Chapter VII: Part 7

The old man drew a curious breath, and sat down on his chair; he opened the paper and read the paragraph. Then he read it again, and again, and again, until his eyes had carried the news to his brain twenty times at least.

'It was a fine thing to do,' he said at last.

'Yes,' said Hermie.

'No other Australian's been mentioned like that.'

'No,' said poor Hermie.

'It was a fine thing to do,' he repeated. He got little further than that all the time the girl stayed; even when Cameron came up, all a-quiver with deep sympathy, he still only said, 'It was a fine thing to do.' After an hour or so, he looked at them expectantly.

'I suppose you'll have to be getting back?' he said; and Cameron and Hermie rose at once.

He saw them down the steps, and even helped Hermie on her horse again. Cameron rode on.

'Good-bye, missie,' he said. Then he shot an almost aggressive look at her. 'You ought to be fine and set up that a fellow like that loved you.'

'I am,' said Hermie bravely. 'I shall be proud of it just as long as I live, Mr. Stevenson.'

He softened a little, then looked suddenly old and very tired.

'I want to be alone now,' he said. 'But I don't mind if you come up again to-morrow.'

With that he went back to the house, the paper still in his hand. But the next day, when she went, she found him pacing the place like a wounded tiger. The servants told her he had been very quiet all the morning and the previous evening, and had told them all several times about the fine thing his son had done. But Barnes had brought in the day's papers an hour ago, and he had been raging like this ever since. The girl found him with bloodshot eyes and clenched hands, walking the big verandahs.

'Go away!' he shouted when he saw her. She turned and went into the house at once, to wait the passing of the mood. She stood at the window of one of the handsome rooms, and looked with dreary eyes out to the twin hill that lay bathed in the clear sunshine half a mile away, and never knew how often Mortimer had sat at that same window, smoking his after-dinner pipe, and building his sunny cottage for her on the bright hill-top.

Presently the old man came in to her.

'Take the paper from me,' he said quaveringly, and held it out to her. 'If I read it any more, I'll lose me reason!'

The girl looked startled.

'I didn't know there was anything new to-day,' she said. 'Bart told me he had lost our paper on the way.' Her eyes, large with fear and grief, tore through the cables they had kept back from her at the selection.

'Private Stevenson,' said a paragraph, 'did not die instantaneously. He was shot through the jaw and through one lung, and dragged himself to a rock, leaving a long trail of blood behind. He must have lingered in frightful agony all night, for when his body was picked up by the ambulance, it was found that he had written the word "Cold" on the ground with his finger.'

'Dear God, how can they do this?' Mrs. Cameron had cried, when she saw the paragraph. 'Have they no sense of pity or decency, that they print these frightful details? This is more terrible a thousandfold for those who loved him than the plain news that he was dead.'

The poor little girl, who had gone up so resolved to be calm and brave, screamed out uncontrollably at the cruel news, then buried her head in her hands to keep the moans back.

The old man brought her a glass of water from the sideboard.

'Let's tear it up,' he said, and rent the horrid news in pieces. 'Let's only remember the boy did the right thing, and died like a man.'

He found himself comforting the girl who had come to comfort him. She found herself telling him with streaming eyes how she had loved his boy and thought of him, even though at the time he asked her she had said, 'No.'

'If only he could have known!' she sobbed. 'Perhaps, perhaps he was thinking of me part of that night when he--was cold.'

The next day there was another cable about the affair.

'The trooper who saved General Strong's life at Krug's Spruit was Private Mark Stevenson, of the Queensland Contingent, not Mortimer Stevenson of the New South Wales, as reported yesterday.'

Hermie tore along the road to Coolooli to rejoice with the old man, since before she had gone to grieve with him.

He was sitting on the verandah looking very shaken and bewildered, and reading the third cable as often as he had read the first.

'I--hardly understand,' he said feebly.

Hermie had seized his two hands, and was shaking them joyously.

'He is alive--alive!' she cried.

He looked at her piteously.

'Didn't he do that fine thing at all?' he said.

'No,' she cried. 'Some other man did it, thank God! He is alive, alive--Mortimer--he is not dead!

He drew his hands out of her eager ones a little pettishly.

'They should be more careful with these cables,' he said.

'Oh,' she cried happily, 'we will forgive them anything! He is alive--alive!'

'But he never did that fine thing,' he repeated sadly.

*CHAPTER XXII*

*Conclusion*

'Let one more attest
I have lived, seen God's hand through a lifetime, and
all was for best.'

Life, so long a hopeless tangle, smoothed itself out at last for the little family. Challis was well again, and had gone off to give a series of concerts in the respective capitals of each colony; gone off in high spirits, touched with sweet responsibility, inasmuch as she was the bread-winner for the family. Mr. Cameron went with her this time, and her mother stayed thankfully at home on the selection. And Australia, despite the fact that she neither recited 'The Absent-Minded Beggar,' nor yet had 'Sons of the Empire' in her _repertoire_, gave her so warm a welcome everywhere that in three months she was back again at The Rosery with a fresh thousand pounds put to her credit in the bank.

This pleasant sum was to pay passages across the sea for all the family.

For, warm-hearted as the big overgrown young island had proved, its eager, easily roused enthusiasm would soon be turned upon some other object, and there would be no permanent opening for the girl-musician. She must go to the little, pulsing, crowded island the other side of the world for that.

Mrs. Cameron had the plan of campaign all in readiness in her head. They were to find an ideal house in a pleasant countrified suburb just out of London, and Challis, accompanied by her father, was to fulfil her English engagements from there.

When she went abroad, they would all, when possible, go with her, and make headquarters in some inexpensive French or German village. The benefit of a varied life like this would be incalculable to the young ones, after the stagnant years at Wilgandra.

Bart was to go to an English public school the moment they touched land after the voyage. He had but three or four years left now in which to crowd all his school education, and he was eager to begin. In general education and the making of moral fibre, Wilgandra had done a better work than Eton or Rugby could ever hope to do.

'But I shall come back and be a squatter,' he always insisted. 'No other life for me.'

'If he sticks to that,' old Stevenson said to his father, 'send him back to me. I'll give him a start, and be thankful to do it. He's got the stuff in him to make the kind of man this country wants.'

Then he fell to chuckling over the memory of the calf that Bart had sold him, and so started the intimacy between them.

Hermie was to travel as much as possible, take lessons in various subjects from good masters, and go on with her general education under the able guidance of her mother. And there were picnics and dances and all manner of brightness for her in her mother's campaign, to counteract the grey monotony of her earlier girlhood.

And, when the war was over, one in khaki would step in and take the young life into his keeping, and make all the sunshine for it that a boundless love makes possible.

On his far battle-fields Mortimer knew now the little girl's heart was his own. His father had written to him one of his characteristic letters.

'I'm glad to hear, my boy, you're still alive, but it was a fine thing that other fellow Stevenson did for his general. I take pride that my name's the same. But perhaps you'll get a chance yet to do the same thing. I've been looking round, and I think the hill over the way will make the best place for your house, and I daresay two or three thousand a year would keep you going for a time, as she's not flighty and used to fine things, like Luke's wife. It's a pity she can't make soap and such things, but maybe she can learn; she may favour her mother, who seems a sensible body, more than that fool of a father of hers. I'll give the little baggage credit, at all events, for being fond of you. A nice job of it I had with her, when we thought it was you killed instead of that fine fellow Mark Stevenson. She was nearly crazy, because she said you'd never know how she loved you.'

So Mortimer fought the rest of his battles with a light heart, and many a night, when the veldt slumbered restlessly beneath its covering of white, harmless-looking tents, he lay happily awake, thinking of the green twin hill at home and the bright cottage that was going to crown it.

'But I shall insist that he travels about with you for a year or two before you settle down,' said the mother; 'it will do you both good. And he must bring you for a visit home to us at least every three years.'

The girl went on her way, shyly, sweetly, learning all she might to fit her for the high office of woman and wife.

Miss Browne?

At first Mrs. Cameron had almost obeyed the natural impulse to dismiss her kindly, give her a handsome present of money, and help her to find a comfortable situation. But the vision perpetually haunted her of the poor woman with a strand of dull hair blown loose, and her blouse and skirt not quite meeting, and her face moist with perspiration, toiling in one hot country town after another, getting sparks in her eyes, cooking other peoples' food, dragging fat babies out for a walk, battling helplessly with naughty small boys and girls, and distractedly saying to them, 'My love, my dear.'

This while she and her own family, their eyes turned eagerly to a glowing future, sailed thankfully away from all the misery and monotony of the past.

She could not do it. The woman seemed to stand right in their path, a moral responsibility for all their lives.

So while Mr. Cameron was away with Challis on the Australian tour, she filled in all her spare time undertaking a mission to Miss Browne. Her first battle was to make the woman respect herself, trust herself. She ordered some clothes for her, well-cut coats and skirts, warm-coloured home dresses with soft lace to hide the bony neck and wrists. She gave deep thought to a style of doing her hair, and having found it, kept her to it, insisting that she should give plenty of time to curling those helpless strands and brushing them and getting them into good condition. She encouraged her to form her own opinions on things, and teased her gently out of her little eccentricities of speech. She applied herself energetically to making her capable and efficient in the branches of housekeeping which all these years she had so hopelessly muddled. The mission was sheer hard, exhausting work--there were times when it seemed almost desperate; but women have battled far harder and with far less hope of success with the Island blacks or the far Chinese, and here was her work come to her hand.

'Why,' cried the changed woman, at the end of a day that had seen the accomplishment of a most respectable pie-crust, an almost invisible patch on a coat, and a hard piece of music mastered, 'I shall be able to ask for ten shillings a week, I am sure, when I go to the registry office again; I never used to get more than five or six until I came to Mr. Cameron, and I am sure I was not worth the ten he used to pay me then.'

'My dear,' said Mrs. Cameron, 'you have finished with registry offices. I want you to come to England with us, and help me with Floss and Roly.'

This decision she and her husband had only just arrived at; to leave her behind, even improved as she was, would mean she would soon sink back without stimulus into her dreary ways. So Challis gave yet one more concert in a country town, to pay for the extra passage money and frocks, and the future they left to look after itself. She had a relative or two in England who might give her a home; if not, well, unless life went very crookedly again, they would always keep a corner for her themselves wherever they lived.

But before they had been in London six months the pleased Fates relieved them of their anxiety.

Next door to them in the pleasant home they had made was a widower, just getting over--and without overmuch difficulty--the loss of a wife who had insisted upon managing his very soul as well as his house, and his two children and his very respectable cheque-book.

His small ones were running wild--he noted the contrast between them and Floss and Roly, whom Miss Browne seemed now to manage so admirably. The intimacy increased; the change from his past, overruled existence to the companionship of this gentle lady-help, who deferred humbly to his opinions, and asked his advice, and was curiously grateful for the smallest attention, was such a restful novelty to him that he offered her his hand and heart and lonely little children forthwith.

And now that Fortune, so long harsh and uncompromising, had taken to flinging gifts at the family with unstinted hand, it did not leave Cameron himself out of its scheme of sudden generosity.

The picture of the ship had found its way safely from under Miss Browne's bed at Wilgandra across the sea to the artist who painted in leafy Fontainebleau pictures the world was pleased to stand and look at long.

And the man's artist-soul rose in recognition of the passion and strength that had gone forth into the brush that had worked so feverishly in that far-away bush township.

An important Paris exhibition was just coming on. He rushed up to the city with the canvas, and his influence got it in at the right time, and saw it well hung. The second day the exhibition was opened it sold for two hundred guineas, and the path Cameron had ached to walk on all his life was at last open to his feet.

The day had not dropped her burdens from the backs of these people for ever; it had merely strengthened weak shoulders with soldierly discipline, and readjusted the weight.

Bright days, sad days, separations, meetings, temptations, love, death, all would come along, as they always have done, as they always will.

For this is Life we fare upon, and not just a little journey to ask smooth ground for all the way.

THE END.

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