Chapter XV Heart to Heart
‘We will not speak of years to-night;
For what have years to bring,
But larger floods of love and light,
And sweeter songs to sing?’
They were in a quiet room at the hotel at last. They had lost sight of the tall-hatted gentleman and one musician entirely; the other had said thoughtfully that he would not intrude.
‘This is not the way we meant to welcome your daughter, Mrs. Cameron,’ he said, laughing, as he clung by one hand to the timber, ‘but, as you see, we’re all mad together to-day. By to-morrow we shall have calmed down a little, and there will be a deputation and everything in order. You’ll be at the Australia, of course?’
‘Yes, I have rooms waiting for them,’ Cameron said quietly.
So the pleasant, long-haired fellow drifted away, and Cameron, at the first chance, steered his little family out of the thinning crowd, and found a cab to take them to the peace of the hotel.
They took their hats off. Waiters seemed to think eating was a necessity, and brought in a meal, and stood, two of them, to help serve.
Mrs. Cameron turned her head.
‘We would rather wait on ourselves,’ she said. ‘We have everything that we shall need, thank you, so you may go.’
Cameron drew a relieved breath, though he would as soon have thought of dismissing the men himself as of calmly ordering one of those magnificent colonels out of his way during the afternoon.
‘Now we can be cosy,’ Challis said, and sat down on her father’s knee, instead of using the chair the waiter had placed for her. ‘Are we like what you thought?’ she asked. ‘Someway I can’t think now how I could have fancied you would be any different. Oh, I’m sure you’re just like what I thought, only——’ She paused then, and a little sensitive flush ran up into her cheeks. She had almost said, ‘Only your beard is grey.’
But her eyes had gone to its greyness.
‘Yes,’ he said a little sadly, ‘I didn’t wait for you, Molly, did I? We always said we would grow old together, but I have left you far behind.’
He hardly knew his wife. Time seemed to have turned back for her. There was not a wrinkle on her skin, the sharp winters had given a bloom like girlhood’s to her cheeks, and the varied life and rest from domestic worries had brought the spring back into her blood.
The wife who had gone away had been shrinking, careworn; she had worn shabby bonnets of her own trimming, dresses she had turned and turned about again. This one had the quiet, assured manner of a woman accustomed to travel. She wore a tailor-made fawn coat and skirt, whose very severity accentuated their style. There was the hall-mark of Paris on her bonnet of violets.
Cameron sent a fleeting thought of gratitude to Mortimer, who had made it possible for his own clothes not to blush beside such garments. They were a quiet little party, and Challis did most of the talking. Cameron looked at his wife when she was occupied with the tea-cups; her searching eyes fastened on him when he turned to speak to his little daughter.
Once, when he passed a plate to Challis, she noticed his hands against the snow of the tablecloth—hands she did not know at all, so rough and weather-marked and deeply brown they were. But she asked no question; instinctively she felt there was something to be told to her, and she hung back from the knowledge, knowing the telling would be pain to him.
‘Oh dear,’ said Challis, ‘if only you had brought Bart down, too, daddie, and he was sitting just here on this chair next to me!’
‘I thought it was Hermie you wanted most,’ the mother said.
‘Ah, Hermie! I want Hermie to sleep with. No, not to sleep with, for we sha’n’t shut our eyes at all, but just to lie in the dark and talk and talk.’
‘Roly wanted to come,’ Cameron said. ‘He’s war mad, of course. He’s painted the name Transvaal Vale on the sliprails.’
‘On the what?’ said Mrs. Cameron.
Cameron went darkly red.
‘The—gate,’ he said.
‘What else does he do? I want to know about Roly,’ Challis said eagerly.
‘He wears a football jersey most of the time,’ said the father, ‘and is to be met at any hour of the day hung all over with the table-knives and the tin-opener and the cork-screw and the sharpening-steel. Also, he carries round his neck a string of what I think he calls double bungers. These are his cartridges. And he came possessed of an old tent in some way—the railway navvies gave it to him, I believe—and he has pitched it just outside the back door, and sleeps in it all night.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear! The night air; he will catch a dreadful chill!’ cried the mother, used now to English nights.
‘Not he! He’s a hardy little chap,’ said Cameron.
‘More, more,’ said Challis. ‘He’s great fun, I think. Tell some more about him, daddie.’
‘A neighbour, young Stevenson—you remember the Stevensons of Coolooli, Molly?—gave him half a crown the other day, and of course he went off to Wilgandra and laid in a stock of crackers. He made a rather ingenious fortification that he called Spion Kop, and invited us all out to see it. You don’t know Darkie, the cattle dog, of course—we’ve only had him four years; Darkie naturally came too. He’s rather a curiosity in his way, old Darkie; seems to have a natural love for fire, and goes off his head with excitement whenever a cracker is let off or the boys make a bonfire. Well, he made enough noise barking and yelping over Roly’s display to satisfy even that young man. Presently Roly Put a whole packet of his double bungers on the top of his fort, and—what he did not tell me till afterwards—a quantity of blasting powder he had purloined from the navvies. Then he put a lighted match near a long piece of string, and cut down to us as hard as he could. Just at the critical moment, when we were getting our ears ready for the big explosion, Darkie gave a frantic bark of delight, bounded to the fort and seized the whole packet in his mouth. There wasn’t time even to shout at him; there came a tremendous explosion, and the air seemed full of stones and earth and Darkie. The old fellow must have been blown six feet up in the air. I think we all shut our eyes, not liking the thought of seeing the poor old dog descend in a thousand pieces. But when we opened them he was down on the ground barking and yelping with more furious delight than ever, and except for a badly singed coat and a burnt tongue, not a bit the worse for his elevation.’
Mrs. Cameron was looking disturbed.
‘He seems to do very dangerous things,’ she said.
Cameron laughed.
‘That’s what Miss Browne says,’ he answered; ‘but he always turns up safe and sound.’
‘Miss Browne?’ repeated Mrs. Cameron.
Cameron’s eyes dropped to his plate, and he drank deeply at his tea, to put off the moment of his answer.
‘Who is Miss Browne?’ his wife asked again.
Cameron moved his eyes to a button on her coat.
‘I was obliged to change lady-helps,’ he said.
Mrs. Cameron’s face expressed absolute alarm.
‘Miss Macintosh—is not Miss Macintosh still with you? You did not tell me. Why did she go? How long has she been gone?’
Cameron looked white. ‘Some—little time,’ he said; ‘she—went to be married.’
‘And is this other—is Miss Browne as good? Oh, it would almost be impossible. Have you had to change much?’
Cameron reassured her on that point. Miss Browne had been with them ever since Miss Macintosh left.
‘But how long is that? You don’t tell me,’ she cried.
Cameron looked at a lower button.
‘Some—time,’ he repeated faintly.
‘Jim,’ she cried, and almost sharply, ‘have you been keeping things from me? How long has Miss Macintosh been gone?’
He lifted his eyes and looked at her. The day of reckoning had come.
‘She left six months after you went,’ he answered.
The news held Mrs. Cameron speechless for three minutes.
‘This other person—Miss Browne—is she as good?’ she asked at length.
Cameron breathed hard, and cut a slice of bread.
‘She does her best,’ he said, ‘but she is not—very capable.’
‘Jim,’ said Mrs. Cameron, ‘is there anything else? Have you lost your position?’
He bent his head a little. He merely nodded, and she might have thought it a careless nod, only her eyes suddenly saw the trembling of his work-marked hands.
‘Challis,’ she said, ‘go away—leave us alone.’
The child put down her spoon and fork, and vanished.
Cameron stood up, looking fixedly at the carpet, waiting with bowed head for her questions.
‘Have you hidden anything else?’ she said, ‘Are any of the children dead?’
‘None of them are dead,’ he said.
‘Are any of them deformed or hurt in any way?’
‘None of them are hurt—they are in good health,’ he said.
‘Have you ceased to love me?’—her voice was losing the note of fear that made it hard and unnatural.
He looked at her, and his eyes swam.
Her arms were round him, she was kissing him, kissing his wet eyes, his trembling lips, stroking his cheeks, crying over him.
‘You are afraid to tell me—me, your own little wife—something that does not matter at all. What can anything matter? We are all alive, and we love each other as we have done always. Darling, darling, don’t look like that! Put down your head here, here on my breast—my husband, my darling! This is Molly, who went all through the ups and downs with you; you never used to be afraid to tell her anything.’
He tried to speak, but sobs shook him instead.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘There, don’t talk, don’t try to tell me. I know, darling. You lost the position, and you couldn’t get another, and you’re all as poor as poor can be. Pooh! what does that matter? You have none of you starved, since you are all alive, and the end has come. Poor hands, poor hands,’—her kisses and tears covered them,—‘have they been breaking stones that the children might have bread?’
‘Molly,’ he said, anguished, ‘your worst thought cannot picture what I have brought them to.’
She trembled a little—Hermie, little Floss, the boys!
But she laughed.
‘They are alive—they are together, and not in the Benevolent Asylum. My darling, I don’t mind in the very least.’
‘Molly,’ he cried, ‘you cannot dream how bad it is! It is Dunks’ selection; we have been there four years!’
She trembled again, for she had seen Dunks’ selection, and the memory of it was yet in her mind.
But again she laughed.
‘It will have made them all hardy,’ she said; ‘I can see it has done so, or Roly wouldn’t be sleeping out of doors.’
‘My wife,’ he said, ‘my wife, my wife!’
They clung together.
‘The past is gone,’ she whispered. ‘I will never leave you again.’
‘My wife, my wife!’
‘Together now till death; nothing else shall part us, nothing else.’
‘My wife!’
Her tears rained down, mingled with his, and fell away into the greyness of his beard.
They clung together, and the room and the world faded. They clung together, and there was no one in all space but themselves and God—God who had given them into each other’s arm once more.
Challis came to the door—she had knocked twice, to tell them that the luggage had come from the ship—then she turned the handle, for she thought they had gone out.
But those faces! Those faces of the father and mother, wet, uplifted, almost divine!
Very softly she closed the door again, and stole away.