In the Roaring Fifties Part 35

'How many of those blackguard rebels are you hiding in your tent, Mother Kyley?' said the sergeant.

'Is that you, Sergeant Wallis? Was there ever so attentive an admirer?

You'd follow me to the world's end for the love you have of me. I've a dozen rebels inside. Come and be introduced.'

A tall bearded digger with a loaf of bread under his arm had slouched from the business tent, and stood watching the scene with incurious eyes.

'Who the devil are you, and where did you spend last night, my man?' said the trooper.

'I'm a party by the name of Smith, Ephraim Smith--called Eph. I spent last night in my bunk, bein' too d.a.m.n drunk to join the boys down there, worse luck!'

'Your license, Mr. Ephraim Smith.'

The license was handed up, and found correct. 'You had too much discretion to burn your license with the rest of the seditious blackguards, at any rate, Mr. Smith.'

As it happens.'

'And your ruffianly husband, Mrs. Kyley?'

'I haven't such a thing about me; but if you mean Ben Kyley,' said Mary, 'come down in your private capacity, sergeant, and put the question to him in the same gentlemanly way. I'll hold your coat and see you get fair play, if I have to referee the argument myself.'

'Where is Kyley, you harridan?'

'He went out an hour ago to watch the murder and manslaughter going on down at Eureka, Sergeant Wallis, and if you miscall me again, you Vandemonian pig-stealer, I'll drag you from your horse and drown you in a tub of suds!'

Wallis struck his horse with his open hand, and rode away, followed by his men, laughing back at the seemingly furious Mrs. Kyley, whose a.s.sumed anger, however, suddenly gave place to a broad grin as they pa.s.sed from sight, and she winked a mischievous aside at the bearded digger.

'My oath, but that's a beautiful beard you have,' she said. 'I've a mind to see how it would suit me.'

'Get a doctor to Done as quickly as you can. There are several among the diggers who'll stand by you,' said Ryder, disregarding Mary's levity.

'You'll look after him? You can draw on me for money to any amount.'

'I'll look after the poor boy, and I won't draw on you for a sixpence.'

'He's with good friends, I know.'

'He is. There's a girl in there who would work the fingers off her two hands to serve him.'

'I will call again when I can, and as often as I can, but I'm in no little danger myself.

I understand. You were one of Lalor's men.' Ryder nodded. That idea would suit him very well.

Then, if it wasn't that I love the boy in there, I'd do it for your sake as a good man and true,' continued Mary.

Ryder gave a few directions as to the treatment of the patient and then turned and sauntered away, carrying the loaf under his arm. Mary reentered the tent, and found Aurora, very pale but apparently quite calm, busying herself about the patient. She had removed all the blood articles, and they lay in a heap on the floor. These Mrs. Kyley would have gathered up, but the girl interfered.

'No, no,' she said, 'leave it to me--leave it all to me! I must work--I must be busy! If I stopped now my heart would break. Look at him!'

'My G.o.d! it is very like death,' whispered Mrs. Kyley.

It was not easy to get a doctor in Ballarat that day. Ben was entrusted with the mission, and warned to proceed cautiously. He found the doctors in urgent demand. There were wounded men hidden away in many places, and the authorities had obtained a monopoly of the services of the practising physicians. At ten o'clock that night Ben led a young Scotchman named Clusky in triumph to the tent. Clusky had qualified but gold on the rushes had proved more attractive than the wearisome hunt for fees in a Scottish villages and on Ballarat Dr. Clusky was a working miner.

'He's the third to-day,' Clusky said to Mary, 'and the worst--by far the worst. No fool did that, though,' he continued, referring to the bandaging of the shoulder, as he rapidly removed the linen. 'The damage is not so very great here, after all,' he said a moment later; 'but there's no blood to spare left in his veins, poor devil!'

The doctor refused to interfere with Ryder's st.i.tching in the scalp wound, and gave a long prescription and much advice, and Jim was left to the tender mercies of Aurora, Mary, and Ben. Ryder called every night for a week, and then, having received a favourable verdict from the doctor, disappeared, his disappearance being satisfactorily accounted for by the earnest inquiries of a police officer who called upon Ben a few days later. Meantime, Harry Peetree, who had remained in Ballarat to try and discover the whereabouts of Jim and Mike, hunted the Kyleys out, and learned the truth. He left a message for Jim, and then followed his father and brother, who had made for Simpson's Ranges again immediately after their escape from the stockade. But ere this, and long before Jim Done was again conscious of the world about him, poor Mike Burton had been buried with the rest of the slain insurgents in a common grave.

Fever supervened on Jim Done's injuries, and December pa.s.sed as he lay helpless in Mary Kyley's tent, babbling of Chisley, of life on the Francis Cadman, and of Diamond Gully and b.o.o.byalla. The injury to his head proved the most serious wound, and there were moments when despair filled the heart of Aurora; but she nursed him with a devotion that overlooked nothing, and Mrs. Kyley, and Ben, and the business were all sacrificed to the patient's needs. Mrs. Kyley and Ben made the sacrifice gladly, the former because of the big soft heart she hid under her formidable bulk, and Ben because gall and wormwood were sweet compared with the bitterness he felt in being one of the many whose neglect had contributed to the sacrifice of the rebels in the stockade. Business was practically suspended in the shanty while Done lay in the adjoining tent, only peaceful drinkers being permitted to refresh themselves with Mary's wonderful rum. Mrs. Ben, too, was indefatigable in her care of the wounded man; but Aurora was jealous of her labour of love, and Mary was sometimes compelled to force her to take rest, and to go out in the open air and make some effort to drive the pallor from her cheeks.

Aurora's beauty was entirely the beauty of perfect health and fine vitality; under the influence of her long labours and the wearing anxiety she endured her good looks faded. She was apparently years older than she had seemed a month before.

'Your prettiness is all dying out of you, dear,' said Mary; 'you must rest yourself, you must go into the air and let the roses freshen again, or the boy won't look at you when he wakes.'

''Twill all come back fast enough when he is well,' Aurora would answer; and it was into her pale face that Jim gazed with a long look of childlike gravity when he opened his eyes to consciousness. She detected the light of reason in his gaze, and her fingers clasped his hand. From her face his eyes went slowly round the apartment, lingering with an intent look on familiar objects, and then they went to the roof, and for fully twenty minutes he watched the glowing patch where a sunbeam struck the canvas cover, and there was in his face something of the wonder of a creature born into a new world. Aurora was very grave: she did not smile, her heart felt no elation--it was numb and old. Jim had a perplexing sensation of feathery lightness; he felt like a frail snowflake in an unsubstantial world. The bed under him was a bed of gossamer, if not wholly visionary. He might fall through at any moment, and if he did he might go on falling endlessly, a pinch of down in a bottomless abyss. He tried to close his fingers on Aurora's strong hand. He knew she was there, and she was real, substantial, although something of the wanness of this mysterious world was about her.

'Joy,' he whispered. She bent her head to him. 'Where--what--' He relapsed with a sigh. After all, it did not matter.

'You have been very ill, Jimmy,' she said.

His eyes moved to her face again, and he tried to nod, but found that that was too much trouble too. It was too much trouble to pretend to understand even. Aurora would hold him and prevent his floating out into the fantastical, fairy atmosphere. It seemed right and natural that she should be there. He had quite expected it. But had he? The train of thought was too laborious: he abandoned it. Joy gave him something to drink. She poured it into his mouth, and it ran down his throat. It was good, wonderfully good--nectar, surely. Had he been told it was water he would have resented the lie with as much energy as he was capable of putting into any thought, and that was just the thin, silken line, next to none at all. As a matter of fact, Joy had given him nothing but water.

It seemed to add to his weight, to give some little quality of substance to his being. He thought he might thank her with a pressure of his fingers presently, but the necessary power did not come, and he drifted into sleep.

XX

THE Christmas of 1854 was the gayest ever known at b.o.o.byalla; never had Mrs. Donald Macdougal been so prodigal, never had such lavish hospitality been dispensed under Macdougal's roof-tree, and the squatter wore a dour and anxious look as he saw the liquor flowing, and heard the music, and the laughter, and the clatter of dishes, and found himself in collision with his wife's guests in all the pa.s.sages and windings of his large, wandering homestead. Macdougal, who, in addition to his sobriquet of Monkey Mack, was known as Old Dint-the-Tin by the sundowners, shearers, and miscellaneous swagmen to whom he sold pints of flour out of a pannikin dinted in to shorten the measure, was not miserly in his dealings with his wife and his children. He was reputed to be mean enough to steal the b.u.t.tons off a shepherd's s.h.i.+rt for his own use, and yet permitted his wife to indulge in all the extravagances of purple and fine linen, and paid, if not cheerfully--for it was not in his nature to be cheerful over anything--at least without open complaint, for social indulgences that ate up a large part of the results of his miraculous economies in station management, and a sedulous penuriousness in everything beyond his wife, his children, and his few favourite horses.

But on this occasion Mrs. Macdougal had outdone herself, and had exceeded all her previous efforts to s.h.i.+ne as a generous hostess. Her aim had been to make b.o.o.byalla the centre of attraction for thirty miles round throughout the merry Yuletide, and for nearly two weeks Donald had gone about with an air of lively trepidation, due to an idea that he was being brought precipitately to ruin by all this wasteful and ridiculous excess.

When Mrs. Macdougal's guests came upon her lord and master laboriously casting up sums with a stab of carpenter's pencil on bits of waste-paper, or smooth chips, or even on the walls, they understood perfectly that he was satisfying himself, with accurate calculations, that the shameful increase in the household expenses their presence entailed had not dragged him over the jealously guarded margin between income and expenditure.

Mrs. Macdougal's guests did not mind Macdougal in the least, however; the eccentricities of Old Dint-the-Tin were well known to the neighbouring squatters, and from their point of view, as visitors at b.o.o.byalla on pleasure bent, he did not count. They b.u.mped against him in the dark pa.s.sages of his absurdly disjointed house, and found him on occasions in the drawing-room and the dining-room, but nothing was done or left undone out of consideration for his feelings. If they were content to talk about sheep and cattle, he would converse with them, and he was even capable of enthusiasm on the subject of horses, but evidently had no interests apart from these matters. n.o.body outside the family circle had known him to address more than half a dozen words to his wife at one time, and his average remark contained one monosyllable. He behaved a good deal like a stranger towards his own children. Occasionally he went so far as to place a hand on a curly head, with an uncouth show of interest, or to say a few words of kindness; but it was done diffidently, and a close observer might have detected in the man a sensitive shrinking from the idea of bringing his misshapen figure and weird ugliness into contrast with the peculiar beauty of the youngsters. The only human creature about b.o.o.byalla in whose company he seemed to be quite at home was Yarra, the half-caste aboriginal boy, scandalously reputed in the neighbourhood--not without excellent reason, it must be admitted--to be his own son.

We have seen Donald Macdougal, J.P., as he appeared in Melbourne, but that was on one of the few very special occasions when he condescended to 'dress up.' At home on b.o.o.byalla his usual attire comprised a heavy pair of water-tights, old trousers, much the worse for wear more senses than one, hanging in great folds, a dark gray jumper tucked into the trousers, and a battered felt hat, pulled, after long service, into the shape of a limp cone. The only concession to 'company manners' Mack would make was in drawing on a despised black coat over his collarless jumper.

In addition to the peculiarities already mentioned, Donald Macdougal had an extraordinary trick of chewing his tongue, and a most disconcerting habit of allowing his trousers to drift down, wrinkle after wrinkle, till chance strangers fell into an agony of apprehension, and then suddenly recovering them with a with a convulsion of his body that was entirely instinctive.

And yet n.o.body with a pinch of brains ever made the mistake of supposing Donald Macdougal to be a fool. Old Dint-the-Tin was a wealthy man, and had made his fortune out of the land by exercising a shrewdness that was the envy of half the squatters in the colony, and had no apparent desire in life but to go on increasing that fortune in the same way, although there were some who credited him with a great if secret satisfaction in seeing his wife outdo the wives of his neighbours in the social graces, a satisfaction superior to the gratification he derived from adding to his great acc.u.mulation in the Bank of New South Wales.

Mrs. Macdougal spent a merry Christmas, if not a New Year. She was extremely fond of company, particularly the company of young people, and that amiable trait was indulged to the utmost. She had drawn her guests from far and wide, and the most superior people amongst the 'squatocracy'

had not hesitated to accept her invitations, although there were a few who in her absence occasionally referred to her as the cow-girl, to show they had no intention of forgetting the fact that she was once dairymaid to Mrs. Martin Cargill at Longabeena. But society at this stage could not very well afford to be punctilious in the matter of parentage and pedigree, and Mrs. Mack derived no little satisfaction from the mystery surrounding her birth. Her father had carried her to Longabeena, a child just able to toddle; he described himself as a widower, and asked for work, and it was given him, but a week later he disappeared, leaving little Marcia, and the Cargills never heard of him again.

This Mrs. Macdougal found ever so much nicer than having prosaic parents who could be produced at any moment; it left a wide field for the imagination, and Marcia was free to think herself a misplaced princess, or, at the very least, the daughter of a distressed earl. Naturally, being a sentimental soul, she provided herself with a sufficiently romantic history up to the moment of the disappearance of her nondescript papa; and if she could not substantiate it, there was much satisfaction in knowing that no body could disprove it. That she had been christened with an aristocratic and poetical name like Marcia she held to be convincing testimony of her inherent gentility.

Not a little of the extra merriment of Mrs. Macdougal's Christmas and the happiness of her New Year was due to the fortunate circ.u.mstance that she had a lion to present to her guests in the person of the Honourable Walter Ryder. It was Marcia herself who insisted upon giving Mr. Walter Ryder the t.i.tle of quality; he merely implied that at the most he was a man of good family, eccentric enough to prefer the rough-and-ready Australian life to the methodical weariness of the social order 'at home'; and when his hostess laughingly insisted on not being deceived by his plebeian pretensions, he gallantly submitted.

'Give me what t.i.tle you please, Mrs. Macdougal,' he said; 'you are my queen.'

Mr. Ryder had done Macdougal of b.o.o.byalla a great service in rescuing him and his sovereigns from the revolver and the predatory fingers of Dan Coleman and one of his gang, and was always welcome to b.o.o.byalla. To be sure, Macdougal was not to be expected to know how much Coleman had been paid for providing Walter Ryder with this opportunity of ingratiating himself with a prominent squatter, the proprietor of a large sheep-run.

The Honourable Walter arrived at the station a week before Christmas, riding a fine gray horse, and carrying with him the paraphernalia of a gentleman. His clothing was cut in the latest possible London style, and he was splendidly equipped. He lamented the one thing Australia could not produce, a satisfactory valet.

'My profound objection to democracy as a principle arises from the fact that the levelling process destroys our perfect valets,' he told Mrs.

Macdougal.