Cover art
'HERMIE.' (See page [134].)
THE WONDER-CHILD
An Australian Story
BY
ETHEL TURNER
(MRS. H. R. CURLEWIS)
Author of 'Seven Little Australians,' 'The Camp
at Wandinong,' 'The Story of a Baby,' 'Three
Little Maids,' etc.
'The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Is, not to fancy what were fair in life,
Provided it could be,—but finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means,'—ROBERT BROWNING.
With Illustrations by Gordon Browne
FIFTH IMPRESSION
LONDON
THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Paul's Churchyard E.C.
1901
CONTENTS
CHAP.
- [TWO WORLDS]
- [THE WONDER-CHILD]
- [THE SECOND LADY-HELP]
- [THE PAINTING OF THE SHIP]
- [DUNKS' SELECTION]
- [THIRTY THOUSAND A YEAR]
- [COME HOME! COME HOME]
- [AN ATHEIST]
- [MORTIMER STEVENSON]
- ['I LOVE YOU']
- [A SQUATTER PATRIOT]
- [R.M.S. UTOPIA]
- [THE BUSH CONTINGENT]
- [HOME TO THE HARBOUR]
- [HEART TO HEART]
- [THE ROSERY]
- [CROSSING THE VELDT]
- [A SKIRMISH BY THE WAY]
- [THE MOOD OF A MAID]
- [MISS BROWNE]
- [THE MORNING CABLES]
- [CONCLUSION]
THE WONDER-CHILD
CHAPTER I
Two Worlds
'Ah me! while thee the seas and sounding shores
Hold far away.'
They were walking from the school to the paddock where the children's horses, thirty or forty nondescript animals, grazed all day long.
'Sh' think,' said Peter Small, son of the butcher who fed Wilgandra,—'Sh' think you could have afforded one sprat at least for teacher's present!'
'Afforded!' quoth Bartie Cameron. 'I could have afforded a thousand pounds!'
'Then why d'ye 'ave 'oles in your stockings, and bursted boots?' asked Peter.
''Cause it's much nicer than having darns and patches,' returned Bartie, looking disparagingly upon his companion's neater garments.
'My old man's got a mortgage on your sheep,' said Peter, baffled on the patches.
'We like mortgages,' said Bartie airily; 'they make the sheep grow.'
'We've got a new red carpet comin' for our livin'-room,' shouted Peter.
Bartie looked him over contemptuously.
'I've got a sister in London, and she makes fifty pounds a night by her playing.'
'You're a lie!' said Peter, who was new to the school, and did not know the Camerons.
'Take this, then!' said Bartie, and put his strong young fist in the face of his friend.
A big girl, saddling her horse, came and pulled them apart, after they had had a round or two.
'Haven't I got a sister who makes fifty pounds a concert?' demanded Bartie breathlessly.
'Ain't he a lie?' demanded the son of the slaughterer.
The big girl arbitrated instantly. Certainly Bartie had a sister who made hundreds and hundreds—more shame to her. Peter had better go home and read the papers, if he did not believe it.
Peter said he did read the papers; he had never seen anything in them about no sisters.
'What papers?' said the girl.
'P'lice Budget and War Cry, of course,' answered the boy.
'That's the sort of paper your sister would be in,' Bartie said; 'mine is always in the cables.' He turned off from both girl and boy, and made his way to where a half-clipped horse nibbled at the exhausted pasturage.
A small girl of eight had, with incredible exertion, put the huge saddle on its back; Bartie had nothing to do but fasten the girths in place and put on the bridle. He flung himself up, and moved the animal close to a stump; Floss, the small girl, climbed to a place behind him, and a nine-year-old boy, playing marbles near, rose up at the sight of the moving horse, pocketed his marbles, swung his bag of books round his neck, and clambered up to the third place on the steed's broad neck.
All the paddock was a-move. There was a general race down to the sliprails, a gentle thunder of horses' hoofs and boys' shouts, broken by the shriller cries and 'Good-byes' of the girls.
Then up and down, left and right, away along the branching roads rode the country school children, tea and home before them, behind, one more day of the quarter's tedium dropped away for ever.
The Cameron horse jogged along; as a rule she had only Roly and Floss to carry, Bartie having a rough pony to journey on; but to-day the pony had wandered too far to be caught before school-time, so Tramby had an extra burden, and walked sedately.
Floss had a tiny red palm to show.
'Why, that's three times this week you've had the cane! You must be going it, Floss,' said Roly.
'It was sewing,' sighed Floss; 'how would you like to sew? I know you'd go and hide behind the shed.'
The front horseman turned his head. 'It's time you did learn, Floss,' he said; 'look at my stockings, I'm sick of having holes in them. Look at my trousers.'
'I heard Miss Browne telling you to leave them for her to mend,' said Floss.
'No, thanks,' said Bart; 'I know her mending too jolly well. She'd patch it with stuff that 'ud show a mile off.'
'Yes, look at my elbows,' Roly said; and though the positions forbade this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.
Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock was exquisite—a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully embroidered.
'I wish some more of Challis's frocks would come,' she sighed; 'this one's so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.'
'Why, she'd be shivering,' said Roly.
'Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!'
'Think how hot it is here!' sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming little face with her disengaged hand.
'I got the mail,' Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his pocket—a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the postmark of Windsor.
'Suppose they're stopping with the Queen again,' he added laconically.
'Wonder what they have for tea at her house?' sighed Flossie, and her system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in prospect for her own meal.
Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out the sliprail—nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.
Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.
HOME FROM SCHOOL.
Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not saying very much, for Wilgandra's vegetation as a rule copied the neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant to the eye in country wilds.
There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have carried, but still in good condition—it seemed as if the mortgage was fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.
Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves lapped idly.
There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and a table.
Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah, and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.
There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.
'Have you got the mail?' she asked.
Bartie nodded.
'Go and fetch father,' he said; 'he's down with the roses, I saw his hat moving.'
He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table, on which was no cloth as yet.
'Miss Browne,' he called, the very tears in his voice, 'Miss Browne, isn't tea ready?'
A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying into the room.
'Poor Roly!' she said. 'Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending your best jacket, and didn't notice the time. But I'll soon have it ready now.' She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged, and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.
Then she noticed the rent of extraordinary dimensions in Bartie's coat, the same jagged place that had made even Peter Small exclaim.
'Dear, dear,' she said, 'this will never do. This really must not go a moment longer. Where is my thimble? Where can I have put my thimble? Give me that coat, Bartie, this minute, if you please.
Bartie took it off, but sat with jealous eye upon it all the time it was in her hands. He would have it mended his way.
'Now, look here,' he said, 'please don't go putting any fresh stuff in it. Just sew it over and over, so the places come together. I'll take to mending my own clothes. It's just the way you go letting new pieces in that spoils your mending, Miss Browne.'
'But, Bartie dear,' the gentle lady said, 'see, my love, when a place is torn right away like this, we have to put fresh stuff underneath. I'll just get a tiny bit from my work-basket.'
'You just won't,' said Bartie stubbornly. 'You give it to me, and I'll mend it myself'—and he actually took the needle and cotton and cobbled it over till there certainly was no hole left.
'Now, my love,' he said, and held it up triumphantly.
'But it will break away again to-morrow,' said Miss Browne, in deep distress. 'If you would just let me put a little patch, Bartie.'
But Bartie clung to his coat.
Roly had strayed out to look at his kangaroo-rats, but now came back.
The tears came to his voice again at the sight of Miss Browne, sitting with her thimble on, looking helplessly at Bartie.
'Oh dear,' he said, 'isn't there never going to be any tea?'
'You poor little fellow!' she said. 'Just one minute more, Roly dear. You can be sitting down.'
Hermie had gone flying across the ground to a place in the eighty acres where the ground dipped into a little valley. It was all fenced round with wire, to keep off the fowls and sheep. Within there grew roses in such beauty and profusion as to astonish one. She saw a very old cabbage-tree hat bending over a bush, and darted towards it.
'Dad,' she said, 'dad darling, come along in; the mail has come.'
There rose up a man, grey as his own selection, a man not more than five-and-forty. Eyes blue as Hermie's own looked from under his grey eyebrows, a grey beard covered his mouth.
'The mail, did you say, little woman?' he said, and stopped to prune just one more shoot here, and snip off just one more drooping blossom.
'And tea, too, darling; at least I suppose it will be ready some day. Come along, you are very tired, daddie. Why did you start ploughing a day like this?'
The man sighed.
'It had to be done, girlie; but see, I gave myself a reward. I have been down here an hour. Now let us go and read our letters.'
As they reached the living-room they found Miss Browne dusting the piano and tidying the music; the setting of the table was advanced one stage further, that is, the knives and forks were now on.
Roly came up again from another visit to his rats.
'Miss Browne,' he said, 'oh dear, oh dear!'—and stalked off to the kitchen, to demand of Lizzie, the young State girl who scrubbed and washed for them, where was the corned beef for tea, and wasn't there any butter?
But the father was tearing open the letters. Hermie and Bartie hung over his shoulder, reading just as eagerly as he. Floss crouched between his knees to catch the crumbs. Roly, munching while he waited at a hunch of ill-coloured bread, kept an eye and an ear for any spoken news, and Miss Browne moved continually about the room, straightening chairs, altering the position of the table vases, rearranging the knives and forks.
Mr. Cameron looked up, and drew forward a chair next to his own.
'Do sit down, Miss Browne,' he said; 'I am sure you are very tired. Sit down, and let us enjoy this all together.'
So Miss Browne, too, joined the circle, Roly watching her with a brooding eye.
'WINDSOR CASTLE.
'OH, MY DEAR ONES, MY DEAR ONES' ran the white letter,—'Is the earth shaking beneath me, have my hands ague, that my pen trembles like this? We are coming home, home, home. No false reports this time, no heart-sickening disappointment; the papers are actually signed for a long season, and we leave by the Utopia in six weeks. The news came an hour ago. I saw an equerry coming in with the letters, saw the letter that meant so much carried up to my room by a house steward, and had to pass along the corridor and leave it. Challis was going down to play to the Queen in her private sitting-room. But after it all was over how we went to our rooms again! There was only a chambermaid in sight, and for the last twenty yards of corridor we ran. Home, home, home, to your arms, my husband, my dear one, my patient old sweetheart! Home to my little girls, my boys, my little boys! Darlings, my eyes are streaming. Oh, to hold you all again, to feel you, to touch my Hermie's hair—is it all sunlight yet?—to be crushed with Bartie's hug, to hold again the poor little babies I left, my Roly, my little Floss. Ah, dear ones, dear ones, now it is all over, now we are coming, coming to you, I can let you know. Oh, these weary, weary years, these great cities where we have no home, no corner of a home. I have broken my heart for you all every night since I came away. Six years, my dear ones, six years of nights to break my heart. Be sorry for mother, and love her, darlings. Have you forgotten her, Hermie? Bart, Bart, have you kept a little love warm for her? Ah, dear God, my babies will not know me, little Floss will turn away her head. My sweetheart, my sweetheart, if the time has been as long for you, and pleasures as tasteless, and all things as void, then my heart sickens afresh, for I know what your life has been.
'What has kept me up all this weary time I cannot even think. Whatever it was, it has snapped now, and I am limp, useless, broken up into little bits, like nothing so much as a little child stretching out its arms and crying to its mother. Can you not see my arms stretching, stretching to you? Does not my cry come to your little town? It is Challis who is the woman now; she sees my work is done. She had begun to show me the bracelet the Queen gave her, and to tell me what every one had said, but I had torn open Warner's letter, and found the home orders had come. She is packing various little things now, and has rung, and given orders with the dearest little air of self-possession. "Sit down and write, and tell daddie," she said; "I will see to everything now."
'The carriage is to come for us in an hour. We have been here three days, and every one has been as kind and as enthusiastic as they are always. We go to Sandringham on Friday; the Princess asked for Challis to play for her guests that night; the Dowager Empress is to be there, and others.
'Then at Manchester an immense farewell concert on Monday; Mr. Warner says two thousand seats are already booked to hear the "Wonder-Child"; another at Plymouth on Friday; a rush up to Edinburgh, just for her to appear at the Philharmonic. They are only giving her forty pounds for the night, but Mr. Warner is unwilling for her to lose the Scotch connection.
'Then peace, perfect peace, and home. I sit and try to fancy the changes the six years have made in the home. I am glad you have had two new bedrooms built; that will allow you to have a study again, sweetheart, and Hermie a drawing-room—sixteen is sure to be hankering for one. The furniture is looking a little shabby, I know; but of course that can be easily remedied, and I have always had my boxes stuffed with art vases and bits of brass and bronze, ready for when the good time came. You have probably laid down new carpets long ere this in all the rooms, but I shall bring some rugs and Eastern squares, for I doubt if your back-block towns have supplied what would satisfy my now cultured taste.
'I suppose people wonder at you still being stuck to the Civil Service at a wretched two hundred and fifty pounds a year. Isn't the prevailing idea that we are rolling in money? There is surprisingly little for all the enthusiasm there has been—I think Mr. Warner said he had banked three thousand pounds for her—all the rest goes in expenses, which are enormous. We are obliged to be at the best hotels, and to be dressed up-to-date; that runs away with big sums. And the advertising that Mr. Warner says is so necessary swallows gigantic amounts. This has been the first year with much profit. Sometimes when I dress my little girlie in her Paris frocks I think of Hermie, making last season's do again, perhaps. Did the last box of Challis's frocks do for Flossie? The lady-help, I am sure, will have been able to cut them down.
'Do not let us think of the future, sweetheart, I cannot bear it yet. I cannot leave you any more, you must not be left; Challis has had her meed of her mother now, and it is the turn for the others. Yet Mr. Warner says it must be kept up, this life of hers, this Wandering Jew life. It is the price great artists pay. But the child is brave.
'"You shall not have it any more, mamma," she said when I read this out; "you shall go home to daddie for always now."
'But when I looked at her face it was pale, and there was that wan look in it that comes sometimes. To think of the little tender thing bearing all this alone!
'But we must not think of the future, sweetheart; we must not think of it for an instant. You will come to Sydney to meet us? Perhaps only you. And we will come straight home to Wilgandra with you. If she ruins her chances for ever, she shall have one month's quiet home before the Sydney season begins. Mr. Warner will try to prevent this, but I shall be very firm. Then you must get leave, and children and all, we will go to Sydney together, and you shall hear the darling play. To think you have none of you ever seen great audiences carried away by her little fingers!
'Ask the lady-help not to do up my bedroom for me. I want to see the faded pink and white hangings, and the sofa with the green roses on it, and the knitted counterpane that grandma made—just as they were when I left them.
'Oh, my little home, not beautiful, not even very comfortable, stuck away in that hot little town hundreds of miles from Sydney—my heart is breaking for you!'
Nobody spoke when the letter was finished—nobody, indeed, had spoken all the way through. Tired little Floss, finding no news forthcoming, had fallen asleep.
Roly had sat down to the table, and was sawing an end off the corned beef. Miss Browne, since nothing was read aloud, had gently risen up and was dusting the piano, to be less in the way. But from time to time she glanced at the letter, alarm in her eyes. Could it be the little golden girl was ill?
The father put down the letter, and his hand shook.
'Coming home,' he said, and rose up, looking dazed; 'we—we must stop her at once, of course. Children, how can we stop her?'
Bart's chest was heaving. For a second he had heard the crying come to the little town, and seen the stretching of the arms.
But out of the window lay the grey selection that she had never seen; closer at hand were the rents in his clothes, the broken places on his boots. He pulled himself together.
'I'll go down to the post and cable to her not to come,' he said; 'you be writing it down, dad.'
And Hermie's girl-heart was breaking. The letter had shaken the very centre of her being, and wakened in her a passion of love and longing for this tender woman. Oh, to be held by her, kissed, caressed—to feel that hand on the hair she could not help but know was pretty!
But looking up she saw her father's anguished gaze around him—Bart's manly mastery of himself. She brushed her tears aside.
'I'll get the pen and ink,' she said; 'it—it's late—the cable ought to go to-night.'
Miss Browne sat down, quivering with the suspense.
'Which,' she whispered, 'which of them is dead, your mother or little Challis?'
Bartie it was who laughed—a hoarse apology for a laugh.
'Dead!' he said; 'they're coming home, Miss Browne!'
It was Miss Browne's turn to look anguished. She rose up and moved uncertainly about the room, she began to tidy the music in feverish haste, she dusted the piano yet again.
Then she turned to Mr. Cameron with one hand fluttering out.
'I—I—must ask you to let me have a s—shilling,' she quavered; 'the—the boys really must have their hair cut before she sees them.'
CHAPTER II
The Wonder-Child
'Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with His dew
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue,
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings.'
Up to the last eight years Mr. Cameron's friends and relatives had always had their hands full with finding positions for him that would enable him to support his wife and family.
Once or twice he was in receipt of five hundred a year, but much more frequently he would be in a bank or an insurance company, starting with a modest salary of a hundred and twenty.
Every one liked him cordially—they could not help it. But every one was unfeignedly glad when one of the relatives made a great effort, and, by dint of interviewing Members of Parliament and getting a little influence to bear here and a little there, worked him into the Civil Service, the appointment being that of Crown Land Agent at Wilgandra, the salary two hundred and forty pounds, less ten pounds for the Superannuation Fund.
Wilgandra was so far away—three hundred and seventy-three miles back, back, away in the heart of the country—the very farthest town to which the Government sent its Land Agents. Surely the bad penny could never turn up again to vex their peace!
Even Mrs. Cameron's anxious soul was set at rest.
The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable. But the work seemed smooth and easy, and after so many ups and downs the quiet security of the small hot township seemed delicious to her.
It was not that Mr. Cameron drank or gambled, or possessed indeed any highly coloured sin. He was simply one of the impracticables, the dreamers, that the century has no room for.
He had written verses that the weekly papers had accepted; indeed, a few daintily delicate things had found their way into the best English magazines.
He had painted pictures—a score of them, perhaps; the art societies had accepted three of them, refused nine, and never been even offered the remainder; no one had ever bought one of them.
He had composed some melodies that a musical light passing through Sydney professed to be captivated with, had promised to have published in London, and had forgotten entirely.
When they were unpacking their much-ravelled chattels the first night in Wilgandra, James Cameron came to his great paint-box that the late family vicissitudes had prevented him touching for so long.
'Ah,' he said, and a light of great pleasure came into his grey eyes as he lifted it from the packing-case and rubbed the dust off it with his good cuff—'mine old familiar friend. Why, Molly darling, I shan't know myself with a brush in my hand again. With all the spare time there will be here, I ought to do some good work at last.'
Then his wife laid down the stack of little torn pinafores and patched jackets and frocks she was lifting from another box, and crossed the room and knelt down by her husband's side, just where he was kneeling beside the rough packing-case that had held his treasure.
'Dear one,' she said, 'dear one, Jim, Jim,'—one hand went round his neck, her head, with its warm brown hair that the grey was threading years too soon, pressed against his shoulder, her face, old, young, sad, smiling, looked into his, her brave brown eyes held tears.
'Why, little woman,' he said, 'what is it—what is troubling you? Smiling time has come again, Molly, the worries are all left behind with Sydney.'
'Jim,' she said, and her hand tightened on the paint-box he held, 'Jim, do you know we have five children, five of them, five?'
'Well, girlie,' he said, and got up and sat down on the edge of the box and drew her beside him, 'haven't we an income of two hundred and thirty pounds for them, a princely sum, when we are in a place where there is nothing to tempt us to buy? And we hardly left any debts behind us this time.'
'But, dearest, dearest,' she urged, 'if you get hold of this, we shall not have it a year; you will get up in cloudland and forget to furnish your returns or some such thing, and then you will be dismissed again.'
'Ah, Molly,' he said, his face falling, 'always the gloomy side. Couldn't you have given me a night of happiness?'
A stinging tear fell from the woman's eyes.
'I couldn't, I couldn't,' she said; 'the danger made my heart grow sick again. See, for I must be brutal, the time has come for it. I love your ways, your dreams; no canvas you have touched, no song, no verses but I have loved. But what have they done for us, what have they done?'
The man's eyes, startled, followed her tragic finger that swept a circle. Outside he saw the sun-baked, weary little town that must see their days and years, inside the cramped room full of boxes that were disgorging a pitiful array of shabby clothes and broken furniture; just at hand his wife, the woman he had taken to him, fresh and beautiful, to crown his tenderest dream and turned into this thin, careworn, anxious-eyed creature.
His face whitened. 'It is worse than drink!' he said.
She acquiesced sadly.
'Nothing else would make me take it from you,' she said, her wet eyes falling again to the paint-box; 'and if it were you and I only against the world, you should have it all your days. But five children to get ready for the world! Jim, my heart fails me!'
He was trembling too. It was the first time he had felt a sense of genuine responsibility for his tribe since the time Hermie was put into his arms, a babe three hours old. Then he had rushed away to insure his life for five hundred pounds. He forgot, of course, to keep up the policy after the second month. Now his heart felt the weight of the whole five, Hermie, Bartie and Challis, Roly and little Floss.
He gave his wife a passionate kiss.
'You are right,' he said, 'take it; I give it all up for ever, and begin from now to be a man.'
Time went past, and the criss-cross lines on the mother's brow were fading, and the anxious outlook of the eyes seemed gone. She called up a home around her where before had only been a house; the children were taught; she even, by dint of hard economy, made it possible to send to Sydney for the piano they had left as security for a debt.
The friends in Sydney, two years gone by, began indeed to congratulate themselves that Wilgandra had swallowed up for all time that troublesome yet well-liked fellow Cameron, and his terrible family.
Then the name began to crop up in the country news of the daily papers. Another wonder-child for Australia had been discovered, it seemed—a certain Challis Cameron, a mite of eight years who was creating much excitement in the township of Wilgandra.
Presently from the larger towns near the paragraphs also were sent. A concert had been given in aid of the Church Fund, and a pleasing programme had been submitted. Among the contributors was a tiny child, Challis Cameron, whose wonderful playing fairly astonished the big audience.
Before Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had quite waked up to the situation, an enthusiastic committee had been formed, a subscription list started and filled, and a sum of sixty pounds thrust into their astonished hands, for the child to be taken to Sydney for lessons.
Nowhere on the earth's surface is there a a land where the people are so eager to recognise musical talent, so generous to help it, as in Australia.
Mr. and Mrs. Cameron looked at each other when they were left alone, a little dismay mingled with their natural pride. And from each other they looked to the paddock beside their house where all the children were playing. This especial child was unconcernedly filling up her doll's tea-cups with a particularly delightful kind of red mud, and then turning out the little shapes and calling Bartie to come and look at her 'jellies.'
Talent they had always known she had, but hardly thought it was anything much above that of any child very fond of music. As a baby she had cried at discords; at three years old she used to stand at the end of the piano and make quite pretty little tunes with one hand in the treble, while Bartie thumped sticky discords in the bass. At four she used to stand beside Hermie, whom her mother was teaching regularly, and in five minutes understood what it took her sister an hour to learn imperfectly. At four, too, her head hidden in the sofa-cushion, she could call out the names of not only single notes but chords also, as Hermie struck them. So her mother undertook her tuition too, and in two years these paragraphs were appearing in the papers.
But to go away with her and stay in Sydney while masters there heard her and taught her! What was to become of the other four, and the husband who needed his wife so much?
'I am afraid we must send her to a boarding-school there,' she faltered. 'How can I leave the home?'
But later the child came and stood at her knee; a tall, thin, little child she was, with fair fine hair that fell curlless down her back, and in her eyes that touch of grey that makes hazel eyes wonderful.
The face was delicately cut, the skin clear and pale; only when the pink ran into it was she pretty.
'I made another song, mamma,' she whispered.
The dying light of the long still day was in the room, very far away in some one's fig-trees the locusts hummed, a sprinkle of sweet rain had fallen, the first for months, and the delicate scent of it came through the window.
'What is it, darling?' whispered the mother.
The child's eyes grew larger, she swayed her tiny body to and fro.
'Oh, the roses, the roses and the shivery grass! Oh, the sea! Oh, the little waves running on the sand! Oh, the wind, blowing the little roses till they die! Oh, the pink roses crying, crying! Oh, the sea! Oh, the waves of the crying sea!'
The mother's arm went round the little body, down into the depths of those eyes she looked, those eyes with their serious brown and grey lights mingling, and for one clear moment there looked back at her the strange little child-soul that dwelt there.
Out at the door there was a clamour, Roly demanding bread-and-jam. From the paddock came a sudden gust of quarrelling, the next-door children, with Hermie, shrill-voiced, arbitrating. Probably down in the street Bartie was fighting any or all of the boys who passed.
'Dear heart!' ran the woman's thoughts. 'My days are too crowded to tend this little soul. Better that she too asked bread-and-jam of me.'
'Play it for me, mother,' said the child, and plucked at her hand. 'I can't; I have tried and tried, and the sea won't cry, only the roses.'
'Nonsense, nonsense!' said the troubled mother; 'run and play till bedtime. Play chasings with Roly and Floss, or be Bartie's horse. Have you forgotten the reins I made him?'
The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.
'I will get the reins,' she said nervously, obediently.
Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or strangers.
Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the shilly-shallying in using it.
So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk beside her in a second-class carriage.
'We shall be back in a month at most,' she called out for the twentieth time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.
But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said, the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to bury her excited little face on her mother's breast.
Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its hands recklessly into its pockets.
Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose of sending the child to Germany.
And now what to do?
The small house at Wilgandra seemed going along very steadily; Mr. Cameron had not once failed to furnish the reports due from him to the Government. The lady-help selected by the mother had the house and the children and the father in a state of immaculate order. She was a magnificently capable, managing woman; every one, Mr. Cameron especially, stood much in awe of her, and unquestioningly obeyed her smallest mandate; even Roly, unbidden, performed magnificent ablutions before he presented himself for a meal, and Hermie was often to be seen surreptitiously trying to mend her own pinafores in the paddock.
Mrs. Cameron could not but confess her place was not crying out for her to the extent she had imagined; indeed, the wonderful lady-help, Miss Macintosh, seemed to have brought the home into a far better state of order and discipline than even she, the mother, had been able to do. Little Floss was a healthy and most independent babe of two; Roly, three years old, was a sturdy mannikin who stared at her stolidly when, her heart full of tears, she stooped over him and asked, did he want her to go away again?
'Mamma mustn't go away in a big ship, must she, sweetheart? You can't do without her again, can you?' she said.
But Roly was a sea-serpent swimming on the dining-room floor, and the interruption irritated him.
'Yes,' he assented, with swift cheerfulness, 'mamma go in big ship. Good-bye, good-bye!'—and he waved an impatient hand to get rid of her.
Hermie and Bartie had just started to a good private school near at hand, and the teaching—all honour to the mistress!—was of so skilful and delightful a nature that the two could hardly summon patience to wait for breakfast ere they set out for the happy place. So Challis's claims tugged hard.
'But you—what of you, my husband?' she said. 'You cannot spare me; it is absurd for you to even think of it!'
But he was excited and greatly moved at the thought of his child's genius. Deep down, in his heart was the knowledge that had he himself been given a chance he could have made a name for himself in this world. But there was always uncongenial work for him, always something else to be done, 'never the time and the place and the loved one all together.'
'Let us give her her chance,' he said. 'It is early morning with her. Don't let ours be the hands to block her, so that when evening comes she can only stand wistful.'
So they sailed away, the mother and the wonder-child; behind them the plain little home, before, the Palaces of Music.
CHAPTER III
The Second Lady-Help
'The droop, the low cares of the mouth,
The trouble uncouth
'Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain
To put out of its pain.'
And for actually six months that home survived! After that the crumbling was to be expected, for some discerning man came along, and married the marvellous lady-help out of hand.
Mr. Cameron spent five pounds in the purchase of a pair of entrée dishes for a wedding-present, and was unhappy that he could so very inadequately reward her great services. But there was a curious air of buoyancy and relaxation observable in him the first day the house was free of her.
At tea he got The Master of Ballantrae out, and read boldly all through the meal, a thing he had not ventured to do for eighteen months. And out in the frozen shrubbery at midnight, with the Master and Mr. Henry thrusting at each other, he spilled the tea that Hermie passed him. When he saw the wide brown stain he had made on the table's whiteness—although the ridiculous fancy pursued him that it was the Master's life-blood smirching the snow—he looked up startled, full of apologies. But there was only Hermie's childish face in front of him; and though she said, 'Oh, papa!' as became a president of the tea-tray, she looked away the next second to laugh at Roly, who had spread his bread with jam on both sides, and did not know how best to hold it. And Cameron felt so much a man and master of his fate once more, that he stretched right across the table to help himself to butter, instead of politely requesting the passing of it. For three months the household ran a merry course. Hermie, a bright little woman of eleven, begged her father to let her 'keep house' and give the orders to Lizzie, the very young general servant.
The father bent his thoughts five minutes to the problem; Miss Macintosh had been away now a fortnight, and everything seemed going along really delightfully. What need to break the sweet harmony of the days by getting in some person whose principles counted reading at table and spilling tea among the cardinal vices?
And Lizzie, the State girl, was at his elbow with a shining face. She was fifteen, she said—fifteen was real old! Now why should the master go getting in any more of them lady-helps, who did nothing but scold from morning to night? She, Lizzie, would undertake all there was to do in this place 'on her head.'
Cameron smiled at the eager girls, and, while hardly daring to consent, put off for a further day the engagement of a successor to Miss Macintosh. And the three months ran gaily along, and still Hermie sat importantly at the head of the table, and still her father read, and still Roly spread his bread upon both sides.
There was always a good table—far better than either the mother or lady-help had kept.
For the family grocer had an alluring way of suggesting delicacies, when he came for his orders that certainly no mistress of eleven or handmaid of fifteen could withstand.
'Almonds?' he would say. 'Very fine almonds this week, Miss Cameron—three pounds did you say—yes? And what about jam? I have it as low as fivepence a tin, but there is no knowing what cheap fruit these makers use.'
'Oh,' Hermie would say, 'I must have very good jam, of course, or it might make my little sister ill! How much is good jam?'
'There's strawberry conserve, a shilling a tin,' the man would say—'pure fruit and pure sugar, boiled in silver saucepans.'
'Silver saucepans! That couldn't hurt Flossie! We will have six tins of that, please,' the small house-woman would answer. Then there were biscuits; Miss Macintosh, frugal soul, only gave Wilgandra, when it came calling, coffee-biscuits at sevenpence a pound with its afternoon tea. Hermie regaled it upon macaroons at half a crown. Then Lizzie would have her say. What was the use of cooking meat and vegetables on washing-day, ironing-day, and Saturdays, she would say, when you could get them tinned from a grocer? So tins of tongue, and whitebait, and pressed meats, French peas, asparagus, and such, were added weekly to the order, the grocer sending to Sydney for the unusual things. 'We are saving a lady-help's wages,' Hermie would say, 'and it saves the butcher's bills, so it is not extravagant a bit.'
It was not until the third month that the day of reckoning came. Then the grocer, grown a trifle anxious over his unusual bill, which no one was settling, ventured to accost Mr. Cameron one day on his verandah and present it.
'No haste, of course,' he said politely, 'only as your good lady and Miss Macintosh always paid monthly, I thought you might not like it going on much longer.'
When he had bowed himself out, Mr. Cameron rubbed his suddenly troubled brow a moment. Money, bills! The thought had actually never crossed his mind all these three months! His wife first and then Miss Macintosh had always managed the finances of the family. Indeed, one of Mrs. Cameron's injunctions to the lady-help had been, 'When Mr. Cameron's cheque for his quarter's salary comes, please be sure to remind him to pay it into the bank.' And Miss Macintosh had never failed to do so, nor to apply for the twelve pounds monthly for payment of the household bills.
He went into the dining-room and began to rummage helplessly about his writing-table. To save his life he could not recollect what had become of his last cheque, for there was a conviction on his mind that he had never paid it into his account.
Hermie was at the table, Mrs. Beeton's cookery-book spread open before her; over her shoulders peeped the heads of Bartie and Roly, absorbed in the contemplation of the coloured plate picturing glorified blancmanges and jellies. For was not to-morrow Roly's fifth birthday, for which great preparation must be made by the young mother of the house?
'Children,' said the father at last entreatingly, 'come and help me; I have lost a very important envelope.'
For over an hour did that family search from one end of the house to the other. It was Lizzie's happy thought that discovered it.
'A long blue envelope, with no stamp on it and just printing instead—why, there was one like that in the kitchen drawer with the dinners on it,' she said.
She rushed for it, and met her anxious master with it held triumphantly out.
The back of the envelope bore dinners for the week in Hermie's round careful hand.
Mon.—Roast fowl, mashed potatoes, collyflower, pink jellie and gem cakes.
Tues.—Tong, blommange and strawberry jam, rainbow cake.
Wed.—Sardenes, current buns, yelow jelly and merangs.
Mr. Cameron thrust a trembling hand into the depths of it, and, to his exquisite relief, was able to draw out the cheque for his quarterly sixty pounds.
In danger of the kitchen fire, in danger of the dust-box, in danger of Roly's passion for paper-tearing, in danger of all the wind-storms that had sprung up and torn raging through the place, in danger of all these for three months, and still safe!
The relief took the man back into the dining-room, responsibility for his family to the front for the third time in his life.
He ran through the bills with a sinking heart. Instead of twelve pounds a month that Miss Macintosh's carefulness had made suffice, little Hermie had brought up the totals to twenty-eight—eighty-four pounds for the quarter, to be deducted from the sixty pounds that must also pay rent and clothes and many other things.
The child cried bitterly when he showed her what she had done. It had been delicious pleasure to her, this time of ordering and helping with the dinners. Delicious pleasure to see her father appreciating the changed meals as much as the boys—Cameron had quite a boyish appetite for good things, and Hermie's brilliant menus had been delightful to him after a long course of Miss Macintosh's boiled rhubarb puddings, treacle roly-polies, and milk sagos.
'A first-rate little manager,' he always called her, when he passed up his plate for more of the jelly, or more whitebait, or asparagus, and he recked even less than Bartie that the things were intrinsically more expensive than rhubarb or rice.
'Oh, daddie, oh, daddie dear, I am so sorry!' she said, awake at last to the sad truth that luxury must be paid for, cash down, and was a dear commodity. And her eyes streamed, and her little chest heaved to such an extent that he had to put the bills aside and comfort her affliction, and explain to her that he was scolding himself, not her.
'But I am eleven,' she kept repeating sadly, 'eleven, papa. I ought to have known.'
There rang at the door a few minutes later the master of the boys' school to which Bartie had just been sent. Hermie, her mother's conscientiousness strong in her, had always gone off to her school each day, though, in truth, so absorbed was she by her housekeeping delights that she was a very ill scholar nowadays.
But Bartie, plain unalloyed boy, had wearied suddenly of tuition, and found a pleasant fishing-ground in a secluded creek. There was no one to tell him to go to school, it was against nature that he should betake himself to servitude every day of his own accord, so, towards the end of the quarter, it fell out that he fished two days of the week and studied three, even at times reversing that order of things. In restitution he took canings, his hands were horny, the touch of the master not over heavy.
But now the matter was before his father, and the master was returning home, the consciousness of duty done lifting his head.
The father's blue eye flashed with strange fire as he looked at the boy.
'Is my son a thief,' he said, 'that he should treat me so? Or is it he despises me because I leave him unwatched and free?'
With that he strode out of the room, out of the house; Bart, his conscience quick once more and in agony, watched him walking, house-coat on and no hat, down the main street of the township and up, up, never resting, to the top of the great hill the other side they call the Jib.
No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas, when the boy marched in with the year's prize for punctuality under his arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.
'I like a man of honour,' he said. But the two events together, the grocer's bill and the master's call, decided the father he must enter into submission and have another lady-help, for the children's sake.
How to obtain one? He made inquiries about Wilgandra, but the class of people from whom he sought to take one were of the mind that prevails in many of the country towns and bush settlements. They would rather starve than serve—at all events where they were known. Now and again a self-respecting intelligent girl broke away from her life and went off with her trunk to find service in Sydney.
But, for the most part, the daughters of a house up to the number of seven, or even ten, stayed under the cramped roof-tree of their fathers, and led an unoccupied, sheepish existence, till marriage or death bore them off to other homes.
So in despair Cameron wrote off to a Sydney registry office, and asked the manageress to send him a lady. Just before he closed the letter the happy freedom of the last three months led him to add a postscript, 'I should like the lady you select to be of not too managing a disposition—gentle and pleasant.'
The registry office keeper rubbed her hands; here surely at last was a chance to dispose of Miss Browne—Miss Browne, who was ever on the books, who was sent off to a situation one week, and came back with red eyes and a hopeless expression the next, dismissed incontinently as incapable.
The registry office keeper turned up the town Wilgandra in her railway time-table.
Three hundred and seventy-three miles away! Surely at such a distance, especially as the employer was paying the expensive fare, Miss Browne might be regarded as settled for a space of three months!
Mr. Cameron had no complaint to make of his new lady-help on the score of being of a managing disposition. She was gentleness itself—that kind of deprecating gentleness that makes the world feel uncomfortable. She tried pitifully hard to be pleasant—pleasant and cheerful. She worked from earliest morning to late at night, and accomplished about as much as Hermie could in two hours. It took her nerveless fingers nearly a quarter of an hour to sew on a waistcoat button, and in little more than a quarter of an hour the button would have tumbled off again.
Lizzie seldom trusted her to cook anything; when she did so the poor lady invariably emerged from the kitchen with her hands burnt in several places, sparks in her eyes, the front width of her dress scorched, her hair singed, and her poor frail body so utterly exhausted, the family would insist upon her instant retirement to bed.
Nobody knew what the woman's life had been, where had gone the vigour, the energy, the graces that should still have been hers, for her years were barely thirty-five.
A crushing sorrow, disappointment on the heel of disappointment, loneliness, or perhaps only a grey life full of petty cares passed in a scorching, withering climate—one or all of these things had dried the sap out of her, and left of what might have been a gracious creature, radiating pleasure and comfort, only the rags and bones of womanhood.
The Camerons suffered her patiently for three long months; then the father gathered his courage up in both hands, closed his ears to the pity that clamoured at his heart, and told her gently enough that she must go.
She threw up her fluttering hands and sank on the sofa—in her eyes the piteous look of amaze and grief that your fireside dog would wear if you took a sudden knife to him. So kind had the family been, so patient, the poor creature had told herself exultingly that they were satisfied, even pleased with her, and had hugged the novel, delicious thought to sleep with her for the last two months.
She asked shakingly what she had done.
'Nothing, nothing at all,' Cameron reassured her eagerly; 'it is merely, merely I can see you are not strong enough for such a hard place as mine.'
'A hard place!' she cried, and looked at him dazed. 'Why, there are only five of you, and Lizzie to do all the rough work! I've been where there were ten, and done the washing and everything. I've been where there were nine, and had to chop the wood and draw the water myself. I've been mother's help and had to carry twin babies miles in the sun. I've been where the children pinched and scratched me. I've been at places where I rose at half-past four, and found my way to bed at eleven. And in none have I ever given notice myself. A hard place! Dear heart!'
'My dear Miss Browne,' Cameron said, and such was the fluent nature of the man that his eyes were filled, and he had no idea that he lied, 'it was solely for the sake of your health I spoke. You look so delicate. If you think the duties are not too heavy, why, I shall be most heartily obliged to you if you will stay with us indefinitely.'
Then he went away to seek his children, to tell them her story, and beg their tenderest patience.
CHAPTER IV
The Painting of The Ship
'Never a bird within my sad heart sings,
But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings.'
Yet his coward pen never plucked courage to itself to write across seas of this family incubus.
The earlier letters had spoken variously of 'Miss Macintosh,' or 'the lady-help'; now there was never a name given, the references being merely to 'the lady-help.' Even the children scrupulously followed this up.
When the Marvellous One had gone off with her entrée dishes to her new home, the father had said, 'Children, we will not tell mother just yet that Miss Macintosh has left, it would only worry her. We will wait till we can write and say we have another one as good.'
So the tale of Hermie's housekeeping and the mislaid cheque never crossed the sea, and the mother in her far German boarding-house continued to comfort herself with the thought of Miss Macintosh's perfections.
When Miss Browne's shortcomings made themselves glaringly patent, the pens again shallied in telling the story.
'It is so close to Challis's concert, we mustn't worry them with our little troubles, children,' the father said.
So Bartie and Hermie continued to write guarded letters; and if the boy's hand at times ran on to tell how Miss Browne had put ugly patches on his clothes, or the girl's heart began to pour itself out on the thin paper and speak of the discomfort of the new reign, recollection would come flooding, the letters would be cast aside and new ones written, short, studied, and never saying more in reference to the vexed question than 'the lady-help had taken Floss out for a walk.'
'I hope Miss Macintosh sees you have your little pleasures,' the mother would write. 'You do not tell me about birthday parties or picnics. Don't forget mother loves to hear of it all.'
And Hermie would write back sadly:
'The lady-help is very busy just now, but when she has more time she is going to let us have a party.'
'I tremble each mail,' the mother wrote once, 'lest your letter should bring me news that Miss Macintosh is engaged and about to be married. It is strange such a woman has not been snapped up long before this.'
And Cameron answered:
'I do not think you need worry, my darling, about the lady-help marrying. She has given me to understand she has had a disappointment, and will never marry.'
But the very guarding of the letters, the reading of them over, to be sure nothing had been let slip, made them seem poor and lifeless to the anxiously devouring eyes the other side of the world.
She wrote at last:
'Sweetheart, from what you don't say, more than from what you do, I learn of your loneliness. You are so dull, my poor boy, and the days rise up and sink to rest all grey like one another. Yet a little more patience, and surely there will be plenty of money to make life all sunshine for you. But just for a little brightness, darling, reach down that box of paints we put away on the cupboard top, get out your brushes, and let them help the hours to fly. While the Conservatorium has been closed for vacation Challis and I have been four days in Rome. And she found me crying one morning in a picture gallery, in front of some great picture, a Raphael, or an Andrea del Sarto—some one, at all events, who painted with hands of fire. And yet it was not the subject of the picture that moved me, unless it was that the magic canvas wrought me to the mood that is yours so often. All I thought of was the cold harsh woman, the Martha with blind eyes, who, that first day in Wilgandra, took away by force and at the same time the paint-box and the glow from your life. My boy, my sweetheart, let me give it back. Ah, would that I could stand on the chair and reach it down from the cupboard and put it into your hands myself! But do it now, my darling, this moment. I know you will be careful and not risk your position by forgetfulness. And when you are loneliest, when you miss me most, let the brushes take my place.'
Cameron had been reading his letter at the tea-table.
'Children,' he said, and rose up, his face working, his eyes shining strangely, 'children, mother wants me to paint pictures again. I—she says I am to get the box down.'
The table had no comprehension of the greatness of the matter, but rose up at once, at seeing the father so moved. Roly brought his mug of sweetened milk along with him, Floss continued to bite at her crust of bread-and-jam, Miss Browne fluttered about, Hermie and Bart pressed at their father's elbow.
'Bring a chair, Bartie,' Cameron said, 'here at the cupboard in the hall.'
'Mine cubbub,' interjected Floss; 'me's hat in dere. Go 'way, daddie.'
'I'll climb up,' said eager Bart. 'What is it up there, dad?'
'Give me the chair—let me reach it down myself,' Cameron said, and stepped up and stretched his long arm to the top.
A dusty mustard-box! The children's eyes brightened with swift thoughts of treasure, then dulled when the lid was flung back and displayed nothing but a chaos of dirty oil-tubes and brushes.
But when they saw their father's glistening eyes, saw him fingering the same tubes with a tender, lingering touch, looking at the brushes' points, they did not tell him they were disappointed in the treasure. Instead, Bart led off with a cheer.
'Hurrah for daddie the artist!' he shouted.
'Hurrah!' cried Hermie.
''Rah!' shrilled Roly.