II
At the trial Jack said, in absolute truth, he shot Easu in self-defence. He had not the faintest thought of shooting him when he rode up to the paddock: nor of shooting anybody. He had called in passing, just to say good-day. And then he had fired at Easu because he knew the axe would come down in his skull if he didn’t.
Herbert gave the same deposition. The shot was entirely in self-defence.
So Jack was free again. There had been no further mention of Monica, after Jack had said he was riding south to see her, because he had always cared for her. No one hinted that Easu was the father of her child, though Mrs. Ellis knew and Old George knew.
Afterwards Jack wondered why he had called at the Reds’ place that morning. Why had he taken the trail past where he and Easu had fought? He had intended to see Easu, that was why. But for what unconscious purpose, who shall say? The death was laid at the door of the old feud between Jack and Red. Only Old George knew the whole, and he, subtle and unafraid, pushed justice as it should go, according to his own sense of justice, like a real Australian.
Meanwhile he had been corresponding with Monica and Percy. They were in Albany, and on the point of sailing to Melbourne, where Percy would enter some business or other, and the two would live as man and wife. Monica was expecting another child. At this news, Mr. George wanted to let them go, and be damned to them. But he talked to Mary, and Mary said Jack would want Monica, no matter what happened.
“When he wants a thing really, he can’t change,” said Mary gloomily. “He is like that.”
“An obstinate young fool that’s never had enough lickings,” said Old George. “Devil’s blood of his mother’s devil of an obstinate father. But very well then, let him have her, with a couple of babies for a dowry. Make himself the laughing stock of the colony.”
So he wrote to Monica: “If you care about seeing Jack Grant again, you’d better stop in this colony. He sticks to it he wants to see you, being more of a fool than a knave, unlike many people in Western Australia.”
She being obstinate like the rest, stayed on in Albany, though Percy, angry and upset, sailed on to Melbourne. He said she could join him if she liked. He stayed till her baby was born, then went because he didn’t want to face Jack.
Jack arrived by sea. He was still not strong enough to travel by land. He got a vessel going to Adelaide, that touched at Albany.
Monica, thinner than ever, with a little baby in her arms, and her flower-face like a chilled flower, was on the dock to meet him. He saw her at once, and his heart gave a queer lurch.
As he came forward to meet her, their eyes met. Her yellow eyes looked straight into his, with the same queer, panther-like scrutiny, and the eternal question. She was a question, and she had got to be answered. It made her fearless, almost shameless, whatever she did.
But with Percy, the fear had nipped her, the fear that she should go forever unanswered, as if life had rejected her.
This nipped look and her strange yellow flare of question as she peered at him under her brows, like a panther, made Jack’s cheeks slowly darken, and the life-blood flow into him stronger, heavier. He knew his passion for her was the same. Thank God he met her at last.
“You’re awfully thin,” she said.
“So are you,” he answered.
And she laughed her quick, queer, breathless little laugh, showing her pointed teeth. She had seen the death-look in his eyes and it was her answer, a bitter answer enough. She stopped to put straight the tiny bonnet over her little baby’s face, with a delicate, remote movement. He watched her in silence.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked him, without looking at him.
“With you,” he said.
Then she looked at him again, with the dry-eyed question. But she saw the unapproachable death-look there in his eyes, at the back of their dark-blue, dilated emotion and passion. And her heart gave up. She looked down the pier, as if to walk away. He carried his own bag. They set off side by side.
She lived in a tiny slab cottage in a side lane. But she called first at a neighbour’s house, for her other child. It was a tiny, toddling thing with a defiant stare in its pale-blue eyes. Monica held her baby on one arm, and led this tottering child by the other. Jack walked at her side in silence.
The cottage had just two rooms, poorly furnished. But it was clean, and had bright cotton curtains and a sofa-bed, and a pale-blue convolvulus vine mingling with a passion vine over the window.
She laid the baby down in its cradle, and began to take off the bonnet of the little girl. She had called it Jane.
Jack watched the little Jane as if fascinated. The infant had curly reddish hair, of a lovely fine texture and a beautiful tint, something like raw silk with threads of red. Her eyes were round and bright blue, and rather defiant, and she had the delicate complexion of her kind. She fingered her mother’s brooch, like a little monkey touching a bit of glittering gold, as Monica stooped to her.
“Daddy gone!” she said in her chirping, bird-like, quite emotionless tone.
“Yes, Daddy gone!” replied Monica, as emotionlessly.
The child then glanced with unmoved curiosity at Jack. She kept on looking and looking at him, sideways. And he watched her just as sharply, her sharp, pale-blue eyes.
“Him more Daddy?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Monica, who was suckling her baby.
“Yes,” said Jack in a rather hard tone, smiling with a touch of mockery. “I’m your new father.”
The child smiled back at him a faint, mocking little grin, and put her finger in her mouth.
The day passed slowly in the strange place, Monica busy all the time with the children and the house. Poor Monica, she was already a drudge. She was still careless and hasty in her methods, but clean, and uncomplaining. She kept herself to herself, and did what she had to do. And Jack watched, mostly silent.
At last the lamp was lighted, the children were both in bed. Monica cooked a little supper over the fire.
Before he came to the fable, Jack asked:
“Is Jane Easu’s child?”
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“No one has told me. Is she?”
Monica turned and faced him, with the yellow flare in her eyes, as she looked into his eyes, challenging.
“Yes,” she said.
But his eyes did not change. The remoteness at the back of them did not come any nearer.
“Shall you hate her?” she asked, rather breathlessly.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“Don’t!” she pleaded, in the same breathlessness. “Because I rather hate her.”
“She’s too little to hate,” said Jack.
“I know,” said Monica rather doubtfully.
She put the food on the table. But she herself ate nothing.
“Aren’t you well? You don’t eat,” he asked.
“I can’t eat just now,” she said.
“If you have a child to suckle, you should,” he replied.
But she only became more silent, and her hands hung dead in her lap. Then the baby began to cry, a thin, poor, frail noise, and she went to soothe it.
When she came back, Jack had left the table and was sitting in Percy’s wooden arm-chair.
“Percy’s child doesn’t seem to have much life in it,” he said.
“Not very much,” she replied. And her hands trembled as she cleared away the dishes.
When she had finished, she moved about, afraid to sit down. He called her to him.
“Monica!” he said with a little jerk of his head, meaning she should come to him.
She came rather slowly, her queer, pure-seeming face looking like a hurt. She stood with her thin hands hanging in front of her apron.
“Monica!” he said, rising and taking her hands. “I should still want you if you had a hundred children. So we won’t say any more about that. And you won’t oppose me when there’s anything I want to do, will you?”
She shook her head.
“No, I won’t oppose you,” she said, in a dead little voice.
“Let me come to you, then,” he said. “I should have to come to you if you went to Melbourne or all round the world.’ And I should be glad to come,” he added whimsically, with the warmth of his old smile coming into his eyes. “I suppose I should be glad to come, if it was in hell.”
“But it isn’t hell, is it?” she asked, wistfully and a little defiantly.
“Not a bit,” he said. “You’ve got too much pluck in you to spoil. You’re as good to me as you were the first time I knew you. Only Easu might have spoiled you.”
“And you killed him,” she said quickly, half in reproach.
“Would you rather he’d killed me?” he asked.
She looked a long time into his eyes, with that watchful, searching look that used to hurt him. Now it hurt him no more.
She shook her head, saying:
“I’m glad you killed him. I couldn’t bear to think of him living on, and sneering—sneering!—I was always in love with you, really.”
“Ah, Monica!” he exclaimed softly, teasingly, with a little smile. And she flushed, and flashed with anger.
“If you never knew, it was your own fault!” she jerked out.
“Really,” he said, quoting and echoing the word as she had said it, and smiling with a touch of raillery at her, before he added:
“You always loved me really, but you loved the others as well, unreally.”
“Yes,” she said, baffled, defiant.
“All right, that day is over. You’ve had your unreal loves. Now come and have your real one.”
In the next room Easu’s child was sleeping in its odd little way, a sleep that was neither innocent nor not innocent, queer and naively “knowing,” even in its sleep. Jack watched it as he took off his things: this little inheritance he had from Easu. An odd little thing. With an odd, loveless little spirit of its own, cut off and not daunted. He wouldn’t love it, because it wasn’t lovable. But its odd little dauntlessness and defiance amused him, he would see it had fair play.
And he took Monica in his arms, glad to get into grips with his own fate again. And it was good. It was better, perhaps, than his passionate desirings of earlier days had imagined. Because he didn’t lose and scatter himself. He gathered, like a reaper at harvest gathering.
And Monica, who woke for her baby, looked at him as he slept soundly and she sat in bed suckling her child. She saw in him the eternal stranger. There he was, the eternal stranger, lying in her bed sleeping at her side. She rocked her baby slightly as she sat up in the night, still rocking in the last throes of rebellion. The eternal stranger, whom she feared, because she could never finally possess him, and never finally know him! He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel so terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against, but could no longer withstand. Because the emptiness of the other men, Easu, Percy, all the men she knew, was worse than the doom of this man who would never give her his ultimate intimacy, but who would be able to hold her till the end of time. There was something enduring and changeless in him. But she would never hold him entirely. Never! She would have to resign herself to this.
Well, so be it. At least it relieved her of the burden of responsibility for life. It took away from her, her own strange and fascinating female power, which she couldn’t bear to part with. But at the same time she felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her. After all, this man was magical.
She put her child in its cradle, and returning waked the man. He put out his hand quickly for her, as if she were a new, blind discovery. She quivered and thrilled, and left it to him. It was his mystery, since he would have it so.