[p i]
]

[p iv]
]

“‘He is exactly twenty-one pounds,’ she said.”

The Story of a Baby.] [

[Page 2].

[p v]
]

[p vii]
]TO THE BEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD

E. T., Sydney.

[p ix]
]CONTENTS

[p 1]
]THE STORY OF A BABY

CHAPTER I
THE BURDEN OF IT

Larrie had been carrying it for a long way and said it was quite time Dot took her turn.

Dot was arguing the point.

She reminded him of all athletic sports he had taken part in, and of all the prizes he had won; she asked him what was the use of being six-foot-two and an impossible number of inches round the chest if he could not carry a baby.

Larrie gave her an unexpected glance and moved the baby to his other arm; he was heated and unhappy, there seemed absolutely [p 2] ]no end to the red, red road they were traversing, and Dot, as well as refusing to help to carry the burden, laughed aggravatingly at him when he said it was heavy.

‘He is exactly twenty-one pounds,’ she said, ‘I weighed him on the kitchen scales yesterday, I should think a man of your size ought to be able to carry twenty-one pounds without grumbling so.’

‘But he’s on springs, Dot,’ he said, ‘just look at him, he’s never still for a minute, you carry him to the beginning of Lee’s orchard, and then I’ll take him again.’

Dot shook her head.

‘I’m very sorry, Larrie,’ she said, ‘but I really can’t. You know I didn’t want to bring the child, and when you insisted, I said to myself, you should carry him every inch of the way, just for your obstinacy.’

‘But you’re his mother,’ objected Larrie.

He was getting seriously angry, his arms ached unutterably, his clothes were sticking to his back, and twice the baby had poked a little fat thumb in his eye and made it water.

[p 3]
]‘But you’re its father,’ Dot said sweetly.

‘It’s easier for a woman to carry a child than a man’—poor Larrie was mopping his hot brow with his disengaged hand—‘everyone says so; don’t be a little sneak, Dot, my arm’s getting awfully cramped; here, for pity’s sake take him.’

Dot shook her head again.

‘Would you have me break my vow, St Lawrence?’ she said.

She looked provokingly cool and unruffled as she walked along by his side; her gown was white, with transparent puffy sleeves, her hat was white and very large, she had little white canvas shoes, long white Suéde gloves, and she carried a white parasol.

‘I’m hanged,’ said Larrie, and he stopped short in the middle of the road, ‘look here, my good woman, are you going to take your baby, or are you not?’

Dot revolved her sunshade round her little sweet face.

‘No, my good man,’ she said, ‘I don’t propose to carry your baby one step.’

[p 4]
]‘Then I shall drop it,’ said Larrie. He held it up in a threatening position by the back of its crumpled coat, but Dot had gone sailing on.

‘Find a soft place,’ she called, looking back over her shoulder once and seeing him still standing in the road.

‘Little minx,’ he said under his breath.

Then his mouth squared itself; ordinarily it was a pleasant mouth, much given to laughter and merry words; but when it took that obstinate look, one could see capabilities for all manner of things.

He looked carefully around. By the roadside there was a patch of soft, green grass, and a wattle bush, yellow-crowned, beautiful. He laid the child down in the shade of it, he looked to see there were no ants or other insects near; he put on the bootee that was hanging by a string from the little rosy foot and he stuck the india-rubber comforter in its mouth. Then he walked quietly away and caught up to Dot.

‘Well?’ she said, but she looked a little [p 5] ]startled at his empty arms; she drooped the sunshade over the shoulder nearest to him, and gave a hasty, surreptitious glance backward. Larrie strode along.

‘You look fearfully ugly when you screw up your mouth like that,’ she said, looking up at his set side face.

‘You’re an unnatural mother, Dot, that’s what you are,’ he returned hotly. ‘By Jove, if I was a woman, I’d be ashamed to act as you do. You get worse every day you live. I’ve kept excusing you to myself, and saying you would get wiser as you grew older, and instead, you seem more childish every day.’

She looked childish. She was very, very small in stature, very slightly and delicately built. Her hair was in soft gold-brown curls, as short as a boy’s; her eyes were soft, and wide, and tender, and beautiful as a child’s. When she was happy they were the colour of that blue, deep violet we call the Czar, and when she grew thoughtful, or sorrowful, they were like the heart of a great, dark purple pansy. She was not particularly beautiful, [p 6] ]only very fresh, and sweet, and lovable. Larrie once said she always looked like a baby that has been freshly bathed and dressed, and puffed with sweet violet powder, and sent out into the world to refresh tired eyes.

That was one of his courtship sayings, more than a year ago when she was barely seventeen. She was eighteen now, and he was telling her she was an unnatural mother.

‘Why, the child wouldn’t have had its bib on, only I saw to it,’ he said, in a voice that increased in excitement as he dwelt on the enormity.

‘Dear me,’ said Dot, ‘that was very careless of Peggie, I must really speak to her about it.’

‘I shall shake you some day, Dot,’ Larrie said, ‘shake you till your teeth rattle. Sometimes I can hardly keep my hands off you.’

His brow was gloomy, his boyish face troubled, vexed.

And Dot laughed. Leaned against the fence skirting the road that seemed to run to eternity, and laughed outrageously.

[p 7]
]Larrie stopped too. His face was very white and square-looking, his dark eyes held fire. He put his hands on the white, exaggerated shoulders of her muslin dress and turned her round.

‘Go back to the bottom of the hill this instant, and pick up the child and carry it up here,’ he said.

‘Go and insert your foolish old head in a receptacle for pommes-de-terre,’ was Dot’s flippant retort.

Larrie’s hands pressed harder, his chin grew squarer.

‘I’m in earnest, Dot, deadly earnest. I order you to fetch the child, and I intend you to obey me,’ he gave her a little shake to enforce the command. ‘I am your master, and I intend you to know it from this day.’

Dot experienced a vague feeling of surprise at the fire in the eyes that were nearly always clear, and smiling, and loving, then she twisted herself away.

‘Pooh,’ she said, ‘you’re only a stupid overgrown, passionate boy, Larrie. You my [p 8] ]master! You’re nothing in the world but my husband.’

‘Are you going?’ he said in a tone he had never used before to her. ‘Say Yes or No, Dot, instantly.’

‘No,’ said Dot, stormily.

Then they both gave a sob of terror, their faces blanched, and they began to run madly down the hill.

Oh the long, long way they had come, the endless stretch of red, red road that wound back to the gold-tipped wattles, the velvet grass, and their baby!

Larrie was a fleet, wonderful runner. In the little cottage where they lived, manifold silver cups and mugs bore witness to it, and he was running for life now, but Dot nearly outstripped him.

She flew over the ground, hardly touching it, her arms were outstretched, her lips moving. They fell down together on their knees by their baby, just as three furious, hard-driven bullocks thundered by, filling the air with dust and bellowing.

[p 9]
]The baby was blinking happily up at a great fat golden beetle that was making a lazy way up the wattle. It had lost its ‘comforter’ and was sucking its thumb thoughtfully. It had kicked off its white knitted boots, and was curling its pink toes up in the sunshine with great enjoyment.

‘Baby!’ Larrie said. The big fellow was trembling in every limb.

‘Baby!’ said Dot. She gathered it up in her little shaking arms, she put her poor white face down upon it, and broke into such pitiful tears and sobs that it wept too. Larrie took them both into his arms, and sat down on a fallen tree. He soothed them, he called them a thousand tender, beautiful names; he took off Dot’s hat and stroked her little curls, he kissed his baby again and again; he kissed his wife. When they were all quite calm and the bullocks ten miles away, they started again.

‘I’ll carry him,’ said Larrie.

‘Ah no, let me,’ Dot said.

‘Darling, you’re too tired—see, you can hold his hand across my shoulder.’

[p 10]
]‘No, no, give him to me—my arms ache without him.’

‘But the hill—my big baby!’

‘Oh, I must have him—Larrie, let me—see, he is so light—why, he is nothing to carry.’

[p 11]
]CHAPTER II
THE RED ROAD COUNTRY

In cool weather the Red Road was very pleasant walking. It wound up hill and down dale for many a mile till it reached Hornsby, and branched away into different country.

All the way there were gum trees—gum trees and fences; here and there were closer palings and garden shrubs indicating human residence, but they were far apart and the road was very lonely. Parallel to it and showing in places between the trees was the single line of the railway. It did not spoil the scenery at all, it rather gave a friendly look to it and reminded the pedestrian that in spite of the bush silences, the towering trees, the vista of blue hills and the mountain-like [p 12] ]freshness of the air, he could be in all the bustle and happy fellowship of town in half-an-hour.

Away to the left the ground dipped, then rose again, in a blue soft hill, dipped again, and the new rise was purple and beautiful. The third dip, just a line, white sometimes and again blue was the harbour. On clear days one could see the smoke of vessels. Beyond the hills and the water-line stretched Sydney city, white and shining in the distant sunlight. Further away, over near the sky, the grey blue hills and the light that meant sand-stretches was Botany.

Higher up, and between the first and second hill-rise, ran the river they call Lane Cove. A great white building, St Ignatius, made one land-mark and the Mortlake gas-works another; from those places the residents knew their geography. That was Eastwood away over there, nestling among hills; those blurred cottages indicated Ryde; just where the tree tops showed in a hollow, was the head of the river, and right away on the west [p 13] ]horizon a certain patch was the highest place in the blue mountains. In a few years the beautiful country-side will be commonplace suburbs; there will be stucco villas and terrace houses, shops and paved roads; the railway has broken its fastness and the change is inevitable.

The smooth grass slopes, the wooded stretches will live only in memory. The great red-and-black and silver-limbed gums will be hewn down to make way for spreading civilisation. The blue gracious hills will be thick with chimneys and advertisement boards. There will be a double line of railway, no longer picturesque, and big spreading stations instead of primitive sidings where one held up a ‘flag by day and a light at night’ to be picked up of the passing train.

Past St Leonard’s the railway is very new, a matter of months indeed.

Before it was opened there were obstacles in the way of reaching Sydney that made would-be residents shake their heads, and go to live at Paddington, and Forest Lodge, and such [p 14] ]crowded places that could be reached by tram with a certain degree of comfort.

But before the year of grace 1893, the train from the hills that only just escaped being mountains, used to empty out its passengers on the little St Leonard’s Station. There were two ways only after that of getting to Sydney.

Either one merrily trudged a pathway mile, and then caught a North Shore cable tram to the point where the Ferry boat leaves for the Circular Quay, or one entrusted one’s life and well-being to a vehicle that might have been a Noah’s Ark, or a bathing machine, or a convict van.

In ancient days it used to run between Shoalhaven and Moss-Vale, as its red painted sides still bore witness, but travellers in those parts did better for themselves, so they brought it here, and charged sixpence each way for the twenty-five minutes’ journey. Now there is a combination of the railway; pressure was brought to bear, and the New South Wales Government finished in a hurry [p 15] ]a work that had dragged on till people despaired of its completion. The line winds down towards the chimneys and smoke of ‘The Shore’; one has glimpses from the train of blue bright bays and white sails moored boats, and a broken wharf or two waiting to catch the artist’s eye. Then it skirts along the harbour, close to the water, in a semi-circular sweep, and makes an eye-sore. Two years ago, Lavender Bay was beautiful.

But about the Red Road. Just at the top of one of the elevations, there was a big stone house standing in the middle of an orange and lemon orchard. Dot’s mother lived here by herself.

A mile and a half away down the road there was a weather-board cottage in a garden running over with flowers. Larrie and Dot lived here, and the baby of course. They had been going up to ‘mother’s’ the afternoon they quarrelled about carrying the child; they always went on Sundays.

Very often Dot went on Mondays too, [p 16] ]that was the day Peggie, her aide-de-camp, made the cottage unsavoury with soap-suds. Tuesday nights they always had dinner up at the house, Peggie never had time to cook on Tuesdays, there were so many of Dot’s dresses and Larrie’s shirts, and baby’s multitudinous garments to be finely ironed.

On Thursdays and Saturdays the mother used to come down to the cottage and put it straight, and help poor Peggie, and bring a new knitted jacket or bootees or a hood or pinafore for baby.

The house was a big lonely place for such a little woman. She was even smaller than Dot. She had a tiny fragile figure, and a tiny face, brown and shrivelled with Australian suns. Her eyes were very big and pathetic, something like Dot’s in wistful moments, and her mouth with its infinitude of lines, was very sweet.

After her eyes, her brooch was the first thing that invited notice. It was one of those large, very old-fashioned ones with a miniature set on the front of it. Dot had [p 17] ]begged her to cease wearing it; ‘It isn’t good taste,’ she had said once vexedly, ‘keep it in a drawer;’ but the mother would not lay it aside even though it was the only thing in which she had ever thwarted Dot in her life.

When she went to bed she pinned it on her night-gown, when she dressed in the morning she fastened her collar with it. A hundred times a day her fingers strayed to it. In her sleep her hand stole up and closed upon it.

The miniature was of a very young man in the old fashioned naval uniform that used to be worn forty years ago. He had the correct miniature smile, but the eyes were well done and you could see his brow had been splendid. He was Dot’s father, dead sixteen years ago; it was the only likeness he had ever had taken.

Inside the brooch was a cluster of little heads, gaudily painted, six in all; Dot, the seventh, had been born after it was done.

[p 18]
]Four of the heads pressed clay pillows in a churchyard not very far away, seas washed over the fifth, and the sixth lay in a lonely grave in the wilds of Western Australia.

Dot was the only one alive, and now she had flown from the home-nest to one of her own, leaving unutterable desolation behind her in the mother’s heart.

It was because death had so broken and bruised this little frail mother that she had never crossed Dot’s will in anything since she was born. The days of insistence and control, and obedience-seeking were buried with the buried six. Dot ruled, and the mother poured out her heart at her feet and worshipped with a love almost desperate.

So when Dot said she was going to be married at once, albeit only seventeen years had passed over her little sunny head, the mother had not been able to refuse. She had only reminded Larrie, whom she loved dearly and had known for years, how young her darling was, and on her knees she had prayed him to be good to her always. Larrie [p 19] ]was twenty-two. For sixteen years he had come up to the house in the holidays at the first sign of a ripening orange; he had eaten bananas with Dot, one of them at each end of the fruit, when she was two.

He had played cricket with her at six, climbed trees with her at ten, pulled her hair and pinched her for being a girl at twelve, forgotten her for a time at fifteen, and come back and married her at seventeen.

He had £250 a year, and no guardians or parents to give him unasked advice. So he resolved to take a year’s holiday according to his doctor’s orders, before he started his profession, and teach and train Dot till she was an ideal wife. He had all kinds of ideas on the subject, though he was so very boyish to look at, and he intended to inculcate Dot with them all. But for the first year he was so exuberantly happy he forgot all about them.

It was only when the baby was growing into months, and Dot was continually forgetting some article of its clothing, or the kicking [p 20] ]exercise that was to make it an athlete, or when her piano made her forget its existence for a little while, that he began to think he was not doing his duty by her, and must turn over a new leaf.

[p 21]
]CHAPTER III
DOT AND LARRIE FALL OUT

‘And though she is but little, she is fierce.’

The cottage was a delightful place. It was built of weatherboard, not the kind that overlaps, but that with a groove between each board. The verandah was very wide and ran round the four sides; that was Larrie’s great extravagance when he improved the place.

‘Where’s a fellow to smoke when it’s hot or wet if there isn’t a decent verandah?’ he said.

He and Dot had walked miles upon it in the early months of the year, he with his pipe in his lips and a look of great content in his eyes, she with her hands linked at the back of her neck or slipped around his arm.

[p 22]
]There was a profusion of hammocks and lounges and chairs that made you lazy to look at them. That was Dot’s extravagance. On one side the outer wall was of yellow and white roses that flowered eternally, on another, wistaria with delicate down-dropping blooms. The third—the kitchen side—was passion-vines, and the fourth was clear, and showed a grand sweep of country, and all the Sydney vista.

There was a narrow hall and a painted front door, on either side of it long French windows opening, one into the dining-room, the other into Dot’s beautiful little drawing-room.

She had spent a week thinking out the furnishing of that room, and nearly all her mother’s wedding-present cheque upon it.

‘No, I won’t have a carpet,’ she said when her mother was dwelling upon the advantages of Brussels over Wilton pile, ‘and no, I won’t have felt, it’s too stuffy looking; and if you buy me a proper tapestry suite I shall set fire to it. In India people furnish sensibly, [p 23] ]but in Australia, which must be nearly as hot, they do everything in English style.’

The little mother ceased her suggestions, and Dot worked her own will with really charming effect.

The room was rather low, and the walls and ceiling tinted a delicate green. There was a large centre square of white matting, fringed at the edge and a border of pale green around it. The three French windows had long soft curtains of white with pale green frills. No two chairs were alike. They were of rattan and pith, and bamboo in quaint shapes. One had a flat sea-green cushion of plush, one a triangular one of silk with frills of coral pink; there was a lovely pith sofa lounge, wide, inviting, with a pile of pillows in cool Liberty silk. In a corner the piano stood, a beautiful instrument though very plain. It was not draped in art muslin, and it had no photos or bric-à-brac on it to jingle and spoil the wonderful music Dot brought forth from it. A great lamp stood beside it with a green crinkled paper canopy, restful to the eye.

[p 24]
]In another corner there was a low bookcase running along the wall; volumes of Browning caught the eye, Tennyson, William Morris, Shelley, Keats, all the gods.

There was a sandal wood writing-table, with silver handles and silver equipments, a silver lamp with a rose-leaf shade, and a photo of baby in a silver chased frame.

There was not a tambourine on the walls, not a single fan pocket, not a plaque. Half-a-dozen pictures perhaps, bits of exquisite colouring chiefly in long narrow gold frames; a sunset at Manly Lagoon, a bit of the Kanimbla valley, with summer upon it, a water colour of the road above Mossman’s Bay, a woman’s face, pale and unspeakably beautiful, painted against a background of purple velvet, some chrysanthemums, tawny yellow and brown.

One or two engravings as well. ‘Wedded’ in an oak frame hung over the piano. Dot said the man was Larrie’s very counterpart; when she sang she used to look up at it and feel glad he was her husband. On a tall [p 25] ]easel on a table there was the ‘Peacemaker.’ Larrie said the little girl was Dot. There were bits of quaint china on the little tables, and a few photographs, not many. Flowers there were in all possible places. Daffodils and spiky leaves in the windows, roses and ‘shivery’ grass on the tables, low vases of violets and primroses, tall ones of jonquils. Dot dusted this room herself every morning, then before she could put the duster away, the piano would tempt her, and the rest of the house be forgotten. But for Peggie what a place it would have been!

Peggie was a real Cornstalk. She was fully five-feet-eleven, and had impossibly long arms and an impossible number of freckles. But she had also all a Cornstalk’s warm, honest heart; she was devoted to Dot and Larrie, and absolutely worshipped the baby. She made no better a servant as far as work went, than the average untrained Australian girl; but she was wonderfully learned in the ways and wants of babyhood, and so was invaluable to Dot who was absurdly ignorant. When [p 26] ]Larrie had engaged her twelve months ago at a Sydney registry office, he had asked her name.

‘Marjorie

Dorothy Pegerton,’ she said.

‘Ah!’ said Larrie, ‘that’s a high day and holiday name, shall we say Mary on week days?’

‘Marjie, some folks call me,’ she answered. ‘Or there’s Dolly—I’m not particular—you can even call me Peg if you like, Mr—what was it the gentleman said your name was?’

‘Armitage,’ said Larrie, ‘and let us decide on Peggie; it is unique, and altogether charming in these days.’

They were both very fond of Peggie, she was the stay of the cottage in all domestic affairs—it would have fallen to pieces but for her, and the baby—well there is really no knowing what would have happened to that same baby had it not been for Peggie.

Larrie generally minded the baby on Thursday mornings. It was Thursday morning [p 27] ]now. Peggie was doing her routine work for that time, scrubbing the bare pine floors of the bedrooms. Larrie and Dot both hated carpets.

Larrie was smoking his third postprandial pipe, and was pacing up and down one side of the verandah; he would have liked to have gone the whole distance, but then there was the baby.

It was lying in a hammock in a nest of pillows, and looking with calm, large gaze out into all the world that appeared through a gap in the rose creeper. There was the pink flush of recent sleep on its little soft cheeks, and its hair, the softest, warmest gold in the world, was all tumbled and curly with washing. It had a wonderful amount of hair for so young a child, and Dot’s pride in it was forgivable, for nearly all the babies of her acquaintance were bald.

Have you ever kissed a baby’s neck? Was ever anything so warm and white and velvety? The neck of Dot’s baby was absolutely beyond description. Its mouth was [p 28] ]red, bowshaped. Sometimes it gave wide wet touches on Dot’s cheeks, and she would whisper excitedly to Larrie that it was kissing her.

Such wonderful, wondering eyes it had, intensely blue, intensely earnest. There had been moments when Larrie felt he would give his soul to know just what his baby was thinking of.

Did you show it a beautiful flower or a low hanging silver moon, a picture, something bright with colour? it seemed to be looking away far beyond them and smiling in a faint sweet way, because it saw fairer things than ever you dreamed of.

Its hands—well, perhaps they were like most babies’ hands, but neither Dot, nor Larrie, nor Peggie, nor the little mother would have allowed it for a moment. They were like the inside of a flushed, curled, rose-leaf, and when they closed round your finger, you felt how strangely sweet, and soft and warm they were. From the long open window came the sound of Dot’s voice, singing. The [p 29] ]baby was listening as it lay in the hammock. Larrie was listening as he smoked, though in a half reluctant way.

When little souls are born, just before they come to us from the wonderful place of souls, they have to do with a lottery. To a thousand little blind struggling souls, there are half-a-dozen great good gifts. Nine hundred and ninety-four draw blanks, but the band of six come down to us blessed, rejoicing. Dot had been of the six. She had drawn a voice. Generally Larrie rejoiced because of it.

Not this morning, however. He had been brooding lately over Dot’s deficiencies

, and he almost wished she had been of the nine hundred and ninety-four. For one thing, he could have walked all the four sides of the verandah if she had been. The thought rankled.

‘Dot,’ he called in ‘a voice.’

Only little bursts of melody answered him. She was singing a rippling song of Schubert’s; it was in keeping with the warm, soft air [p 30] ]outside, the twittering of birds, the faint motion of the gum leaves.

‘Dot!’ he shouted.

She put a curly little head between the window curtains.

‘Well, Larrakin?’ she said.

‘Come and mind the baby,’ he said shortly, ‘I want to smoke.’

‘But baby doesn’t mind smoke at all—do you, small sweet?’ she said, going over to the hammock. ‘Oh Larrie, look how uncomfortable he is, you’re a nice one to look after him; and where’s his comforter? he’ll have no thumb left presently.’

‘I threw it away,’ Larrie answered, ‘all that indiarubber can’t be good for him, I don’t intend him to have another.’

‘Stupid!’ said Dot. She kissed the baby, tickled it, tossed it, then laid it down again.

‘What did you call me for,’ she said. ‘I was just enjoying myself.’ Her eyes still had the look of being away in the spheres. ‘He’s all right there and it’s your turn to mind him, [p 31] ]Larrie. I walked him about for an hour in the night.’

She moved to go in again.

‘Stop here when I tell you, and mind him,’ he said in an unpardonable voice.

Dot gave him a surprised look.

‘You forget yourself, Larrie,’ she said quietly.

She went in and her fingers wandered into the quiet, calm music of one of Mendelssohn’s gondola songs. But she took it in rather hurried time. Larrie disturbed her when he had this mood on. He came behind her and lifted her hands off the keyboard.

‘Go and mind the child this minute.’ The flame in his eyes showed itself instantly in hers.

‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ she said.

‘Go and mind the child,’ said Larrie.

Dot crashed a passionate chord on the piano, she lifted her right hand for a brilliant run. But Larrie picked her up in his arms and put her outside on the verandah near the hammock. Then he went in and closed the drawing-room door behind him.

[p 32]
]By the time she had flown round through the dining-room he was locking the piano.

‘How dare you!’ Dot said in trembling fury. ‘My piano! give me that key instantly.’

‘Go and mind your child,’ he said. He was stooping a little, for the key stuck, since it was never used; his head was almost on a level with the lid.

The next minute he was standing straight in confused astoundment. Dot had dealt him a passionate box on the ear, and fled from the room.

[p 33]
]CHAPTER IV
THE ‘LITTLE MOTHER’

‘Kiss and be friends, like children being chid.’

It was unwritten law that thunder storms at the cottage should never travel to the house. But when Dot hurried up the drive and burst into the dining-room with a scarlet face and glowing eyes, the mother was afraid something was wrong.

‘Why, it’s Thursday, Dot!’ she said, ‘I was just coming down.’

Dot took off her wide brimmed hat and fanned herself for a moment.

‘There was curry cooking in the kitchen,’ she said; ‘onions, pah!’

‘How’s the baby, why didn’t you bring him?’ asked the little mother.

[p 34]
]‘Oh, bother the baby,’ said Dot.

‘Is Larrie’s neuralgia better?’ the mother ventured after a little pause. And ‘bother Larrie,’ was Dot’s wifely response.

The mother got out the twenty-seventh pair of boots she was knitting for baby, and worked two rows in silence. She wondered if it was Larrie’s fault or Dot’s. Larrie’s she was sure. She wished Dot was her one little girl again, so she could take all the troubles for her.

‘How did Peggie like the new soap I left her?’ she said, anxiously flying from topics that made Dot’s brows frown.

‘Bother Peggie,’ said Dot. ‘She washed baby’s nightgowns with it, and the whole world’s placarded with advertisements that say don’t. Idiot!’

‘The oranges are ripening beautifully,’ said the poor little mother.

Dot went over to her and kissed her passionately.

‘You’re the best woman in the world,’ she said.

[p 35]
]Tears of quick pleasure sprang into the mother’s eyes.

‘My little girl,’ she said softly.

She held Dot from her a minute, and scanned the flushed face with eyes that saw everything.

‘I wish I was,’ Dot said, in a stifled tone, ‘

just yours.’

Anger crept into the mother’s big eyes. ‘Has Larrie?’—she said, ‘Larrie, has he—does he?’—indignation overcame her.

‘Oh no,’ said Dot, ashamed of so nearly infringing the law. ‘Larrie’s all right—what are you running your head against, small woman?’

‘He is good to you?’ suspiciously.

‘Very good.’

She got up and went to the piano. ‘I came to have a good practice,’ she said. ‘One can’t with baby about.’

She screwed up the stool, opened the lid, and got out a pile of music. Wagner was at the bottom of the canterbury, and she sought for him, and then attacked him with level brows.

[p 36]
]By the time she had made ten mistakes, and the little mother’s head was aching, there was the click of an opening gate.

‘I—’ said Dot, ‘

I—think I shall go home.’ She jumped up and peeped through the Venetian. ‘Baby may want me, and—and—if Larrie should happen to come in, you needn’t say I’ve been; he thinks I walk too much.’

She gave her mother a hurried kiss on the top of her cap, and slipped out of the back door and across the paddocks to the train.

Larrie came down the hall with slow step. He sat down in Dot’s old rocking-chair. ‘Morning, mum,’ he said, ‘the oranges are looking lovely.’ He was eating one he had plucked near the gate, but did not seem to be paying any attention to the taste of it.

The little mother regarded him with eyes full of severity, though she tried to hide it.

‘Dot is not looking well,’ she said, ‘haven’t you noticed? We mustn’t let her do too much, we must be very careful of her, Larrie boy.’

[p 37]
]Larrie looked a trifle disturbed for a minute, then righteous wrath prevailed over incipient anxiety. ‘Why she doesn’t do anything,’

he said, ‘anything.’

‘She’s very young,’ was the mother’s reply.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Larrie ‘lots of girls of eighteen are married and do everything.’

‘Not little tiny girls like Dot,’ urged mother, ‘you mustn’t be hard on her, Larrie, she’ll be all she should be in time.’

‘But not if I don’t teach her,’ he insisted; ‘why, how can she?’

‘It comes of itself,’ the mother answered.

But a dark look of recollective annoyance spread over Larrie’s brow.

‘She forgot baby’s teething necklace three days last week, she’s always forgetting things,’ he said.

Then he too remembered the law, and ate the rest of his orange in silence.

‘I wish you would not come down to the cottage quite so often,’ was the remark with which he broke a meditation that had [p 38] ]involved criss-crossed brows and five slow minutes. A little odd sound broke from the mother’s lips. Larrie looked up and saw she was white under her brown and her eyes were piteous.

He crossed over to her with two swift steps. He knelt down beside her chair, and put both his arms round her thin waist.

‘How dare you, mum, how dare you have such thoughts!’ he said. He kissed her several times in an eager, boyish way. ‘You know you could never come too often for me, you know you are more to me than my own mother ever was. It’s only Dot, don’t you see? She’s getting too dependent, mum. We’ll have to let her stand alone a little more. Peggie spoils her, you spoil her—I even spoil her myself—mightn’t it be a good thing to let her do things by herself for a change, just for a trial, mum? And she shall come here of course. Only, don’t you come to the cottage for a bit, and do all the things she leaves undone in that quiet little way you have.’

[p 39]
]‘Not even Saturdays, Larrie? That’s the hardest day.’

‘No,’ Larrie said. ‘Be a good little mum and leave her to me.’

He stood up, all his six feet and odd inches, his young face grave, resolute, his eyes full of seriousness.

‘He looks like a man fit to be trusted with his own wife,’ the little mother told herself as she looked up at him.

Aloud, she said in a tone of wistful resignation. ‘Very well, Larrie, you will be gentle with her, I know—she’s such a little thing.’

Larrie walked home. He was thinking all the way of the new leaf he was about to turn. Dot had behaved in an altogether unforgivable manner. He must be firm with her, very firm, he told himself. He was inclined to spoil her, as he had said, and overlook her faults—but from now, he must show her, too, his displeasure at the disrespectful way she had treated him in the morning. Boxing a husband’s ears!

The red burnt on his brow as he opened [p 40] ]the gate, thinking of it and heard Dot trilling Amiens’ song as she watered some sickly pelargoniums she was trying to grow.

‘I must be firm, very firm,’ Dot had told herself. ‘No husband should order his wife about in the way Larrie ordered me. He is a little, just a little inclined to tyrannise, and I shall be laying up unhappiness for myself if I do not nip it in the earliest bud.’

When she saw his figure coming down the hill, she laid the baby down in the cot inside and bade Peggie give an eye to him. Then she popped on a clean muslin dress with forget-me-nots sprinkled all over it, tied the blue ribbons of her picturesque garden hat in a coquettish bow at the side of her chin, and when Larrie opened the gate she was flitting about the flower beds with an absurdly small red watering can in her hand and the gay little song on her lips. It certainly was provoking.

[Plate opp. p40]
]

“When Larrie opened the gate she was flitting about the flower beds.”

The Story of a Baby.] [[Page 40].

He had pictured her coming to his side with eyes all wet and sorry, and asking forgiveness for being so naughty and childish. [p 41] ]He had decided to forgive her after a time, but to show her first, quietly and gravely, how much in error she had been. And now—

‘Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly!

Then heigh-ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.’

and a whole gamut of lilts and trills of her own introduction.

Larrie closed his lips very tightly and strode past her into the house.

‘I might have known she would turn into that kind of woman,’ he muttered, casting off his straw hat in the dining-room. ‘A man never knows a girl till he’s married to her, she never shows herself in a true light before.’

He went into an adjoining bedroom for a linen coat to get cool in.

Baby was disporting himself in the high-sided cot; his little legs were bare and kicking against the pillows, his arms were bare, and his soft, sweet neck. Such a gurgle and chirrup of welcome he gave his father! He banged his heels on the iron, he gave a [p 42] ]rapturous little leap, and said ‘Googul, googul, googul.’

Larrie glanced half-shamefacedly through the window to make sure Dot could not see, and then he went over to the cot and said glad responsive ‘googuls,’ and submitted his crisp curls to the wee fingers, and tossed him about in his arms.

But when the dinner-bell rang he laid him down in a hurry, and moved out of the room. Only he could not quite call up the stern ‘firm’ manner again.

Dot sprang up the verandah steps, and went into the bedroom to take off her hat, and wash invisible gardening marks from her fingers.

‘I won’t quarrel,’ she whispered to herself, ‘but I must really show him I am not to be bullied. I will be very firm.’

‘Googul’ said baby.

Such a mournful little googul! there were actually two tiny tears welling up in the blue wide eyes, for tossing and petting were joyful to him.

[p 43]
]Dot shut the door. Then she said ‘Baby’ in a tempestuous little way, and two quick answering tears sprang up in her own eyes as she lifted him up to her. It was such a lonely, reproachful little ‘googul.’ She sat down on the bed with him, and made his small heart gladsome again with kisses and baby-talk.

The door opened one inch—then wide.

‘The curry coolin’ as ’ard as it can, and master lookin’ black, and ’ere you are,’ said Peggie resentfully. ‘Give ’im to me, the darling angel.’

Dot handed him over, and hurried into the dining-room.

‘You’re putting milk in, what are you thinking of?’ Larrie said in an injured tone after two minutes’ silence. Dot was actually thus spoiling the cup of tea he always drank brown and sugarful. Peggie had forgotten the slop basin. Dot got up to go to the cupboard which was near Larrie’s end of the table.

‘If you’ll never be naughty again I’ll [p 44] ]forgive you,’ she said in a whisper at his elbow. Her eyes were wet, sorry, pleading.

‘You dear little girl,’ Larrie said. He laid down his knife and fork and put his arms round her waist, ‘I was a perfect brute to you, it was all my fault.’

‘No, mine,’ said Dot.

‘Mine,’ insisted Larrie.

[p 45]
]CHAPTER V
MORE RIFTS IN THE LUTE

‘This grew: I gave commands,

Then all smiles stopped together.’

But naturally this kind of thing could not go on for ever.

Quarrels, with little tender makings up like that had a certain charm while their freshness lasted. But when the fallings out became events of almost weekly occurrence, the fallings in were no longer things to be put away in ‘the hushed herbarium where we keep our hearts’ forget-me-nots.’

Larrie was exacting and inclined to be tyrannical. And Dot was careless and childish, and unreasonable. The first week that the mother did not come down to look after [p 46] ]Peggie, and do her fifty odd acts of straightening, the cottage was in a glorious state of muddle.

Larrie by nature was an order-loving and somewhat methodical man, and had an inborn objection to see Dot’s pretty slippers lying about the house, or stray articles of baby’s clothing on the verandah chairs. He thought breakfast things too ought not to be left on the table till all hours in the morning, and when Dot asked him how he could expect Peggie to dress baby and make the beds and wash up by ten, he retorted brutally that she was a lazy little slattern, and should do it herself.

‘A slattern is a person untidy in herself,’ Dot replied, ‘you can’t say you’ve ever seen me like that, Laurence Armitage!’

And he certainly could not. Whatever her faults were, Dot was a little lady to the backbone, and would have been always sweet and fresh, and guiltless of pins and rents if she had never been able to afford more than fourpence half-penny prints to clothe herself [p 47] ]with. Shabby finery she had a wholesome detestation for; however plain her dress might be, it was always dainty, her shoes fitted trimly, her collar was above reproach and fastened with precision, her gloves were unsoiled, and her hats always fresh if only trimmed with Indian muslin.

But she was certainly a shocking young person where household matters were concerned. There was plenty of work to do even in so small a place; Peggie, however, had cheerfully taken it on her own shoulders at the beginning, and the things she ought to have done and left undone, the little mother did.

It was not until there was a third member in the family that the housework was appreciably neglected. When the fascination of ‘dressing baby’ was no longer new to Dot, and Peggie, its devoted worshipper, begged to add that duty to her others, Dot consented with alacrity. And Larrie looked on and told himself daily these things ought not to be.

[p 48]
]One day there was a very great passage-at-arms. Peggie had gone to Sydney for the day to spend her month’s wages in a fearful and wonderful hat she had long had her eye upon, and Dot was left with the whole burden of the household upon her shoulders.

Generally on the rare occasions of Peggie’s absence, the mother came down and presided over the kitchen and the baby, and Dot had little else to do than lay the table and help to dish up. But to-day Larrie’s wicked conspiracy stood in the way.

The mother sent down a little note; it was very hot, would Dot mind if she did not come, her head was inclined to ache badly? And Larrie had ‘business in town’ and would be back by the train just in time for dinner.

Dot felt overwhelmed with the responsibilities of her position.

‘I think you had better take baby up to mother’s first, Larrie,’ she said, ‘I don’t see how I am to mind him and cook the dinner and do everything.’

‘How does Peggie manage when you’re [p 49] ]away? My dear Dot, I hope you are not going to give me the idea that you are one of those women utterly without resource,’ said my lord Larrie. ‘My sister Charlotte—’

‘Grace!’ cried Dot, ‘spare me the recapitulation of the puddings she could make and the wonders she could do at sixteen.’

‘Well, I only wanted to show you,’ said Larrie.

He brushed the dust off his shoulders, set his straw hat perfectly straight on his head—he always wore it tilted forward or stuck jauntily back in these wilds—and with a paternal kind of kiss to Dot and a grandfatherly one to the baby, he departed.

‘I’ll just show him what I can do,’ said Dot going kitchenwards. ‘Horrid boy!’

It was six or thereabouts when the ‘horrid boy’ returned. He was hungry—amazingly hungry—and apart from his experiment he really hoped that there was a very nice dinner ready. The white tablecloth was on the dining-room table and the flowers were exquisitely arranged, drooping blossoms of [p 50] ]wistaria and delicate leaves on a ground of pale yellow silk. There were also some knives and forks in a heap, two salt-cellars and the silver gong. From the bedroom came doleful baby wails that filled all the cottage. From the kitchen a strong smell of burning.

‘Gracious Lor,’ said Peggie.

But ‘Hang it all!’ was her master’s remark.

Peggie set her bandbox down and followed at his heels into the kitchen.

Dot was standing over the fire. Nearly every piece of crockery in the house stood dirty upon the table. Egg shells lay about, the sugar jar, the currant, the peel, the pepper, the flour, and all the store cupboard were in evidence. She turned a peony face towards them. ‘Dinner’s not ready yet, and it’s no use being cross, Larrie, if only you knew what a bother I’ve had with the fire.’ She lifted a saucepan with a groan and set it aside.

‘Is there anything to eat?’ Larrie asked in [p 51] ]a tone not altogether mild. ‘The place smells like a crematorium.’

Dot sniffed. ‘Does it?’ she said. ‘The meat’s burnt, I couldn’t help it, it burnt while I ran in to dress baby, and then a visitor came after I put some cakes and a batter pudding in the oven, and they burnt, there’s a boiled pudding though, it’ll be cooked in half-an-hour, and we can have eggs for once.’

Peggie hastened to her bedroom to change her very best dress for an old one in which she might take command of her region.

‘You really mean to say, Dot, that in all these hours you haven’t been able to cook a little dinner,’ Larrie began. His chin squared itself, his lips closed.

‘It’s no good making faces, my good man,’ Dot said. ‘I’ve cut my thumb, and I’ve burnt my wrist, and had sparks in my eyes, and now this is all the thanks I get.’

‘Eggs when a man comes in hungry for his dinner!—and a pudding not cooked! The table—’

[p 52]
]‘Will you go out of the kitchen, Laurence Armitage,’ Dot said facing round. ‘Do you think I’ve not had enough without you beginning?’

‘—The table not set and a crying baby,’ Larrie went on.

‘Larrie, do you want to provoke me into throwing a saucepan at your head like an Irish washerwoman?’ Dot said.

She took the lid off the potatoes and disclosed a pulpy mass boiled out of all recognition.

‘I don’t profess to be perfect; accidents will happen even to the sister Charlottes.’

‘It’s this kind of thing that drives a man from his home to seek comfort and pleasure elsewhere,’ Larrie said darkly. He really felt exceedingly ill-used, and Dot’s heated face and worried expression did not appeal to him at all.

He even steeled his heart to the little tired tremble in her voice that showed the tears were near, and all the time came the distracting sound of baby’s mournful screams that no one had time or inclination to soothe.

[p 53]
]‘You’re a bad wife, Dot,’ Larrie said, fully persuaded she was.

Dot gave a hysterical laugh.

‘All this because your food’s not ready to put in your mouth; men are as bad as animals in the Zoo when meal time is delayed!’

‘You fail in your duty in every respect, look at this kitchen, Dot, think of the dinner, listen to your child.’

But Dot, utterly tired and overwrought, burst into a passion of tears and brushed past him.

‘I h-h-hate you,’ she said, ‘I wish I wasn’t married to you, oh I do wish I wasn’t.’

‘And so do I,’ returned Larrie grimly. Even dinner did not restore his equanimity, albeit he made a tolerably hearty one with four boiled eggs, quantities of bread and butter, and half a tin of sardines as dessert.

Dot stayed out in the garden and refused food entirely.

She wept oceans of tired, hot tears and told herself she was the most miserable woman on earth. Later, when only her [p 54] ]eyelashes were wet and the quiet evening wind had cooled her cheeks and heart, she still wondered why girls all the world over were in such a hurry to marry.

She thought wistfully of her careless, unfettered girlhood that she had cut so short through her own wilfulness.

‘I might have had eight more years,’ she whispered to herself, ‘twenty-five is the proper age to marry, he would have been older and more patient too, and I should never have felt like this.’

She put down her head on the old seat back and sobbed again heartbrokenly for ‘like this’ meant that love was dying.

Then the wind dried her tears once more, and she sat staring at a patch of light that fell from the dining-room lamp out upon the little lawn: she was wondering drearily how she should be able to live out all the other days of her life.

Larrie stepped out on the verandah, she could see the red of his cigar and the dusky outlines of his figure.

[p 55]
]‘Dot,’ he called.

The wind carried his voice over the sleeping flowers, and the wet grass down to the broken seat and flung it at her. She slipped out of her place and stole off towards the piece of ground that was still unreclaimed bush; she could not bear his presence yet. But he saw her white flitting dress and followed.

‘The dew’s as heavy as it can be, you’ll get another cold,’ he said, ‘come in.’

She shook her head without looking at him.

‘Come in, and don’t be a silly child,’ he said.

Again she shook her head and walked on.

But he caught her arm and turned her gently but firmly round.

‘I don’t want to have to carry you,’ he said. Then he threw his cigar away and spoke gravely.

‘Look here, Dot, I’m not going to say anything more about this afternoon, we’ll let that go, all I want you to understand is you must give up being childish, and act in a way [p 56] ]that befits a married woman. I’m tired of this.’

Dot did not speak, she hardly heard the words in fact, only the cold tone they were spoken in. She wondered vaguely if her love had been dying for a long time or if to-night was only the beginning. She hoped she should not live long, she felt quite glad to think the doctor had said she had no constitution; how could she go on living if calm careless affection was going to take the place of the wonderful love that had once made a glory of their every hour. They had both been incredulous of the existence of such a place as the dead level of matrimony—was this it indeed they had already come upon?

‘Well?’ said Larrie, ‘I’m waiting, Dot, are you going to give it up?’