Ultima Thule (11 page)

On the way home Mahony overtook his children and the governess, returning from their morning walk. The twins' short fag legs were weary. Entrusting his bag to Cuffy, who forthwith became "the doctor," bowing graciously to imaginary patients, and only waggling the bag just the least little bit to hear the things inside it rattle, their father took his little girls by the hand. Poor mites! They were losing their roses already. Somehow or other he must make it possible to send them away when the real hot weather came. This was no place for children in summer; he heard it on every side. And his, reared to sea-breezes, would find it doubly hard to acclimatise themselves. Stung by these reflections he unthinkingly quickened his pace, and strode ahead, a gaunt figure, dragging a small child at a trot on either hand. Miss Prestwick gave up the chase.

Dinner over, out he had to turn again. Back to the main street and the hotel, where a buggy should have been in waiting. It was not. He had to stand about in the sun while the vehicle was dragged out, the horse fetched, harnessed, and backed between the shafts. A strap broke in the buckling; the ostler, whistling between his teeth, leisurely repaired the damage with a bit of string.

Stiffly Mahony jerked himself up into the high vehicle and took the reins. He had a ten-mile drive before him, over the worst possible roads; it would be all he could do to reach home by dark. The horse, too, was unfresh. In vain he urged and cajoled; the animal's pace remained a dilatory amble. And the heat seemed to accumulate under the close black hood, which weighed on his shoulders like a giant hat. Yet, if he alighted to slip a rail, it was so much hotter outside that he was glad to clamber back beneath its covering. Still he did not complain. These bush visits were what brought the shekels in: not the tinkering with rachitic infants or impecunious Irish, whom, as this morning, he sometimes paid for the privilege of attending. (Ha, ha! . . . capital! . . . as that fool Thistlethwaite would have said.) And to-day promised to be more than ordinarily remunerative; for he had another long drive before him that evening, in an opposite direction. He could count on clearing a ten-pound note.

But when, towards six o'clock, he reached home, the summons he was expecting had not come. There was time for a bath, a change, a rest; and still the trap that should have fetched him had not appeared. He began to grow fidgety. The case was one of diphtheria. On the previous day he had given relief by opening the windpipe; it was essential for him to know the result of the operation. What could the people be thinking of? Or had the child died in the meantime . . . the membrane spread downwards, causing obstruction below the tube? "Surely in common decency they would have let me know?"

He wandered from room to room, nervously snapping his fingers. Or sat down and beat a tattoo on chair-arm or table, only to spring up at an imaginary sound of wheels.

Mary dissuaded him from hiring a buggy and driving out to see what had happened. She also pooh-poohed his idea of an accident to the messenger. The father, a vinegrower, had several men and more than one horse and buggy at his disposal. The likelihood was, he would have come himself, had the child been worse. Unless, of course . . . well! it wasn't death she thought of. But the township of Mittagunga was not much farther than Barambogie from the patient's home; and there was another doctor at Mittagunga. She did not speak this thought aloud; but it haunted her; and, as the evening wore eventlessly away, the question escaped her in spite of herself: "Can you have offended them? . . . in any way?"

"Offended them? I? -- Well, if it's offensive to leave one's bed in the middle of the night for an eight-mile drive on these abominable roads, to perform a ticklish operation!" And very bitterly: "What extraordinary ideas you do have, Mary! What on earth do you mean now?"

But Mary, repenting her slip, was not prepared to stir up the heated discussion that would inevitably follow.

She went into the dining-room and sat down to her sewing; while he fell to pacing the verandah. But though she, too, never ceased to keep her ears pricked for the noise of wheels, no sound was to be heard but that of Richard's feet tramping to and fro ("How tired he will be to-morrow!") and the peevish whine of a little nightwind round the corners of the house. Sorry as she felt for him, she did not again try to reason with him or console him. For when in one of his really black moods, he seemed to retire where words could not get at him. And these moods were growing on him. Nowadays, any small mishap sufficed to throw him into a state of excitement, the aftermath of which was bottomless depression. How would it all end? -- Letting her work fall, Mary put her chin in her hand, and sat staring into the flame of the kerosene lamp. But she did not see it. She seemed to be looking through the light at something that lay beyond . . . something on the farther side, not only of the flame, but of all she had hitherto known of life; to be looking, in visionary fashion, out towards those shadowy to-morrows, for the first of which Richard was so surely incapacitating himself. . . an endless line of days, that would come marching upon her, with never a break, never a respite, each fuller of anxiety than the one that went before.

Till, with a shiver, she resolutely shook herself free. "Tch! . . . it comes of listening to that silly, dismal wind."

Yet when, on the clock striking eleven, she stepped out on the verandah, her first words were: "Oh, what a lovely night!"

For the little wind whistled and piped out of a clear sky; and the moon, at full, drenched the earth with its radiance. Before the house the Lagoon lay like a sheet of beaten silver. Trees and bushes, jet-black on one side, were white as if with hoar frost on the other. The distant hills ran together with the sky in a silver haze. All was peace . . . except for the thudding of Richard's feet.

"My dear, I'm sure it's no use waiting up any longer. They won't come now. Do go to bed."

"I'm too worried. I couldn't sleep."

"But at least it would rest you. As it is, you're wearing yourself out."

"Very easy for you to talk! But if anything should happen . . . the responsibility . . . my practice here -- I can't afford it, Mary, and that's the truth . . . not yet."

There was nothing to be done. With a sigh that was like a little prayer for patience, Mary turned away.

THE postman handed in a letter with a mourning border fully an inch wide: there was barely room for name and address, which were squeezed in anyhow. It was from Mr. Henry; and opening it in some trepidation Mary read the sad news of Agnes's death. Mr. Henry was kind enough to give her full particulars. Agnes had, it seemed, stood the voyage out well. But on landing at the Cape she had met with an accident; had caught her foot in a rope and fallen heavily; and the shock had brought on an apoplexy from which she never rallied. Mr. Henry wrote as one bereft of all he held dear; as the fond father whose pious duty it would henceforth be, to fill a mother's place to his orphaned children. In reading the letter aloud, Mary swallowed hard; then veiled her discomfort with an apologetic: "Oh well, you know. . . poor man, . . . I daresay ---- " by which she meant to imply that, with death's entry on the scene, the realities were apt to get overlaid. Mr. Henry saw himself and his situation, not as they were, but as he would have wished them to be.

Richard, of course, sniffed at Ocock's layman-ish account of his wife's end. And he was right. For Tilly's gloss on the affair ran: Purd heard from a man who was on board the same ship. It's true she did trip over a rope and come a cropper (and not the first time neither, as we know) and this brought on a violent attack of d.t.'s which carried her off: Henry hasn't looked the same man since. His relief is immense -- simply immense.

But Mary's faithful stubborn heart rebelled. For Agnes's own sake, her death was perhaps, pitifully enough, the best solution. But that, of all who had known her, none should mourn her passing; that even among her nearest it should stir only a sense of good riddance and relief: the tragedy of such a finish moved Mary to the depths. Tenderly she laid away the keepsake Mr. Henry sent her for remembrance: a large cameo-brooch, at the back of which, under glass, was twined a golden curl, cut from the head of the little child whose untimely end had cost Agnes her bitterest tears.

A day or two later there came into her possession a still more pathetic memento: a letter from the dead, which had to be opened and read though the hand that wrote it was lying cold at the bottom of a grave. It had been found by Mr. Henry amongst his wife's belongings -- found sealed and addressed but never posted -- a blotted and scrawled production and more than a little confused, but full of love and kindness; though written with the firm conviction that they would never meet again. Poor thing, poor thing! And having read, Mary hid it away at the back of a drawer, where no eyes but her own would ever see it. She could not have borne Richard's sarcastic comments on Agnes's poor spelling and poorer penmanship.

But there was nothing new in this secretiveness: she was falling more and more into the way of keeping Richard in the dark. A smash of china by the clumsy servant; Miss Prestwick's airs and insufficiencies; the exorbitant price of the children's new boots; disturbing gossip retailed by the girl: of vexations such as these, which were her daily portion, he heard not a word. It left her, of course, much freer to deal with things. But it also spared him the exhaustion of many a towering rage (under the influence of which he was quite capable of writing to the bootmaker and calling him a thief); saved him, too, from going off into one of his fits of depression when he imagined the whole world in league against him. The real truth was, he hadn't enough to occupy him; and not a soul to speak to . . . except his dreadful patients. Nor did he ever write or receive a letter. In coming here he seemed to have had but one desire: to forget and be forgotten.

She it was who sat up at night, spinning out the letters necessary to make people remember you. And it fell to her to write the note of welcome when Baron von Krause, the well-known botanist, proposed to break his journey from Sydney to Melbourne, solely to pay them a visit. -- Though putting up a visitor nowadays meant considerable inconvenience: they had to turn out of their own room, she going in with the children, Richard making shift with the dining-room sofa. Still, in this case she thought the upset worth while: for Richard's sake. He had been as friendly with the Baron as it was in his nature to be with anybody; and the latter had once spoken to her, in warm terms, of Richard's intimate knowledge of the native flora, and lamented the fact that he should not have found time to systematise his studies.

The next morning, while Richard was out, she climbed the step-ladder and unearthed the glass cases that contained his collections of plants, minerals and butterflies: for the first time on moving into a new house, he had not set them up in his room. But she wasn't going to let people think that, because he had come to live up-country, he was therefore running to seed. And having dusted and rubbed and polished, she ranged the cases along the walls of the passage and on the dining-room sideboard. To the delight of the children.

But she might have spared her pains. As far as Richard was concerned, the visit was a failure.

Baron von Krause arrived during the forenoon. Richard was on his rounds, and did not reach home till they were half through dinner. And then he tried to get out of coming to table! Going in search of him on his non-appearance, she found him sunk in his armchair, from which he vowed he was too tired to stir . . . let alone exert himself to entertain strangers.

"Strangers? There's only him! And he's just as nice as he always was. We're getting on capitally. The children, too."

The Baron was a short, sturdy little man, bronzed brown with the sun -- beside him Richard, who never tanned, looked almost transparent -- dark of hair and beard, and with a pair of kindly blue eyes that beamed at you from behind large gold spectacles. Veteran colonist though he was, he still spoke a jargon all his own, coupled with a thick, foreign accent. He also expressed himself with extreme deliberation, using odd, archaic words ("Like the Bible," thought Cuffy); and, could he not at once find the word he sought, he paused in what he was saying and scoured his mind till he had captured it. This, added to the fact that he did things at table that were strictly forbidden them, made him an object of enormous interest to the children; and three pairs of eyes hung entranced on him as he ate and spoke, to the detriment of their owners' own table-manners. In waiting, too, for him to be delivered of a word, three little faces went pink with a mixture of embarrassment and anticipation. In vain did Mary privately frown and shake her head. A knifeful of peas, "melancholy" for melancholy, and all three were agog again. It was a real drawback, at a time like this, to have such noticing children.

But with their father's entry a change came over their behaviour. Cuffy kept his eyes fixed on his plate and minded what he was doing, and Lallie and Lucie faithfully followed suit. The fun was at an end. For it wasn't at all the same when Papa forgot, in the middle of a sentence, what he was going to say (because Mamma interrupted him with a potato) and tried and tried his hardest to remember and couldn't, and got very cross with himself. Mamma thought it was funny though, for she laughed and said she believed he'd forget his head if it weren't screwed on; and then she told a story about Papa nearly going out without his collar, and how she had rushed after him and saved him . . . which made Papa cross with her as well.

It was too hot to go walking. And after dinner, Mahony having been called back to the surgery, the Baron strayed to the drawing-room, opened the piano, and put his hairy, knuckly hands on the keys. Mary thought this an excellent chance to slip away and "see to things"; but Richard, the patient gone, first set his door ajar, then came along the passage and sat down in an armchair by the drawing-room window. Cuffy, at ball on the verandah, also crept in and took up his position close to the piano, leaning against it and staring fixedly at the player -- listening, that is to say, after the fashion of children, as much with the eyes as with the ears (as if only by keeping the maker of the sounds in view can they grasp the sounds themselves) -- the while he continued mechanically to tip his ball from hand to hand.