Colonial Born Part 10

"How do you do, Nellie?" she said simply, as she held out her hand.

"And this is the other--Ailleen," he added, before Nellie could answer.

Ailleen, looking into the clear, open eyes which looked so steadily into hers, and were so different from what she had pictured to herself, took the extended hand.

"I am so glad to be able to see you. Oh, I forgot--I'm so sorry," she added quickly.

"Dearie, dearie," the blind woman said, in a gentle, caressing tone, placing her other hand over Ailleen's, "it's very kind of you to say that, very kind of you. There's many a one said far worse and never given a thought whether it hurt me or not. Come, sit ye down, dearie, and tell me all about yourself. w.i.l.l.y, bring a chair."

But w.i.l.l.y, convoyed by Nellie, had pa.s.sed out of sight and hearing.

"I will sit here," Ailleen exclaimed, as she sat on the top of the steps leading to the ground from the verandah.

"Ay, ay," the other woman said. "He's no sooner here than he's away.

Tell me, dearie, all about yourself. Never mind him; maybe he's gone to get some tea or some fruit for you--he's an unselfish boy, a good, unselfish boy."

Ailleen looked into the open eyes, sightless and expressionless, and felt a twinge of pity for the lonely heart who spoke so fondly of her boy--the boy who had spoken of her to Ailleen, and said that she was ill-tempered, fretful, and worrying. She, guileless herself, had sympathized with him, never doubting that some truth existed in his words. Now she had seen the two together, had heard the abrupt manner of the son to the mother and the almost pleading gentleness of the mother to the son, and in a trice there had come a dual sense--attraction to the mother; repulsion from the son.

As she sat talking to her, looking out across the level, sun-scorched paddocks to the fringe of standing bush, with the purple loom of the distant ranges showing over the irregular tops of the gums as a bank of purplish cloud against the blue of the sky, and with the chromatic whistle of the magpies coming faint but clear through the still air--just a glimpse of the Australian scenery that grows so dear in its simplicity and colour--she was more and more attracted to the woman who had known so much of human suffering, and waited so long and so patiently in darkness which was more than solitude. The simple story of her life Ailleen told--saving any reference to the absent Tony--and the blind woman caught with swift sympathy at the fact that she was motherless, and might at any moment be fatherless also.

"And you have no relatives--no friends?" she asked gently.

"Oh, heaps of friends, but no relatives," the girl answered.

"And if--supposing you were left alone----"

"Well, I can work," Ailleen added, as the other paused.

"Ay, dearie; but you'd be lonely, and it's bad to be lonely when you're young."

"Then I'll come and take care of you," the girl answered, as she laughed lightly.

The woman turned her head quickly and held out her hand, as a smile, soft and gentle, rippled over her face, and almost overcame the fixed stare in the sightless eyes.

"You will, dearie? Ay, and you shall. Come to me, dearie, when you are alone. Make Barellan your home whenever you need one."

As she spoke d.i.c.kson and Nellie came round the corner of the verandah.

The s.h.i.+fty eyes of the one twinkled for a moment with a glee which was not beautiful to see; the dark eyes of the other glittered.

"She never said that to me," Nellie said under her breath. "You'll have to tell her--or I shall."

"She's only cranky," d.i.c.kson answered in the same tone. "She's dotty half her time and scotty the other."

CHAPTER VII.

THE EVOLUTION OF SLAUGHTER.

The Three-mile, where Slaughter lived--Cold-blood Slaughter, as they termed him, from his pessimistic, cynical manner of thought and speech--was an out-of-the-way spot even for the district of Birralong. A track, which was little more than what would result were a dray driven off the road at right angles, branched off the main road, and meandered for a couple of miles, always indistinct and never straight, until a small patch of cultivation, a few acres square, showed green and picturesque amid the prevailing sombre hues of the untamed bush. On the far side of it, as one approached from the direction of the main road, was a small hut, built of roughly split slabs of timber, and roofed with sheets of bark, standing in almost aggressive solitude away from the trees which, farther behind it, formed an unbroken background of subdued colour. There was a waterhole some thirty yards from the hut, and a fork-and-sapling fence cut it into two portions, one of which, the smaller, was included in the small paddock where Slaughter kept his horse, the only living creature besides himself which resided at the Three-mile.

Viewed from the point on the track where first it came into sight, there was a certain pictorial attractiveness about the place which roused curiosity and interest--the contrast of the green of the cultivation patch with the prevailing neutral greys and yellowy-browns of the gum-tree forest; the simple form of the hut standing distinct and clear against the darker line of shade caused by the solid growth of bush beyond; and the quiet and apparently peaceful solitude of the whole scene appealing to the imagination. Nearer inspection left the solitude untouched, but robbed the picture of all else. Once, tradition averred, a hardy, daring denizen of Birralong had ventured out to the Three-mile for a yarn and a smoke with Slaughter. It was in the days when he had lately taken up the land, and when the glamours of proprietors.h.i.+p should have been still thick upon him, and when the neighbourly act of a brother settler ought to have been greeted with a friendly warmth. But the adventurer rode back to Birralong distressed and distrait, refusing, or failing, to put into words for the benefit of others his experience at the lonely Three-mile. All that he could express was conveyed by the pursing up of his lips, the nodding of his head in the direction of Slaughter's residence, and the exclaiming, solemnly and sadly, "Him? A melancholy bandicoot ain't in it." That, and the influence of Slaughter's bearing and conversation, when he was in the towns.h.i.+p, had upon the community effectually prevented any one else making the attempt to penetrate into the solitude of the Three-mile; and Slaughter lived his own life, in his own way, and no one knew more of it than had been learned in the first year of his residence in the district.

He was a customer of Marmot's, and that gave him the right to sit and smoke and yarn on the verandah of the store when he was in the towns.h.i.+p.

He never pa.s.sed his tobacco round, and rarely took an active part in the yarning, save to put in a few curt, cutting sentences that at first roused a sense of anger in his hearers, till they fell back under the protection of the phrase that "it was only Cold-blood Slaughter," and ignored the words that grated. He ran a "tally" at the store for the few necessaries of his life, and every six months cleared it with money which came in a letter for him from a city in a southern colony. It was the one link which existed between Slaughter and the outside world, that half-yearly letter, and its contents the one unsolved riddle in the annals of Birralong. With the regularity of the date itself the letter appeared, bearing the Sydney postmark on the cover, and as regularly Slaughter allowed it to rest a few days at the store, as though he knew both the mental anxiety it caused the _habitues_ of the verandah as they tried to worry out some feasible explanation of its appearance, and the moral struggle its presence caused Marmot, who, as postmaster, felt bound by every tie of duty to hold it inviolate for the addressee, while, as the centre of Birralong gossip, he yearned to fathom the secret of its source, even at the cost of opening it. During all the years which had elapsed since Slaughter first came upon the scene the struggle had gone on, and still the mystery was unsolved and the riddle unread. Never had an occasion offered itself when anything could be learned from an outside source, and Slaughter himself was too cold and isolated an individual to be melted into confidence.

To those who gave any thought to the matter it was evident that, save for the unexpected appearance of outside information, the mystery of Slaughter's existence prior to his arrival at the Three-mile would remain unsolved, just as the chilling demeanour with which he surrounded himself would remain unpenetrated. But in Birralong, as in other parts of the world, it was the unexpected that happened.

The towns.h.i.+p one day was profoundly moved by the information, which pa.s.sed with the rapidity which is only possible for gossip in a small community, that the schoolmaster had been struck down and lay dying. No one was especially surprised at that, for every one knew that he was suffering from a lung complaint which had not yielded to the influence of the pure, dry air of the district, and so was bound to carry him off sooner or later; for, as a travelling medical man had once observed, the consumptive who did not get well in the eucalyptus-scented air of inland Australia deserved to die, if only for the perversity of refusing Nature's kindliest aid! A ruptured blood-vessel certainly a.s.sisted in the collapse of G.o.dson, but it was not even that which so astounded Birralong.

The sick man, knowing himself to be at death's door, had called for one thing, pleaded for one thing, prayed for one thing, and that the presence of Cold-blood Slaughter.

For some time the combined population of Birralong wondered, until, indeed, Ailleen rushed down from the cottage, where her father lay, to the roadway in front of the school, where the inhabitants of the towns.h.i.+p stood, and taunted them with being heartless cowards and listless fools to ignore the pleadings of a dying man.

"If you're not man enough to do what he asks," she said fiercely to Marmot, "you're postmaster, so do your duty and deliver that;" and she flung at the abashed storekeeper a letter addressed to Slaughter.

Without waiting for his answer, she swung round and ran back to the cottage, and the men of Birralong, looking sheepishly at one another, fidgeted uneasily as Marmot took up the letter.

A selector's boy, riding into sight at the moment, was hailed.

"Take that out to Cold-blood Slaughter at the Three-mile, and I'll give you a s.h.i.+lling when you come back," Marmot said; and the boy rode off.

Then they sat, wherever there was shade, and waited, uneasy lest the quick-tongued Ailleen should again swoop down upon them with anger which they knew was just, and yet unable to do otherwise than wait, if only to see whether Slaughter would come, and what he would do when he did come.

A cloud of dust rapidly advancing along the road was the first intimation of his approach, and as it came nearer they caught the sound of the galloping horse. He rode right up to the school-house gate and jumped out of the saddle. Marmot and his companions gathered round the gate as though to intercept him, till they saw his face. Then they fell back, and made way for him as he strode up the path towards the cottage, following him with their eyes, silent before the fascination of the terrible expression on his face. They were men whose minds worked slowly and in stolid grooves; men who pondered heavily over the prosaic occurrences which made up the monotonous routine of their lives; men who had no grasp of more subtle phenomena than those which formed the ordinary sequence of events in the restricted limits of their commonplace experiences. How, then, could they grasp in a moment, let alone comprehend, the sudden transformation of Slaughter from a soured and indifferent man to one of keen, quick, resolute character, whose tightly closed lips and lowering brow only emphasized the flash and glitter of his eyes?

They watched him as he pa.s.sed up the pathway, with a stride and a swing so different from his ordinary listless dawdle. They heard the sound of his heavy tread on the boards of the cottage verandah. Then there was a silence, and the heavy wits of each of the waiting men strove to grasp sufficient of the spectacle to put his thoughts into words and ask for his comrades' help to understand. But before that could be done Slaughter again appeared coming down the pathway. He walked towards them, the frown gone from his face, and his eyes wide open and staring.

A yard from them he stopped.

"He's dead," he exclaimed, in a hard, strained voice. "Dead--and I was too late."

The first words roused their interest, the last touched such sensibilities as they had. The figure of the man before them, strangely altered and moved, with the scornful bitterness they had learned to regard as his characteristic gone from his face, struck into their dull minds as something akin to a rebuke for their indifference to Ailleen's repeated requests for them to carry out a dying man's wish. The man was dead now, and Slaughter's words "too late" made them wince.

"It's a bad business," some one mumbled. "It's a bad business--for Yaller-head," he added, by way of diverting the suspicion of personal shortcomings.

"We'll see her through," Marmot said. "We'll----"

He stopped abruptly as he met Slaughter's glance; and the others looked from one to the other--from Marmot, disconcerted and uneasy, to Slaughter, whose face was set and hard in an expression that conveyed even to the men of Birralong the fact that they were in the presence of something which over-ruled them and subjugated them into a state of mental inferiority. The verbose Marmot, wordless; the listless Slaughter, dominant. It was a psychological crisis that humbled and abashed them.

They could only stand silent and expectant for the new development. The return of Slaughter to the cottage, this time with slow steps and bowed head, did not appeal to them as a development, and with that obtuse folly which is the birthright of the stolid, they straggled up the path after him. They were able to see into the room without going on to the verandah, and as each one glanced into it, he saw enough to rebuke him and make him turn back and walk sedately and quietly to the roadway.

When Slaughter reached the cottage the second time and looked into the room, Ailleen was on her knees crouched down beside the low bed on which lay the still form of her dead father. She held in both her hands one of his, and her head was resting on them, the wealth of golden hair, broken loose from its restraint, welling round and over them. Slaughter, as he came to the doorway, took the old felt hat from his head, and tried to walk on tip-toe lest his heavy boots should make too much noise.

With bowed head and averted glance he slowly walked from the door across the room, and round to the side of the bed where the girl was kneeling.

She, hearing his footsteps, looked up for a moment, and then hid her face again. But he did not notice it. He walked on, with his eyes cast down, till he was beside her, when he sank on to his knees also, and gently touched her arm with his hard, rough hand.