"You must put all that out of your head," she interrupted curtly.
"I cannot. A man doesn"t love a woman like you, and, because she is married to another man, put her out of his head--in two years or ten--or Eternity, for that matter."
She laughed joylessly. "Eternity!" she scoffed.
They were in the veranda after luncheon, she swinging slowly in the hammock, playing with a cigarette, he smoking likewise, scarcely attempting to suppress the stormy feeling in his face and voice. For her, the crude brown-grey landscape rose and fell with the motion of the hammock, and jarred with the exotic memories he evoked. She had been called back to the varied emotional interests of her girlhood, and realised, in a rush, how deadly dull was life in the arid wastes of the Never-Never. Nothing more exciting than to watch the great parched plain, with the dry heat-haze upon it, getting browner every day, and the shrinking lagoon and its ever widening border of mud. Nothing, when she turned her eyes to right and left, but ragged gum trees and black gidia forest. What a dead blank wilderness it was!"
She gave a little gasp as if for breath. He seemed to read her thoughts.
"Do you remember Rome--and the Campagna, that first day we went to Albano?--And our walk through the woods down to Lake Nei?--It was then I first knew that I loved you."
"Will--if you are going to stay here you mustn"t talk like that. It"s not playing the game." She spoke pleadingly.
"Does your husband play the game?" Maule retorted. "Is it playing the game to leave you here alone with me, when he must know--or at least, guess--how things have been between us?--Do you think I didn"t notice yesterday that he suspected me--suspected us both? I should have been a blind mole not to see by his face and manner how he felt. Upon my soul, he would have no defence--if...."
She stopped him with a gesture.
"I must ask you again not to discuss my relations with my husband; they do not concern you."
"Do they not!" And as she rose abruptly from the hammock, "I beg your pardon," he added humbly, "I will do my best not to offend again."
He got up too and stood, his back against the veranda railings.
"Lady Bridget, you mustn"t be angry with me. I suppose I am a little off my balance, you must remember that this is--for me, a rather staggering experience."
"Shall we go for a ride?" she asked suddenly. "I don"t suppose you have much idea of what a wild western station is like."
"Oh, I"m fairly well acquainted with life on big pastures," he answered lightly, taking her cue. "You would be surprised, perhaps, at the list of my qualifications as an "out-back squatter."--I"m a bit of a rancher--had one in the Argentine--a bit of a doctor--a bit of a policeman--I was in charge once of a constabulary force out in British Guiana. That"s where I got a rise off Harris--a bit of a law breaker, too--in fact a bit of everything. Yes, I should enjoy a ride round here with you immensely."
"Then do you mind looking for Mr Ninnis, the overseer, you know."
"Yes, I know Ninnis. Had a yarn--as he"d say--with him last night while your husband was talking to Harris. Ninnis doesn"t get on well with Harris--another point of sympathy. We"re quite friends already. Ninnis and I--he"s been in South America, too."
"You"ll find him somewhere about the Bachelors" Quarters, and I"ll go and put on my habit," she said.
Lady Bridget appeared as Maule and Ninnis were finishing saddling the horses. Ninnis had stayed near the head station, and was keeping a sharp look-out for bush fires, he said. Otherwise, there appeared to be no elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual att.i.tude towards strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South America, and also to Maule"s undoubted knack of managing men.
CHAPTER 2
They rounded the lagoon and skirted the gidia scrub. Maule was on a Moongarr horse, Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already had opportunity to admire the famous O"Hara seat. They had hunted together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty, however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost tragic hardships of life on the Leura--how she had been left servantless--until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura--when the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush. She described the chivalrous SUNDOWNER who had on one occasion helped her through a week"s washing; and Zack Duppo the horsebreaker, whose Christmas pudding had been a culinary triumph, and the loyalty of faithful Wombo, who had done violence to all his savage instincts in acting as house-servant until the advent of the Malay boy Kuppi. She told of her first experience of a summer out West. The frying of eggs in the sun on a sheet of corrugated zinc, so intense was the heat. The terror of snakes, centipedes, scorpions. The plagues of flies and white ants.
Then how, during the servantless period, in utter loneliness and Colin"s enforced absence at the furthest out-station she had had an attack of dengue fever, and no woman within forty miles of her.
"And your husband allowed this? But where was that barmaid-looking person who seems to keep house here for stray gentlemen--and, who has the yellow-headed and blue-eyed little boy?"
Bridget"s lip curled.
"Mrs Hensor had accepted a temporary situation at an hotel in Fig Tree Mount--the only time I"ve regretted her absence," and the musical laugh seemed to Maule to have acquired a note of exceeding bitterness.
"Perhaps you don"t know," she went on, "that Mrs Hensor is a sort of Helen of the Upper Leura--though unfortunately as yet no Paris has carried her off--I wish there was one bold enough to do it. She had to be asked to take a change of air because there was rivalry about her between the buyer of a Meat Preserving Establishment and the chief butcher at Tunumburra. Fair Helen scorned them both. Result: The two buyers bought beasts elsewhere and, as you would understand, on a cattle station, butchers may not be flouted. Though I daresay," Lady Bridget added with a shrug, "if I could have had the butchers in the house--I draw the line only at Harris--and had sung to them and played up generally, I might have scored even off Mrs Hensor. But they wouldn"t come until after she had gone and there was no further danger of a duel taking place outside the Bachelors" Quarters."
Maule took her cue again and laughed as if the matter were one to jest about. But as he looked round, his face did not suggest merriment. Nor for that matter did the landscape. They were riding at the edge of the immense sandy plain, patched with brown jaggled gra.s.s and parched brambles and p.r.i.c.kly lignum vitae--nothing to break the barren monotony but clumps of stunted brigalow and gidia, a wind-mill marking the site of an empty well with the few hungry-looking cattle near it.
Now they dipped into a scrub of dismal gidia.
"This is the most depressing country I have ever ridden through," he said.
"You don"t know what a difference three inches of rain makes," she answered. "Then the gra.s.s is green, the creeks are running, and at this time the dead brambles are covered with white flowers. But it doesn"t rain. There"s the tragedy."
"The tragedy is that you--you of all women should be wasting your youth and beauty in this wilderness. How long is it going to last?"
She shrugged again, and for an instant turned her face up towards the sky. "You must ask the heavens?"
"Meaning, I presume, that like most of the Australian squatters, your husband hasn"t capital enough at his back to stand up against continued drought?"
"Precisely." She looked at him, with her puzzling smile.
"But you couldn"t have understood his position when you married him?"
"No, I didn"t--altogether. But I should really like to remind you that I am not in the witness box."
"I think you owe me the truth!" he said, pa.s.sionately.
"What do you call the truth?" she asked, reining in her horse and meeting his eyes straight.
But she had to turn hers away before he answered, and he as well as herself was conscious of the compelling effect his gaze had upon her.
"I could have made you marry me if I had been strong enough to persist," he said.
"Cannot any man do what he is strong enough to do--if he wishes it enough to persist?"
"I should have put it this way. If I had thought less of you and more of myself. But after what you said that day, when you jeered so contemptuously at the kind of environment in which, THEN, I should have had to place my wife--what could I do--except withdraw? But you suffered, Bridget," he went on vehemently. "Not so much as I did--but still you suffered. You thought of me--I felt it, and you must have felt too, how continually I thought of you. I used to try and make you think of me--dream of me. And I succeeded. Isn"t that true?"
"Yes, it is true," she answered in a low voice.
"Only lately, since I have been in the district, it has seemed to me that the invisible wires have been set working afresh. Isn"t that true also?"
"Yes, it is true," she said again, as if forced to the acknowledgment.
"Then, can there be any question of the bond between us? You see, it"s independent of time and s.p.a.ce! for you WERE sorry--you DID care. That"s the truth you owe me. If after--after we parted in that dreadful way, I had gone back, had thrown up everything, had said to you, "Come with me ANYWHERE, let us be all in all to each other--on the slopes of the Andes, on an island in the South Seas--you would have come?""
"I always told you," she said with her puzzling smile, "that the slopes of the Andes appealed to me."
"Peru would have been more picturesque than this, anyway. Is that all I can get out of you--that grudging admission? Well, never mind, I am satisfied. You have owned up to enough. I won"t tease you now for more admissions."
"I have admitted too much," she said gloomily. "The curse of the O"Hara"s is upon me. Almost all of them have gambled with their lives, and most of them have lost."