Chapter XX Miss Browne
‘I shall have no man’s love
For ever, and no face of children born
Or tender lips upon me.
Far off from flowers or any love of man
Shall my life be for ever.’
What was it that broke the barriers down? The wet eyelashes of the little music-maker? The droop of her soft mouth? Or came there across that poor room one of those divine waves of sympathy and understanding that wash at times from a richly endowed soul to a lonely stunted one?
Miss Browne found herself telling anything and everything that had happened in her life, and even the things that might have happened. Not that the whole of them made a sum of any account, if you condensed them; but, told ramblingly and with pauses for tears, they fell pathetically on the young listening ears.
Thirty-eight grey years! Life in this country town and that country town, in this crowded suburb or on that out-back station or selection—a hireling always. The first twenty-five had dragged by under English skies that even in summer had no sun for a motherless, fatherless girl, pupil-teacher from the age of fourteen. She bore twelve years of it patiently enough, and indeed would have borne another score, but two friends, stronger, more restless souls than she, though chained to the same life, told her they were going to break through it all, strike out of the stagnant waters of suburban England into the fresh, glittering sea the other side of the world.
They were saving their salaries to pay their passage to Australia. Governesses were royally paid out there, they had heard, and more than that—they whispered this a little ashamed—husbands grew on every bush.
Miss Browne scraped and saved for a year, cheerfully shivering without a winter jacket, happily heedless of the rain that came through the holes of her umbrella. If it had been a question of economising in her diet, she would have brought herself down to a crust a day, in her eagerness to make a plunge into a different life, but fortunately governesses are ‘all found.’ The three women cheerfully cramped their bodies third-class for the voyage, letting their souls soar boundlessly in the pleasant evenings on deck.
They came to their new land, saw it, and after a few years were conquered. Almost the same conditions of life, the same sickening struggle of a multitude of educated women for one poor place, the same grey outlook. One found a husband; he took her to some heaven-forgotten corner of North Queensland, where she had for neighbours Japanese and Chinese and Javanese, and he drank, as the men all do in those forgotten corners, where alligators are to be found on the river-banks, and coloured labour crowds out the white man’s efforts. She bore him six children in eight years, and then died thankfully. The second woman went into a hospital and became a nurse; for the last five years she had been in Western Australia, kept busy with the typhoid in Perth. Once in a while she wrote to Miss Browne; once or twice she had eagerly said she was ‘all but engaged,’ but later letters never confirmed the hope, and now a dull commonplace had settled down over the correspondence.
Miss Browne drifted from place to place, place to place; there was nothing she was capable of doing really well, and no land has a hospitable welcome for such.
‘It is a funny thing,’ she said to Challis, ‘but, however hard I try, I never seem able to do things like other people can.’ Her eyes stared in front of her. ‘If it had been your mother now in my place, she could have managed; she is made of the stuff that never goes under. But you would have thought any one like I am would have been sheltered and—cared for—as so many women are cared for.’
Challis stroked her restlessly moving hand.
‘Sometimes,’ she continued—her voice dropped, her eyes stared straight out before her—‘sometimes I can’t help feeling as if Providence has pushed me out to the front, and quite forgotten to give me anything to fight with.’
Then she pulled herself together reprovingly.
‘Of course, that attitude is very wrong of me,’ she said. ‘It is only very seldom I think that, my love.’
Challis squeezed her hand sympathetically.
‘It will all come right some day,’ she said, with the large vague hopefulness of the very young.
‘That’s what I have always told myself,’ said Miss Browne; ‘but you must see, my love, if—if it does not come right very soon, it will be too late. I am thirty-eight—there, there is no need to mention it to Hermie or the rest of the family, my love.’
‘But thirty-eight is not old,’ said Challis, so eager to comfort, she left truth to take care of itself. ‘Think what lots of people are fifty, and they don’t think themselves a bit old.’
‘But who will marry you after you are thirty-eight?’ said poor Miss Browne, unable to keep any ache back to-night.
‘Oh,’ said Challis, ‘lots of people don’t get married, and they are as happy as anything.’
Miss Browne’s lip quivered.
‘If I had been asked,’ she said, ‘then I should not mind so much. But I am—thirty-eight, and no one has—ever asked me.’
Challis put her arm round the poor woman’s neck; she stroked her cheek, patted her shoulder.
‘Of course,’ Miss Browne said at last, sitting up with tremulous, red-eyed dignity, ‘there is no need to tell Hermie that, my love.’
‘But you must have lots of friends,’ said Challis, looking at the number of envelopes lying on the dressing-table. The colour ran up into Miss Browne’s face. She half put her hand over the letters, then drew it back.
‘If I told you about these, you would think me so foolish, my dear,’ she faltered.
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t!’ said Challis. ‘Now I know you so well, I seem to understand everything.’
Miss Browne got some little papers out of a drawer, English penny weeklies devoted to ‘ladies’ interests.’ She turned to the Answers to Correspondents pages, ‘Advice on Courtship and Marriage.’
‘Those marked with a little cross are the answers to me,’ whispered Miss Browne. And Challis read these three marked paragraphs:
‘Fair Australienne writes: “I am the only daughter of a very wealthy squatter, and have two lovers. One is a squatter on an adjoining station, the other an English baronet travelling in Australia. If I marry the baronet, I must leave my father, who loves me dearly; but I care for him more than I do for the squatter. What would you advise me to do?”
And the ‘Aunt Lucy’ who conducted the page had replied:
‘Marry where your heart dictates. Could you not induce your father to live in England with you?’
‘Sweet Rock Lily.—“I am eighteen, and, my friends tell me, very, very beautiful. I am governess in a wealthy family, and the son is deeply in love with me. If he marries me, he will be disinherited. What should I do? I love him very much. And will you tell me a remedy for thin hair?”
‘The editor’s answer is: “Try to overcome the prejudice of the family, Rock Lily, and all will go well. Bay rum and bitter apples is an excellent tonic.”
‘Little Wattle Blossom.—“I am seventeen, and only just out of the schoolroom. I am passionately in love with a young handsome man, who loves me in return; but my parents are trying to force me into a marriage with an old foreign nobleman. They have even fixed the wedding day, and I am kept a prisoner. What would you advise me to do?”
‘The editor’s answer is: “You cannot be forced into a marriage in these days. Refuse firmly. In four years you will be of age. In answer to your second question, your friend had better try massage for the crow’s feet and thin neck.”’
Challis read in extreme puzzlement.
‘I hardly understand,’ she said. ‘How do you mean—these are to you?’
‘It is only my foolishness, my love,’ said Miss Browne, gathering them up again; ‘but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it. The days the mail comes and I get the papers, I am so excited I don’t know what to do. You get into the way of feeling it really is yourself.’
But this phase of Miss Browne was beyond Challis’s comprehension, and she only looked doubtfully at the papers, so Miss Browne was swift to change the subject.
‘These letters,’ she said, ‘are to the Melbourne and Adelaide art societies. I should like to tell you about this, my love. Your father, about four years ago, painted a picture, and something happened that made him try to burn it. Well, we managed to prevent that, and I got hold of it and hid it away. He has forgotten all about it now, imagines I sold it, but I haven’t, and it occurred to me lately to write to several artists and describe the picture to them, and see if they would buy it. I did not mention your father’s name; just said it was by a friend of mine—you will forgive me for the liberty, my love?’
‘But didn’t you send the picture?’ said Challis. ‘They could hardly tell from a description.’
‘I had no money,’ said Miss Browne, sighing ‘I made inquiries at Wilgandra, but it would cost so much to have it packed and sent to Sydney. And there is the risk of losing it. I was very careful over the description; it took me five long evenings to write—I left no detail out.’
‘And what happened?’ said Challis.
Miss Browne flushed.
‘Courtesy seems dying out,’ she said. ‘Not one of them answered. It might have been any lady writing—they could not know it was only I.’
Challis asked more questions about the picture. She asked to be shown it, and waited patiently while Miss Browne disinterred it from under the bed, and took off the old counterpane with which it was wrapped.
‘I have never seen any great picture-galleries,’ said Miss Browne, ‘but I know there is something about this that must be good. It could not work up the feelings in me that it does, if it were just an ordinary picture. Look at the man’s eyes, my love—isn’t the hopelessness frightful?—and yet look at him well. You just know he’ll keep on trying and trying till he gets there.’
Challis gazed at it for a long time.
‘Yes,’ she said slowly; ‘that is how it makes me feel. I feel I want to beg him to stop trying, and lie down and go to sleep. But it wouldn’t be any use. You feel the storm will last for ever, and the captain will go on trying for ever to get to wherever he has made up his mind to get to.’
‘Your father intends it to represent the Flying Dutchman,’ said Miss Browne.
‘Oh yes!’ Challis said. ‘Of course. I ought to have known. But it is just like this picture—just as sad. And I play it too. Wagner, you know,—Der fliegende Hollander,—it makes you want to cry.’
‘My love,’ cried Miss Browne, ‘you say you know an artist in Paris. Why, surely that would be the very thing! I believe they are all jealous of him in Sydney. Write to your friend. He would take notice of a letter from you. Write to him, and send the picture too. You can afford to, and it is not likely to go astray, since you know the exact address. Suppose we start to do it now?’
Challis sprang up with shining eyes. It seemed the loveliest plan in the world.
‘It shall be our secret, you dear, dear thing!’ she cried. ‘We won’t tell a single soul in the world—not even mother. Let’s write it down that we promise.’ She pushed pen and ink to Miss Browne. ‘Write on this paper,’ she said, ‘“I promise Challis Cameron faithfully I won’t tell any one in the world.”’
Miss Browne wrote the compact down, smiling.
Challis seized the pen.
‘I promise Miss Brown faithfully I won’t tell,’ she wrote.
‘Oh, my dear, my love!’ said Miss Browne distressed. ‘My love, how careless of you! I spell my name with an “e.” I never thought you would forget, my love. No, don’t add it on there; it looks as if it were an afterthought. Please write it again. We have always spelt our name with an “e,” my love.’