the mountains, and into the early dawn down, down the Great Zigzag on the other side, till he came out on the plain to a little siding, where he scrambled out with his bundle, and shouldered it briskly, and trudged along eight miles, perhaps, to a wretched selection where his father, for his mother and six or seven children younger than Larkin, fought the losing fight of the Man on the Land. A few hours here, slipping [p29] his wages into his mother’s reluctant hand, escorted by his father round the place to see the latest devices for trapping rabbits and other pests, telling his brothers stirring tales of the struggles between himself and Howie, then the long tramp to the station, and the travelling through the night again, snatching his only chance of sleep sitting upright in his crowded carriage, he fitted his holidays naturally into the Railway Commissioners’ Cheap Excursion seasons. And then the fight again in the new-born day with Howie.

The lad looked miserable. How could he give up such a holiday? Yet how allow Howie an uncontested victory with the latest stranger?

Max and Muffie had run back along the path in pursuit of a lively lizard. Only Lynn and Pauline, their sweet little faces ashine with sympathy, hung on the gate.

The lad blurted out his highest hope to them. He gave his mother his wages, of course, he told them, but he had been saving up his commissions for a special purpose. He wanted to put “a bit of stuff” on the Melbourne Cup.

“I know I’ll win,” he said, with glistening eyes. “It’ll be five hundred at least,—p’raps a cool thou,—then I’ll buy Octavius and Septimus out, and mother and the old man shall chuck up that dirty selection, and come [p30] an’ get all the custom here. And the kids can go to school, an’ I’ll get Polly an’ Blarnche a pianner.” The rapt look of the visionary was on his face.

But he was torn with the conflict; it was plain he must give up either his holiday or his commission on the new “stranger.”

Pauline’s position as eldest had developed her naturally resourceful and intrepid disposition.

“Larkin,” she said, “I’ve thought what to do. You go and see your mother. We’ll get you the new man’s custom. And before Howie gets a chance of it.”

Then Anna appeared on the verandah, ringing the lunch bell violently, and Larkin rode home his dead lame horse, and Pauline marched into the house with her head up, the other children following and clamouring to be told of her great plan.

[Back to [Contents]]

[p31]
CHAPTER III

MISS BIBBY

The Judge’s mountain home had an inviting aspect. It was not large,—it was not handsome,—simply a comfortable brick cottage with a gable or two cut to please the eye as well as meet architectural requirements, and a fine window here and there where a glimpse of far-off mountain piled against mountain could be obtained.

It stood back from the road and hid itself from the picnickers’ gaze in lovely garments of trees and green vines that would take the envious newly-sprung cottage ten years at least to imitate.

Yet “Greenways” had never looked crude and painful as the naked places about did, even when it emerged years ago fresh from the hands of the local builder. For the Lomaxes, unlike many Australians, respected the hand of Nature even when it had traced Australian rather than English designs on their land. And the young gum trees still tossed their light heads here and there, and [p32] clumps of noble old ones stood everywhere smiling benevolent encouragement to the beginners.

It had been the Judge’s original intention to have nothing but native trees and shrubs and flowers on this summer estate, and a well-clipped hedge of saltbush at present flanked the drive, and a breakwind plantation of Tasmanian blue gum, alternated with silver wattle, ran for several hundred feet where the westerly winds had at first caught one side of the house.

The tennis-court was guarded along both ends by soldierly rows of magnificently grown waratahs, that from October to Christmas time were all in bloom and worth coming far to see. And you approached that same tennis-court through a shady plantation, where every tree and shrub was native-born, and the ground carpeted with gay patches of boronia and other purely aboriginal loveliness. Rarely did the Judge take his walks abroad on the hills or in the gullies but he returned carefully cherishing in one hand some little seedling tree or plant he had dug up with his penknife. And he would set and water and shade it in his plantation, and tell you its name and its species, and its manner of growth, for the bushland was an open book to him and every letter of it had been lovingly conned.

[p33]
But Mrs. Lomax, English-born, while he was Australian, through two or three generations, hankered, after a year or two of this native garden, for the softer and richer greens and more varied loveliness of the trees and flowers of English cultivation. So they laughingly drew a line of division through the estate; and it must be confessed that, whatever the Judge’s opinion, the average eye gathered more permanent pleasure and refreshment from Mrs. Lomax’s division than from the stiff, though brilliant, portion under the Judge’s jurisdiction.

After ten years the demarcation was not so clearly defined: pines and young oaks, ashes and elms, stood about in perfectly friendly relations with the gum trees and wattles, and the boronia looked up at the rose and saw that it, too, was good.

“Have you washed your hands? Max, Muffie—go into the bathroom instantly, please, and wash your hands,” said Miss Bibby, as the children trooped in after their interview with Larkin.

Dinner was spread in the dining-room as usual. The children sighed for the times when their mother had been with them, and had had such a delightful habit of having that meal served in all sorts of unexpected places, even on days when they could not go for an orthodox picnic. Behind the waratahs [p34] one day—and of course they imagined themselves waited on by a row of stiff and magnificent footmen in red plush. Among the wattles another time, and the wattles just in bloom. Once in the vegetable garden with big leaves for plates, and the tomatoes that made the first course bending heavily on the trellis behind their seats, and the purple guavas that made the last hiding among their leaves just the other side of the path.

It would have required an earthquake to dislodge Miss Bibby from the stronghold of the dining-room table.

She sat at the head of that table now, a thin delicately-coloured woman not far from forty, with a nervous mouth and anxious blue eyes. Possibly she had been quite pretty in youth, if ever peace and the quiet mind had been hers. But the unrest and worry of her look left rather a disturbed impression on the beholder.

She sat at the head of the table and carved a leg of mutton, and saw Anna putting vegetables upon the children’s plates under silent protest.

She did not believe in meat. She did not believe in vegetables. She did not believe in puddings. Pauline had drawn her into confessing this at the first meal she had had with them, and the shock was so great that Muffie had actually burst into tears, and Max had [p35] clambered down from his chair with the half-formed intention of setting out at once for New Zealand, and dragging his mother back to her proper place.

Miss Bibby, however, set their minds at rest. She had no intention of interfering with the food they were accustomed to; only she begged to be excused from partaking of such herself.

No meat, no vegetables, no pudding, and still alive! The children took an abnormal interest in watching her preparations for eating at each meal.

She began each day, they found out, with a pint of hot water. Indeed they found it out to their sorrow, for she had Mrs. Lomax’s entire permission to work upon themselves one or two of her hygienic reforms—if she could only manage it.

So at seven o’clock, when in various stages of their morning toilet, they were confronted by Miss Bibby, armed with a tall jug of hot water and five tumblers. And they found they had to sit down on the edges of their beds and, receiving a full tumbler, hand back an empty one. If it had been their mother now, they might have protested and wheedled and got out of it in some way. But Miss Bibby was so strange to them, so new—and then mother had bidden them, even as she gave them their last kiss at the station, do [p36] all she bade them—that they found themselves making an absolute habit of this watery beginning to the day. Worse still, instead of being rewarded for such heroic behaviour, they were, in consequence of it, deprived of the pleasant cup of cocoa or hot milk that had always hitherto formed part of their breakfast.

“I consider it perfectly uncivilized to eat and drink at the same meal,” Miss Bibby said.

Pauline blinked at her very fast, in a way she had when angry.

“Daddy and mamma always do,” she said.

“For children, I mean,” said Miss Bibby, correcting herself. “I trust, Pauline, you do not think me capable of reflecting upon the conduct of your father and mother.”

But Pauline was engrossed with her breakfast again.

“All food should be taken dry,” Miss Bibby continued; “and your mother is anxious that I should get you into good ways. At the same time the human system needs a certain degree of liquid, so I shall call you in for your drink meals at eleven, and at three, and you may also have a glass of water each upon retiring.”

Sometimes it made the children quite depressed to watch her. Pauline used to say she would feel perfectly happy if she [p37] could once see Miss Bibby eat a big, lovely woolly currant bun or a plate of rich brown sausages dished on buttered toast.

And Lynn—it actually moved Lynn to poetry, the tragedy of this meagre fare. Pauline was bidden write “the song” down.

“And the name of the song,” added the poetess after a melancholy verse or two, “is ‘Sorrow,’ or ‘Miss Bibby.’”

Muffie told of the appearance of Mrs. Gowan and the heroic conduct of Pauline in announcing their contagion.

Lynn paused in her agreeable occupation of slicing up her banana and adding strawberry jam and milk to it.

“From to-morrow,” she said, “we have to keep in the orchard when we’re at home, so the man won’t hear us shouting.”

“What man?” asked Miss Bibby.

“The one who writes books,” said Lynn.

“What is the child talking about?” said Miss Bibby, looking at Pauline.

“At ‘Tenby,’” said Pauline. “Well, he should have asked were there any children near when he took the cottage. Why should we give up swinging on the gate? He can take his old books and sit on the Orphan Rock to write them. No one will disturb him there.”

“What are you talking about, children?” said Miss Bibby. “Pauline, answer me [p38] properly. I didn’t know ‘Tenby’ was let. Who has taken it?”

“I forget his name,” said Pauline; “please pass the bananas. Oh, Lynn, you’ve taken all the jam. Will you ring for some more, Miss Bibby?”

Miss Bibby rang absent-mindedly, though she had made the observation that any one eating bananas and strawberry jam together was actually inviting an attack of acute indigestion.

“I suppose you have confused the account,” she said, and sighed.

But a momentary agitation had shaken her.

She was a woman with one absorbing ambition—to publish a book. She carried a most pathetic tin trunk about with her—the sepulchre of the hopes of years. The MS. of at least seven novels lay inside, each neatly wrapped in paper, and with a faithful docket of its adventures pasted upon it.

It is enough to examine one of them:—The Heirs of Tranby Chase. It weighed four or five pounds. The publishers would never have had to grumble at its brevity, or have been compelled to use large type and wide margins to “bulk up.” It was written in the thin, early Victorian handwriting not often met with in this generation [p39] of writers. It subscribed faithfully to the great canons of publication—for instance, it was written on “one side only of the paper”; it was pinned together at the “left-hand top corner”; no publisher had ever found it necessary to gnash his teeth because it reached him rolled instead of flat.

Yet behold the piteous history!

“The Heirs of Tranby Chase, by Katherine J. Howard Bibby, Author of The Quest of Guy Warburton, Through Darkness to Light, or Lady Felicia’s Peril, etc., etc. Commenced Jan. 1, 1895. Finished March 6, 1896. Copied out (three times) December, 1896. Submitted to Messrs. Kesteven, Sydney; but they say they are publishing very little at present, as times are depressed. To James & James, Melbourne; returned. And unread, I am sure; the package had hardly been touched. To Brown & McMahon, Melbourne. A most polite note, but they do not care to publish so long a story. Shortened it, and copied again (July, 1898). Sent again to Brown & McMahon. A printed refusal: ‘Regret cannot use.’ December, 1899, posted to London to Messrs. Frogget & Leach. No reply. Wrote five times, but could not get packet back again, though I enclosed postal note for return in case of rejection. (Memo., never submit another MS. to this firm.) Copied story again, and sent [p40] to Bailey & Thompson, Paternoster Row. An extremely kind and flattering reply; their reader evidently thinks highly of the story. Will be glad to publish it at my own expense. Consulted Thomas. He thinks this would be unwise, and will not allow me to withdraw my savings from the bank for the purpose until I have tried other firms. Sent to Mr. Lance Rankin, the great author’s agent, together with the five-guinea fee which I found was necessary. April, 1902. Returned by Mr. Rankin, who says he has submitted it to fourteen different firms, but that there is a great depression in the book market at present. Possibly my plot is weak—must try another story.”

And so on, and so forth. The pluck of the woman! The marvellous patience and endurance! Did this extinguish her spirit? No; she refreshed herself with reading tales of other writers worsted in the fight—Gissing’s New Grub Street afforded her the maximum of melancholy satisfaction—and then she fell to work on a new book. And what the character of the new book was the latest popular success decided. Among the seven novels the trunk secreted was a historical romance, a religious novel, a detective tale, some “bush studies,” and a book of political character.

Lynn disposed of a second saucerful of [p41] the banana compound that she called her ice cream. It seemed to quicken her memory.

“Hugh Rosskin is his name,” she said deliberately, “and if Howie gets him it will be a great big shame, ’cause Larkin——”

But Miss Bibby was standing up, trembling from head to foot, and with a spot of scarlet colour in her cheeks.

“Hugh Kinross,—oh children, children—was that really the name? Oh, Pauline, my dear, my dear, try to think!”

“Yes,” said Pauline, “Hugh Kinross—that was it.”

“Hugh Kinross! Hugh Kinross! And at ‘Tenby’!” Miss Bibby looked as excited as Muffie had done, when, going to feed her guinea-pig the day before, she found five little pinny gigs, as she tumultuously expressed it, had been unexpectedly added unto her stock.

Then she tried to pull herself swiftly together and to look—as Miss Bibby should look.

“If you have finished, children, you may go,” she said. “Yes, Anna, you may clear the table.”

She hurried away out of the room.

“It’s my belief she’s in love with ’im, and p’raps they’ve ’ad a quarrel,” said Anna, who was aching in this quiet country place for a spice of adventure. Miss Bibby had [p42] not noticed that the girl had come into the room at Max’s request with “more lawberry leserve.”

The little girls looked at each other with sparkling eyes. They loved a mystery as much as Anna did.

“Oh,” said Pauline, “won’t it be lovely? Let’s go and watch at the gate.”

They flew off to stare at “Tenby”—“Tenby” with the local charwoman already there, throwing up the windows and sweeping away the dust of the winter.

[Back to [Contents]]

[p43]
CHAPTER IV

THE FAMOUS NOVELIST

It was very early morning, seven o’clock perhaps, and Hugh Kinross, the famous novelist, sat in a camp chair at “Tenby,” his feet on the verandah rail, and marvelled at his fame.

It was not his custom to rise quite so early to do this, but circumstances over which he alone had any control, namely the mountain fly, had driven him out of bed. There are no mosquitoes on the mountains; consequently many householders will not go to the expense of mosquito nets.

But the mountain fly rises earlier than any other fly extant, and the stranger who is not provided with a guardian net, leaping desperately up with it, has the early-rising virtue forcibly thrust upon him.

Later in the day, his wrath forgotten, the novelist writes to his city friends and boasts of the light atmosphere of the mountains, [p44] as if he had had something to do with the manufacture of it.

“I actually find myself rising at six,” he writes, “simply to get out into the delicious air.” And not one mention does he make of the debt he owes to the fly.

Hugh Kinross had been routed out at six and, his first choler spent, was quite pleased with himself. He discovered a path leading to a gully, and in the gully a pool beneath a fall, and here he had a circumscribed but delightful swim. Then he climbed up the gully side again, and the Lomaxes’ home caught his eye, and so pleased the artistic side of him that he leaned over one of its hedges to gaze at it.

And “Greenways” in the clear morning air, nestling in its setting of tender green, splashed everywhere with the light tints of flowers,—“Greenways,” with its eyes turned to the mountain where the marvellous morning lay in the first fresh indescribable blueness that creeps there after the pinks and purples and yellows of the dawn,—“Greenways,” with a chimney at the rear sending up the friendly line of its earliest smoke, begot in him a vague emotion that all the bricks and mortar in the city were incapable of doing. He told himself that he, too, wanted a home;—not the boarding-house life that had been his before fame swooped down on him, nor the more luxurious [p45] club life that had followed, nor a holiday-month like this present one, in a rented cottage with his favourite sister for companion; but a home—like “Greenways”—with a slender woman in white, like the one there moving about the paths. There was no question in his mind but that she must be slender, for he himself and his sister were both stout. How Miss Bibby’s heart would have leapt could she have known whose eyes were watching her as she walked perseveringly up and down, practising the early deep-breathing exercises that she maintained were so essential to health!

And it must be a home with signs of children’s occupancy about—he was quite sure of that. Max and Muffie would have been amazed to know that the little red tricycle on the verandah, and the doll’s perambulator overturned on a path, were assisting a celebrated man to this vague emotion.

“Ridiculous!” he said. “I’m hungry; that’s what it is; this mountain air is doing me good already.”

He crossed the road and went back to “Tenby,” where his sister’s bedroom was yet darkened, and the very servant still slept serenely. He was good-hearted, and could not bring himself to hammer on the doors; but as he went to the pantry to find something for himself, he concluded that they had fortified [p46] themselves against the fly by drawing the sheets over their heads.

The pantry and kitchen left him rueful. Boxes of every size stood about in what seemed to him the same wild confusion that they had worn last night when they had been tossed out of the carrier’s cart. He foraged everywhere and could find no bread; in none of the tins or jars in which he peered lurked there any butter. Yet he realized that he had no one to blame but himself for this confusion. Matters had been beautifully arranged. His married sister, Mrs. Gowan, had taken “Tenby” for him, and seen to it that it was spotlessly clean; his unmarried sister, Kate, with an efficient servant, was to come up a week ahead of himself to get everything in perfect order and comfort for him, since he was supposed to be overworked and in need of a change.

And then, what must he do but upset everything! He had told Kate he would come to the station and see her comfortably off; but, indeed, she had seen all the luggage into the van, and the servant into another carriage, and bought her own magazines and ensconced herself comfortably in an empty first-class compartment before there was a sign of him. But then he came, and with a vengeance. She saw him, red-faced with hurrying, come striding along the platform, a Gladstone bag [p47] in his hand, plainly looking for her. She waved to him and he seized on a guard to unlock her door for him.

“You’ll be carried on,—quick, quick, get out!” she gasped, for the bell was ringing.

But he had dropped comfortably on to the seat opposite to her, after putting his portmanteau on the rack.

“I’m coming, too,” he said.

“You’re not,” she cried,—“you can’t,—I shan’t be ready for you; there’ll be no breakfast. Get out immediately, Hugh, and don’t be so foolish.” She actually dragged at his coat to pull him up from his seat.

But then the train gave a jerk, and she recognized the matter was out of her hands.

“Well, of all the wild doings!” she said; “you really might be twenty again, Hugh, and going off to England at two days’ notice with your very socks undarned.”

“I wish I were,” he said, and ruefully smoothed a bald patch on the top of his head.

“But—but—you don’t realize things a bit. I haven’t ordered anything,—the very beds aren’t made,—there won’t be a meal fit to eat for at least two days.” Kate looked as nearly put out as a stout, bright-faced woman of forty-five could look.

[p48]
“I’ll sleep on a sofa,” he said, good-humouredly.

“It will have to be made up,” she snapped, or tried to snap.

“Very well, I’ll sleep under it.”

“And what about breakfast? Well, you will simply have to go to the hotel till I’m ready for you.”

“I’ll go to no hotel,” he said; “I’m sick of them. I’ll have half of your breakfast.”

“A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no butter,” she said scornfully.

“A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no butter be it,” he answered.

“But what on earth induced you to do such a mad thing?” she persisted.

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“I think it was chiefly because the beggar wouldn’t propose,” he said.

“What are you talking about, you mad boy?”

“You see,” he said, “he was a decent fellow—I’d quite spread myself on him, and she was no end of a girl, quite the best I’ve done. And I’d got him right up to the fence, and I’m hanged if I could get him over. He perorated, he posed like a shop-walker, you could see him hanging limp like a broken puppet, and me behind with beads on my forehead uselessly jerking the wires.”

[p49]
“Poor old boy!” said Kate sympathetically. “Oh, he’ll do it beautifully when once you’re on the mountains. Now I look at you I can see you really are run down. I’ve been planning how I will make you a comfortable little study out of one of the bedrooms, and fix up your writing-table under a window that has a view, and give you a verandah to stalk up and down on when the fine frenzies seize you. But I don’t want you to come in for all the confusion of the first day.”

“Nonsense,” he said; “if you can stand it, I ought to be able to.”

But that noble sentiment was uttered at night, after a comfortable dinner at the club, and with the grateful appreciation of the sacrifice this loyal sister was making in breaking all her engagements to come to look after his welfare. It was before breakfast now, a time when the sentiments are absolutely raw, and the noblest mind is capable of resentment when not fortified with food. Hugh went out of the pantry and settled himself gloomily upon a side verandah, uncertain which to anathematize, the flies that had broken in upon his slumbers, or the ones that evidently were studiously refraining from awakening his sister and her handmaid.

But after a time the peace of the perfect morning soothed him, and he put his feet up on [p50] the verandah rail, and fell to marvelling at his own fame.

Five years ago he had been quite unknown—a struggling journalist savagely treated by Fate. And for sheer need once of saner employment for his leisure hours, he poured out some of the bitterness that a severe attack of indigestion had deposited on the wholesome substratum of his nature in perhaps as fierce a novel as had yet been written.

Five publishers rejected it with their customary regret; to the stereotyped refusal of the sixth the reader added a few lines, saying he had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy. Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six shillings for his only capital puts five of them in a sweep where the odds are a thousand to one.

And then Fortune, who for more than forty years had pretended she did not know that there was any such person as Hugh Kinross cumbering the globe, suddenly veered [p51] round and smiled one of her most gracious smiles upon him.

He fairly leapt into fame. The inscrutable reading world, long bored almost to death by a sameness of methods, actually rose up and waved its hat at this savage treatment, and demanded that he should continue so to deal with it.