Under Two Skies Read online

  Miss Anstruther had been silent and subdued during the drive home. She was considerably ashamed of herself. She was more ashamed of having ill-treated the white-faced boy over that dance—now that it was done—than she would have been to reject his hand after encouragement; use had blunted her feelings to this sort of sin; but the wrong of breaking in cold blood an engagement to dance was altogether out of harmony with her character and practices. She was notorious for leading men on to certain humiliation; she was celebrated for the punctilio with which she kept her word in the smallest matter. She had injured the good reputation in snapping the backbone of the bad one; and she did not feel at all pleased with Lord Nunthorp, who had said or implied one thing, and then stared its opposite. Her spirits had improved, however, on her arrival at the house: she had found a letter for herself, with three bright blue stamps in the corner, stuck up on the mantelpiece. Her hand had closed eagerly over this letter before the lamp was turned up. She was twisting it between her fingers, under her shawl, while her sister repoved her, not too seriously, for her treatment of that boy.

  “I know it,” she answered rather dolefully; “I know well enough what a flirt I am! I have never denied it in my life, not even to them. But I really never mean them to go so far. And—and I don’t think I’m so heartless as I make myself out to be!”

  Her sister gazed at her fondly. Her own family, at all events, loved and believed in Miss Anstruther, and held her faults to be all on the surface. The sister now saw in the sweet, flushed face the look that Lord Nunthorp had noticed more than once, but never interpreted.

  “Is there some one you care for after all, Midge, dear?” she asked softly.

  “There may have been some one all the time,” the young girl whispered, her eyelids fallen, her hand squeezing the letter under her shawl.

  “Is it—is it Ted Miller?”

  Midge looked up into her sister’s eyes. Her lip was quivering. She was a girl who seldom cried—her detractors would have told you why. She controlled herself before speaking now.

  “It was the most hopeless affair of them all,” she said simply; “but—but he was the only one who really meant it!”

  His letter was against her bosom.

  The married sister’s eyes had filled. “You write to each other still, don’t you, Midge?”

  “Yes—as friends. Good-night, Helen!”

  “Good-night, darling Midge; forgive me for speaking!” Helen murmured, kissing her eyes.

  “Forgive you? You’ve said nothing to what I deserve!”

  The girl was running up to her room two steps at a time. Ted Miller’s letter was pressed tight to her heart.

  Ted Miller had been four years in Australia. He had written to her regularly, the whole time, as her friend; and she had written fairly regularly to him, as his. His was the one refusal in which she had not been a free agent; she had been but seventeen at the time. There was love between them when they parted; there was never a word of it in their letters. He wrote and told her all that he was doing: he was roughing it in the wilderness; he was not making his fortune: he never spoke of coming home. She wrote and told him—nearly all.

  A pleasant fire was burning in her room. She lit the candles, and sat down just as she was, in her very extravagant ball-dress, to read his present letter. She felt, as always in opening a letter from Ted, that she was going to open a window and let in a cool current of fragrant, fresh air upon an unhealthy, heavy atmosphere; and she noticed, what she had not noticed downstairs, through hiding the letter before the lamp was turned up, that its superscription was not in Ted’s hand. The bright blue stamps of New South Wales were really all she had looked at downstairs. She now tore open the envelope with strange misgivings; and the letter turned out to be from the squatter’s wife on Ted Miller’s station, telling how a buck-jumper had broken Ted Miller’s back; and how, before his death, which ensued in a matter of hours, he had directed her to write to his family, and also—but separately—to “his greatest friend.”

  The fire dulled down, the candles shortened, and in their light Miss Anstruther sat in her dazzling ball-dress, her face as gray as its satin sheen. Her rounded arms had more colour than her face. She moaned a little to herself; she could not cry.

  At last she stirred herself. Her limbs were stiff. As she crossed the room, she saw herself from head to foot in her pier-glass—with all her grace of form and motion dead and stiff within her dress. She saw herself thus, but at the time with senseless eyes; the sight first came back to her when she next used that mirror. She was going to a certain drawer; she unlocked it, and drew it out bodily; she carried it to the table where the candles were slowly burning down. The drawer was filled with Miller’s letters.

  “His greatest friend!” They had been merely friends from the day they parted. He had nothing. Out there he had found fortune but a little less in-accessible than at home; he had written her no words of love, for how could there be any hope for them? She had plenty of money, but that was all the more reason why he must have some. His letters were not vulgarised by a single passionate, or sentimental, or high-flown passage. They were the letters of an honest friend; they were the letters of a good soldier—on the losing side, certainly, but fighting, not talking about fighting—talking, indeed, of quite other matters. And because these letters had been just what they were, Ted Miller himself had been to a frivolous girl, through frivolous years, what no one else had ever been—not even himself as she had known him face to face. Their friendship had been pure and strong and strengthening; their love idealised by improbability, and further by not being discussed, and yet further by being written “friendship.” His tone to her had been: “Enjoy yourself. I want to hear you’re having a good time. I am—there’s nothing like work.” She had answered, very truthfully, that she was doing so; and now he knew how! This was the bitterest thought: that the new knowledge was now his, and she, in his eyes, just what she had been in the eyes of the throng!

  She sat down and read all his letters. The pure breath of heaven rose from every leaf. They did not touch her yet: her heart was numb. But the tones that had once come to her ears from every written word came no longer; the voice was silenced. She returned the letters to the drawer. She would keep them till her death.

  And yet—would he like that?

  She sat very still, trying to answer this question. The candles went out, but a leaden light had crept into the room through the blinds. She thought that he saw her, that he had seen her for weeks, that she had been grieving him the whole time, that she might please him now. And he was the one man she had known who would have wished her not to keep his letters.

  She rose resolutely from her chair, and with difficulty rekindled her fire; it ruined her elaborate dress, but she was glad never to wear this one again. It did not seem to her that she was about to do anything cruel or unnatural. She was going to do violence to her own feelings only. It would please Ted that she was not going to keep his letters, to read them in her better moods, and less and less as the years went on. For her own part, she felt she would like to have them a little longer. It was a subtle sense of sacrifice for his sake—her first and last—which nerved her to burn his letters. Overstrung as she was, she burnt them, every one, and without a tear.

  A half-leaf happened to escape. She picked it out of the fender when the rest were burnt black, and as her heart was beginning to ache for what she had done. She took it to the window, and read on the crisp, scorched paper the ordinary end of an ordinary letter—the end of all was, as ever: “Yours always, E. M.”

  Without a moment’s warning, her tears rattled upon the hot paper; she pressed it passionately to her mouth; she flung herself upon the bed in a paroxysm of helpless agony.

  Strong-minded Miss Methuen.

  When Canon Methuen was offered the least tempting of Australian bishoprics, strong hopes of a refusal were entertained by admirers of that robust and popular divine. His chances of a much more desirable preferment, if he woul
d but wait for it, were, on the one hand, considerable; and on the other hand was his daughter Evelyn. Miss Methuen, an only unmarried child, was not the one to suffer transportation to the bush, while she was the very one to influence her father’s decision. So said those who knew her, showing, as usual, how little they did know her. For whatsoever was novel, romantic-sounding, or unattractive to her friends, most mightily attracted Evelyn Methuen; and the Australian bishopric possessed all these merits. Her friends were right about the girl’s influence in general with their beloved Canon; they did not over-rate the weight of her say in this particular matter; but beyond this their fond calculations proved sadly adrift. Evelyn never even paused to consider the thing, say in the light of transportation and live burial; she jumped at it; and on this occasion she did not jump back. Her father, who knew her, gave her time for the customary rebound. But for once she knew her mind, and on the fifth day the world learnt that a Colonial bishopric of which it had never heard before had been definitely accepted by the Reverend Canon Methuen.

  Miss Methuen had done it, and apparently she knew no regrets. That repentance at leisure of which her father had disquieting visions, founded on past experience of her, did indeed become conspicuous, but only in a delightful manner. She was not, of course, without a proper sorrow at departure; the spires at sunset made her pensive; she duly cried when the wrench came, but performed that wrench strong-mindedly, notwithstanding. This was her accredited characteristic, strength of mind. It enabled her to tear herself away from a grand old town for which she had an unaffected veneration—where she spent most of her life, where her mother lay buried, where two sisters lived married: from some precious Extension Lectures, in the middle of the Browning Course: from her own little room, made pretty with her own hands, at small cost, with fans and Aspinall and photographs in frames: from those very young men who were foolish about her at this time; and almost as easily, six weeks later, from the more mature and less impossible admirers of the outward voyage. But though, to be sure, she had never had absolute occasion for a refusal of marriage, she would have refused Lord Shields himself—the fellow-passenger—on the voyage out. Her heart was set upon the wilderness, and on that Bishop’s Lodge there, her future home; and after devouring some Australian romances, she felt that she would rather encounter one bushranger on his professional rounds than plough the seas with a boat-load of friendly peers.

  Before reading those romances—that is, until there came the prospect of living in Australia—Miss Methuen’s ideas of that continent had been very vague, very elementary, and rather funny. Her timely reading gave shape and background to her ideas, but left them funnier than ever; it did not prepare her for the place she was going to, perhaps it did not pretend to do so, that romantic literature; but Miss Methuen had chosen to assume that all Australian scenery would be in the same style. She was prepared for gullies, gum-trees, caves, ranges, kangaroos, opossums, claims, creeks, snakes in the grass, and chivalrous robbers on the highroad; but she was not prepared for a dead level of sandy desert, broken only by the river-timber of a narrow, sluggish stream, nor for a wooden township where the worst weapons of man were strong drink in the head and strong language on the tongue; and this was what she found. Great was the disillusion, and in every respect; it discounted and discoloured all things, even to the Bishop’s Lodge, which, with its complete margin of creeper-covered verandah, was charming in everything but situation.

  “Call this the bush!—where are the trees?” she said rather petulantly to her father; and, as she looked at his long dust-coat of light-coloured silk, duck trousers, and pith helmet, she might have added: “Call you a Bishop!—where are your gaiters?”

  In fact, Miss Methuen’s contentment wore away, very nearly, with the novelty. The Bishop saved the situation by taking her with him on his first episcopal round up country. He wore, too, on that round, his gaiters (with a new chum’s stout shooting-boots underneath) and black garments, for the cool weather was coming on. They had a delightful cruise among the sheep-stations of the diocese (a little district the size of England), their pilot being the Bishop’s Chaplain, who, as it happened, was a son of the soil. They gave the hospitality of the squatter a splendid trial, and found that celebrated Colonial quality rated not at all too high. The Bishop held services in the queerest places, and administered holy rites to the most picturesque ruffians, winning in all quarters the respect and admiration of men not prone to respect or to admire, for his broad shoulders and grizzled beard and his erect six feet, as well as for the humanity and virility of every sentence in his simple, telling addresses. Evelyn, perhaps, was admired less; but she did not suspect this, and she enjoyed herself thoroughly. There were gentlemanly young overseers at nearly all the stations. These young men, naturally taken with the healthy colour and good looks of the English girl, were sufficiently attentive, and seemed duly impressed by her conversation. So they were. But clever Evelyn was not clever in her topics; she talked Browning to them, and culture, and the “isms”; and they mimicked her afterwards—the attentive young men. This she did not suspect either. She returned from the cruise in the highest spirits, her preconceptions of the bush not realised, indeed, but forgotten; and after weeks among the stations the wooden town seemed a different and a better place, and the Bishop’s Lodge a paradise of ease and beauty.

  But during the less eventful period of the Bishop’s ministry at headquarters, the satisfaction on his daughter’s part tapered, as it invariably did in the absence of variety. She began systematically to miss things “after old England”; and here the Bishop could sympathise, though the forced expression of his sympathy galled his contented and tolerant nature. He pointed out that comparison was scarcely fair, and hinted that it lay with Evelyn, as with himself, at once to enjoy and to improve the new environment. Naturally there were matters for regret, occasions for a sigh. The service of the sanctuary was necessarily less sumptuous here than in the old English minster; and Evelyn had a soul of souls for high mass, and the exaltation of the spirit through the senses. Then when the service was over, there were no young curates of culture to step in to Sunday supper or dinner, as the case might be. This was a want of another kind; it is not suggested that it was the greater want. The social void, certainly, was an unattractive feature of Bishop’s Lodge, where even the young overseers of the back-blocks, who had barely heard of Browning and were not ashamed of themselves would have been royally welcomed visitors. As it was, almost the only visitors were the Chaplain and his wife, who did not count, since they practically lived at the Lodge. Nor was either of this excellent couple to Evelyn’s taste. The Chaplain, indeed, was but a bush-man with a clean mouth; clerical, to the eye, in his clothes only. No one could have accused him of polish, nor yet, on the other hand, of laziness or insincerity. Evelyn, however, tilted her nose at him. As for the Chaplain’s wife, she was just one of those kind, unpretentious women who are more apt to be spoken of as “bodies.” She did many things for Evelyn; but she had also many children, and spoilt them all; so that Evelyn could do nothing but despise her. For, in her reputed strong mind, Miss Methuen nursed a catholic contempt for human weaknesses of every shade.

  When, however, the time came for further episcopal visitations, Evelyn, who accompanied her father as before, once more enjoyed herself keenly. Her pleasure was certainly enhanced by the fact that the ground traversed was not the old ground. But this turned out to be her last treat of the kind for some time to come. The next round of travels was arranged with the express object of Confirmation, and the Bishop seemed to feel that in this connection the companionship of his daughter might be out of place. He decided, at all events, to take no one but the Chaplain. So Evelyn was left behind with the Chaplain’s wife, and neither lady had a very delightful time. The girl spent most of hers in writing exhaustive letters to her friends, prolix with feminine minutiae, but pathetically barren of the adventures which she longed to recount, if not to experience. In particular she corresponded with some old friends
in Sydney, at whose fashionable residence she had spent a night before accompanying her father up country. These people sympathised with her on many sheets of expensive note-paper. The letters became mutually gushing; and long before the Bishop’s return, Evelyn had arranged to spend the term of his next absence with her opulent friends in Sydney.

  When he did return, Evelyn, as it happened, was not in the house. In point of fact, she was reading under the gum-trees by the sluggish little river, but, as usual, the Chaplain’s wife was not in the unnecessary secret of her whereabouts. Evelyn’s book on this occasion had itself a strong odour of the gum-trees, for it chanced to be the Poems of the bush poet, Lindsay Gordon. Now Evelyn, having attended University Extension Lectures on the subject of “Modern Poetry,” was of course herself an authority on that subject; equally of course she found much to criticise in these bush ballads. What, however, not even Miss Methuen could find fault with was their local colour. She had seen it herself up the country; she only wished she had seen more of it—more of Gordon’s bush and Gordon’s bushmen. Oddly enough, though in his book, the verses that attracted her most were never written by Gordon at all: —

  “Booted, and bearded, and burnt to a brick,

  I loaf along the street;

  I watch the ladies tripping by,

  And I bless their dainty feet.”

  She liked these lines well enough to learn them as she walked back to the house; and it was impossible to avoid glancing at her own dainty feet in doing so. Why did she never encounter the booted bushman who had seen better days?

  “I watch them here and there,

  With a bitter feeling of pain;

  Ah! what wouldn’t I give to feel

  A lady’s hand again!”

  “Ah!” echoed Evelyn, looking at her own small hand, “and what wouldn’t I give—to pull some poor fellow to the surface with you!”