Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 5

  ‘Why don’t you tell them more what you think of things?’ said Alfred. ‘They won’t fancy you half appreciate the Old Country.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ replied his young wife. ‘You know that I do like what I see, dear: you know that I am just delighted with everything: but how can I tell them so, unless I tell them in my own way? Well, then, I see they don’t like it when I drag in the Colonies; yet you must compare what you see with something you’ve seen before; and the Colonies is the only other country ever I did see.’

  But the fact is, it was not so much their daughter-in-law’s comparisons, which were inoffensive in themselves, as the terms in which these comparisons were expressed, that Lady Bligh and Sir James felt bound to discourage. For it soon became plain that Gladys could not talk for two minutes about her native country without unseemly excitement; and this excitement was invariably accompanied by a small broadside of undesirable phrases, and by an aggravation of the dreadful Australian twang, even if some quite indecorous Bush idiom did not necessitate a hasty change of subject. When Australia was rigorously tabooed the Bride was safe, and stupid; when it was not, she might be bright and animated and amusing — but you could never tell what she would say next — the conversation was full of perils and pitfalls.

  The particular conversations that revealed the thinness of the ice in this quarter were trivial in the extreme. In them it was mere touch-and-go with the dangerous subject, nothing more: nothing more because Gladys was quick to perceive that the subject was unpopular. So she became rather silent in the long evenings at the dinner-table and in the drawing-room; for it was her only subject, this one that they did not seem to like. To strangers, however, who were glad to get up a conversation with one of the prettiest women they had ever met in their lives, this seemed the likeliest topic in the world; they could not know that Australia was dangerous ground. The first of them who ventured upon it did not soon forget the experience; it was probably always a more amusing reminiscence to him than to Gladys’s new relatives, who heard all that passed, and grinned and bore it.

  The stranger in question was by way of being illustrious. He was a Midland magnate, and his name, Travers, was a good one; but, what was for the moment much more to the point, he was a very newly elected Member of the House of Commons; in fact, ‘the new boy’ there. He came down to dinner at Twickenham flushed with the agreeable heat of successful battle. Only the week before he had snatched his native borough from the spreading fire of Democracy, and won one of the very closest and most keenly contested by-elections of that year. Naturally enough, being a friend of some standing, he talked freely of his electioneering experiences, and with a victor’s rightful relish. His manner, it must be owned, was a trifle ponderous; according to Granville, he was an inflated bore. But Mr Travers, M.P., was sufficiently well listened to (Lady Bligh was such a wonderful listener); and he fought his good fight over and over again with such untiring energy, and depicted it from so many commanding points of view, that, even when it came to tea in the drawing-room, the subject was still unfinished. At all events, it then for the first time became lively; for it was then that Mr Travers turned to young Mrs Bligh (also for the first time), and honoured her with an observation: —

  ‘No doubt you order these things better in Australia; eh?’

  ‘What things?’ asked the Bride, with some eagerness; for of Australia she had been thinking, but not of Mr Travers or his election.

  ‘Why,’ said the Member, with dignity, ‘your elections. I was speaking of the difficulty of getting some of the lower orders to the poll; you have almost to drive them there. What I say is, that very probably, in Australia, you manage these things on a superior system.’

  ‘We do,’ said the Bride laconically.

  The new Member looked astonished; he had expected a more modest answer.

  ‘Indeed!’ he said stiffly, and addressed himself to his tea-cup.

  ‘For,’ explained the Bride, exhibiting dangerous symptoms, ‘we do drive ‘em to the poll out there, and make no bones about it either!’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Mr Travers again; but this time there was some curiosity in his tone. ‘This is interesting. I always thought Australia was such a superlatively free country!’

  The Bride scented a sarcasm.

  ‘So it is,’ she cried warmly, beginning to speak at a perilous pace, and with her worst twang; ‘my word it is! But you don’t understand me. It’s like this: we do drive ‘em to the poll, up the Bush; I’ve driven ‘em lots o’ times myself. They’re camped out — the voters, like — all over the runs, for all the hands have a vote; and to get ‘em to the police-barracks (the poll, d’ye see?) on election day, each squatter’s got to muster his own men and drive ‘em in. I used to take one trap with four horses, and father another. Gracious, what a bit of fun it was! But the difficulty was — —’

  She hesitated, for Lady Bligh was staring at her; and, though her ladyship’s face was in shadow, the Bride was disturbed, for a moment, by the rigid pose of the old lady’s head. A queer expression was come over the face of the new Member, moreover; but this Gladys could not see, for he was a tall man, standing, while she was seated.

  ‘What was the difficulty?’ asked Granville from a corner, in an encouraging tone.

  Gladys instantly forgot Lady Bligh. ‘To keep ‘em from going to the shanty first,’ she answered, with a merry laugh.

  ‘The shanty?’ repeated Mr Travers, with a vague idea of sailors’ songs.

  ‘The pub., then. Of course they all went afterwards, and — but we were obliged to keep them sober till they’d voted; and that’s where the difficulty came in.’

  The assembly shuddered; but, before new ground could be broken, Mr Travers, for the first time interested in somebody else’s electioneering experiences, said inquiringly: —

  ‘These squatters I presume, represent the landed interest; my party, in fact?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know nothing about that,’ replied the Bride.

  At this juncture Alfred announced, in an uncommonly loud and aggressive tone, that — what do you think? — the glass was going down!

  ‘Is it?’ cried Sir James, with a lively concern quite foreign to his habit. ‘Dear, dear! And Mr Travers just now assured me that the weather was quite settled. I fear that this will disappoint — er — Mr Travers!’

  But it failed even to attract that gentleman’s attention; and Granville, in the background, chuckled satanically over the ingenuousness of the device. Mr Travers, in fact, was sufficiently interested elsewhere. ‘Yet, of course,’ he was saying, ‘there are two parties?’

  ‘My word, there are!’ returned the Bride.

  ‘And do you call them Whig and Tory?’

  ‘I don’t think it’ — doubtfully.

  ‘Conservative and Liberal, perhaps?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Yet you say you have two parties — —’

  ‘Of course we have, same as you,’ broke in the Bride, who would brook anything rather than the implied inferiority of Australia in the most trivial respect. ‘But all ever I heard ‘em called was the squatters’ candidate and the selectors’ man!’

  ‘And your men, I suppose, voted for the squatters’ candidate?’

  ‘I should rather hope so!’ said Mrs Alfred, with severe emphasis. ‘Even Daft Larry — who’s both deaf and mad — had sense enough to give us his vote!’

  Mr Travers, though astonished at her tone, said nothing at the moment; but Granville asked from his corner: —

  ‘What if they didn’t, Gladys?’

  The Bride was seized with a sudden fit of uncontrollable mirth. Some reminiscence evidently tickled her.

  ‘There was one man that we knew of that voted wrong,’ she said, ‘and he got it pretty hot, I can tell you!’

  ‘Advanced Australia!’ murmured Granville.

  ‘I am sorry to hear that, Mrs Bligh,’ said Mr Travers (who had ceased to deal with those local tradesmen, at his place in the Mi
dlands, who were suspected of having ‘voted wrong’ the previous week). ‘I am sorry indeed to hear that. May I ask who punished him?’

  ‘Certainly — I did.’

  It was a startling reply. The Judge quietly quitted the room. Alfred, with his back to every one, surveyed his red face in the mantel-mirror, and ground his teeth; only Lady Bligh sat stoically still.

  ‘He came back to the trap very drunk — blind, speechless, paralytic,’ the Bride explained rapidly, ‘and owned up what he’d done as bold as brass. So I let him have it with the whip, pretty sudden, I can tell you. It was chiefly for his drunken insolence — but not altogether,’ said Gladys, candidly.

  Mr Travers had been glad to pick up a thing or two concerning Australian politics, but he seemed now to consider himself sufficiently enlightened.

  ‘Do you sing, Mrs Bligh?’ he asked somewhat abruptly.

  ‘Not a note,’ said the Bride, perceiving with regret that the subject was changed.

  ‘You play, perhaps? If so — —’

  ‘No, I can’t play neither,’ said the Bride, smiling broadly — and bewitchingly. ‘I’m no good at all, you see!’

  It seemed too true. She had not the saving grace of a single accomplishment — nothing, nothing, nothing but her looks!

  CHAPTER VII

  IN RICHMOND PARK

  The day after Mr Travers dined at Twickenham was almost the first day that passed without the happy pair running up to London together.

  ‘It’s far too hot to think of town, or of wearing anything but flannels all day,’ said Alfred in the morning. ‘But there’s plenty to see hereabouts, Gladdie. There’s Bushey Park and Hampton Court, and Kew Gardens, and Richmond Park. What do you say to a stroll in Richmond Park? It’s as near as anything, and we shall certainly get most air there.’

  Gladys answered promptly that she was ‘on’ (they were alone); and they set out while the early haze of a sweltering day was hanging closely over all the land, but closest of all about the river.

  There was something almost touching in the air of serious responsibility with which these two went about their daily sight-seeing; though Granville derived the liveliest entertainment from the spectacle. The worst of guides himself, and in many respects the least well-informed of men, Alfred nevertheless had no notion of calling in the aid of a better qualified cicerone, and of falling into the rear himself to listen and learn with his wife. At the same time, the fierce importance, to his wife, of this kind of education exaggerated itself in his mind; so he secretly armed himself with ‘Baedeker,’ and managed to keep a lesson ahead of his pupil, on principles well known to all who have ever dabbled in the noble art of ‘tutoring.’ But, indeed, Alfred’s whole conduct towards his wife was touching — touching in its perpetual tenderness, touching in its unflagging consideration, and ten times touching in the fact that his devotion was no longer blind. His eyes had been slowly and painfully opened during this first week at home. Peculiar manners, which, out there in the Bush, had not been peculiar, seemed worse than that here in England. They had to bear continual comparison with the soft speech and gentle ways of Lady Bligh, and the contrast was sharp and cruel. But the more Alfred realised his wife’s defects the more he loved her. That was the nature of his simple heart and its simple love. At least she should not know that he saw her in a different light, and at first he would have cut his tongue out rather than tell her plainly of her peculiarities. Presently she would see them for herself, and then, in her own good time, she would rub down of her own accord the sharper angles; and then she would take Lady Bligh for her model, instinctively, without being told to do so: and so all would be well. Arguing thus, Alfred had not allowed her to say a word to him about that escapade with the stock-whip on the first morning, for her penitence was grievous to him — and was it a thing in the least likely to happen twice? Nevertheless, he was thoroughly miserable in a week — that electioneering conversation was the finisher — and at last he had determined to speak. Thus the walk to Richmond was strangely silent, for all the time he was casting about for some way of expressing what was in his mind, without either wounding her feelings or letting her see that his own were sore.

  Now they walked to Richmond by the river, and then over the bridge, but, before they climbed the hill to the park gates, a solemn ceremony, insisted upon by Alfred, was duly observed: the Bride ate a ‘Maid-of-Honour’ in the Original Shop; and when the famous delicacy had been despatched and criticised, and Alfred had given a wild and stumbling account of its historic origin, his wife led the way back into the sunshine in such high spirits that his own dejection deepened sensibly as the burden of his unuttered remonstrances increased. At last, in despair, he resolved to hold his tongue, for that morning at least. Then, indeed, they chatted cheerfully together for the first time during the walk, and he was partly with her in her abuse of the narrow streets and pavements of Richmond, but still stuck up for them on the plea that they were quaint and thoroughly English; whereat she laughed him to scorn; and so they reached the park.

  But no sooner was the soft cool grass under their dusty feet, and the upland swelling before them as far as the eye could travel, than the Bride became suddenly and unaccountably silent. Alfred stole curious glances as he walked at her side, and it seemed to him that the dark eyes roving so eagerly over the landscape were grown wistful and sad.

  ‘How like it is to the old place!’ she exclaimed at last.

  ‘You don’t mean your father’s run, Gladdie?’

  ‘Yes, I do; this reminds me of it more than anything I’ve seen yet.’

  ‘What nonsense, my darling!’ said Alfred, laughing. ‘Why, there is no such green spot as this in all Australia!’

  ‘Ah! you were there in the drought, you see; you never saw the run after decent rains. If you had, you’d soon see the likeness between those big paddocks in what we call the “C Block” and this. But the road spoils this place; it wants a Bush road; let’s get off it for a bit.’

  So they bore inward, to the left, and Gladys was too thoroughly charmed, and too thoughtful, to say much. And now the cool bracken was higher than their knees, and the sun beat upon their backs very fiercely; and now they walked upon turf like velvet, in the shadow of the trees.

  ‘You don’t get many trees like these out there,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Well — not in Riverina, I know we don’t,’ Gladys reluctantly admitted; and soon she added: ‘Nor any water-holes like this.’

  For they found themselves on the margin of the largest of the Pen Ponds. There was no wind, not a ripple could be seen upon the whole expanse of the water. The fierce sun was still mellowed by a thin, gauzy haze, and the rays were diffused over the pond in a solid gleam. The trees on the far side showed fairly distinct outlines, filled in with a bluish smoky gray, and entirely without detail. The day was sufficiently sultry, even for the Thames Valley.

  ‘And yet,’ continued Gladys, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, ‘it does remind one of the Bush, somehow. I have sometimes brought a mob of sheep through the scrub to the water, in the middle of the day, and the water has looked just like this — like a great big lump of quicksilver pressed into the ground and shaved off level. That’d be on the hot still days, something like to-day. We now and then did have a day like this, you know — only, of course, a jolly sight hotter. But we had more days with the hot wind, hot and strong; what terrors they were when you were driving sheep!’

  ‘You were a tremendous stock-rider, Gladdie!’ remarked her husband.

  ‘Wasn’t I just! Ever since I was that high! And I was fond, like, of that old run — knew every inch of it better than any man on the place — except the old man, and perhaps Daft Larry. Knew it, bless you! from sunrise — you remember the sunrise out there, dull, and red, and sudden — to sundown, when you spotted the station pines black as ink against the bit of pink sky, as you came back from mustering. Let’s see — I forget how it goes — no, it’s like this: —

  ‘’Twas merry ‘mid
the black-woods when we spied the station roofs, To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard, With a running fire of stock-whips and a fiery run of hoofs, Oh, the hardest day was never then too hard!

  That’s how it goes, I think. We used sometimes to remember it as we rode home, dog-tired. But it was sheep with us, not cattle, more’s the pity. Why, what’s wrong, Alfred? Have you seen a ghost?’

  ‘No. But you fairly amaze me, darling. I’d no idea you knew any poetry. What is it?’

  ‘Gordon — mean to say you’ve never heard of him? Adam Lindsay Gordon! You must have heard of him, out there. Everybody knows him in the Bush. Why, I’ve heard shearers, and hawkers, and swagmen spouting him by the yard! He was our Australian poet, and you never had one to beat him. Father says so. Father says he is as good as Shakespeare.’

  Alfred made no contradiction, for a simple reason: he had not listened to her last sentences; he was thinking how well she hit off the Bush, and how nicely she quoted poetry. He was silent for some minutes. Then he said earnestly: —

  ‘I wish, my darling, that you would sometimes talk to my mother like that!’

  Gladys returned from the antipodes in a flash. ‘I shall never talk to any of your people any more about Australia!’ And, by her tone, she meant it.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they don’t like it, Alfred; I see they don’t, though I never see it so clearly as when it’s all over and too late. Yet why should they hate it so? Why should it annoy them? I’ve nothing else to talk about, and I should have thought they’d like to hear of another country. I know I liked to hear all about England from you, Alfred!’