He sat down again, with his back to the tree, looking at the sharp stars, and the fume of stars, and the great black gulfs between the stars. His hand and arm were aching and paining a great deal. But he watched the gulfs between the stars.
"I suppose my Lord meant me to be like this," he said. "Think if I had to be tied up and a gentleman, like that Blessington. Or a lawyer like Old George. Or a politician dropping his aitches, like that Mr. Watson. Or empty and important like that A.D.C. Or anything that's successful and goes to church and sings hymns and has supper after church on the best linen table cloth! What Lord is it that likes these people? What God can it be that likes success and Sunday dinners? Oh God! It must be a big, fat, rusty sort of God.
"My God is dark and you can't see him. You can't even see his eyes, they are so dark. But he sits and bides his time and smiles, in the spaces between the stars. And he doesn't know himself what he thinks. But there's deep, powerful feelings inside him, and he's only waiting his time to upset this pigsty full of white fat pigs. I like my Lord. I like his dark face, that I can't see, and his dark eyes, that are so dark you can't see them, and his dark hair that is blacker than the night on his forehead, and the dark feelings he has, which nobody will ever be able to explain. I like my Lord, my own Lord, who is not Lord of pigs."
He slept fitfully, feverishly, with dreams, and rose at daylight to drink water, and dip his head in water. His horse came, he tended it and with great difficulty got the saddle on. Then he left it standing, and when he came again, it wasn't where he had left it.
He called, and it whinnied, so he went into the scrub for it. But it wasn't where the sound of whinnying came from. He went a few more steps forward, and called. The scrub wasn't so very thick either, yet you couldn't see that horse. He was sure it was only a couple of yards away. So he went forward, coaxing, calling. But nothing . . . Queer!
He looked round. The track wasn't there. The well wasn't there. Only the silent, vindictive, scattered bush.
He couldn't be lost. That was impossible. The homestead wasn't more than twenty miles away—and the settlement.
Yet, as he tramped on, through the brown, heath-like undergrowth, past the ghost-like trunks of the scattered gum-trees, over the fallen, burnt-out trunks of charred trees, past the bushes of young gum-trees, he gradually realised he was lost. And yet it was impossible. He would come upon a cabin, or pick up the track of a woodcutter, or a 'roo hunter. He was so near to everywhere.
There is something mysterious about the Australian bush. It is so absolutely still. And yet, in the near distance, it seems alive. It seems alive, and as if it hovered round you to maze you and circumvent you. There is a strange feeling, as if invisible, hostile things were hovering round you and heading you off.
Jack stood still and coo-eed! long and loud. He fancied he heard an answer, and he hurried forward. He felt light-headed. He wished he had eaten something. He remembered he had no water. And he was walking very fast, the sweat pouring down him. Silly this. He made himself go slower. Then he stood still and looked around. Then he coo-eed! again, and was afraid of the Tinging sound of his own cry.
The changeless bush, with scattered, slender tree-trunks everywhere. You could see between them into the distance, to more open bush: a few brown rocks: two great dead trees as white as bone: burnt trees with their core charred out: and living trees hanging their motionless clusters of brown, dagger-like leaves. And the permanent soft blue of the sky overhead.
Nothing was hidden. It was all open and fair. And yet it was haunted with a malevolent mystery. You felt yourself so small, so tiny, so absolutely insignificant, in the still, eternal glade. And this again is the malevolence of the bush, that it reduces you to your own absolute insignificance, go where you will.
Jack collected his wits and began to make a plan.
"First look at the sky, and get your bearing." Then he would go somewhere straight west from the Reds. The sun had been in his eyes as he rode last evening.
Or had he better go east, and get back? There were scores of empty miles, uninhabited, west. It was settled, he would go east. Perhaps someone would find his horse, and come to look for him.
He walked with the sun straight bang in his eyes. It was very hot, and he was tired. He was thirsty, his arm hurt and throbbed. Why did he imagine he was hungry? He was only thirsty. And so hot! He took off his coat and threw it away. After a while his waistcoat followed. He felt a little lighter. But he was an intolerable burden to himself.
He sat down under a bush and went fast asleep. How long he slept he did not know. But he woke with a jerk, to find himself lying on the ground in his shirt and trousers, the sun still hot in the heavens, and the mysterious bush all around. The sun had come round and was burning his legs. What was the matter? Fear, that was the first thing. The great, resounding fear. Then, a second, he was terribly thirsty. For a third, his arm was aching horribly. He took off his shirt and made a sling of it, to carry his arm in.
For a fourth thing, he realised he had killed Easu, and something was gnawing at his soul.
He heard himself sob, and this surprised him very much. It even brought him to his senses.
"Well!" he thought. "I have killed Easu." It seemed years and years ago. "And the bush has got me, Australia has got me, and now it will take my life from me. Now I am going to die. Well, then, so be it. I will go out and haunt the bush, like all the other lost dead. I shall wander in the bush throughout eternity, with my bloody hand. Well, then, so be it. I shall be a lord of death hovering in the bush, and let the people who come beware."
But suddenly he started to his feet in terror and horror. The face of death had really got him this time. It was as if a second wakening had come upon him, and his life, which had been sinking, suddenly flared up in a frenzy of struggle and fear. He coo-eeed! again and again, and once more plunged forward in mad pursuit of an echo.
He might certainly run into a 'roo hunter's camp, any minute. The place was alive with them, great big boomers! Their silly faces! Their silly complacency, almost asking to be shot. There were a lot of wallabies out here too. You might make a fortune hunting skins.
Christ! how one could want water.
But no matter. On and on! His soul dropped to its own sullen level. If he was to die, die he would. But he would hold out through it all.
On and on in a persistent dogged stupor. Why give in?
Then suddenly he dropped on a log, in weariness. Suddenly he had thought of Monica. Why had she betrayed him? Why had they all betrayed him, betrayed him and the thing he wanted from life. He leaned his head down on his arms and wept hoarsely and dryly, and went silent again even as he sat, realising the futility of weeping. His heart, the heart he wept from, went utterly dark. He had no more heart of torn sympathy. That was gone. Only a black, deep male volition. And this was all there was left of him. He would carry the same in to death. Young or old, death sooner or later, he would carry just this one thing into the further darkness, his deep, black, undying male volition.
He must have slept. He was in great misery, his mouth like an open sepulchre, his consciousness dull. He was hardly aware that it was late afternoon, hot and motionless. The outside things were all so far away. And the blackness of death and misery was thick, but transparent, over his eyes.
He went on, still obstinately insisting that ahead there was something, perhaps even water, though hope was dead in him. It was not hope, it was heavy volition that insisted on water.
The sling dragged on his neck, he threw it away, and walked with his hand against his breast. And his braces dragged on him. He didn't want any burden at all, none at all. He stopped, took off his braces and threw them away, then his sweat-soaked undervest. He didn't want these things. He didn't want them. He walked on a bit.
He hesitated, then came for a moment to his senses. He was going to throw away his trousers too. But it came to him: "Don't be a fool, and throw away your clothes, man. You know men do it who are lost in the bush, and then they are found naked, dead."
He looked vaguely round for the vest and braces he had just thrown away. But it was half an hour since he had flung them down. His consciousness tricked him, obliterating the interval. He could not believe his eye. They had ghostlily disappeared.
So he rolled his trousers on his naked hips, and pressed his hurt hand on his naked breast, and set off again in a sort of fear. His hat had gone long ago. And all the time he had this strange desire to throw all his clothes away, even his boots, and be absolutely naked, as when he was born. And all the time something obstinate in him combated the desire. He wanted to throw everything away, and go absolutely naked over the border. And at the same time, something in him deeper than himself obstinately withstood the desire. He wanted to go over the border. And something deeper even than his consciousness, refused.
So he went on, scarcely conscious at all. He himself was in the middle of a vacuum, and pressing round were visions and agonies. The vacuum was perhaps the greatest agony, like a death-tension. But the other agonies were pressing on its border: his dry, cardboard mouth, his aching body. And the visions pressed on the border too. A great lake of ghostly white water, such as lies in the valleys where the dead are. But he walked to it, and it wasn't there. The moon was shining whitely.
And on the edge of the aching void of him, a wheel was spinning in his brain like a prayer-wheel.
"Petition me no petitions, Sir, to-day;
Let other hours be set apart for business.
Today it is our pleasure to be drunk
And this our queen . . ."
Water! Water! Water! Was water only a visionary thing of memory, something only achingly, wearyingly, thought and thought and thought, and never substantiated?
"A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave . . ."
The wheel of words went round, the wheel of his brain, on the edge of the vacuum. What did that mean? What was a Briton?
"A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave."
he words went round and round and were absolutely meaningless to him.
And then out of the dark another wheel was pressing and turning.
"How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land."
Away on the hard dark periphery of his consciousness, the wheel of these words was turning and grinding.
His mind was turning helplessly, but his feet walked on. He realised in a weird, mournful way that he was shut groping in a dark unfathomable cave, and that the walls of the cave were his own aching body. And he was going on and on in the cave, looking for the fountain, the water. But his body was the aching, ghastly, jutting walls of the cave. And it made this weary grind of words on the outside. And he had need to struggle on and on.
In little flickers he tried to associate his dark cave-consciousness with his grinding body. Was it night, was it day?
But before he had decided that it was night, the two things had gone apart again, and he was groping and listening to the grind.
"But hushed be every thought that springs
From out the bitterness of things.
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things
Falling from us, vanishing."
He was so weary of the outward grind of words. He was stumbling as he walked. And waiting for the walls of the cave to crash in and bury him altogether. And the spring of water did not exist.
"Blank misgivings of a creator moving about in a world not realised."
This phrase almost united his two consciousnesses. He was going to crash into this creator who moved about unrealised. Other people had gone, and other things. Monica, Easu, Tom, Mary, Mother, Father, Lennie. They were all like papery, fallen leaves blowing about outside in some street. Inside here there were no people at all, none at all. Only the Creator moving around unrealised. His Lord.
He stumbled and fell, and in the white flash of falling knew he hurt himself again, and that he was falling forever.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FIND
I
The subconscious self woke first, roaring in distant wave-beats, unintelligible, unmeaning, persistent, and growing in volume. It had something to do with birth. And not having died. "I have not let my soul run like water out of my mouth."
And as the roaring and beating of the waves increased in volume, tiny little words emerged like flying-fish out of the black ocean of consciousness. "Ye must be born again," in little silvery, twinkling spurts like flying-fish which twinkle silver and spark into the utterly dark sea again. They were gone and forgotten before they were realised. They had merged deep in the sea again. And the roar of dark consciousness was the roar of death. The kingdom of death. And the lords of death.
"Ye must be born again." But the twinkling words had disappeared into the lordly powerful darkness of death. And the baptism is the blackness of death between the eyes, that never lifts, forever, neither in life nor death. You may be born again. But when you emerge, this time you emerge with the darkness of death between your eyes, as a lord of death.
The waves of dark consciousness surged in a huge billow, and broke. The boy's eyes were wide open, and his voice was saying:
"Is that you, Tom!"
The sound of his voice paperily rustling these words was so surprising to him that he instantly went dark again. He heard no answer.
But those surging dark waves pressed him again and again, and again his eyes were open. They recognised nothing. Something was being done to him on the outside of him. His own throat was moving. And life started again with a sharp pain.
"What was it?"
The question sparked suddenly out of him. Someone was putting a metal rim to his lips, there was liquid in his mouth. He put it out. He didn't want to come back. His soul sank again like a dark stone.
And at the very bottom it took a command from the Lord of Death, and rose slowly again.
Someone was tilting his head, and pouring a little water again. He swallowed with a crackling noise and a crackling pain. One had to come back. He recognised the command from his own Lord. His Lord was the Lord of Death. And he, Jack, was dark-anointed and sent back. Returned with the dark unction between his brows. So be it.
He saw green leaves hanging from a blue sky. It was still far off. And the dark was still better. But the dark green leaves were also like a triumphal banner. He tries to smile, but his face is stiff. The faintest irony of a smile sets in its stiffness. He is forced to swallow again, and know the pain and tearing. Ah! He suddenly realised the water was good. He had not realised it the other times. He gulped suddenly, everything forgotten. And his mind gave a sudden lurch towards consciousness.
"Is that you, Tom?"
"Yes. Feel better?"
He saw the red mistiness of Tom's face near. Tom was faithful. And this time his soul swayed, as if it too had drunk of the water of faithfulness.
He drank the water from the metal cup, because he knew it came from Tom's faithfulness.
Gradually Jack revived. But his burning bloodshot eyes were dilated with fever, and he could not keep hold of his consciousness. He realised that Tom was there, and Mary, and somebody he didn't for a long time recognise as Lennie; and that there was a fire, and a smell of meat, and night was again falling. Yes, he was sure night was falling. Or was it his own consciousness going dark? He didn't know. Perhaps it was the everlasting dark.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Sundown," said Tom. "Why?"
But he was gone again. It was no good trying to keep a hold on one's consciousness. The ache, the nausea, the throbbing pain, the swollen mouth, the strange feeling of cracks in his flesh, made him let go.
Tom was there and Mary. He would leave himself to Tom's faithfulness and Mary's tenderness, and Lennie's watchful intuition. The mystery of death was in that bit of deathless faithfulness which was in Tom. And Mary's tenderness, and Lennie's intuitive care, both had a touch of the mystery and stillness of the death that surrounds us darkly all the time.
II
They got Jack home, but he was very ill. His life would seem to come back. Then it would sink away again like a stone, and they would think he was going. The strange oscillation. Several times, Mary watched him almost die. Then from the very brink of death, he would come back again, with a strange, haunted look in his blood-shot eyes.
"What is it, Jack?" she would ask him. But the eyes only looked at her.
And Lennie, standing there silently watching, said:
"He's had about enough of life, that's what it is."
Mary, blanched with fear, went to find Tom.
"Tom," she said, "he's sinking again. Lennie says it's because he doesn't want to live."
Tom silently threw down his tool, and walked with her into the house. It was obvious he was sinking again.
"Jack!" said Tom in a queer voice, bending over him. "Mate! Mate!" He seemed to be calling him into camp.
Jack's expressionless, fever-dilated, blood-shot eyes opened again. The whites were almost scarlet.
"Y' aren't desertin' us, are y'?" said Tom, in a gloomy, reproachful tone. "Are y' desertin' us, mate?"
It was the Australian, lost but unbroken on the edge of the wilderness, looking with grim mouth into the void, and calling to his mate not to leave him. Man for man, they were up against the great dilemma of white men, on the edge of the white man's world, looking into the vaster, alien world of the undawned era, and unable to enter, unable to leave their own.
Jack looked at Tom and smiled faintly. In some subtle way, both men knew the mysterious responsibilities of living. Tom was almost fatalistic-reckless. Yet it was a recklessness which knew that the only thing to do was to go ahead, meet death that way. He could see nothing but meeting death ahead. But since he was a man, he would go ahead to meet it, he would not sit and wait.
Jack smiled faintly, and the courage came back to him. He began to rally.
The next morning, he turned to Mary and said:
"I still want Monica."
Mary dropped her head and did not answer. She recognised it as one of the signs that he was going to live. And she recognised the unbending obstinacy in his voice.
"I shall come for you too in time," he said to her, looking at her with his terrible scarlet eyes.
She did not answer, but her hand trembled as she went for his medicine. There was something prophetic and terrible in his sallow face and burning, blood-shot eyes.
"Be still," she murmured to him. "Only be still."
"I shan't ever really drop you," he said to her. "But I want Monica first. That's my way."
He seemed curiously victorious, making these assertions.
CHAPTER XXIII
GOLD
I
The boy Jack never rose from that fever. It was a man who got up again. A man with all the boyishness cut away from him, all the childishness gone, and a certain unbending recklessness in its place.
He was thin, and pale, and the cherubic look had left his face forever. His cheeks were longer, leaner, and when he got back his brown-faced strength again, he was handsome. But it was not the handsomeness, any more, that would make women like Aunt Matilda exclaim involuntarily: "Dear boy!" They would look at him twice, but with misgiving, and a slight recoil.
It was his eyes that had changed most. From being the warm, emotional dark-blue eyes of a boy, they had become impenetrable, and had a certain fixity. There was a touch of death in them, a little of the fixity and changelessness of death. And with this, a peculiar power. As if he had lost his softness in the otherworld of death, and brought back instead some of the relentless power that belongs there. And the inevitable touch of mockery.
As soon as he began to walk about, he was aware of the change. He walked differently, he put his feet down differently, he carried himself differently. The old drifting, diffident, careless bearing had left him. He felt his uprightness hard, bony. Sometimes he was aware of the skeleton of himself. He was a hard skeleton, built upon the solid bony column of the back-bone, and pitched for balance on the great bones of the hips. But the plumb-weight was in the cage of his chest. A skeleton!
But not the dead skeleton. The living bone, the living man of bone, unyielding and imperishable. The bone of his forehead like iron against the world, and the blade of his breast like an iron wedge held forward. He was thin, and built of bone.
And inside this living, rigid man of bone, the dark heart heavy with its wisdom and passions and emotions and its correspondences. It was living, softly and intensely living. But heavy and dark, plumb to the earth's center.
During his convalescence, he got used to this man of bone which he had become, and accepted his own inevitable. His bones, his skeleton was isolatedly itself. It had no contact. Except that it was forged in the kingdom of death, to be durable and effectual. Some strange Lord had forged his bones in the dark smithy where the dead and the unborn came and went.
And this was his only permanent contact: the contact with the Lord who had forged his bones, and put a dark heart in the midst.
But the other contacts, they ware alive and quivering in his flesh. His passive but enduring affection for Tom and Lennie, and the strange quiescent hold he held over Mary. Beyond these, the determined molten stirring of his desire for Monica.
And the other desires. The desire in his heart for masterhood. Not mastery. He didn't want to master anything. But to be the dark lord of his own folk: that was a desire in his heart. And the concurrent knowledge that, to achieve this, he must be master too of gold. Not gold for the having's sake. Not for the spending's sake. Nor for the sake of the power to hire services, which is the power of money. But the mastery of gold, so that gold should no longer be like a yellow star to which men hitched the wagon of their destinies. To be Master of Gold, in the name of the dark Lord who had forged his bones neither of gold nor silver nor iron, but of the white glisten of knife. Masterhood, as a man forged by the Lord of Hosts, in the innermost fires of life and death. Because, just as a red fire burning on the hearth is a fusion of death into what was once live leaves, so the creation of man in the dark is a fusion of life into death, with the life dominant.
The two are never separate, life and death. And in the vast dark kingdom of afterwards, the Lord of Death is Lord of Life, and the God of life and creation is Lord of Death.
But Jack knew his Lord as the Lord of Death. The rich, dark mystery of death, which lies ahead, and the dark sumptuousness of the halls of death. Unless Life moves on to the beauty of the darkness of death, there is no life, there is only automatism. Unless we see the dark splendour of death ahead, and travel to be lords of darkness at last, peers in the realms of death, our life is nothing but a petulant, pitiful backing, like a frightened horse, back, back to the stable, the manger, the cradle. But onward ahead is the great porch of the entry into death, with its columns of bone-ivory. And beyond the porch is the heart of darkness, where the lords of death arrive home out of the vulgarity of life, into their own dark and silent domains, lordly, ruling the incipience of life.
II
At the trial Jack said, in absolute truth, he shot Easu in self-defence. He had not the faintest thought of shooting him when he rode up to the paddock: nor of shooting anybody. He had called in passing, just to say good-day. And then he had fired at Easu because he knew the axe would come down in his skull if he didn't.
Herbert gave the same deposition. The shot was entirely in self-defence.
So Jack was free again. There had been no further mention of Monica, after Jack had said he was riding south to see her, because he had always cared for her. No one hinted that Easu was the father of her child, though Mrs. Ellis knew and Old George knew.
Afterwards Jack wondered why he had called at the Reds' place that morning. Why had he taken the trail past where he and Easu had fought? He had intended to see Easu, that was why. But for what unconscious purpose, who shall say? The death was laid at the door of the old feud between Jack and Red. Only Old George knew the whole, and he, subtle and unafraid, pushed justice as it should go, according to his own sense of justice, like a real Australian.
Meanwhile he had been corresponding with Monica and Percy. They were in Albany, and on the point of sailing to Melbourne, where Percy would enter some business or other, and the two would live as man and wife. Monica was expecting another child. At this news, Mr. George wanted to let them go, and be damned to them. But he talked to Mary, and Mary said Jack would want Monica, no matter what happened.
"When he wants a thing really, he can't change," said Mary gloomily. "He is like that."
"An obstinate young fool that's never had enough lickings," said Old George. "Devil's blood of his mother's devil of an obstinate father. But very well then, let him have her, with a couple of babies for a dowry. Make himself the laughing stock of the colony."
So he wrote to Monica: "If you care about seeing Jack Grant again, you'd better stop in this colony. He sticks to it he wants to see you, being more of a fool than a knave, unlike many people in Western Australia."
She being obstinate like the rest, stayed on in Albany, though Percy, angry and upset, sailed on to Melbourne. He said she could join him if she liked. He stayed till her baby was born, then went because he didn't want to face Jack.
Jack arrived by sea. He was still not strong enough to travel by land. He got a vessel going to Adelaide, that touched at Albany.
Monica, thinner than ever, with a little baby in her arms, and her flower-face like a chilled flower, was on the dock to meet him. He saw her at once, and his heart gave a queer lurch.
As he came forward to meet her, their eyes met. Her yellow eyes looked straight into his, with the same queer, panther-like scrutiny, and the eternal question. She was a question, and she had got to be answered. It made her fearless, almost shameless, whatever she did.
But with Percy, the fear had nipped her, the fear that she should go forever unanswered, as if life had rejected her.
This nipped look and her strange yellow flare of question as she peered at him under her brows, like a panther, made Jack's cheeks slowly darken, and the life-blood flow into him stronger, heavier. He knew his passion for her was the same. Thank God he met her at last.
"You're awfully thin," she said.
"So are you," he answered.
And she laughed her quick, queer, breathless little laugh, showing her pointed teeth. She had seen the death-look in his eyes and it was her answer, a bitter answer enough. She stopped to put straight the tiny bonnet over her little baby's face, with a delicate, remote movement. He watched her in silence.
"Where do you want to go?" she asked him, without looking at him.
"With you," he said.
Then she looked at him again, with the dry-eyed question. But she saw the unapproachable death-look there in his eyes, at the back of their dark-blue, dilated emotion and passion. And her heart gave up. She looked down the pier, as if to walk away. He carried his own bag. They set off side by side.
She lived in a tiny slab cottage in a side lane. But she called first at a neighbour's house, for her other child. It was a tiny, toddling thing with a defiant stare in its pale-blue eyes. Monica held her baby on one arm, and led this tottering child by the other. Jack walked at her side in silence.
The cottage had just two rooms, poorly furnished. But it was clean, and had bright cotton curtains and a sofa-bed, and a pale-blue convolvulus vine mingling with a passion vine over the window.
She laid the baby down in its cradle, and began to take off the bonnet of the little girl. She had called it Jane.
Jack watched the little Jane as if fascinated. The infant had curly reddish hair, of a lovely fine texture and a beautiful tint, something like raw silk with threads of red. Her eyes were round and bright blue, and rather defiant, and she had the delicate complexion of her kind. She fingered her mother's brooch, like a little monkey touching a bit of glittering gold, as Monica stooped to her.
"Daddy gone!" she said in her chirping, bird-like, quite emotionless tone.
"Yes, Daddy gone!" replied Monica, as emotionlessly.
The child then glanced with unmoved curiosity at Jack. She kept on looking and looking at him, sideways. And he watched her just as sharply, her sharp, pale-blue eyes.
"Him more Daddy?" she asked.
"I don't know," replied Monica, who was suckling her baby.
"Yes," said Jack in a rather hard tone, smiling with a touch of mockery. "I'm your new father."
The child smiled back at him a faint, mocking little grin, and put her finger in her mouth.
The day passed slowly in the strange place, Monica busy all the time with the children and the house. Poor Monica, she was already a drudge. She was still careless and hasty in her methods, but clean, and uncomplaining. She kept herself to herself, and did what she had to do. And Jack watched, mostly silent.
At last the lamp was lighted, the children were both in bed. Monica cooked a little supper over the fire.
Before he came to the fable, Jack asked:
"Is Jane Easu's child?"
"I thought you knew," she said.
"No one has told me. Is she?"
Monica turned and faced him, with the yellow flare in her eyes, as she looked into his eyes, challenging.
"Yes," she said.
But his eyes did not change. The remoteness at the back of them did not come any nearer.
"Shall you hate her?" she asked, rather breathlessly.
"I don't know," he said slowly.
"Don't!" she pleaded, in the same breathlessness. "Because I rather hate her."
"She's too little to hate," said Jack.
"I know," said Monica rather doubtfully.
She put the food on the table. But she herself ate nothing.
"Aren't you well? You don't eat," he asked.
"I can't eat just now," she said.
"If you have a child to suckle, you should," he replied.
But she only became more silent, and her hands hung dead in her lap. Then the baby began to cry, a thin, poor, frail noise, and she went to soothe it.
When she came back, Jack had left the table and was sitting in Percy's wooden arm-chair.
"Percy's child doesn't seem to have much life in it," he said.
"Not very much," she replied. And her hands trembled as she cleared away the dishes.
When she had finished, she moved about, afraid to sit down. He called her to him.
"Monica!" he said with a little jerk of his head, meaning she should come to him.
She came rather slowly, her queer, pure-seeming face looking like a hurt. She stood with her thin hands hanging in front of her apron.
"Monica!" he said, rising and taking her hands. "I should still want you if you had a hundred children. So we won't say any more about that. And you won't oppose me when there's anything I want to do, will you?"
She shook her head.
"No, I won't oppose you," she said, in a dead little voice.
"Let me come to you, then," he said. "I should have to come to you if you went to Melbourne or all round the world.' And I should be glad to come," he added whimsically, with the warmth of his old smile coming into his eyes. "I suppose I should be glad to come, if it was in hell."
"But it isn't hell, is it?" she asked, wistfully and a little defiantly.
"Not a bit," he said. "You've got too much pluck in you to spoil. You're as good to me as you were the first time I knew you. Only Easu might have spoiled you."
"And you killed him," she said quickly, half in reproach.
"Would you rather he'd killed me?" he asked.
She looked a long time into his eyes, with that watchful, searching look that used to hurt him. Now it hurt him no more.
She shook her head, saying:
"I'm glad you killed him. I couldn't bear to think of him living on, and sneering—sneering!—I was always in love with you, really."
"Ah, Monica!" he exclaimed softly, teasingly, with a little smile. And she flushed, and flashed with anger.
"If you never knew, it was your own fault!" she jerked out.
"Really," he said, quoting and echoing the word as she had said it, and smiling with a touch of raillery at her, before he added:
"You always loved me really, but you loved the others as well, unreally."
"Yes," she said, baffled, defiant.
"All right, that day is over. You've had your unreal loves. Now come and have your real one."
In the next room Easu's child was sleeping in its odd little way, a sleep that was neither innocent nor not innocent, queer and naively "knowing," even in its sleep. Jack watched it as he took off his things: this little inheritance he had from Easu. An odd little thing. With an odd, loveless little spirit of its own, cut off and not daunted. He wouldn't love it, because it wasn't lovable. But its odd little dauntlessness and defiance amused him, he would see it had fair play.
And he took Monica in his arms, glad to get into grips with his own fate again. And it was good. It was better, perhaps, than his passionate desirings of earlier days had imagined. Because he didn't lose and scatter himself. He gathered, like a reaper at harvest gathering.
And Monica, who woke for her baby, looked at him as he slept soundly and she sat in bed suckling her child. She saw in him the eternal stranger. There he was, the eternal stranger, lying in her bed sleeping at her side. She rocked her baby slightly as she sat up in the night, still rocking in the last throes of rebellion. The eternal stranger, whom she feared, because she could never finally possess him, and never finally know him! He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel so terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against, but could no longer withstand. Because the emptiness of the other men, Easu, Percy, all the men she knew, was worse than the doom of this man who would never give her his ultimate intimacy, but who would be able to hold her till the end of time. There was something enduring and changeless in him. But she would never hold him entirely. Never! She would have to resign herself to this.
Well, so be it. At least it relieved her of the burden of responsibility for life. It took away from her, her own strange and fascinating female power, which she couldn't bear to part with. But at the same time she felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her. After all, this man was magical.
She put her child in its cradle, and returning waked the man. He put out his hand quickly for her, as if she were a new, blind discovery. She quivered and thrilled, and left it to him. It was his mystery, since he would have it so.
III
They were married in Albany, and stayed there another month waiting for a ship. Then they sailed away, all the family, away to the North-West. They did not go to Perth: they did not go to Wandoo. Only Jack saw Mr. George in Fremantle, and waved to him Good-bye as the ship proceeded North.
Then came two months of wandering, a pretty business with a baby and a toddling infant. The second month, Percy's baby suddenly died in the heat, and Monica hardly mourned for it. As Jack looked at its pinched little dead face, he said: You are better dead. And that was true.
The little Jane, however, showed no signs of dying. The knocking about seemed to suit her. Monica remained very thin. It was a sort of hell-life to her, this struggling from place to place in the heat and dust, no water to wash in, sleeping anywhere like a lost dog, eating the food that came. Because she loved to be clean and good-looking and in graceful surroundings. What fiend of hell had ordained that she must be a sort of tramp-woman in the back of beyond?
She did not know, so it was no good asking. Jack seemed to know what he wanted. And she was his woman, fated to him. There was no more to it. Through the purgatory of discomfort she had to go. And he was good to her, thoughtful for her, in material things. But at the centre of his soul he was not thoughtful for her. He just possessed her, mysteriously owned her, and went ahead with his own obsessions.
Sometimes she tried to rebel. Sometimes she wanted to refuse to go any further, to refuse to be a party to his will. But then he suddenly looked so angry, and so remote, looked at her with such far-off, cold, haughty eyes, that she was frightened. She was afraid he would abandon her, or ship her back to Perth, and put her out of his life forever.
Above all things, she didn't want to be shipped back to Perth. Here in the wild she could have taken up with another man. She knew that. But she knew that if she did, Jack would just put her out of his life altogether. There would be no return. His passion for her would just take the form of excluding her forever from his being. Because passion can so reverse itself, and from being a great desire that draws the beloved towards itself, it can become an eternal revulsion, excluding the once-beloved forever from any contact at all.
Monica knew this. And whenever she tried to oppose him, and the deathly anger rose in him, she was pierced with a fear so acute she had to hold on to some support, to prevent herself sinking to the ground. It was a strange fear, as if she were going to be cast out of the land of the living, among the unliving that slink like pariahs outside.
Afterwards she was puzzled. Why had he got this power over her? Why couldn't she be a free woman, to go where she chose, and be a complete thing in herself?
She caught at the idea. But it was no good. When he went away prospecting for a week or more at a time, she would struggle to regain her woman's freedom. And it would seem to her as if she had got it: she was free of him again. She was a free being, by herself.
But then, when he came back, tired, sunburnt, ragged, and still unsuccessful: and when he looked at her with desire in his eyes, the living desire for her; she was so glad, suddenly, as if she had forgotten, or as if she had never known what his desire of her meant to her. She was so glad, she was weak with gladness instead of fear. And if, in perverseness, she still tried to oppose him, in the light of her supposedly regained freedom; and she saw the strange glow of desire for her go out of his eyes, and the strange loveliness, to her, of his wanting to have her near, in the room, giving him his meal or sitting near him outside in the shade of the evening; then, when his face changed, and took on the curious look of aloofness, as if he glistened with anger looking down on her from a long way off; then she felt all her own world turn to smoke, and her own will mysteriously evaporated, leaving her only wanting to be wanted again, back in his world. Her freedom was worth less than nothing.
Still often, when he was gone, leaving her alone in the little cabin, she was glad. She was free to spread her own woman's aura round her, she was free to delight in her own woman's idleness and whimsicality, free to amuse herself half teasing, half loving that little odd female of a Jane. And sometimes she would go to the cabins of other women, and gossip. And sometimes she would flirt with a young miner or prospector who seemed handsome. And she would get back her young, gay liveliness and freedom.
But when the man she flirted with wanted to kiss her, or put his arm round her waist, she found it made her go cold and savagely hostile. It was not as in the old days, when it gave her a thrill to be seized and kissed, whether by Easu, by Percy or Jack, or whatever man it was she was flirting with. Then, there had been a spark between her and many a man. But now, alas, the spark wouldn't fly. The man might be ever so good-looking and likeable, yet when he touched her, instead of the spark flying from her to him, immediately all the spark went dead in her. And this left her so angry, she could kill herself, or so wretched, she couldn't even cry.
That little goggle-eyed imp of a Jane, in spite of her one solitary year of age, seemed somehow to divine what was happening inside her mother's breast, and she seemed to chuckle wickedly. Monica always felt that the brat knew, and that she took Jack's side.
Jane always wanted Jack to come back. When he was away, she would toddle about on her own little affairs, curiously complacent and impervious to outer influences. But if she heard a horse coming up to the hut, she was at the door in a flash. And Monica saw with a pang, how steadily intent the brat was on the man's return. Somehow, from Jane, Monica knew that Jack would go with other women. Because of the spark that flashed to him from that brat of a baby of Easu's.
And at evening, Jane hated going to bed if Jack hadn't come home. She would be a real little hell-monkey. It was as if she felt the house wasn't safe, wasn't real, till he had come in.
Which annoyed Monica exceedingly. Why wasn't the mother enough for the child?
But she wasn't. And when Jane was in bed, Monica would take up the uneasiness of the manless house. She would sit like a cat shut up in a strange room, unable to settle, unable really to rest, and hating the night for having come and surprised her in her empty loneliness. Her loneliness might be really enjoyable during the day. But after nightfall it was empty, sterile, a mere oppression to her. She wished he would come home, if only so that she could hate him.
And she felt a flash of joy when she heard his footstep on the stones outside, even if the flash served only to kindle a great resentment against him. And he would come in, with his burnt, half-seeing face, unsuccessful, worn, silent, yet not uncheerful. And he spoke his few rather low words, from his chest, asking her something. And she knew he had come back to her. But where from, and what from, she would never know entirely.
She had always known where Percy had been, and what he had been doing. She felt she would always have known, with Easu. But with Jack she never knew. And sometimes this infuriated her. But it was no good. He would tell her anything she asked. And then she felt there was something she couldn't ask about.
The months went by. He staked his claim, and worked like a navvy. He was a navvy, nothing but a navvy. And she was a navvy's wife, in a hut of one room, in a desert of heat and sand and grey-coloured bush, sleeping on a piece of canvas stretched on a low trestle, eating on a tin plate, eating sand by the mouthful when the wind blew. Percy's baby was dead and buried in the sand: another sop to the avid country. And she herself was with child again, and thin as a rat. But it was his child this time, so she had a certain savage satisfaction in it.
He went on working at his claim. It was now more than a year he had spent at this game of looking for gold, and he had hardly found a cent's worth. They were very poor, in debt to the keeper of the store. But everybody had a queer respect for Jack. They dared not be very familiar with him, but they didn't resent him. He had a good aura. The other men might jeer sometimes at his frank but unapproachable aloofness, his subtle delicacy, and his simple sort of pride. Yet when he was spoken to, his answer was so much in the spirit of the question, so frank, that you couldn't resent him. In ordinary things he was gay and completely one of themselves. The self that was beyond them he never let intrude. Hence their curious respect for him.
Because there was something unordinary in him. The biggest part of himself he kept entirely to himself, and a curious sombre steadfastness inside him made shifty men uneasy with him. He could never completely mix in, in the vulgar way, with men. He would take a drink with the rest, and laugh and talk half an hour away. Even get a bit tipsy and talk rather brilliantly. But always, always at the back of his eyes was this sombre aloofness, that could never come forward and meet and mingle, but held back, apart, waiting.
They called him, after his father, the General. But never was a General with so small an army at his command. He was playing a lone hand. The mate he was working with suddenly chucked up the job, and travelled away, and the General went on alone. He moved about the camp at his ease. When he sat in the bar drinking his beer with the other men, he was really alone, and they knew it. But he had a good aura, so they felt a certain real respect for his loneliness. And when he was there, they talked and behaved as if in the aura of a certain blood-purity, although he was in rags, for Monica hated sewing and couldn't bear, simply couldn't bear, to mend his old shirts and trousers. And there was no money to buy new.
He held on. He did not get depressed or melancholy. When he got absolutely stumped, he went away and did hired work for a spell. Then he came back to the goldfield. He was now nothing but a miner. The miner's instinct had developed in him. He had to wait for his instinct to perfect itself. He knew that. He knew he was not a man to be favoured by blind luck. Whatever he won, he must win by mystic conquest.
If he wanted gold he must master it in the veins of the earth. He knew this. And for this reason he gave way neither to melancholy nor to impatience. "If I can't win," he said to himself, "it's because I'm not master of the thing I'm up against."
"If I can't win, I'll die fighting," he said to himself. "But in the end I will win."
There was nothing to do but to fight, and fight on. This was his creed. And a fighter has no use for melancholy and impatience.
He saw the fight his boyhood had been, against his Aunts, and school and college. He didn't want to be made quite tame, and they had wanted to tame him, like all the rest. His father was a good man and a good soldier: but a tame one. He himself was not a soldier, nor even a good man. But also he was not tame. Not a tame dog, like all the rest.
For this reason he had come to Australia, away from the welter of vicious tameness. For tame dogs are far more vicious than wild ones. Only they can be brought to heel.
In Australia, a new sort of fight. A fight with tame dogs that were playing wild. Easu was a tame dog, playing the wolf in a mongrel, back-biting way. Tame dogs escaped and became licentious. That was Australia. He knew that.
But they were not all quite tame. Tom, the safe Tom, had salt of wild savour still in his blood. And Lennie had his wild streak. So had Monica. So, somewhere had the à terre Mary. Some odd freakish wildness of the splendid, powerful, wild old English blood.
Jack had escaped the tamers: they couldn't touch him now. He had escaped the insidious tameness, the slight degeneracy, of Wandoo. He had learned the tricks of the escaped tame dogs who played at licentiousness. And he had mastered Monica, who had wanted to be a domestic bitch playing wild. He had captured her wildness, to mate his own wildness.
It was no good playing wild. If he had any real wildness in him, it was dark, and wary, and collected, self-responsible, and of unbreakable steadfastness: like the wildness of a wolf or a fox, that knows it will die if it is caught.
If you had a tang of the old wildness in you, you ran with the most intense wariness, knowing that the good tame dogs are really turning into licentious, vicious tame dogs. The vicious tame dogs, pretending to be wild, hate the real clean wildness of an unbroken thing much more than do the respectable tame people.
No, if you refuse to be tamed, you have to be most wary, most subtle, on your guard all the time. You can't afford to be licentious. If you are, you will die in the trap. For the world is a great trap set wide for the unwary.
Jack had learned all these things. He refused to be tamed. He knew that the dark kingdom of death ahead had no room for tame dogs. They merely were put into the earth as carrion. Only the wild, untamed souls walked on after death over the border into the porch of death, to be lords of death and masters of the next living. This he knew. The tame dogs were put into the earth as carrion, like Easu and Percy's poor little baby, and Jacob Ellis. He often wondered if that courageous old witch-cat of a Gran had slipped into the halls of death, to be one of the ladies of the dark. The lords of death, and the ladies of the dark! He would take his own Monica over the border when she died. She would sit unbroken, a quiet, fearless bride in the dark chambers of the dead, the dead who order the goings of the next living.
That was the goal of the afterwards, that he had at the back of his eyes. But meanwhile here on earth he had to win. He had to make room again on earth for those who are not unbroken, those who are not tamed to carrion. Some place for those who know the dark mystery of being royal in death (so that they can enact the shadow of their own royalty on earth). Some place for the souls that are in themselves dark and have some of the sumptuousness of proud death, no matter what their fathers were. Jack's father was tame, as kings and dukes to-day are almost mongrelly tame. But Jack was not tame. And Easu's weird baby was not tame. She had some of the eternal fearlessness of the aristocrat whose bones are pure. But a weird sort of aristocrat.
Jack wanted to make a place on earth for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone. He wanted to conquer the world.
And first he must conquer gold. As things are, only the tame go out and conquer gold, and make a lucrative tameness. The untamed forfeit their gold.
"I must conquer gold!" said Jack to himself. "I must open the veins of the earth and bleed the power of gold into my own veins, for the fulfilling of the aristocrats-of-the-bone. I must bring the great stream of gold flowing in another direction, away from the veins of the tame ones, into the veins of the lords of death. I must start the river of the wealth of the world rolling in a new course, down the sombre, quiet, proud valleys of the lords of death and the ladies of the dark, the aristocrats of the afterwards."
So he talked to himself, as he wandered alone in his search, or sat on the bench with a pot of beer, or stepped into Monica's hot little hut. And when he failed he knew it was because he had not fought intensely enough, and subtly enough.
The bad food, the climate, the hard life gave him a sort of fever and an eczema. But it was no matter. That was only the pulp of him paying the penalty. The powerful skeleton he was, was powerful as ever. The pulp of him, his belly, his heart, his muscle seemed not to be able to affect his strength, or at least his power, for more than a short time. Sometimes he broke down. Then he would think what he could do with himself, do for himself, for his flesh and blood. And what he could do, he would do. And when he could do no more, he would go and lie down in the mine, or hide in some shade, lying on the earth, alone, away from anything human. Till the earth itself gave him back his power. Till the powerful living skeleton of him resumed its sway and serenity and fierce power.
He knew he was winning, winning slowly, even in his fight with the earth, his fight for gold. It was on the cards he might die before his victory. Then it would be death, he would have to accept it. He would have to go into death, and leave Monica and Jane and the coming baby to fate.
Meanwhile he would fight, and fight on. The baby was near, there was no money. He had to stay and watch Monica. She, poor thing, went to bed with twins, two boys. There was nothing hardly left of her. He had to give up everything, even his thoughts, and bend his whole life to her, to help her through, and save her and the two quite healthy baby boys. For a month he was doctor and nurse and housewife and husband, and he gave himself absolutely to the work, without a moment's failing. Poor Monica, when she couldn't bear herself, he held her hips together with his arm, and she clung to his neck for life.
This time he almost gave up. He almost decided to go and hire himself out to steady work, to keep her and the babies in peace and safety. To be a hired workman for the rest of his days.
And as he sat with his eyes dark and unchanging, ready to accept this fate, since this his fate must be, came a letter from Mr. George with an enclosure from England, and a cheque for fifty pounds, a legacy from one of the Aunts, who had so benevolently died at the right moment. He decided his dark Lord did not intend him to go and hire himself out for life, as a hired labourer. He decided Monica and the babies did not want the peace and safety of a hired labourer's cottage. Perhaps better die and be buried in the sand, and leave their skeletons like white messengers in the ground of this Australia.
So he went back to his working. And three days later struck gold, so that there was gold on his pick-point. He was alone, and he refused at first to get excited. But his trained instinct knew that it was a rich lode. He worked along the van, and felt the rich weight of the yellow-streaked stuff he fetched out. The light-coloured softish stuff. He sat looking at it in his hand, and the glint of it in the dark earth-rock of the mine, in the light of the lamp. And his bowels leaped in him, knowing that the white gods of tameness would wilt and perish as the pale gold flowed out of their veins.
There would be a place on earth for the lords of death. His own Lord had at last spoken.
Jack sent quickly for Lennie to come and work with him. For Lennie, with a wife and a child, was struggling vary hard.
Lea and Tom both came. Jack had not expected Tom. But Tom lifted his brown eyes to Jack and said:
"I sortta felt I couldn't stand even Len being mates with you, an' me not there. I was your first mate. Jack. I've never been myself since I parted with you."
"All right," laughed Jack. "You're my first mate."
"That's what I am. General," said Tom.
Jack had showed Monica some of the ore, and told her the mine seemed to be turning out fairly. She was getting back her own strength, that those two monstrous young twins had almost robbed from her entirely. Jack was very careful of her. He wanted above all things that she should become really strong again.
And she, with her rare vitality, soon began to bloom once more. And as her strength came back she was very much taken up with her babies. These were the first she had enjoyed. The other two she had never really enjoyed. But with these she was as fussy as a young cat with her kittens. She almost forgot Jack entirely. Left him to be busy with Tom and Lennie and his mine. Even the gold failed to excite her.
And she had rather a triumph. She was able to be queenly again with Tom and Lennie. As a girl, she had always been a bit queenly with the rest of them at Wandoo. And she couldn't bear to be humiliated in their eyes.
Now she needn't. She had the General for her husband, she had his twins. And he had gold in his mine. Hadn't she a perfect right to be queenly with Tom and Lennie? She even got into the habit, right at the beginning, of speaking of Jack as "the General" to them.
"Where's the General? Didn't he come down with you?" she would snap at them, in her old sparky fashion.
"He's reviewing his troops," Lennie sarcastically answered.
Whereupon Jack appeared in the door, still in rags. And it was Lennie who mended his shirt for him, when it was torn on the shoulder and showed the smooth man underneath. Monica still couldn't bring herself to these fiddling bothering jobs.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE OFFER TO MARY
I
They worked for months at the mine, and still it turned out richly. Though they kept as quiet as possible, the fame spread. They had a bonanza. They were all three going to be rich, and Jack was going to be very rich. In the light of his luck, he was "the General" to everybody.
And in the midst of this flow of fortune, came another, rather comical windfall. Again the news was forwarded by Mr. George, along with a word of congratulation from that gentleman. The forwarded letter read:
"Dear Sir,
This come hopping to find you well as it leaves me at prisent thanks be to almity God. You dear uncle Passed Away peaceful on Satterday nite And though it be not my place to tell you of it I am Grateful to have the oppertunity to offer my umble Respecs before the lord and Perlice I take up my pen with pleashr to inform you that He passed without Pain and even Drafts as he aloud the umberrela to be put down and the Book read.
The 24 salm and I kep the ink and paper by to rite of his sudden dismiss but he lingered long years after the bote wint so was onable to Inform you before he desist the doctor rote a butiful certicket of death saying he did of sensible decay but I don no how he brote himself to rite it as the pore master was wite as driven snow and no blemish. And being his most umble and Dutiful servants we could not ave brout ourself to hever ave rote as he was sensible Pecos god knows the pore sole was not. Be that as it may we burned him proud under the prisent arrangements of town councel the clerk who was prisent xpects the docters will he mad up the nite you was hear in the cimetary and pending your Return Holds It In Bond as Being rite for us we are Yor Respectable servants to Oblige Hand Commend.
Emma and Amos Lewis."
Jack and Tom roared with laughter over this epistle, that brought back so vividly the famous trip up North.
"Gloryanna, General, you've got your property at Coney Hatch all right," said Tom.
There was a letter from Mr. George saying that the defunct John Grant was the son of Jack's mother's eldest sister, that he had been liable all his life to bouts of temporary insanity, but that in a period of sanity he had signed the will drawn up by Doctor Rackett, when the two boys called at the place several years before, and that the will had been approved. So that Jack, as legal heir and nearest male relative, could now come down and take possession of the farm.
"I don't want that dismal place," said Jack. "Let it go to the Crown. I've no need of it now."
"Don't be a silly cuckoo!" said Tom. "You saw it of a wet night with Ally Sloper in bed under a green cart umbrella. Go an' look at it of a fine day. An' then if you don't want it, sell it or lease it, but don't let the Crown rake it in."
So in about a fortnight's time Jack rather reluctantly left the mine, with its growing heaps of refuse, and departed from the mining settlement which had become a sort of voluntary prison for him, and went west to Perth. He was already a rich man and notorious in the colony. He rode with two pistols in his belt, and that unchanging aloof look on his face. But he carried himself with pride, rode a good horse, wore well-made riding breeches and a fine bandanna handkerchief loose round his neck, and looked, with a silver studded band round his broad felt hat, a mixture of gold miner, a gentleman settler, and a bandit chief. Perhaps he felt a mixture of them all.
Mr. George received him with a great welcome. And Jack was pleased to see the old man. But he refused absolutely to go to the club or to the Government House, or to meet any of the responsible people of the town.
"I don't want to see them, Mr. George. I don't want to see them."
And poor Old George, his nose a bit out of joint, had to submit to leaving Jack alone.
Jack had his old room in Mr. George's house. The Good Plain Cook was still going. And Aunt Matilda, rather older, stouter, with more lines in her face, came to tea with Mary and Miss Blessington. Mary had not married Mr. Blessington. But she had remained friends with the odd daughter, who was now a self-contained young woman, shy, thin, well-bred, and delicate. Mr. Blessington had not married again. In Aunt Matilda's opinion, he was still waiting for Mary. And Mary had refused Tom's rather doubtful offer. Tom was still nervous about Honeysuckle. So there they all were.
When Jack shook hands with Mary, he had a slight shock. He had forgotten her. She had gone out of his consciousness. But when she looked up at him with her dark, clear, waiting eyes, as if she had been watching and waiting for him afar off, his heart gave a queer dizzy lurch. He had forgotten her. They say the heart has a short memory. But now, as a dark hotness gathered in his heart, he realised that his blood had not forgotten her. He had only forgotten her with his head. His blood, with its strange submissiveness and its strange unawareness of time, had kept her just the same.
The blood has an eternal memory. It neither forgets nor moves on ahead. But it is quiescent and submits to the mind's oversway.
He had a certain blood-connection with Mary. He had utterly forgotten it, in the stress and rage of other things. And now, the moment she lifted her eyes to him, and he saw her dusky, quiet, heavy permanent face, the dull heat started in his breast again, and he remembered how he had told her he would come for her again.
Since his twins were born and he had been so busy with the mine, and he had Monica, he had not given any thought to women. But the moment he saw Mary and met her eyes, the dark thought struck home in him again: I want Mary for my other woman. He didn't want to displace Monica. Monica was Monica. But he wanted this other woman too.
Aunt Matilda dear-boyed him more than ever. But now he was not a dear boy, he didn't feel a dear boy, and she was put out.
"Dear boy! and how does Monica stand that drying climate?"
"She is quite well again, Marm."
"Poor child! Poor child! I hope you will bring her into a suitable home here in Perth, and have the children suitably brought up. It is so fortunate for you your mine is so successful. Now you can build a home here by the river, among us all, and be charming company for us, like your dear father."
Mary was watching him with black eyes, and Miss Blessington with her wide, quick, round, dark-grey eyes. There was a frail beauty about that odd young woman; frail, highly-bred, sensitive, with an uncanny intelligence.
"No, Marm," said Jack cheerfully. "I shall not come and live in Perth."
"Dear boy, of course you will! You won't forsake us and take your money and your family and your attractive self far away to England? No, don't do that. It is just what your dear father did. Robbed us of one of our sweetest girls, and never came back."
"No, I shan't go to England either," smiled Jack.
"Then what will you do?"
"Stay at the mine for the time being."
"Oh, but the mine won't last forever. And dear boy, don't waste your talents and your charm mining, when it is no longer necessary! Oh, do come down to Perth, and bring your family. Mary is pining to see your twins: and dear Monica. Of course we all are."
Jack smiled to himself. He would no longer give in a hair's breadth to any of these dreary world-people.
"À la bonne heure!" he said, using one of his mother's well-worn tags. But then his mother could rattle bad colloquial French, and he couldn't.
Mary asked him many questions about the mine and Monica, and Hilda Blessington listened with lowered head, only occasionally fixing him with queer searching eyes, like some odd creature not quite human. Jack was something of a hero. And he was pleased. He wanted to be a hero.
But he was no hero any more for Aunt Matilda. Now that the cherub look had gone forever, and the shy, blushing, blurting boy had turned into a hard-boned, healthy young man, with a half haughty aloofness and a little reckless smile that made you feel uncomfortable, she was driven to venting some venom on him.
"That is the worst of the colonies," she said from her bluish powdered face. "Our most charming, cultured young men go out to the back of beyond, and they come home quite—quite—"
"Quite what, Marm?"
"Why I was going to say uncouth, but that's perhaps a little strong."
"I should say not at all," he answered. He disliked the old lady, and enjoyed baiting her. Great stout old hen, she had played cock-o'-the-walk long enough.
"How many children have you got out there?" she suddenly asked, rudely.
"We have only the twins of my own," he answered. "But of course there is Jane."
"Jane! Jane! Which is Jane?"
"Jane is Easu's child. Monica's first."
Everybody started. It was as if a bomb had been dropped in the room. Miss Blessington coloured to the roots of her fleecy brown hair. Mary studied her fingers, and Aunt Matilda sat in a Queen Victoria statue pose, outraged.
"What is she like?" asked Mary softly, looking up.
"Who, Jane? She's a funny little urchin. I'm fond of her. I believe she'd always stand by me."
Mary looked at him. It was a curious thing to say.
"Is that how you think of people—whether they would always stand by you or not?" she asked softly.
"I suppose it is," he laughed. "Courage is the first quality in life, don't you think? And fidelity the next."
"Fidelity?" asked Mary.
"Oh, I don't mean automatic fidelity. I mean faithful to the living spark," he replied a little hastily.
"Don't you try to be too much of a spark, young man," snapped Aunt Matilda, arousing from her statuesque offence in order to let nothing pass by her.
"I promise you I won't try," he laughed.
Mary glanced at him quickly—then down at her fingers.
"I think fidelity is a great problem," she said softly.
"Pray, why?" bounced Aunt Matilda. "You give your word, and you stick to it."
"Oh, it's not just simple word-faithfulness, Mrs. Watson," said Jack. He had Mary in mind.
"Well, I suppose I have still to live and learn," said Aunt Matilda.
"What's that you have still to live and learn, Matilda?" said Mr. George, coming in again with papers.
"This young man is teaching me lessons about life. Courage is the first quality in life, if you please."
"Well, why not?" said Old George amiably. "I like spunk myself."
"Courage to do the right thing!" said Aunt Matilda.
"And who's going to decide which is the right thing?" asked the old man, teasing her.
"There's no question of it," said Aunt Matilda.
"Well," said the old lawyer, rubbing his head, "there often is, my dear woman, a very big question!"
"And fidelity is the second virtue," said Mary, looking up at him with trustful eyes, enquiringly.