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.