An Australian Lassie Part 5

And there followed him "big John Brown," of mathematical and pugilistic renown.

He stared at Betty very hard, and Betty stared at him--only for a moment, though, for Baby began to cry and had to be hushed--and the chain clanked and frightened her while it produced no visible effect upon her grandfather.

The old man turned sharply to the wondering boy.

"Is this a trick of yours, John?" he demanded sharply.

"No," said Betty, "it's--it's only me," and she looked straight into her grandfather's face, although her voice was trembling.

"And who are _only you_?"

The child hesitated. In a vague way she felt she would be doing her mother's and Cyril's great future an injury to tell her name. And yet, quick-witted as she was, it did not occur to her to find a new one.

The young face in the old black bonnet looked beseechingly into the man's.

"_Please_ don't ask my name," she begged.

"Take off your bonnet."

She put Baby on the floor at her feet and pulled off her bonnet. And her dark curly hair fell loosely around her odd white face.

"Now--your name!" shouted the old captain, as if he were calling to a sailor high up a mast.

"Elizabeth Bruce," faltered the girl, for her reason showed her in a second how John Brown would give it if she did not.

A certain gleam that had been in the old man's eyes went away and his brow grew black as thunder. Betty instinctively picked up the baby again and gathered up the train of her dress.

"Ah!" said the old man, breathing hard.

Then suddenly a light dawned on Betty and she saw things as this old man would see them, which was the very way of all others that he must not do.

She repeated swiftly to herself her old charm against fear--"No Bruce is afraid. I can only die once. He won't eat me."

"It's all my fault," she said, and her brown eyes looked into his brown ones. "Cyril and I got tried of being poor, and I--I thought it would be a good plan if you adopted Cyril--and--and I came to frighten you."

"Ah----"

"I thought you were old, and--and--might be sorry now, and I thought a bit of a fright--I thought if a ghost----"

Her chain clanked and her hands trembled, and Baby b.u.mped up and down in her arms. The very remembrance of her words left her, for a great frown was spreading over the old man's face. He turned angrily to the boy.

"Put her out of the door," he said. "Put her out of the place!" and some hot words, fearful and unintelligible some of them to the small girl, burst from his lips.

And Betty, Baby and chain and all went out into the darkness. Only the bonnet remained.

Cyril was on the outermost edge of the grove, and with danger behind him, and Betty and Baby before his eyes, safe and unhurt, a wave of very ill-temper swept over him. He refused to have part in any more of Betty's "silly games," left her to carry the baby unaided, and told her she had spoilt his chance of ever being adopted. But he was all the time wis.h.i.+ng pa.s.sionately that he too had "done and dared"--that he had not crouched there among the trees, afraid and trembling. A small inner voice, that spoke to him very sharply after such occasions, told him contemptuously, that he had been more afraid than a girl; that he had been a coward; and as soon as he reached their small lamp-lit home, he ran away from silent Betty and the babbling baby, to his own bedroom, to cry in loneliness over this second self who had done the wrong.

And Betty stole silently into her bedroom. The dining room door was still closed, and those quiet elder ones were having their "pleasant"

evening. She undressed the baby, and kissed her over and over, then put her into her little cot and gave her a dimpled thumb to suck. And she herself cuddled up very close to her, and began to cry too. So much for all her show of bravery now.

And a small voice spoke to her also, and showed her the seamy side of this great deed of hers. Told her that no one else in all the world would have dreamed of doing so wrong a thing; pointed out her mother and father and pretty Dot, Mrs. and Mr. Sharman as examples of great goodness. When the baby was placidly sleeping, she sat upright on the end of her mother's bed in her earnestness to "see" if any of those righteous five would be guilty of the wickedness of becoming ghosts to frighten an old man. She would have felt easier at once if she could have convinced herself that they would; but she could only see each of them rounding eyes of horror at her, and her sobs, broke out afresh.

The door opened and Cyril came into the darkness, whispering and whimpering,--

"I didn't play fair, Betty," he said--"I wish I'd played fair--I----"

"Oh," said Betty sobbingly--"Oh, Cyril, you're ever so much n.o.bler than I am. You wouldn't frighten an old man, neither. Oh, I wish I was as good as you!"

Whereat a sweet sense of well-doing stole over Cyril. "Never mind," he said cheerfully, "do as I do another time."

"There won't be another time," said Betty. "I'm going to turn over a new leaf, and be as good as if I was grown up."

CHAPTER V

JOHN BROWN

John Brown's life had hitherto been a curiously rough and tumble sort of existence. There had been a season, brief and entirely unremembered by him, when his home had been in one of Sydney's most fas.h.i.+onable suburbs; when a tender-eyed mother had watched delightedly over his first gleams of intelligence, and a proud father had perched him on his shoulder for a bed-time romp. When he had been taken tenderly for an "airing" by the trimmest of nursemaids, and in the daintiest of perambulators. When he had worn tiny silk frocks and socks and bonnets. When hopes and fears had arisen over "teething-time." When he had been carried round a drawing-room, to display to admiring friends, his chubby wrists, his dimpled fat legs, his quite remarkable length of limb and growth of bone.

Then Death slipped in unawares, and called the sweet young mother from that happy home, and little John Brown became a perplexity and a care to a grief-maddened father.

For a s.p.a.ce it was conjectured that the baby, pending the arrival of a step-mother, would be handed over to the cook, a rotund motherly person who was fond of a.s.serting that she had buried thirteen children and reared one.

But conjectures have a way of falling beside the mark.

One morning an old schoolmate of poor little Mrs. Brown's arrived from "out back," packed up the baby's things with her own quick brown hands and returned "out back" the same evening.

The perambulator, the cradle, the cot, the dainty baby basket and a mult.i.tude of other things were sold the next week along with the tables and chairs and other "household effects," and Mr. John Brown, senior, a cabin box and a portmanteau, left by a mail steamer for j.a.pan.

And the small suburban house became "to let." Thenceforward the pattern of little John Brown's existence became altered. He was one of three other children, and not even the baby, although scarcely one year old.

His elegant lace-trimmed silken and muslin garments were "laid by." He wore dark laundry-saving dresses and neither boots nor socks. He was never carried around for admiration, for the very good reason that visitors were few and far between--and there was (except to doting parents, perhaps) very little to admire about him. He lost his chubbiness and his pink prettiness and became thin and wiry, brown faced and brown limbed.

He was always abnormally tall and abnormally strong, so that he became almost a jest on the station. He learned to fight at three, to swim at four, shoot at seven, ride, yard cattle, milk, chop wood, make bush fires and put them out again, ring bark trees all before he was eleven.

In short, to do, and to do remarkably well, the hundred and one things that make up a man's and boy's existence on an Australian station.

At thirteen he learned that his name was Brown, and that he had a father other than the bluff squatter he had grown up with. And at thirteen he was taken from the station-life he loved, and, after much travelling, delivered by a station-hand into his father's care in Sydney.

Before he could form any idea as to what was about to happen to him, and to this grey-bearded father of his, he was taken across the blue harbour water, and thence by coach to the little towns.h.i.+p over the northern hills.

They walked past the small weather-board school together, and few, if any, words pa.s.sed between them. For the man's thoughts were away down the slope of many years, and the boy's were away in that flat country "out back" where he had been brought up.

They were close to the great iron gates when the man broke the silence; pointing beyond them he remarked--

"This is where your home will be in the future, John."