 Part 4 Chapter 8 Old Ock Ock failed in health that winter. He was really old now, was two or three and sixty, and with the oncoming of the rains and cold gusty winds various infirmities began to plague him. He has done himself rather too well since his marriage, said Marnie, in private. After being a worker for the greater part of his life, it would have been better for him to work on to the end. Yes, that, Mary could understand and agree with, but Richard continued. All it means, of course, is that the poor fellow is beginning to prepare for his last long journey. These aches and pains of his represent the packing and the strapping, without which not even a short earthly journey can be undertaken, and his is into eternity. Mary, making lace over a pillow, looked up at this to trifle apprehensively. What things you do say? If any one heard you, they'd think you weren't very—very religious. Her fear, lest Richard's outspokenness should be mistaken for impurity, never left her. Tilly was plain and to the point. Like a bear with a sore back, that's what he is, since he can't get down among his blessed birds, he leads Tom the life of the condemned over the feeding of those bantams, as if the boy could help him not lying when they awed. At thirty-six, Tilly was the image of her mother. Tilly gone with the slight crust of a serbity that had threatened her in her maiden-days, when thanks to her misplaced affections it had seemed for a time as if the purple prizes of life, love, offers of marriage, a home of her own, were going to pass her by. She was now a stout, high-coloured woman with a roar of a laugh, full yet firm lips, and the whitest of teeth. Mary thought her decidedly toned down and improved since her marriage, but Marnie put it that the means Tilly now had at her disposal were such as to make people shut an eye to her want of refinement. However that might be, old Mrs. Ockock was welcomed everywhere, even by those on whom her bouncing manners grated. She was invariably clad in a thick and handsome black silk gown over which she wore all the jewellery she could crowd on her person, huge cameo brooches, eardrops, rings and bracelets, lockets and chains. Her name topped subscription lists, and having early weaned her old husband off his dissenting habits, she was a real prop to Archdeacon Long and his church, taking the chief and most expensive table at tea-meetings the most thankless stall at Bazaars. She kept open house, too, and gave delightful parties, where, while some sat at Lou, others were free to turn the rooms upside down for a dance, or to ransack wardrobes and presses for costumes for charades. She drove herself and her friends about in various vehicles briskly and well, and indulged besides in many secret charities. Her husband thought no such woman had ever trodden the earth, and publicly blessed the day on which he first set eyes on her. After the dose I'd add with me first was a bit of a risk that I knew, and it put me off me sleep for a night or two beforehand. But my tillie's the queen of women, I say the queen, sir. I've never had a wrong word from her, and when I go she gets every penny I've got. Why, I'm jiggered if she didn't stop at home from the races to the day, and all on my account. Now then, Pa, drop it, or the doctor'll think you've been mixing your liquors. Give your old pin here, and let me poultice it. He had another sound reason for gratitude. Somewhere in the background of his house dwelt his two ne'er-do-well sons. Tillie had accepted their presence uncomplainingly, indeed she sometimes stood up for Tom against his father. Now, Pa, stop nagging at the boy, will you? You'll never get anything out of him that way. Tom's right enough if you know how to take him. You'll never set the Thames on fire, if that's what you mean. But I'm thankful I can tell you to have a handy chap like him at my back. If I had to depend on your silly old paws, I'd never get anything done at all. And so Tom, a flaxen-haired, sheepish-looking man of something over thirty, let a kind of go-as-you-please existence about the place, a jack of all trades, in turn carpenter, white washer, paper-hanger, an expert fetcher and carrier, bullied by his father, sheltered under his stepmother's capacious wing. It isn't his fault he's never come to anything, he hadn't half a chance. The truthy is merry, for all thy say to the opposite, men are ardour than women, so unforgiving like. Just because Tom made a slip once they've never let him forget it, but tied it to his coattails for him to drag with him through life. Little-minded, I call it. Besides if you ask me, my dear, it must have been a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. Tom is seducer, can you picture it, merry, it's enough to make one split? And with a meaning glance at a friend, till he broke out in a contagious peel of laughter. As for Johnny, well, and she shrugged her shoulders. A bad egg's bad, merry, and no amount of cookin' and doctrine else sweeten it. But he didn't like himself, did he? And my opinion is parents should look to themselves a bit more than they do. As she spoke she threw open the door of the little room where Johnny housed. It was an odd place. The walls were plastered over with newspaper-cuttings, with old prints from illustrated journals, with snippets torn off valentines and keepsakes. Stuck one on another, these formed a kind of loose wallpaper which stirred in the draught. Till he went on. I see myself to it being kept cleanish. He hates the girl to come botherin' around. Oh, just Johnny's rubbish! For merry had stooped curiously to the table which was littered with a queer collection of objects, match-boxes on wheels, empty reels of cotton threaded on strings, bits of wood shaped in rounds and squares, boxes made of paper, dried seaweed glued in patterns on strips of cardboard. They's forever potting around with them, or amusement he gets out of it only the Lord can tell. She did not mention the fact, known to Mary, that when Johnny had a drinking-bout it was she who looked after him, got him comfortably to bed, and made shift to keep the noise from his father's ears. Yes, Tillie's charity seemed surely inexhaustible. Again there was the case of Ginny's children. For in this particular winter Tillie had exchanged her black silk for a stuffed gown heavily trimmed with crepe. She was in mourning for poor Ginny, who had died not long after giving birth to a third daughter. Died off the daughter in more senses than one was Tillie's verdict. John had certainly been extremely put out at the advent of yet another girl, and the probability was that Ginny had taken his reproaches too much to heart. However, it was she could not rally, and one day Mary received a telegram saying that if she wished to see Ginny alive she must come at once. No mention was made of Tillie, but Mary ran to her with the news, and Tillie declared her intention of going too. I suppose I may be allowed to say good-bye to my own sister, even though I'm not an honourable. Not that Ginny and I ever really drew together, she continued as the train bore them over the ranges. She'd too much of poor par in her, and I was all ma. I'd luck that it must be just her who managed to get such a domineering brute for her husband. I'll excuse me, Mary, won't you—a domineering brute! And to think I once envied her the match! She went on meditatively, removing her bonnet and substituting a kind of nightcap intended to keep her hair free from dust. Lorks, Mary, it's a good thing fate doesn't always take us at our word. We don't know which side our bread's buttered on, and that's the truth. Why, my dear, I wouldn't exchange my old boy for all the honourables in creation. They were in time to take leave of Ginny lying white as her pillows behind the red-rep hangings of the bed. The bony parts of her face had sprung into prominence, her large soft eyes fallen in. John, stalking solemnly and noiselessly in a long black coat, himself led the two women to the bedroom where he left them. They sat down, one on each side of the great four-poster. Ginny hardly glanced at her sister. It was Mary she wanted—Mary's hand she fumbled for, while she told her trouble. It's the children, Mary, she whispered. I can't die happy because of the children. John doesn't understand them. Ginny's whole existence was bound up in the three little ones she had brought into the world. Dearest Ginny, don't fret. I'll look after them for you and take care of them," promised Mary, wiping away her tears. I thought so, said the dying woman, relieved but without gratitude. It seemed but natural to her who was called upon to give up everything that those remaining should make sacrifices. Her fingers plucked at the sheet. John's been good to me, she went on with closed eyes. But if it hadn't been for the children—yes, the children—I think I'd have done better. Her speech lapsed oddly after her years of patient practice, to have taken—to have taken—the name remained unspoken. Ginny raised astonished eyebrows at Mary, wondering, she telegraphed in lip language, forming the word very largely indistinctly, for neither knew of Ginny having had any but her one glorious chance. Tilly's big heart yearned over her sister's forlorn little ones. They could be heard bleating like lambs for the mother to whom till now they had never cried in vain. Her instant idea was to gather all three up in her arms and carry them off to her own roomy, childless home, where she would have given them a delightful, though not maybe a particularly discriminating, upbringing. But the funeral over, the blinds raised, the two ladies and the elder babes clad in the stiff, expensive mourning that befitted the widow's social position, John put his foot down, and to Mary was extremely explicit. Under no circumstances will I permit Matilda to have anything to do with the rearing of my children, excellent creature though she be. On the other hand he would not have been unwilling for Mary to mother them. This, of course, was out of the question. Richard had accustomed himself to Trotty, but would thank you, she knew, for any fresh encroachment on his privacy. Before leaving, however, she promised to sound him on the plan of placing Trotty as a weekly border at a young lady's seminary and taking the infant in her place. For it came out that John intended to set Zara, Zara but newly returned from her second voyage to England and still sipping like a bee at the suites of various situations, at the head of his house once more, and Mary could not imagine Zara rearing a baby. Equally hard was it to understand John not having learnt wisdom from his two previous failures to live with his sister, but in seeking tactfully to revive his memory she ran up against such an ingrained belief in the superiority of his own kith and kin that she was baffled and could only fold her hands and hoped for the best. Besides, Jane's children are infinitely more tractable than poor Emma's, was John's parting shot. Strange thought Mary how attached John was to his second family. He had still another request to make of her. The reports he received of the boy Johnny, now a pupil at the Geelong Grammar School, grew worse from term to term. It had become clear to him that he was unfortunate enough to possess an out-and-out dullard for a son. Regretfully giving up, therefore, the design he had cherished of educating Johnny for the law, he had resolved to waste no more good money on the boy, but to take him once he had turned fifteen into his own business. Young John, however, had proved refractory, expressing a violent antipathy to the idea of office-life. It is here that I should be glad of another opinion, and I turn to you, Mary, my dear. Jane was of no use whatever in such matters, none whatever, being and very properly so entirely wrapped up in her own children. So Mary arranged to break her homeward journey at Geelong for the purpose of seeing and summing up her nephew. Johnny, he was Jack at school, but that, of course, his tom-fulls of relations couldn't be expected to remember. Johnny was waiting on the platform when the train steamed in. Oh, what a bonny boy, said Mary to herself, all poor Emma's good looks! Johnny had been kicking his heels disconsolently. Another of these wretched old women coming down to draw him, he wished every one of them at the bottom of the sea. However, he pulled himself together and went forward to greet his aunt. He was not in the least bashful. And as they left the station he took stock of her out of the tail of his eye, with a growing approval. This one at any rate he needn't feel ashamed of, and she was not so dreadfully old after all. Perhaps she mightn't turn out quite such a wet blanket as the rest, though from experience he couldn't connect any pleasure with relatives' visits, there were nasty pills that had to be swallowed. He feared and disliked his father. Aunt Zara had been surely ridiculous with her frills and simpers, the boys had imitated her for weeks after. And once most shameful of all his stepmother had come down and publicly wept over him. His cheeks still burnt at the remembrance, and he had been glad to hear that she was dead, served her jolly well right. But this Aunt Mary seemed a horse of another colour, and he did not sneak her into town by a back way as he had planned to do before seeing her. Greatly as Mary might admire the tall fair lad by her side, she found herself at a loss how to deal with him, the mind of a schoolboy of thirteen being a close book to her. Johnny looked amure and answered, Yes, Aunt Mary, to everything she said, but this was a small assistance in getting at the real boy inside. Johnny had no intention in the beginning of taking her into his often betrayed and badly bruised confidence. However, a happy instinct led her to suggest a visit to a shop that sold brandy-snaps and ginger-beer, and this was too much for his strength of mind. Golly didn't he have a tuck in, and a whole pound of bullseye was to take back with him to school. It was over the snaps, with an earth-brown moustache drawn around his fresh-young mouth, the underlip of which swelled like a ripe cherry, that he blurted out, I say, Aunt Mary, don't let the painter stick me in that beastly old office of his, I—I want to go to see. Oh! But, Johnny, your father would never consent to that, I'm sure. I don't see why not, returned the boy in an aggrieved voice. I hate figures, and father knows it. I tell you, I mean to go to see. And as he said it, his lips shot out, and suddenly, for all his limbered blue eyes and flaxen hair, it was his father's face that confronted Mary. He wouldn't think it respectable enough, dear. He wants you to rise higher in the world, and to make money, you must remember who he is. Bosh! said Johnny. Look at Uncle Ned and Uncle Jerry and the governor himself! He didn't have to sit in a beastly old whole of an office when he was my age. That was quite different, said Mary weakly. And as for your Uncle Jerry, Johnny, why afterwards he was as glad as could be to get into an office at all. Well, I'd sooner be hanged, retorted young John. But the next minute, flinging away dull care, he inquired briskly, Can you play tip-cat, Aunt Mary? And vanquished by her air of kindly interest, he gave her his supreme confidence. I say, don't peach, will you, but I've got a white rat. I keep it in a locker under my bed. A nice frank handsome boy, wrote Mary, don't be too hard on him, John. His great wish is to travel and see the world, or, as he puts it, to go to see. Mightn't it be a good thing to humour him in this? A taste of the hardships of life would soon cure him of any such fancies. Stuff and nonsense, said John the father, and threw the letter from him. I didn't send Mary there to let the young devil get around her like that. And thereupon he wrote to the headmaster that the screw was to be applied to Johnny as never before. This was his last chance. If it failed, in his next report showed no improvement, he would be taken away without further ado, and planked down under his father's nose. No son of his should go to see, he was damned if they should. For like many another who has yielded to the wandering passion in his youth, John had small mercy on it when it reared its head in his descendants. End of Part 4, Chapter 8. Henry Ockock was pressing for a second opinion, his wife had been in poor health since the birth of their last child. Marnie drove to Plevener House one morning between nine and ten o'clock. A thankless task lay before him. Mrs. Henry's case had been a fruitful source of worry to him, and he now saw nothing for it but a straight talk with Henry himself. He drove past what had once been the Great Swamp, from a bed of cattle-plowed mud interspersed with reedy water-holes in summer a dry and dust-swept hollow. From this the vast natural depression had been transformed into a graceful lake some three hundred acres in extent. On its surface pleasure-boats lay at their moorings by jetties and boat-sheds. Groups of stiff-necked swans sailed or ducked and straddled while shady walks followed the banks where the whip-like branches of the willows, showing shoots of tenderest green, trailed in the water or swayed like loose harp-strings to the breeze. All the houses that had sprung up around Lake Wendery had well stocked spreading grounds, but Ockock's outdid the rest. The groom opening a pair of decorative iron gates which were the show-piece of the neighborhood. Marnie turned in and drove past exotic firs, Morton Bay fig-trees and arrow-carriers, past cherished English hollies growing side by side with giant cacti. In one corner stood a rockery where a fountain played in goldfish, swam in a basin. The house itself, of brick and two storied, with massive bay windows, had an ornamental verandah on one side. The drawing-room was a medley of gilt and lustres, mirrors and glass shades. The finest objects from Dandaloo had been brought here only to be outdone by Henry's own additions. Yes, Ockock lived in grand style nowadays, as befitted one of the most important men in the town. His old father once gone, and Marnie alone knew why the latter's existence acted as a drag, he would no doubt stand for Parliament. Invited to walk into the breakfast-room, Marnie there found the family seated at table. It was a charming scene. Behind the urn, Mrs. Henry, in beribboned cap and morning wrapper, dandled her infant, while Henry in oriental gown and Turkish fez had laid his newspaper by to ride his young son on his foot. Marnie refused tea or coffee, but could not avoid drawing up a chair, touching the peachy cheeks of the children held aloft for his inspection, and meeting a fire of playful sallies and kindly inquiries. As he did so, he was sensitively aware that it fell to him to break up the peace of this household. May he knew the canker that had begun to eat at its roots. The children born off, Mrs. Henry interrogated her husband's pleasure with a pretty, may I or should I, lift of the brows, and gathering that he wished her to retire, laid her small plump hand in Marnie's, sent a graceful message to dearest Mary, and swept the folds of her gown from the room. Henry followed her with a well-pleased eye. His opinion was no secret that in figure and bearing his wife bore a marked resemblance to Her Majesty the Queen, and admonished her not to fail to partake of some light refreshment during the morning in the shape of a glass of sherry and a biscuit. Unless, my love, you prefer me to order cook to whip you up an eggnog. Mrs. Ock Ock is, I regret to say, entirely without appetite again, he went on, as the door closed behind his wife. What she eats is not enough to keep a sparrow going. You must prove your skill, doctor, and oblige us by prescribing a still more powerful tonic or appetiser, the last had no effect whatever. He spoke from the hearth-rug where he had gone to warm his skirts at the wood fire, audibly fingering the wile and est of sovereigns in a west-cut pocket. I feared as much, said Marnie gravely, and therewith took the plunge. When some twenty minutes later he emerged from the house, he was unaccompanied, and himself pulled the front-door to-behind him. He stood frowning heavily as he snapped the catches of his gloves, and fell foul of the groom over a buckle of the harness, in a fashion that left the man open-mouthed. Blow me if I don't believe he's got the sack, thought the man in driving-townwards. The abrupt stoppage of Richard's visit to Plevener House staggered Mary, and since she could get nothing out of her husband, she tied on her bonnet and went off hot-foot to question her friend. But Mrs. Henry tearfully declared her ignorance. She had listened in fear and trembling to the sound of the two angry voices, and Henry was adamant. They had already called in an upper doctor. Mary came home greatly distressed, and Richard, still wearing his obstinate front, she ended by losing her temper. He knew well enough, said she, it was not her way to interfere or to be inquisitive about his patience, but this was different, this had to do with one of her dearest friends, she must know. In her ears rang Agnes's words. Henry told me, love, he wouldn't insult me by repeating what your husband said of me. Oh, Mary, isn't it dreadful, and when I liked him so is a doctor. She now repeated them aloud. This was too much for Marnie, he blazed up. The confounded mischief monger, the back-biter. Well, if you will have it, wife, here you are, here's the truth. What I said to Ock Ock was, I said, my good man, if you want your wife to get over her next confinement more quickly, keep the sherry-deckander out of her reach. Mary gasped and sank on a chair, letting her arms flop to her side. Richard, she ejaculated. Oh, Richard, you never did. I did indeed, my dear. Oh, well, not in just those words, of course, we doctors must always wrap the truth up in silver paper. And I should feel it my duty to do the same again tomorrow, though there are pleasanter things in life, Mary, I can assure you, than informing a loam monger like Ock Ock that his wife is drinking on the sly. You can have no notion, my dear, of the compliments one calls down on one's head by so doing. The case is beyond my grasp, of course, and I am cloaking my own shortcomings by making scandalous insinuations against a delicate lady, who takes no more than her position entitles her to, his very words, Mary, for the purpose of keeping up her strength. And Marnie laughed hotly. Yes, but was it—I mean, was it really necessary to say it, stammered Mary, still at sea, and as her husband only shrugged his shoulders? Then I can't pretend to be surprised at what has happened, Richard. Mr. Henry will never forgive you, he thinks so much of everything and every one belonging to him. Pray, can I help that, help his infernal pride, and good God, Mary, can't you see that far more terrible than my having had to tell him the truth is the fact of there being such a truth to tell? Oh, yes, indeed I can, and the warm tears rushed to Mary's eyes. Poor, poor little Agnes, Richard, it comes of her having once been married to that dreadful man, and though she doesn't say so, yet I don't believe she's really happy in her second marriage, either. There are so many things she's not allowed to do, and she's afraid of Mr. Henry, I know she is. You see, he's displeased when she's dull or unwell, she must always be bright and look pretty, and I expect the truth is, since her illness she has taken to taking things, just to keep her spirits up. Here Mary saw a ray of light and snatched at it, but in that case mightn't the need for them pass as she grows stronger? I lay in no claim to be a prophet, my dear. If it does seem strange that I never noticed anything, went on Mary, or to herself than to him, I've seen Agnes at all hours of the day, when she wasn't in the least expecting visitors. Yes, Richard, I do know people sometimes eat things to take the smell away, but the idea of Agnes doing anything so, so low, oh, isn't it just possible that there might be some mistake? Oh, well, if you're going to imitate Ock Ock and try to teach me my business, gave back Marnie with an angry gesture, and sitting down at the table he pulled books and papers to him. As if such a thing would ever occur to me! It's only that, that somehow my brain won't take it in. Agnes has always been such a dear, good little soul, all kindness. She's never done anybody any harm or said a hard word about anyone all the years I've known her. I simply can't believe it of her, and that's the truth. As for what people will say when it gets about that you've been shown the door in a house like Miss De Henry's, why I'm afraid even to think of it, and powerless any longer to keep back her tears, Mary hastened from the room. But she also thought it wiser to get away before Richard had time to frame the request that she should break off all intercourse with Plevener House. This she could never promise to do, and the result might be a quarrel. Whereas if she avoided giving her word she would be free to slip out now and then to see poor Agnes when Richard was on his rounds and Mr. Henry had business. But this was the only point clear to her. When standing up for her friend she had been perfectly sincere to think ill of a person she cared for cost Mary an inward struggle. Against this, however, she had an antipathy to set that was almost stronger than herself. Of all forms of vice, intemperance was the one she hated most. She lived in a country where it was alas only too common, but she had never learnt to tolerate it or to look with a lenient eye on those who succumbed, and whether these were but the slaves of the nipping habit or the eternal dram-drinkers who felt fit for nothing if they had not a peg inside them, or those seasoned topers who drank their companions under the table without themselves turning a hair, or yet again those who sober for three parts of the year spent the fourth in secret debauchers. Herself she had remained as rigidly epistemious as in the days of her girlhood, and she often mused with a glow at her heart on her great good fortune in having found in Richard one whose views on this subject were no less strict than her own. Hence her distress at his disclosure was caused not alone by the threatened loss of her friendship, she wept for the horror with which the knowledge filled her. Little by little, though, her mind worked around to what was, after all, the chief consideration, Richard's action and its probable consequences. And here once more she was divided against herself. For a moment she had hoped her husband would own the chance of him being in error, but she soon saw that this would never do. A mistake on his part would be a blow to his reputation, besides making enemies of people like the Henry's for nothing. If he had to lose them as patience it might as well be for a good solid reason, she told herself with a dash of his own asperity. No, it was a case of either husband or friend. And though she pitted agnes from the bottom of her heart, yet there were literally no lengths she would have shrunk from going to to spare Richard Payne or even anxiety. And this led her on to wonder whether, granted things were as he said, he had approached Mr. Henry in the most discreet way. Could he not have avoided a complete break? She sat and pondered this question until her head ached, finding herself up against the irreconcilability of the practical with the ideal, which complicates a man's working life. What she belatedly tried to think out for her husband was some little common-sense stratagem by means of which he could have solved his conscience without giving offence. He might have said that the drugs he was prescribing would be nullified by the use of wine or spirits. Even better have warned agnes in private. Somehow it might surely have been managed. Mr. Henry had no doubt been extremely rude and overbearing, in earlier years Richard had known how to behave towards ill-breeding. She couldn't tell why, but he was finding it more and more difficult to get on with people nowadays. He certainly had a very great deal to do and was often tired out. Again he did not need to care so much as formerly whether he offended people or not. Ordinary patience that was. The Henrys, of course, were of the utmost consequence. Still once on a time he had been noted for his tact. It was sad to see it leaving him in the lurch. Several times of late she had been forced to step in and smooth out awkwardnesses. But a week ago he had poor little Amelia Grindel up in arms by telling her that her sickly first-born would mentally never be quite like other children. To everyone else this had been plain from the outset, but Amelia had suspected nothing, having poor thing, no idea when a babe ought to begin to take notice or cut its teeth. It said it was better for her to face the truth but times than to spend her life vainly hoping and fretting. Indeed it would not be right of him to allow it. Poor dear Richard! He set such store by truth and principle, and she, Mary, would not have had him otherwise. All the same she thought that in both cases a small compromise would not have hurt him. But compromise he would not, or could not. And as recalled to reality by the sight of the week's washing, which strained ballooned, collapsed on its lines in the yard, Biddy was again letting the clothes get much too dry. As Mary rose to her feet she manfully squared her shoulders to meet the weight of the new burden that was being laid on them. With regard to Marnie it might be supposed that having faithfully done what he believed to be his duty he would enjoy the fruits of a quiet mind. This was not so. Before many hours had passed he was wrestling with the incident anew, and a true son of that nation which, for all its level headedness, spends its best strength in fighting shadows, he felt a great deal angrier in retrospect than he had done at the moment. It was not alone the fact of him having got his conger, no medico was safe from that punch below the belt. His bitterness was aimed at himself. Once more he had let himself be hoodwinked, had written down the smooth civility it pleased Ockop to adopt towards him to respect an esteem. Now that the veil was torn he saw how poor the lawyer's opinion of him actually was, and always had been. From memory was struggling to emerge in him setting strings in vibration, and suddenly there rose before him a picture of Ockop that time had dimmed. He saw the latter standing in the dark crowded lobby of the courthouse cursing at him for letting their witness escape. There it was, there in these two scenes far apart as they lay you had the whole man. The unctuous blandness, the sleek courtesy was but a mask which he wore for you just so long as you did not hinder him by getting in his way. That was the unpardonable sin. For Ockop was out to succeed, to succeed at any price and by any means. In tracing his course no goal but this had ever stood before him. The obligations that bore on your ordinary mortal, a sense of honesty, of responsibility to one's fellows, the soft pull of domestic ties, did not trouble Ockop. He laughed them down, or rung their necks like so many pullots. And should the poor little woman who bore his name become a drag on him, she would be tossed onto the rubbish heap with the rest. In a way so complete a freedom from altruistic motives had something grandiose about it, but those who ran up against it and could not fight it with its own weapons had not an earthly chance. Thus Marnie sat in judgment, giving reign for once to his ingrained dislike for the man of whom he had now made an enemy, in whose debt for the rest he stood deep, and had done ever since the day he had been full enough, like the fly in the nursery rhyme, to seek out Ockop and his familiars in their grimy little parlour in Chancery Lane. But his first heat spent he soon cooled down, and was able to laugh at the stagey explosiveness of his attitude, so much for the personal side of the matter. Looked at from a business angle it was more serious. The fact of him having been shown the door by a patient of Ockop's standing was bound, as Mary saw, to react unfavourably on the rest of the practice. The news would run like wildfire through the place. Never were such hot beds of gossip as these colonial towns. Besides the colleague who had been called into Mrs. Agnes in his stead was none too well disposed towards him. His fears were justified. It quickly got about that he had made a blunder. All Mrs. Henry needed, said the newcomer, was change of air and scene. And forthwith the lady was packed off on a trial trip to Sydney. Marnie held his head high and refused to notice looks and hints. But he knew all about what went on behind his back. He was morbidly sensitive to atmosphere, could tell how a house was charged as soon as he crossed the threshold. People were saying, a mistake there, why not here, too? Although recoveries asked themselves if a fresh treatment might not benefit them, lovers of blue pills hungered for more drastic remedies. The disaffection would blow over, of course, but it was painful while it lasted, and things were not bettered by one of his patients choosing just this inconvenient moment to die, an elderly man down with the Russian influenza, who disobeyed orders, got up too early, and was carried off by double pneumonia inside a week. Early over the mishap rubbed his poor medical attendant of sleep for several nights on end. Not that this was surprising. He found it much harder than of old to keep his mind from running on his patients outside working hours. In his younger days he had laid down fixed rules on this score. Every brain-worker he held must, in his spare time, be able to detach his thoughts from his chief business, pin them to something of quite another kind, no matter how trivial. Fowls or root-around gardens played the flute or go in for carpentry. Now he might have dug till his palms blistered it would not help. Those he prescribed for teased him like a pack of spirit presences which clamor to be heard. And if a serious case took a turn for the worse he would find himself rising in a sweat of uncertainty and going lamp in hand into the surgery to con over a prescription he had written during the day. And one knew where that kind of thing led. Now, as if all this were not enough, there was added to it the old evergreen botheration about money. End of Part 4, Chapter 9. Part 4, Chapter 10 of Australia Felix. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson. Part 4, Chapter 10. Thus far Ockock had nursed his mining investments for him with a fatherly care. He himself had been free as a bird from responsibility. Every now and again he would drop in at the office just to make sure the lawyer was on the alert, and each time he came home cheerful with confidence. That was over now. As a first result of the breach he missed to also he believed clearing four hundred pounds. Among the shares he held was one lot which till now had proved a sorry bargain. Soon after purchase something had gone wrong with the management of the claim that had been a lawsuit followed by calls unending and never a dividend. Now when these shares unexpectedly swung up to a high level, only to drop back the week after to their standing figure, Ockock failed to sell out in the nick of time. Called to account he replied that it was customary in these matters for his clients to advise him, thus deepening Marnie's sense of obligation. Stabbed in his touchiness he wrote for all his script to be handed over to him, and thereafter loss and gain depended on himself alone. It certainly brought a new element of variety into his life. The mischief was he could get to his study of the money market only with a fagged brain, and the fear lest he should do something rash or let a lucky chance slip, kept him on tenterhooks. It was about this time that Mary seated one evening in face of her husband found herself reflecting, when one comes to think of it how seldom Richard ever smiles nowadays. For a wonder they were at a suare together at the house of one of Marnie's colleagues, the company consisted of the inner circle of friends and acquaintances. Always the same people, the old job lot, one knows before they open their mouths what they'll say and how they'll say it. Richard had grumbled as he dressed. The Henry Ockocks were not there, though, it being common knowledge that the two men declined to meet, and a dash of fresh blood was present in the shape of a lady and gentleman just out from home. Richard got in to talk with this couple, and Mary, watching him fondly, could not but be struck by his animation. His eyes lit up, he laughed and chatted, made Mary rep artis. She was carried back to the time when she had known him first. In those days his natural gravity was often cut through by a mood of high spirits of boyish jollity, which, if only by way of contrast, rendered him a delightful companion. She grew a little wistful as she sat comparing present with past, and loathe though she was to dig deep for fear of stirring up uncomfortable things. She could not escape the discovery that in spite of all his success, and his career there had surpassed their dearest hopes. In spite of the natural gifts Fortune had showered on him, Richard was not what you would call a happy man. No, nor even moderately happy. Why this should be it went beyond her to say. He had everything he could wish for, yes, everything, except perhaps a little more time to himself and better health. It was not as strong as she would have liked to see him. Nothing radically wrong, of course, but enough to fidget him. Might not this—this—he himself called it want of tone—be a reason for the scant pleasure he got out of life. And I think I'll pop down and see Dr. Muntz about him one morning without a word to him, was how she eased her mind and wound up her reverie. But daylight and the most prosaic hours of the twenty-four made the plan look absurd. It's alive, though, to his condition she felt deeply sorry for him and his patent inability ever to be content. It was a thousand pitties. Things might have run so smoothly for him. He have got so much satisfaction out of them, if only he could have braced himself to regard life in cheery a fashion. But at this, Mary stopped, and wondered, and wondered. Was that really true? Positively her experiences of late led her to believe that Richard would be less happy still if he had nothing to be unhappy about. But, dear me, this was getting out of her depth altogether. She shook her head and rebuked herself for growing fanciful. All the same her new glimpse of his inmost nature made her doubly tender of thwarting him. Hence she did not set her face as firmly as she might otherwise have done against a wild plan he now formed of again altering, or indeed rebuilding the house, although she could scarcely think of it with patience. She liked her house so well as it stood, and it was amply big enough. There was only the pair of them and John's child. It had the name she knew of being one of the most comfortable and best kept in Ballarat, brick facility where wood prevailed, and a wide snowy veranda, up the posts of which rare creepers ran, twining their tendrils one with another to form a screen against the sun. Now, what must Richard do but uproot the creepers and pull down the veranda, thus bearing the walls to the fierce summer heat, plaster over the brick, and more outlandish still at a top story? When she came back from Melbourne, where she had gone a visiting to escape the upset, Richard, ordinarily so sensitive, had managed to endure it quite well, thus proving that he could put up with this comfort if he wanted to. When she saw it again, Mary hardly recognized her home. Personally she thought it ugly for all its grandeur, changed wholly for the worse. Nor did time ever reconcile her to the upper story. Domestic worries spread from it. The staff went off in a huff because of the stairs. They were at once obliged to double their staff. To cap it all, with its flat front unbroken by bay or porch, the house looked like no other in the town. Now instead of passing admiring remarks, people stood stock still before the gate to laugh at its troll appearance. Yet she would gladly have made the best of this had Richard been happier for it. He was not, or only for the briefest of intervals. Then his restlessness broke out afresh. There came days when nothing suited him, not his fine consulting room or the improved furnishings of the house, or even her cookery of which he had once been so fond. He grew dainty to a degree. She searched her cookery book for pecan recipes. Next he fell to imagining it was unhealthy to sleep on feathers and went to the expense of having a hard horse-hair mattress made to fit the bed. Acustum to the softest down he naturally tossed and turned all night long, and rose in the morning declaring he felt as though he had been beaten with sticks. The mattress was stowed away in a lean-tube behind the kitchen, and there it remained. It was not alone. Mary sometimes stood and considered with a rueful eye the many discarded objects that bore it company. Richard, oddly enough he was ever able to poke fun at himself, had christened this outhouse the cemetery of dead fads. Here was the set of Indian clubs he had been going to harden his muscles with every morning, and had used for a week, together with an India rubber gymnastic apparatus bought for the same purpose. Here stood a patent shower-bath that was to have dashed energy over him after a bad night, and had only succeeded in giving him a cute neuralgia. A standing desk he had broken his back at for a couple of days, a homeopathic medicine-chest and a phrenological head, both subjects he had meant to satisfy his curiosity by looking into had time not failed him. Mary sighed when she thought of the waste of good money these and similar articles stood for. Someday he would just have them privately carted away to auction. But if Richard set his heart on a thing he wanted it so badly, so much more than other people did, that he knew no peace until he had it. Only read in his wife's eyes the disapproval she was too wise to utter. At any other time her silent criticism would have galled him. In this case he took shelter behind it. Let her only go on setting him down for lax and spendthrift incapable of knowing his own mind. He would be sorry indeed for her to guess how matters really stood with him. The truth was, he had fallen a prey to utter despondency, was become so spiritless that it puzzled even himself. He thought he could tray some of the mischief back to the professional knocks and jars Ock Ock's action had brought down on him. To hear one's opinion doubted one skill questioned was the Tyro's portion. He was too old to treat such insolence with the scorn it deserved. Of course he had lived the affair down, but the result of it would seem to be a bottomless ennui, a tidium vitie that had something pathological about it. Under its influence the homeiest trifle swelled defeats beyond his strength. There was, for instance, the putting off and on of one's clothing, this infinite boredom of straps and buttons, and all for what? For a day that would be an exact copy of the one that had gone before, a night as unrefreshing as the last. Did any one suspect that there were moments when he quailed before this job, suspect that more than once he had even reckoned the number of times he would be called on to perform it, day in, day out, till that garment was put on him that came off no more, or that he could understand and feel sympathy with those vain souls, and there were such who laid hands on themselves rather than go on doing it, did this get abroad he would be considered ripe for bedlam? Physician heal thyself. He swallowed doses of atonic preparation, and put himself on a fatty diet. Thereafter he tried to take a philosophic view of his case. He had now, he told himself, reached an age when such a state of mind gave cause neither for astonishment nor alarm. How often had it not fallen to him in his role of medical advisor to reassure a patient on this score? The arrival of middle-age brought about a certain lowness of spirits in even the most robust, along with a more or less marked bodily languor went an uneasy sense of coming loss. The time was at hand to bid farewell to much that it hitherto made life agreeable, and for most this was a bitter pill. Meanwhile one held a kind of metal stock-taking, as often as not by the light of a complete disillusionment. Of the many glorious things one had hoped to do or to be, nothing was accomplished. The great realization, in youth breathlessly chased but never grasped, was now seemed to be a mistrath which could wear a thousand forms, but invariably turned to air as one came up with it. In nine instances out of ten there was nothing to put in its place, and you began to ask yourself in a kind of horrific amaze. Can this be all, this? For this the bother of growth, the struggles and the sufferings? The soul's climacteric, if you would, from which immortal came forth dull to resignation, or greedy for the few physical pleasures left him, or prone to that tragic clinging to youth skirts which made the later years of many women and not a few men ridiculous. In each case the motive-power was the same, the haunting fear that one had squeezed life dry, worse still that it had not been worth the squeezing. Thus his reason. But like a tongue of flame his instinct leapt up to give combat. By the gods this cap did not fit him. Squeeze life dry, found it not worthwhile. Why he'd never got within measurable distance of what he called life at all. There could be no question of him resigning himself. Deep down in him he knew was an enormous residue of vitality, of untouched mental energy that only waited to be drawn on. It was like a buried treasure jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life, not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that name, but life with a capital L. The existence he had once confidently counted on as his, a tourney of spiritual adventuring, of intellectual excitement, in which the prize driven for was not money or anything to do with money. Far away, thousands of miles off, luckier men than he were in the thick of it. He of his own free will had cut himself adrift, and now it was too late. But was it, had the time irretrievably gone by? The ancient idea of escape, long dormant, suddenly reawoke in him with a new force, and once stirring it was not to be silenced, but went on sounding like a ground tone through all he did. At first he shut his ears to it, to dally with side issues. For example, he worried the question why the breaking point should only now have been reached, and not six months a year ago. It was quibbling to lay the whole blame on Ock Ock's shoulders. The real cause went deeper was of older growth, and driving his mind back over the past he believed he could pin his present loss of grip to that fatal day on which he learnt that his best friend had betrayed him. Things like that give you a crack that would not mend. He had been rendered suspicious where he had once been credulous, prone to see evil where no evil was, for deceived by Purdy in whom could he trust, of assurity not in the pushful set of jobbers and tricksters he was condemned to live amongst. No discoveries he might make about them would surprise him, and once more the old impotent anger with himself broke forth that he should ever have let himself take root in such detestable surroundings. Why not shake the dust of the country off his feet? From this direct attack he recoiled casting up his hands as if against the evil eye. What next? But exclaim as he might, now that the idea had put on words it was by no means so simple to fend it off as when it had been a mere vey coming at the back of his mind. It seized him, swept his brain bare of other thoughts. He began to look worn, and never more so than when he imagined himself taking the bull by the horns and asking Mary's approval of his wild goose scheme. He could picture her face when she heard that he planned throwing up his fine position and decamping on nothing a year. The vision was a cold douche to his folly. No, no, it would not do. You could not accustom a woman to ease a luxury, and then when you felt you had had enough and would welcome a return to Spartan simplicity to an austere clarity of living, expect her to be prepared at the word to step back into poverty. One was bound, bound by just those silken threads which in premarital days had seemed surely desirable. He wondered now what it would be like to stand free as the wind answerable only to himself. The bear thought of it filled him as with the rushing of wings. Once he had been within an ace of cutting and running, that was in the early days soon after his marriage, trade had petered out, and there would have been as little to leave behind as to carry with him. But even so circumstances had proved too strong for him. What with Mary's persuasions and John's intermeddling, his scheme had come to nothing. And if with so much in his favour he had not managed to carry it out, how in all the world could he hope to now when everything conspired against him. It was besides excusable in youth to challenge fortune a very different matter for one of his age. Of his age the words gave him pause. By their light he saw why he had knuckled under so meekly at the time of his first attempt. It was because then a few years one way or another did not signify he had them to spare. Now each individual year was precious to him. He parted with it lingeringly, unwillingly. Time had taken to flashing past too. Christmas was hardly celebrated before it was again at the door. Another ten years or so and he would be an old man, and it would in very truth be too late. The tempter voice, in this case also the voice of reason, said now or never. But when he came to look the facts in the face his heart failed him anew, so heavily did the arguments against his taking such a step, and due to his race it was these he began by marshalling way down the scales. He should have done it if done it was to be, five, three, even a couple of years ago. Each day the dawn added to the tangle made the idea seem more preposterous. Local dignities had been showered on him. He sat on the committees of the district hospital and the benevolent asylum. Was honorary medical officer of this society and that, a trustee of the church, one of the original founders of the Mechanics Institute, vice-president of the Botanical Society, and so on add in for an item. His practice was second to none, his visiting book rarely showed a blank space, people drove in from miles round to consult him. In addition he had an extremely popular wife, a good house and garden, horses and traps, and a sure yearly income of some twelve or thirteen hundred. Of what stuff was he made that he could likely contemplate turning his back on prizes such as these? Even as he told them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene let down before an empty stage, a painted sham with darkness and peculiarity behind. At bottom none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him. Not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them. Rather would he have chosen to be poor in a nobody among people whose thoughts flew to meet his half way. And there was another side to it. Stingy though the years had been of intellectual grist, they had not scruple to rob him of many an essential by which he set store. His old faculty, for good or evil of swift decision, for instance, it was lost to him now, as witness his present miserable vacillation. It had gone off arm in arm with his health, physically he was but a ghost of the man he had once been. But the bitterest grudge he bore the life was for the shipwreck it had made of his early ideals. He remembered the pure joy, the lofty sentiments with which he had returned to Medeson. Bah! There had been no room for any sentimental nonsense of that kind here. He had long since ceased to follow his profession disinterestedly. The years had made a hack of him, a skilled hack, of course, but just a hack. He had had no time for study, all his strength had gone in keeping his income up to a certain figure, lest the wife should be less well dressed and equipped than her neighbours, or patience fight shy of him, or his confrairs wag their tongues. Oh! he had adapted himself supremely well to the standards of this Australia so-called Felix, and he must not complain if in so doing he had been stripped not only of his rosy dreams, but also of that spiritual force on which he could once have drawn at will. Like a fool he had believed it possible to serve mammon with impunity and for as long as it suited him. He knew better now. At this moment he was undergoing the sensations of one who, having taken shelter in what he thinks a light and flimsy structure, finds that it is built of the solidest stone, worse still that he has been walled up inside. And even suppose he could pull himself together for the effort required, how justify his action in the eyes of the world? His motives would be double-dutch to the hard-headed crew around him, nor would any go to the trouble of trying to understand. There was John. All John would see was an elderly and not over-robust man to liberally throwing away the fruits of year-long toil, and for what? For the privilege of, in some remote spot, as a stranger and unknown, having his way to make all over again, of being free to shoulder once more the risks and hazards the undertaking involved. Little though he cared for John or any one else's opinion, Marnie could not help feeling a trifle sore in advance at the ridicule of which he might be the object, at the zanyish figure he was going to be obliged to cut. But a fig for what people thought of him. Once away from here he would, he thanked God, never see any of them again. No, it was Mary who was the real stumbling block the opponent he most feared. Had he been less attached to her the thing would have been easier. As it was he shrank from hurting her. And hurt and confuse her he must. He knew Mary as well, nay better than he knew his own unrecognable self. For Mary was not a creature of moods, did not change her mental envelope a dozen times a day. And just his precise knowledge of her told him that he would never get her to see eye to eye with him. Her clear serene outlook was attuned to the plain and the practical. She would discover a thousand drawbacks to his scheme, but nary a one of the incorporeal benefits he dreamed of reaping from it. There was his handling of money for one thing. She had come, he was aware, to regard him as incurably extravagant, and it would be no easy task to convince her that he could learn again to fit his expenses to a light purse. She had a woman's instinctive distrust, too, of leaving the beaten track. Another point made him still more dubious. Mary's whole heart and happiness were bound up in this place where she had spent the flower years of her life, who knew if she would thrive as well on other soil. He found it intolerable to think that she might have to pay for his want of stability. Yes, reduced to its essentials, it came to mean the pitting of one soul's welfare against that of another. Was a toss-up between his happiness and hers. One of them would have to yield. Who would suffer more by doing so, he or she? He believed that a sacrifice on his part would make the wreck of his life complete. On hers, well, thanks to her doubty habit of finding good everywhere, there was a chance of her coming out unscathed. Here was his case in a nutshell. Still he did not tackle Mary, for sometimes, after all, a disturbed doubt crept upon him whether it would not be possible to go on as he was, instead of, as she would drastically word it, cutting his throat with his own hand. And to be perfectly honest, he believed it would. They could now afford to pay for help in his work, to buy what books he needed or fancied, to take holidays while putting in a locum, even to keep on the locum at a good salary, while he journeyed overseas to visit the land of his birth. But at this another side of him, what he thought of as spirit, in contra-distinction to soul, cried out in alarm, fearful lest it was again to be betrayed. Thus far, though by rights co-equal in the house of the body, it had been rigidly kept down. Nevertheless it had persisted like a bright cold little spark at dead of night. His restlessness, the spiritual malaise that encumbered him, had been its mute form of protest. Did he go on turning a deaf ear to its warning? He might do himself irreparable harm. For time was flying, the sum of his years mounting, shrinking that roomy future to which he had thus far always postponed what seemed too difficult for the moment. Now he saw that he dared delay no longer in setting free the imprisoned elements in him, was he ever to grow to that complete whole which each mortal aspires to be. That a change of environment would work this miracle he did not doubt. A congenial environment was meat and drink to him, was light and air. Here in this country he had remained as utterly alien as any Jew of old who wept by the rivers of Babylon. And like a half-remembered tune there came floating into his mind words he had lit on somewhere, or learnt on the school bench. As he thought, but whatever their source, words that fitted his case to a nicety, co-illum non-animum, mutant, he transmare carunt. Non-animum! Ah! Could he but have foreseen this, foreknown it? If not before he set sail on what was to have been but a swift adventure, then at least on that fateful day long past, when foiled by Mary's pleadings in his own inertia, he had let himself be bound anew. Thus the summer dragged by, a summer to try the toughest. Marnie thought he'd never gone through its like for heat and discomfort. The drought would not break, and on the great squatting stations around Ballarat and to the north the sheep-drop-like flies at an early frost. The forest reservoirs dried up, displaying the red mud of their bottoms, and a bath became a luxury, or a penance, the scanty water running thick and red. Then the bush caught fire and burnt for three days, painting the sky of rusty brown and making the air hard to breathe. Of a morning his first act on going into the surgery was to pick up the thermometer that stood on the table. Sure as fate, though the clock had not long struck nine, the mercury marked something between a hundred and a hundred and five degrees. He let it fall with a nervless gesture. Since his son's stroke he not only hated, he feared the sun. But out into it he must, to drive through dust-clouds so opaque that one could only draw rain until they subsided, meanwhile hollowing off collisions. Under the close leather hood he sat and stifled, or removing his green goggles for the fiftieth time, climbed down to enter yet another baked wooden house, where he handled prostrate bodies ranked with sweat or prescribed for pallid or fever-speckled children. Then home to toy with the food set before him his mind already running on the discomforts of the afternoon. A few bits of ill luck came his way this summer. Old Ock Ock fell in dismounting from a vehicle and sustained a compound fracture of the femur. Owing to his advanced age there was for a time fear of malunion of the parts, and this kept Marnie on the rack. Secondly a near-neighbour, a common little fellow who kept a jeweller's shop in Bridge Street, actually took the plunge, sold off one fine day, and sailed for home. And this seemed the unkindest cut of all. But the accident that gave the death blow to his scruples was another. On the advice of a wealthy publican he was treating, whose judgment he trusted, Marnie had invested heavily for him, selling off other stock to do it, in a company known as the Hodder Burner State. This was a government affair and ought to have been beyond reproach. One day, however, it was found that the official reports of the work done by the diamond drill-bore were cooked documents, and instantly every one connected with the mine, managers, engineers, lay under the suspicion of fraudulent dealings. Shares had risen as high as ten pounds odd, but when the drive reached the bore and in place of the deep gutter ground the public had been led to expect hard rock was found overhead. There was a panic. Shares dropped to twenty-five shillings and did not rally. Marnie was a loser by six hundred pounds and got besides a moral shaking from which he could not recover. He sat and bit his little fingernail to the quick. As he, he savagely asked himself, going to linger on until the little he had managed to save was snatched from him. He dashed off a letter to John, asking his brother-in-law to recommend a reliable broker, and this done he caught up to look for Mary, determined to come to grips with her at last. CHAPTER X HOW TO BEGIN How reduced to a few plain words the subtle tangle of thought and feeling was the problem. He did not find his wife on her usual seat in the arbor, in searching for her upstairs and down he came to a rapid decision. He would lay chief stress on his poor state of health. I feel I'm killing myself, I can't go on. But Richard dear ejaculated Mary, and paused in her sewing her needle-up lifted, a bead balanced on its tip. Richard had run her to earth in the spare bedroom, to which at this time she often repaired, for he objected to the piece of work she had on hand, that of covering yards of black cashmere with minute jet beads, vowing that she would ruin her eyesight over it. So having set her heart on a fashionable polonaise, she was careful to keep out of his way. I'm not a young man any longer wife, when one's past forty. Poor mother used to say forty-five was a man's prime of life. Not for me, and not here in this God-forsaken whole. Oh, dear me, I do wonder why you have such a down-on ballerette. I'm sure there must be many worse places in the world to live in. And lowering her needle, Mary brought the bead to its appointed spot. Of course you have a lot to do, I know, and being such a poor sleeper doesn't improve matters. But she was considering her pattern sideways as she spoke, thinking more of it than of what she said. Everyone had to work hard out here. Compared with some she could name Richard's job of driving around in a springy buggy simdies itself. Besides, I told you at the time you were wrong not to take a holiday in winter when you had the chance. You need a thorough change every year to set you up. You came back from the last as fresh as a daisy. The only change that will benefit me is one for good and all," said Marnie, with extreme gloom. He had thrown up the bed-curtain and stretched himself on the bed, where he lay with his hands clasped under his neck. Tuted by experience, Mary did not contradict him. And it's the kind I've finally made up my mind to take. Richard, how you do run on, said Mary, still gently and credulous, at a thought wider awake, let her work sink to her lap. What's the use of talking like that? Believe it or not, my dear, as you choose, you'll see that's all. At her further exclamations of doubt and amazement, Marnie's patience slipped its leash. Surely to goodness my health comes first before any confounded practice. Hush, babies, asleep! And don't get cross, Richard, you can hardly expect me not to be surprised when you spring a thing of this sort on me. You've never even dropped a hint of it before. Because I knew very well what it would be. You're dead against it, of course. No, I call that unjust. You've barely let me get a word in edge ways. Oh, I know by heart everything you're going to say. It's nonsense, folly, madness, and so on. All the phrases you women fish up from your vocabulary when you want to stave off a change, hinder any alteration of the status quo. But I'll tell you this, wife. You'll bury me here if I don't get away soon. I'm not much more than skin and bone as it is, and I confess if I've got to be buried I'd rather lie elsewhere, have good English earth at the top of me. Had Mary been a man she might have retorted that this was a very woman's way of shifting ground. She bit her lip and did not answer immediately then. You know I can't bear to hear you talk like that even in fun, besides you always say much more than you mean, dear. Very well then, if you prefer it, wait and see. You'll be sorry some day. Do you mean to tell me, Richard, you're in earnest when you talk of selling off your practice and going to England. I can buy another there, can't I? With these words he leapt to his feet afire with animation. And while Mary, now thoroughly uneasy, was folding up her work, he dilated upon the benefits that would accrue to them from the change. Goodbye to dust and sun and drought, to blistering hot winds and papier-mâché walls, they would make their new home in some substantial old stone house that had weathered half a century or more, tangled over with creepers, folded away in its own privacy, such as only an English house could be. In the flower garden roses would trail over arch and pergola, there would be a lawn with shaped use on it, while in the orchard old apple trees would flaunt their red abundance above gray, lichened walls. As if there weren't apples enough here, thought Mary. She got a frog in his throat as he went on to paint in greater detail, for her, who had left it so young, the intimate charm of the home-country, the rich green-timpled countryside. And not until now did he grasp how sorely he had missed it. Oh, believe me, to talk of going home is no mere figure of speech, Mary. In fancy he trod winding lanes that ran between giant hedges, hedges intend a bud with dew on them, or snowed over with white may-flowers, or be hung with the fairy webs in Gossamer of early autumn, thick as twine beneath their load of moisture. He followed white roads that were banked with prim-roses and ran headlong down to the sea. He climbed the shoulder of a down on a spring morning when the air was alive with larks caroling. But chiefly it was the greenness that called to him the greenness of the greenest country in the world. Viewed from this distance the homeland looked to him like one vast meadow. Oh, to tread its grass again! Not what one knew as grass here a poor annual had lasted for a few brief weeks, but lush meadow-grass afoot high, or shaven emerald lawns on which ancient trees bred their shade, or the rank growth in old orchards, starry with wild flowers on which fruit blossoms fluttered down. He longed too for the exquisite finishness of the mother country, the soft tints of cloud-veiled northern skies. His eyes ached, his brows had grown wrinkled from gazing on iron roof set against the hard-blue overhead, on dirty weatherboards innocent of paint, on higgledy-piggledy backyards and ramshackle fences, on the struggling landscape with its untidy trees, all the unrelieved ugliness in short of the colonial scene. He stopped only for want of breath. Mary was silent. He waited. Still she did not speak. He felt worth with a bump and was angry. Come out with it. I suppose all this seems to you just the ravings of a lunatic. Oh, Richard, no, but a little—well, a little impractical, I never heard before of any one throwing up a good income because he didn't like the scenery—it's a step that needs the greatest consideration. Good God, do you think I haven't considered it, and from every angle there isn't an argument for or against that I haven't gone over a thousand and one times? And with never a word to me, Richard—Mary was hurt and showed it. It really is hardly fair, for this is my home as well as yours. But now listen, you're tired out, run down with the heat in that last attack of dysentery. Take a good holiday, stay away for three months, if you like, sell over to Hobart Town or up to Sydney, you who are so fond of the water. And when you come back strong and well we'll talk about all this again. I'm sure by then you'll see things with other eyes. And who's to look after the practice, Bray? Why a locum tenants, of course, or engage an assistant? Aha! You'd agreed to that, now, would you? I remember how opposed you were once to the idea. Well, if I have to choose between it and you giving up altogether, now if your own sake, Richard, don't go and do anything rash, if once you sell off and leave Ballarat you could never come back. And then, if you regret it, where will you be? That's why I say don't hurry to decide, sleep over it, or let us consult somebody, John, perhaps. Oh, no you don't, madam, no you don't!" cried Richard, with a grim dash of humour. You had me once, crippled me, handcuffed me, you and your John, between you. It shan't happen again. I crippled you. I, Richard. Oh, I never in my life have I done anything but what I thought was feel good. I've always put you first. And Mary's eye is filled with tears. Yes, where it's a question of one's material welfare you haven't your equal, I admit that. The side of me needs coddling too, yes, and sympathy, but it can whistle for such a thing as far as you're concerned. Mary's side. I think you don't realise, dear, how difficult it sometimes is to understand you, or to make out what you rarely do want, she said slowly. Her tone struck at his heart. Indeed, and I do, he cried contritely. I'm a born old grumbum, a bornine, I know, contrariness in person. But in this case, come, love, do try to grasp what I'm after, it means so much to me. And he held out his hand to her to besiege her. Unhesitatingly she laid hers in it. I am trying, Richard, though you may and believe it, I always do. And even if I sometimes can't manage it, well, you know, dear, you generally get your own way in the end. Think of the house. I'm still not clear why you altered it. I liked it much better as it was. But I didn't make any fuss, did I? Though I should have, if I thought we were only to occupy it for a single year after. Still that was a trifle compared with what you want to do now. Though I live to be a hundred, I should never be able to approve of this, and you don't know how hard it is to consent to a thing one disapproves of, you couldn't do it yourself. Oh, what was the use, Richard, of toiling as you have, if now, just when you can afford to charge higher fees than the practice is beginning to bring in money? Let a hand drop, even giving it a slight push from him, and turn to pace the floor anew. Oh, money, money, money, I'm sick of the very sound of the word. But you talk as if nothing else mattered. Can't you, for once, wife, see through the letter of the thing to the spirit behind? I admit the practice has brought in a tidy income of late, but as for the rest of the splendours, they exist, my dear, only in your imagination. If you ask me, I say I lead a dog's life, or even a navvy works only for a fixed number of hours per diem. My days have neither beginning nor end. Look at yesterday, out in the blazing sun from morning till night, I didn't get back from the second round until nine. At ten a confinement that keeps me up until three. From three until dawn I toss and turn far too weary to sleep. By the time six o'clock struck, you, of course, was slumbering sweetly, I was in hell with tick. At seven I could stand it no longer and got up for the chloroform bottle, an hour's rest at any price, else how face the crowd in the waiting-room? And you call that splendour, luxurious ease? If so, my dear, words have not the same meaning any more for you and me. Mary did not point out that she had said nothing of the kind, or that he had set up an extreme case as typical. She tightened her lips, her big eyes were very solemn. And it's not the work alone, Richard was declaring. It's the place, wife, the people. I'm done with them, Mary, utterly done. On my word, if I thought I had to go on living among them even for another twelve month. But people are the same all the world over. The protest broke from her in spite of herself. No, by God, they're not. And here Richard launched into a diatribe against his fellow colonists. This sordid riff-raff, these hard, mean, grasping money-grubbers. That made Mary stand aghast. What could be the matter with him? What was he thinking of, he who is ordinarily so generous? But he forgotten the many kindnesses shown him, the warm gratitude of his patience, people's sympathy at the time of his illness. But he went on. My demands are most modest. All I ask is to live among human beings with whom I have half an idea in common, men who sometimes raise their noses from the ground instead of eternally scheming how to line their pockets, reckoning human progress solely in terms of LSD. No, I've sacrificed enough of my life to this country. I mean to have the rest for myself. And there's another thing, my dear, another bad habit this precious place breeds in us. It begins by making us indifferent to those who belong to us but are out of our sight and ends by cutting our closest ties. I don't mean by distance alone. I have an old mother still living, Mary, whose chief prayer is that she may see me once again before she dies. I was her last born, the child her arms kept the shape of. What am I to her now? What does she know of me, of the hard, tired, middle-aged man I have become? And you were in much the same box, my dear, unless you've forgotten by now that you ever had a mother. Mary was scandalised. Forget one's mother. Richard, I think you're trying what dreadful things you can find to say when I write home every three months. And provoked by this fresh piece of unreason she opened fire in earnest in defence of what she believed to be their true welfare. She'd listened to her without interrupting, even seeming to grunt the truth of what she said. But none the less, even as she pleaded with him, a numbing sense of futility crept over her. She stuttered, halted, and finally fell silent. Her words were like so many lassoes thrown after his vagrant soul, and this was out of reach. It had sniffed freedom, it was free, ran wild already in the boundless plains of liberty. After he had gone from the room she sat with idle hands. She was all in a daze. Richard was about to commit an out-and-out folly, and she was powerless to hinder it. If only she had had someone she could have talked things over with, taken advice of. But no, it went against the grain in her to discuss her husband's actions with the third person. Purdy had been the sole exception, and Purdy had become impossible. Looking back she marvelled at her own dullness in not foreseeing that something like this might happen. What more natural than that the multitude of little whims and fads Richard had indulged should culminate in a big whim of this kind. But the acknowledgment caused her fresh anxiety. She had watched him tire like a fickle child of first one thing, then another. Was it likely that he would now suddenly prove more stable? She did not think so. Fissure attributed his present mood of pettish aversion wholly to the fact of his being run down in health. It was quite true he had not been himself of late. But here again he was so fanciful that you never knew how literally to take his ailments. Half the time she believed he just imagined their existence, and the long holiday she had urged on him would have been enough to sweep the cobwebs from his brain. Oh, if only he could have held on in patience! Four or five years hence at most he might have considered retiring from general practice. She almost wept as she remembered how they had once planned to live for that day. Now it was all to end in smoke. Then her mind reverted to herself and what the break would mean to her, and her little world rocked to its foundations. For no clear call went out to Mary from her native land. She docilely set home with the rest and kept her family to eyes intact, but she had never expected to go back except on a flying visit. She thought of England rather vaguely as a country where it was always raining, and where, according to John, an assemblage of old fogies known as the House of Commons persistently intermeddled in the affairs of the colony. For more than half her life, and the half that truly counted, Australia had been her home. Her home! In fancy she made a round of the house, viewing each cosy room, lingering fondly over the contents of cupboards and presses, recollecting how she had added this piece of furniture for convenience sake, that for ornament, until the whole was as perfect as she knew how to make it. Now everything she loved and valued, the piano, the wax-scandle chandelier, the gilt cornices, the dining-room horse-hair, would fall under the auctioneer's hammer, go to deck out the houses of other people. Richard said she could buy better and handsomer things in England, but Mary allowed herself no illusions on this score. Where was the money to come from? She had learnt by personal experience what slow work building up a practice was, it would be years and years before they could hope for another such home. And soar and sorry as she might feel at having to relinquish her pretty things, in Richard's case it would mean a good deal more than that. To him the loss of them would be a real misfortune, so used had he grown to luxury and comfort, so strongly did the need of it run in his blood. Worse still was the prospect of parting from relatives and friends. The tears came at this freely. John's children, who would watch over them when she was gone? How could she, from so far away, keep the promise she had made to poor Ginny on her deathbed? She would have to give up the baby of which she had grown so fond, give it back into Zara's unmotherly hands, and never again of a Saturday would she fetch poor little long-legged trotty from school. She must say good-bye to one and all, to John and Zara and Jerry, and would know no more at close quarters how they fared. When Jerry married there would be no one to see to it that he chose the right girl. Then Ned and Polly, poor souls, poor souls, what with the rapid increase of their family and Ned's unsteadiness he could not keep a job long because of it they only just contrived to make ends meet. How they would do it when she was not there to lend a helping hand she could not imagine. And outside her brothers and sisters there was good Mrs. Divine. Mary had engaged to guide her friends' tottery-steps on the slippery path of Melbourne's society did Mr. Divine enter the ministry. And poor little Agnes with her terrible weakness, and Amelia and her sickly babes, and Tillie, dear good warm-hearted Tillie, never again would the pair of them enjoy one of their jolly laughs or cook for a picnic or drive out to a mushroom-hunt. No, the children would grow up anyhow, her brothers forget her in carving out their own lives, her friends find other friends. For some time, however, she kept her own counsel. But when she had tried by hook and by crook to bring Richard to reason and failed, when she saw that he was actually beginning on the choir to make ready for departure and that the day was coming on which everyone would have to know, then she threw off her reserve. She was spending the afternoon with Tillie. They sat on the veranda together, John's child, black-eyed, fat self-willed, playing after the manner of two short years at their feet. At the news that was broken to her, Tillie began by laughing immoderately, believing that Mary was taking a rise out of her. But having studied her friend's face she let her work fall, slowly opened mouth and eyes, and was at first unequal to uttering a word. Thereafter she bombarded Mary with questions. Just to leave Ballarat to go home to England, she echoed with an emphasis such as Tillie alone could lay, Well, of all the—or four, what on earth four? Has somebody gone and left him a fortune, or has he been appointed Pilmunger in Ordinary to the Queen herself? What is it, Mary, what's up? What indeed! This was the question Mary dreaded, and one that would leap to every tongue. Why was he going? She sat on the horns of a dilemma. It was not in her to wound people's feelings by bloating out the truth. This would also put Richard in a bad light, and did she give no reason at all many would think he had taken leave of his senses. Weakly, in a very unmarryish fashion, she mumbled that his health was not what it should be, and he had got it into his head that for this the climate of the colony was to blame. Nothing would do him but to return to England. I never—no, never in my born days did I tell of such a thing, until he, exploding, brought a close fist heavily down on her knee. Mary, from mere maggot like that, to chuck up a practice such as he's got, upon my word, my dear, it looks as if he was touched dear, and she significantly tapped her for it. Oh, now I understand! You know, I've seen quite well, love, you've been looking a bit down in the mouth of late, and so has Pa noticed it, too. After you'd gone the other day, he says to me, looks reflexive like does the little lady nowadays, as if she'd got something on her mind. And I to him, who isn't it enough that she's got to put up with the cranks and crotchets of one of your sex? Oh, Mary, my dear, there's many a true word said ingest. How little did I think what the crotchet would be! And slowly the rims of Tillie's eyes and the tip of her nose reddened and swelled. No, I can't picture it, Mary, what it'll be like here without you, she said, and pulling out her handkerchief blew snort after snort, which was Tillie's way nowadays of having a good cry. There, thereby, be aunties only got the snivels. For just think of it, Mary, except that first year or so after you were married, we've been together, you and me, pretty much ever since you came to us that time at the hotel. A little black midget of a thing in short frocks? I can still remember our gin and I laughed at the idea of you teaching us, and our poor Ma said to wait and make sure we weren't laughing on the wrong side of our mouths. And Ma was right, as usual. If ever a clever little kid trod the earth, it was you. Mary poo-pooed the cleverness. I knew very little more than you yourselves. No, it was you who were all so kind to me. I'd been feeling so lonely, as if nobody wanted me, and I shall never forget how mother put her arms around me and cuddled me, and how safe and comfortable I felt. It was always just like home there to me. And why not? I'd like to know. Look here, Mary, I'm going to ask you something plump and plain. Have you really been happy in your marriage, my dear, or have you not? It's such a loyal little soul, I know you'd never show it if you weren't, and sometimes I've had me doubts about you, Mary, for you and the doctor are just as different as chalk and cheese. Of course I have, as happy as the day is long, cried Mary, sensitive as ever to a reflection on her husband. You mustn't think anything like that, Tilly, I couldn't imagine myself married to any one but Richard. Then that only makes it harder for you now, poor thing, pulled two ways like as you are, said Tilly, and trumpeted afresh. All the same there isn't anything I'd stick at, Mary, to keep you here. Don't be offended, my dear, but it doesn't matter off so much about the doctor going as you. There's none cleverer than him, of course, in his own line, but he's never fitted in properly here. I don't want to exactly say he thinks himself too good for us, but there is something, Mary, love, and I'm not the only one who's felt it. I've known people go on like anything about him behind his back. Nothing would induce them to have him any sort he has inside their doors again, et cetera." Mary flushed. Yes, I know people do sometimes judge Richard very unkindly, for at heart he's the most modest of men. It's only his manner, and he can't help that, can he? There are those who say a doctor ought to be able to, my dear, but never mind him. Oh, it's you I feel for, Mary, been dragged off like this. Can't you do something, dear? Put your foot down." Mary shook her head. It's no use. Richard is so, well, so queer in some ways, tilly. Besides, you know, I don't think it would be right of me to really pit my will against his. Poor little you. Oh, men are queer fish, Mary, aren't they? Not that I can complain. I drew a prize in the lucky bag when I took that old Jorkens in there. But when I look around me, I'll think back and see what we women put up with. There was poor old Ma, she had to be man for both. And Gin, Mary, who doesn't dare call a soul her own, and me Lady Agnes is travelling the self-same road, while she has to cocker I at Henry Nade's before she trusts herself to say whether it's beef or mutton she's eating. And Na, here's you, love, codded off with never a with-you-leave or by-your-leave, just because the doctor's tired of it and thinks he'd like a change. There's no question of whether you're tired or not, oh, my no. But he has to earn the money, Tilly. It isn't quite fair to put it that way," protested her friend. Well, I don't know, Mary, I'm sure, until he's plump person rose and sank in a prodigious sigh. But if I was his wife, he wouldn't get off so easy. I know that. It makes me just boil." Mary answered with a rueful smile. She could never be angry with Richard in cold blood or for long together. As time went on though and the break-up of her home began, by the auctioneer's man appearing to pour over and appraise the furniture, a certain dull resentment did sometimes come up a most. Under its sway she had forcibly to remind herself what a good husband Richard had always been and to tell off his qualities one by one instead of taking them as hitherto for granted. No, her quarrel, she began to see, was not so much with him as with the powers above. Why should her husband alone not be as robust and hardy as all the other husbands in the place? None of their healths threatened to fail, nor did any of them find the conditions of the life intolerable. That was another shabby trick fate had played Richard in not endowing him with worldly wisdom and a healthy itch to succeed. Instead of that he'd been blessed with ideas and impulses that stood directly in his way. And it was here that Mary bore more than one of her private ambitions for him to its grave. A new expression came into her eyes, too, an unsure, baffled look. Life was not, after all, going to be the simple straightforward affair she had believed. Thus far, safe for the one unhappy business with Purdy, wrongs and complications had passed her by. Now she saw that no more than any one else could she hope to escape them. Out of this frame of mind she wrote a long confidential letter to John. John must not be left in ignorance of what hung over her. It was also a relief to unboozle herself to one of her own family. And John was good enough to travel up expressly to talk things over with her, and, as he put it, to call Richard to order. Like every one else he showed the whites of his eyes at the latter's flimsy reasons for seeking a change. But when, in spite of her warning, he bearded his brother-in-law with a jacuzzi and hearty, come, come, my dear Marnay, what's all this? You're actually thinking of giving us the slip?" Richard took his interference so badly, became so agitated over the head of the harmless question that John's area of remonstrance died in his throat. Mad as a march-hair was his private verdict as he shook down his ruffled plumes. To Mary, he said ponderously, Well, upon my soul, my dear girl, I don't know, I'm frankly at a loss what to say. But by every practical standard the steppy contemplates his little short of suicidal. I fear he will live to regret it. And Mary, who had not expected anything from John's intervention, and also knew the grounds for Richard's heat, Mary now resigned herself with the best grace she could muster to the inevitable. CHAPTER XI House and practice sold for a good round sum. The brass plates were removed from gate and door, leaving dirty squares flanked by screw-holes, carpets came up and curtains down, and like rats from a doomed ship, men and women's servants fled to other situations. One fine day the auctioneer's bell was rung through the main streets of the town, and both on this and the next, when the red flag flew in front of the house, a troupe of intending purchases, together with an even larger number of the merely curious, streamed in at the gate and overran the premises. At noon the auctioneer mounted his perch, gathered the crowd around him, and soon had the sail in full swing, catching head-bobbs or wheedling and insisting, with, when persuasion could do no more, his monotonous parrot cry of, going, going, gone. It would have been in bad taste for either husband or wife to be visible while the auction was in progress, and the night before Mary and the child had moved to Tillies, where they would stay for the rest of the time. But Marnie was still hard at work. The job of winding up and getting in the money owed him was no light one, for the report had somehow got abroad that he was retiring from practice because he had made his fortune, and only too many people took this as a tacit permission to leave their bills unpaid. He had locked himself and his account-books into a small back-room where stood the few articles they had picked out to carry with them. Mary's sewing-table, his first gift to her after marriage, their modest stock of silver, his medical library. But he had been forced to lower the blind to hinder impertinent noses flattening themselves against the window, and thus could scarcely see to put pen to paper, while the auctioneer's grating voice was a constant source of distraction, not to mention the rude comments made by the crowd on house and furniture, the ceaseless trying of the handle of the locked door. When it came to the point this tearing up of one's roots was a murderous business, nothing for a man of his temperament. Mary was a good deal better able to stand it than he. Violently as she had opposed the move in the beginning she was now, dear soul, putting a cheery face on it. But then Mary belonged to that happy class of mortals who could set up their lares and panates inside any four walls, whereas he was a very slave to associations. Did she regret parting with a pretty table and a comfortable chair, it was solely because of the prettiness and convenience, as long as she could replace them by other articles of the same kind she was content. But to him each familiar object was bound by a thousand memories, and it was a loss of these which could never be replaced that cut him to the quick. Meanwhile this was the kind of thing he had to listen to. In our ladies and gents we have a very fine beer glass, a very chaste and tasty beer glass indeed, a real addition to any lady's drawing room. Mrs. Rupp, do I understand you are right Mrs. Rupp? Mrs. Rupp offers 12 Bob for this very answer article. 12 Bob, going 12, 15, thank you Mrs. Brombie. Going 15, going, going 18, right you are my dear. And so on. It had a history, had that beer glass, its purchase dated from a time in their lives when they had been forced to turn each shilling in the palm. Mary had aspired it one day in Playstow's stores and had set her heart on buying it. How she had schemed to scrape the money together, saving so much on a new gown, so much on bonnet and mantle. He remembered, as if it were yesterday, the morning on which she had burst in, eyes and cheeks aglow to tell him that she had managed it at last, and how they had gone off arm in arm to secure the prize. Yes, for all their poverty those had been happy days. Little extravagances such as this or the trifling gifts they had contrived to make each other had given far more pleasure than the costly presence of later years. The next article I draw your attention to is a sofa, went on the voice sounding suddenly closer, and with a great trampling and shuffling the crowd tube after it to the adjoining room, and a very easy and comfortable piece of furniture it is too, a bit shabby and warner and there, but not any the worst of that. You don't need to worry if the kids play puff puffs on it, and it fits the shape of the body all the better. Anyone like to try it, just the very thing for a tired gent ome from biz or andy to pop your lady on when she faints, as the best of ladies will. Any hoffers? Mr. Dule Plastria, a guinea? Thank you, mister. One guinea, going a guinea. Now, come on, ladies and gentlemen, do you think I've got an ocean to make your present of it? What's that? Two and twenty. God! Is this a tiddlin' match? How proud he had been of that sofa! In his first surgery he had had nowhere to lay an aching head. Well-worn, small wonder, he would like to know how many hundreds of times he had flung himself down on it utterly played out. He had been used to lie there of an evening, too, when Mary came in to chat about household affairs or to report on her day's doings. And he remembered another time when he had spent the last hours of a distracted night on it, and how between sleeping and waking he had strained his ears for footsteps that never came. The sofa was knocked down to his butcher for a couple of pounds, and the crying or decrying of his bookcases began. He could stand no more of it. Sweeping his papers into a bag he guiltily unlocked the door and stole out by way of kitchen and back gate. But once outside he did not know where to go or what to do. Leaving the town behind him he made for the lake and roved aimlessly and disconsolidly about, choosing sheltered paths and remote roads where he would be unlikely to run the gauntlet of acquaintances, for he shrank from recognition on this particular day when all his domestic privacies were being bared to the public view. But altogether of late he had fought shy of meeting people. Their hard matter-of-fact faces showed him only two plainly what they thought of him. At first he had been fool enough to scan them eagerly in the hope of finding one saving touch of sympathy or comprehension. But he might as well have looked for grief in the eyes of an undertaker's mute, and so he had shrunk back into himself, wearing his stiffer stare as a shield and leaving it to marry to pericolonial inquisitiveness. When he reckoned that he had allowed time enough for the disposal of the last pots and pans, he rose and made his way, while the word home was by now become a mere figure of speech. He ended a scene of the wildest confusion. The actual sale was over, but the work of stripping the house only begun, and successful bidders were dragging off their spoils. His glass-fronted bookcase had been got as far as the surgery door. There it had stuck fast, and an angry altercation was going on her best to set it free. A woman passed him bearing Mary's gerundalls. Another had the dining-room clock under her arm, a third trail to whatnot after her. After the palings of the fence, several carts and buggies had been hitched, and the horses were eating down his neatly clipped hedge. It was all he could do not to rush out and call their owners to account. The level sun rays flooded the room, showing up hither to unnoticed smudges and scratches on the wall-papers, showing the prints of hundreds of dusty feet on the carpetless floors. Voices echoed in hollow fashion through the naked rooms. Men shouted and spat as they tugged heavy articles along the hall or bumped them down the stairs. It was pandemonium. The death of a loved human being could not, he thought, have been more painful to witness. Thus a home went to pieces. This was a page of one's life turned. He hastened a way to rejoin Mary. There followed a week of Mrs. Tilley's somewhat stifling hospitality when one was forced three times a day to overeat oneself for fear of giving offence, followed formal presentations of silver and plate from Masonic Lodge and District Hospital, as well as a couple of public testimonials got up by his medical brethren. But at length all was over. The last visit had been paid and received. The last evening party in their honour sat through and Marnie breathed again. He had felt stiff and unnatural under this overdose of demonstrativeness. Now, as always, on sighting relief from a state of things that irked him, he underwent a sudden change, turned hearty and spontaneous, thus innocently succeeding in leaving a good impression behind him. He kept his temper, too, in all the fuss and adieu of departure, the running to and fro after missing articles, the sitting on the lids of overflowing trunks, the strapping of carpet bags, a fixing of labels. Their luggage hoisted into a spring cart, they themselves took their seats in the buggy and were driven to the railway station, and to himself Marnie murmured an all's well that ends well. Upon alighting, however, he found that his gray coat had been forgotten. He had to reseat himself in the buggy and gallop back to the house, arriving at the station only just in time to leap into the train. A close shave that, he ejaculated as he sank on the cushions and wiped his face, and in more senses than one, my dear, in tearing around a corner we nearly had a nasty spill. Had I pitched out and broken my neck this whole would have got my bones after all. Not that I was sorry to miss that cock-and-hen show, it was really too much of a good thing altogether. For a large and noisy crowd had gathered around the door of the carriage to wish the travellers God's speed, among them people to whom Marnie could not even put a name whose very existence he had forgotten, and it had fairly snowed last gifts and keepsakes. Drying her eyes, Mary now set to collecting and arranging these. Just fancy so many turning up-tier! The railway people must have wondered what was the matter? Oh, by the way, did you notice? I don't think you did. You were in such a rush, who I was speaking to as you ran up. It was Jim. Old Jim, but so changed, I hardly knew him, as Spruce's could be in a black coat and a bell topper. He's married again, he told me, and has one of the best paying hotels in Smithsdale. Yes, and he was at the sale, too. He came over specially for it, to buy the piano. He did confound him, cried Marnie, hotly. Oh, you can't look at it that way, Richard, as long as he has the money to pay for it. Fancy, he told me he had always admired the tune of it so much when I played and sang. My dear little piano! You shall have another in a better one, I promise you, old girl. Don't fret. Well, that's slice of our life's over and done with, he added, and laid his hand on hers. But we'll hold together, won't we, wife, whatever happens? They had passed Black Hill and its multicoloured clay in gravel heaps, and the train was puffing up hill. The last scattered huts and weather-boards fell behind, the worked-out holes grew fewer, wooded rises appeared. Gradually, too, the white roads around Mount Bunninyong came into view, and the trees became denser. And having climbed the shoulder, they began to fly smoothly and rapidly down the other side. Marnie bent forward in his seat. There goes the last of old Warren-heap, thank the Lord, I shall never set eyes on it again. On my word I believe I came to think that hill the most tiresome feature of the place, whichever street one turned into, up it bobbed at the foot, like a peep-show, or a bad dream, or a prison wall. In Melbourne they were the guests of John, Marnie had reluctantly resigned himself to being beholden to Mary's relatives and Mary's friends to the end of the chapter. At best living in other people's houses was for him more of a punishment than a pleasure, but for sheer discomfort this day capped the climax. Under Zara's incompetent rule John's home had degenerated into a lawless and slovenly abode. The meals were unpalatable, the servants pert and lazy, while the children ran wild. You could hardly hear yourself speak for the racket. Whenever possible Marnie fled the house. He lunched in town, looked up his handful of acquaintances, bought necessaries and unnecessaries for the voyage. He also hired a boat and had himself rode out to the ship, where he clambered on board amid the mess of scarring and painting, and made himself known to the chief mate. Or he sat on the pier and gazed at the vessel lying straining at her anchor, while quick-grain squalls swept up and blotted out the bay. Of Mary he caught but passing glimpses, her family seemed determined to make unblushing use of her as long as she was within reach. A couple of days prior to their arrival John and Zara had quarrelled violently, and for the docenth time Zara had packed her trunks and departed for one of those miraculous situations, the doors of which always stood open to her. John was for Mary going after her and forcing her to admit the error of her ways. Mary held it wiser to let well alone. Do be guided by me this time, John, she urged, when she had heard her brother out. You and Zara will never hit it off, however often you try. But the belief was ingrained in John that the most suitable head for his establishment was one of his own blood. Mary answered indignantly, and why not pray, may I ask, who is to hit it off, as you put it, if not two of a family? Oh, John! Mary felt quite apologetic for her brother. Clever as Zara is, she is not at all fitted for a post of this kind. She is no hand with the servants, and children don't seem to take to her. Young children, I mean. Not fitted? Bah! said John. Every woman is fitted by nature to rear children and manage a house. They should be, I know, yielded Mary in conciliatory fashion, but with Zara it doesn't seem to be the case. Then she ought to be ashamed of herself, my dear Mary, ashamed of herself, and that's all about it. Zara wept into a dainty handkerchief and was delivered of a rigmarole of complaints against her brother, the servants, the children. According to her the last were naturally perverse, and John indulged them so shockingly that she had been powerless to carry out reforms. When she punished them he cancelled the punishments. If she left their naughtiness unchecked he accused her of indifference. Then her housekeeping had not suited him. He reproached her with extravagance, with mismanagement, even with lining her own purse. While the truth is, John is mean as dirt. I literally had to drag each penny out of him. But whatever induced you to undertake it again, Zara? Yes, what indeed, echoed Zara bitterly, however once bitten Mary twice shy, never again. But remembering the bite Zara had already received, Mary was silent. Even Zara's amateurish hand thus finally withdrawn it became Mary's task to find some worthy and capable person to act as mistress. Taking her obligation seriously she devoted her last days in Australia to conning and penning advertisements and interviewing applicants. No one too attractive, if you please, Mrs. Marnie, if you don't want him to fall a victim, teased Richard, remember our good John's inflamability is a very laden jar again at present. No indeed I don't, said Mary with emphasis, but the children are the first consideration. Oh, dear, it does seem a shame that Tillie shouldn't have them to look after, and it would relieve John of so much responsibility. As it is he's even asked me to make it plain to Tillie that he wishes Trotty to spend her holidays at school. The forsaking of the poor little motherless flock cut Mary to the heart. Trotty hit clung to her, inconsolable. Oh, aren't he take me with you? Oh, what shall I do without you? It's not possible, darling, your papa would never agree. But I tell you what, Trotty, you must be a good girl and make haste and learn all you can. For soon I'm sure he'll want you to come and be his little housekeeper and look after the other children." Sounded on this subject, however, John said dryly, Emma's influence would be undesirable for the little ones. His prejudice in favour of his second wife's children was an eternal riddle to his sister. He dandled even the youngest whom he'd not seen since its birth with visible pleasure. It must be the black eye, said Mary to herself, and shook her head at men's irrationality, for Ginny's offspring had none of the grace and beauty that marked the two older children. And now the last night had come, and they were gathered to family party round John's mahogany. The cloth had been removed, nuts and port were passing. As it was a unique occasion the ladies had been excused from withdrawing, and the gentlemen left their cigars unlighted. Mary's eyes roved fondly from one face to another. There was Tilly come over from her hotel. Nothing would induce me to spend a night under his roof, Mary. Tilly sat hugging one of the children who had run in for the almonds and raisins of dessert. Not a mother lost in her, sighed Mary once more. There was Zara, so far reconciled to her brother as to consent to be present, but only speaking at him, not to him. And dear Jerry, eager and alert, taking so intelligent a share in what was said. Poor Ned alone was wanting, neither Richard nor John having offered to pay his fare to town. Young Johnny's seat was vacant too, for the boy had vanished directly dinner was over. In the harmony of the evening there was just one jarring note for Mary, and at moments she grew very thoughtful. For the first time Mrs. Kelly, the motherly widow on whom her choice had fallen, sat opposite John at the head of the table, and already Mary was the prey of a nagging doubt. For this person had doffed the neat morning garb she had worn when being engaged, and come forth in a cap trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons. Not only this, she smiled in sugary fashion and far too redly, while the extreme humility with which she deferred to John's opinion and hung on his lips made another bad impression on Mary, nor was she alone in her observations, after a particularly glaring example of the widow's complacence till he looked across and shut one eye in an unmistakable wink. Meanwhile the men's talk had gradually peated out, there came long pauses in which they twiddled and twirled their wine-glasses unable to think of anything to say. At heart both John and Marnie held with a certain relief the coming break. After all I dare say such a queer fatty fellow is out of his element here. He'll go down better over there," was John's mental verdict. Marnie is a characteristic, thank God I shall not have to put up much longer with his confounded self-importance or suffer under his matrimonial muddles. When at a question from Mary John began animatidly to discuss the tuition of the younger children Marnie seized the chance to slip away. He would not be missed, he never was, here or anywhere. On the veranda a dark form stirred and made a hasty movement. It was the boy Johnny now grown as tall as Marnie himself, and to judge from the smell what he tried to smuggle into his pocket was a briar. Oh, well, yes, I'm smoking," he said sullenly, after a feeble attempt at evasion. Go in and blab on me if you feel you must, Uncle Richard. Nonsense! But telling fibs about a thing does no good. Oh, yes it does, it saves the hiding, retorted the boy, and added with the youthful vehemence. I'm hanged if I let the Governor take a stick to me nowadays. I'm turn sixteen, and if he dares to touch me. Come, come, you know you've been something of a disappointment to your father, Johnny. That's the root of the trouble. Glad if I have. He hates me, anyway. He never cared for my mother's children," answered Johnny with a quaint dignity. I think he couldn't have cared for her, either. There you're wrong. He was devoted to her, her death nearly broke his heart. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, my boy. "'Was she?' said Johnny civilly, but with meager interest. This long-dead mother had bequeathed him not even a memory of herself, was as unreal to him as a dream at second hand. From the chilly contemplation of her he turned back impatiently to his own affairs which were burning and insistent, and senting a vague sympathy in this stranger uncle who, like himself, had drifted up from the intimacy of the candlelit room, he made a clean breast of his troubles. I can't stand the life here, Uncle Richard, and I'm not going to. Not if father cuts me off with a shilling. I mean to see the world. This isn't the world, this dead and alive old country. It's got to seem like it to the Governor he's been here so long. And he cleared out from his before he was even as old as I am. Of course there isn't another blessed old Australia for me to live at a camp to. He might be a bit sweeter about it if there was. But America's good enough for me, and I'm off there, yes, even if I have to work my passage out. Early next morning, fully equipped for their journey, the Marnie stood on the Williamstown Pier, the centre of the usual crowd of relatives and friends. This had been further swelled by the advent of Mrs. Devine, who came panting up followed by her husband, and by Agnes Ockock and Amelia Grindel, who had contrived to reach Melbourne the previous evening. Even John's children were tacked on, clad in their Sunday best. Everybody talked at once and laughed or wept, while the children played hide and seek round the ladies' crinolines. Strange eyes were bent on their party, strange ears cocked in their direction. And yet once again Marnie's dislike of a commotion in public choked off his gratitude toward these good and kindly people. But his star was rising, tears and farewells and vows of constancy had to be cut short, a jaunt planned by the whole company to the ship itself abandoned, for a favourable wind had sprung up and the captain was impatient to weigh anchor. And so the very last kisses and hand-clasps exchanged. The travellers climbed down into a boat already deep in the water with other cuddly passengers and their luggage, and were rode out to where lay that good clipper-ship the red jacket. Sitting side by side, husband and wife watched, with feelings that had little in common the receding key, Mary fluttering her damp handkerchief until the separate figures had merged in one dark mass, and even till he planted in front a handkerchief tied flag-wise to the top of Jerry's cane could no longer be distinguished from the rest. Marnie's foot met the rib-teak of the deck with the liveliest satisfaction. His nostrils drank in the smell of tarred ropes and oiled brass. Having escorted Mary below, seen to the stowing away of their belongings, and changed his town-clothes for a set of comfortable baggy garments, he returned to the deck, where he passed the greater part of the day tirelessly pacing. They made good headway, and soon the ports and towns of the water's edge were become mere whitey smudges. The hills in the background lasted longer, but first the Macedon group faded from sight, then the Dandenong ranges grown bluer and bluer were also lost in the sky. The vessel crept round the outside of the great bay to clear shoals and sand-banks, and by afternoon, with the sails close rigged in the freshening wind, they were running parallel with the cliff. The cliff thought Marnie with the curl of the lip, and indeed there was no other, nothing but low-scrub-grown sand-hills which flattened out till they were almost level with the sea. The passage through the heads was at hand, impulsively he went down to Fetch-Mary, threading his way through the saloon in the middle of which grew up one of the masts, he opened a door leading off it. Come on, deck, my dear, and take your last look at the old place, it's not likely you'll ever see it again. But Mary was already uncoffin'd in her narrow berth. Don't ask me to even lift my head from the pillow, Richard, besides I've seen it so often before. He lingered to make some arrangements for her comfort, fidgeted to know where she had put his books, then mounted a locker and craned his neck at the porthole. Now for the ripped wife, by God, Mary, I little thought this time last year that I should be crossing it to-day. But the cabin was too dark and small to hold him. Climbing the steep companion-way he went on deck again and resumed his fittings to and fro. He was no more able to be still than was the good ship under him. He felt himself one with her and gloried in her growing unrest. She was now come to the narrow channel between two converging headlands where the waters of Hobson's Bay met those of the open sea. They boiled and churned in an eternal commotion over treacherous reefs which thrust far out below the surface and were betrayed by straight white lines of foam. Once safely out the vessel hoved too to drop the pilot. Leaning over the gunnel, Marnie watched a boat come alongside, the man of oil-skins climbed down the rope ladder and row away. Here in the open a heavy swell was running, but he kept his foot on the swaying boards long after the last of his fellow passengers had vanished, a tall thin figure with an eager pointed face and hair just graying at the temples. Contrary to habit he had a word for every one who passed from mate to cabin-boy and he drank a glass of wine with the captain in his cabin. Their start had been auspicious, said the latter, seldom had he had such a fair wind to come out with. Then the sun fell into the sea and it was night, a fine starry night clear with the hard cold radiance of the south. Marnie looked up at the familiar constellations and thought of those others long mist that he was soon to see again. Over! This page of his history was turned and done with, and he had every reason to feel thankful. For many and many a man, though escaping with his life, had left youth and health and hope on these difficult shores. He had got off scot-free. Still in his prime, his faculties green, his zest for living unimpaired, he was heading for the dear old mother country, for home. Alone and unaided he would never have accomplished it. Strength to will the enterprise, steadfastness in the face of obstacles had been lent him from above. And as he stood gazing down into the black and fathomless deep, which sent crafty licking tongues up the vessel's side, he freely acknowledged his debt, gave honour where honour was due. From thee cometh victory, thee cometh wisdom, and thine is the glory, and I am thy servant. The last spark of a coast-light went out. Buffeted by the rising wind, the good-ship began to pitch and roll. Her canvas rattled, her joints creaked and groaned, as lunging forward she cut her way through the troubled seas that break on the reef-bound coast of this old, new world. End of Part 4, Chapter 12. Recording by Tabathat. This is also the end of Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson. The continuation of Richard Marnie's story may be found at www.gutenberg.net.au slash e-books 01 slash 01 0009 dot txt.