William Shakespeare - "The Second Part of King Henry IV"

N. Destouches, translated by Frank J. Morlock - "The Triple Marriage"

F. Colburn Adams - "Siege of Washington, D.C."

Juanita Helm Floyd - "Women in the Life of Balzac"

Australia Felix

H >> Henry Handel Richardson (1870 1946) >> Australia Felix




Arrived at their destination--a miserable wooden shanty on a sheep-run
at the foot of the ranges--he found his patient tossing on a dirty bed,
with a small pulse of 120, while the right thigh was darkly bruised and
swollen. The symptoms pointed to serious internal injuries. He performed
the necessary operation.

There was evidently no woman about the place; the coffee the father
brought him was thick as mud. On leaving, he promised to return next day
and to bring some one with him to attend to the lad.

For the home-journey, he got a mount on a young and fidgety mare, whom
he suspected of not long having worn the saddle. In the beginning he had
his hands full with her. Then, however, she ceased her antics and
consented to advance at an easy trot.

HOW tired he felt! He would have liked to go to bed and sleep for a week
on end. As it was, he could not reckon on even an hour's rest. By the
time he reached home the usual string of patients would await him; and
these disposed of, and a bite of breakfast snatched, out he must set
anew on his morning round. He did not feel well either: the coffee
seemed to have disagreed with him. He had a slight sense of nausea and
was giddy; the road swam before his eyes. Possibly the weather had
something to do with it; though a dull, sunless morning it was hot as he
had never known it. He took out a stud, letting the ends of his collar
fly.

Poor little Mary, he thought inconsequently: he had hurt and frightened
her by his violence. He felt ashamed of himself now. By daylight he
could see her point of view. Mary was so tactful and resourceful that
she might safely be trusted to hush up the affair, to explain away the
equivocal position in which she had been found. After all, both of them
were known to be decent, God-fearing people. And one had only to look at
Mary to see that here was no light woman. Nobody in his senses--not
even Grindle--could think evil of that broad, transparent brow, of
those straight, kind, merry eyes.

No, this morning his hurt was a purely personal one. That it should just
be Purdy who did him this wrong! Purdy, playmate and henchman, ally in
how many a boyish enterprise, in the hardships and adventures of later
life. "Mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my
bread!" Never had he turned a deaf ear to Purdy's needs; he had fed him
and clothed him, caring for him as for a well-loved brother. Surely few
things were harder to bear than a blow in the dark from one who stood
thus deeply in your debt, on whose gratitude you would have staked your
head. It was, of course, conceivable that he had been swept off his feet
by Mary's vivid young beauty, by over-indulgence, by the glamour of the
moment. But if a man could not restrain his impulses where the wife of
his most intimate friend was concerned . . . Another thing: as long as
Mary had remained an immature slip of a girl, Purdy had not given her a
thought. When, however, under her husband's wing she had blossomed out
into a lovely womanhood, of which any man might be proud, then she had
found favour in his eyes. And the slight this put on Mary's sterling
moral qualities, on all but her physical charms, left the worst taste of
any in the mouth.

Then, not content with trying to steal her love, Purdy had also sought
to poison her mind against him. How that rankled! For until now he had
hugged the belief that Purdy's opinion of him was coloured by affection
and respect, by the tradition of years. Whereas, from what Mary had let
fall, he saw that the boy must have been sitting in judgment on him,
regarding his peculiarities with an unloving eye, picking his motives to
pieces: it was like seeing the child of your loins, of your hopes, your
unsleeping care, turn and rend you with black ingratitude. Yes,
everything went to prove Purdy's unworthiness. Only HE had not seen it,
only he had been blind to the truth. And wrapped in this smug blindness
he had given his false friend the run of his home, setting, after the
custom of the country, no veto on his eternal presence. Disloyalty was
certainly abetted by just the extravagant, exaggerated hospitality of
colonial life. Never must the doors of your house be shut; all you had
you were expected to share with any sundowner of fortune who chanced to
stop at your gate.

The mare shied with a suddenness that almost unseated him: the next
moment she had the bit between her teeth and was galloping down the
road. Clomp-clomp-clomp went her hoofs on the baked clay; the dust
smothered and stung, and he was holding for all he was worth to reins
spanned stiff as iron. On they flew; his body hammered the saddle; his
breath came sobbingly. But he kept his seat; and a couple of miles
farther on he was down, soothing the wild-eyed, quivering, sweating
beast, whose nostrils worked like a pair of bellows. There he stood,
glancing now back along the road, now up at the sky. His hat had gone
flying at the first unexpected plunge; he ought to return and look for
it. But he shrank from the additional fatigue, the delay in reaching
home this would mean. The sky was still overcast: he decided to risk it.
Knotting his handkerchief he spread it cap-wise over his head and got
back into the saddle.

Mine own familiar friend! And more than that: he could add to David's
plaint and say, my only friend. In Purdy the one person he had been
intimate with passed out of his life. There was nobody to take the
vacant place. He had been far too busy of late years to form new
friendships: what was left of him after the day's work was done was but
a kind of shell: the work was the meaty contents. As you neared the
forties, too, it grew ever harder to fit yourself to other people: your
outlook had become too set, your ideas too unfluid. Hence you clung the
faster to ties formed in the old, golden days, worn though these might
be to the thinness of a hair. And then, there was one's wife, of course
--one's dear, good wife. But just her very dearness and goodness served
to hold possible intimates at arm's length. The knowledge that you had
such a confidante, that all your thoughts were shared with her, struck
disastrously at a free exchange of privacies. No, he was alone. He had
not so much as a dog now, to follow at heel and look up at him with the
melancholy eyes of its race. Old Pompey had come at poison, and Mary had
not wished to have a strange dog in the new house. She did not care for
animals, and the main charge of it would have fallen on her. He had no
time--no time even for a dog!

Better it would assuredly be to have some one to fall back on: it was
not good for a man to stand so alone. Did troubles come, they would
strike doubly hard because of it; then was the time to rejoice in a
warm, human handclasp. And moodily pondering the reasons for his
solitariness, he was once more inclined to lay a share of the blame on
the conditions of the life. The population of the place was still in a
state of flux: he and a mere handful of others would soon, he believed,
be the oldest residents in Ballarat. People came and went, tried their
luck, failed, and flitted off again, much as in the early days. What was
the use of troubling to become better acquainted with a person, when,
just as you began really to know him, he was up and away? At home, in
the old country, a man as often as not died in the place where he was
born; and the slow, eventless years, spent shoulder to shoulder,
automatically brought about a kind of intimacy. But this was only a
surface reason: there was another that went deeper. He had no talent for
friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and
say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered
friendship; and this, though there came moments when he longed, as your
popular mortal never did, for close companionship. Sometimes he felt
like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him
to partake, because he had already given it to be understood that he
would decline. But such lapses were few. On nine days out of ten, he did
not feel the need of either making or receiving confidences; he shrank
rather, with a peculiar shy dread, from personal unbosomings. Some imp
housed in him--some wayward, wilful, mocking Irish devil--bidding him
hold back, remain cool, dry-eyed, in face of others' joys and pains.
Hence the break with Purdy was a real calamity. The associations of some
five-and-twenty years were bound up in it; measured by it, one's
marriage seemed a thing of yesterday. And even more than the friend, he
would miss the friendship and all it stood for: this solid base of joint
experience; this past of common memories into which one could dip as
into a well; this handle of "Do you remember?" which opened the door to
such a wealth of anecdote. From now on, the better part of his life
would be a closed book to any but himself; there were allusions, jests
without number, homely turns of speech, which not a soul but himself
would understand. The thought of it made him feel old and empty;
affected him like the news of a death.--But MUST it be? Was there no
other way out? Slow to take hold, he was a hundred times slower to let
go. Before now he had seen himself sticking by a person through
misunderstandings, ingratitude, deception, to the blank wonder of the
onlookers. Would he not be ready here, too, to forgive . . . to forget?

But he felt hot, hot to suffocation, and his heart was pounding in
uncomfortable fashion. The idea of stripping and plunging into ice-cold
water began to make a delicious appeal to him. Nothing surpassed such a
plunge after a broken night. But of late he had had to be wary of
indulging: a bath of this kind, taken when he was over-tired, was apt to
set the accursed tic a-going; and then he could pace the floor in agony.
And yet. . . Good God, how hot it was! His head ached distractedly; an
iron band of pain seemed to encircle it. With a sudden start of alarm he
noticed that he had ceased to perspire--now he came to think of it, not
even the wild gallop had induced perspiration. Pulling up short, he
fingered his pulse. It was abnormal, even for him . . . and feeble. Was
it fancy, or did he really find a difficulty in breathing? He tore off
his collar, threw open the neck of his shirt. He had a sensation as if
all the blood in his body was flying to his head: his face must
certainly be crimson. He put both hands to this top-heavy head, to
support it; and in a blind fit of vertigo all but lost his balance in
the saddle: the trees spun round, the distance went black. For a second
still he kept upright; then he flopped to the ground, falling face
downwards, his arms huddled under him.

The mare, all her spirit gone, stood lamb-like and waited. As he did not
stir she turned and sniffed at him, curiously. Still he lay prone, and,
having stretched her tired jaws, she raised her head and uttered a
whinny--an almost human cry of distress. This, too, failing in its
effect, she nosed the ground for a few yards, then set out at a gentle,
mane-shaking trot for home.


* * * * *


Found, a dark conspicuous heap on the long bare road, and carted back to
town by a passing bullock-waggon, Mahony lay, once the death-like coma
had yielded, and tossed in fever and delirium. By piecing his broken
utterances together Mary learned all she needed to know about the case
he had gone out to attend, and his desperate ride home. But it was
Purdy's name that was oftenest on his lips; it was Purdy he reviled and
implored; and when he sprang up with the idea of calling his false
friend to account, it was as much as she could do to restrain him.

She had the best of advice. Old Dr. Munce himself came two and three
times a day. Mary had always thought him a dear old man; and she felt
surer than ever of it when he stood patting her hand and bidding her
keep a good heart; for they would certainly pull her husband through.

"There aren't so many of his kind here, Mrs. Mahony, that we can afford
to lose him."

But altogether she had never known till now how many and how faithful
their friends were. Hardly, for instance, had Richard been carried in,
stiff as a log and grey as death, when good Mrs. Devine was fumbling
with the latch of the gate, an old sunbonnet perched crooked on her
head: she had run down just as she was, in the midst of shelling peas
for dinner. She begged to be allowed to help with the nursing. But Mary
felt bound to refuse. She knew how the thought of what he might have
said in his delirium would worry Richard, when he recovered his senses:
few men laid such weight as he on keeping their private thoughts
private.

Not to be done, Mrs. Devine installed herself in the kitchen to
superintend the cooking. Less for the patient, into whom at first only
liquid nourishment could be injected, than: "To see as your own strength
is kep' up, dearie." Tilly swooped down and bore off Trotty. Delicate
fruits, new-laid eggs, jellies and wines came from Agnes Ocock; while
Amelia Grindle, who had no such dainties to offer arrived every day at
three o'clock, to mind the house while Mary slept. Archdeacon Long was
also a frequent visitor, bringing not so much spiritual as physical aid;
for, as the frenzy reached its height and Richard was maddened by the
idea that a plot was brewing against his life, a pair of strong arms
were needed to hold him down. Over and above this, letters of sympathy
flowed in; grateful patients called to ask with tears in their eyes how
the doctor did; virtual strangers stopped the servant in the street with
the same query. Mary was sometimes quite overwhelmed by the kindness
people showed her.

The days that preceded the crisis were days of keenest anxiety. But Mary
never allowed her heart to fail her. For if, in the small things of
life, she was given to building on a mortal's good sense, how much more
could she rely at such a pass on the sense of the One above all others.
What she said to herself as she moved tirelessly about the sick room,
damping cloths, filling the ice-bag, infiltering drops of nourishment,
was: "God is good!" and these words, far from breathing a pious
resignation, voiced a confidence so bold that it bordered on
irreverence. Their real meaning was: Richard has still ever so much work
to do in the world, curing sick people and saving their lives. God must
know this, and cannot now mean to be so foolish as to WASTE him, by
letting him die.

And her reliance on the Almighty's far-sighted wisdom was justified.
Richard weathered the crisis, slowly revived to life and health; and the
day came when, laying a thin white hand on hers, he could whisper: "My
poor little wife, what a fright I must have given you!" And added: "I
think an illness of some kind was due--overdue--with me."

When he was well enough to bear the journey they left home for a
watering-place on the Bay. There, on an open beach facing the Heads,
Mahony lay with his hat pulled forward to shade his eyes, and with
nothing to do but to scoop up handfuls of the fine coral sand and let it
flow again, like liquid silk, through his fingers. From beneath the brim
he watched the water churn and froth on the brown reefs; followed the
sailing-ships which, beginning as mere dots on the horizon, swelled to
stately white waterbirds, and shrivelled again to dots; drank in, with
greedy nostrils, the mixed spice of warm sea, hot seaweed and aromatic
tea-scrub.

And his strength came back as rapidly as usual. He soon felt well
enough, leaning on Mary's arm, to stroll up and down the sandy roads of
the township; to open book and newspaper; and finally to descend the
cliffs for a dip in the transparent, turquoise sea. At the end of a
month he was at home again, sunburnt and hearty, eager to pick up the
threads he had let fall. And soon Mary was able to make the comfortable
reflection that everything was going on just as before.

In this, however, she was wrong; never, in their united lives, would
things be quite the same again. Outwardly, the changes might pass
unnoticed--though even here, it was true, a certain name had now to be
avoided, with which they had formerly made free. But this was not
exactly hard to do, Purdy having promptly disappeared: they heard at
second-hand that he had at last accepted promotion and gone to
Melbourne. And since Mary had suffered no inconvenience from his
thoughtless conduct, they tacitly agreed to let the matter rest. That
was on the surface. Inwardly, the differences were more marked. Even in
the mental attitude they adopted towards what had happened, husband and
wife were thoroughly dissimilar. Mary did not refer to it because she
thought it would be foolish to re-open so disagreeable a subject. In her
own mind, however, she faced it frankly, dating back to it as the night
when Purdy had been so odious and Richard so angry. Mahony, on the other
hand, gave the affair a wide berth even in thought. For him it was a
kind of Pandora's box, of which, having once caught a glimpse of the
contents, he did not again dare to raise the lid. Things might escape
from it that would alter his whole life. But he, too, dated from it in
the sense of suddenly becoming aware, with a throb of regret, that he
had left his youth behind him. And such phrases as: "When I was young,"
"In my younger days," now fell instinctively from his lips.

Nor was this all. Deep down in Mary's soul there slumbered a slight
embarrassment; one she could not get the better of: it spread and grew.
This was a faint, ever so faint a doubt of Richard's wisdom. Odd she had
long known him to be, different in many small and some great ways from
those they lived amongst; but hitherto this very oddness of his had
seemed to her an outgrowth on the side of superiority--fairer judgment,
higher motives. Just as she had always looked up to him as rectitude in
person, so she had thought him the embodiment of a fine, though somewhat
unworldly wisdom. Now her faith in his discernment was shaken. His
treatment of her on the night of the ball had shocked, confused her. She
was ready to make allowance for him: she had told her story clumsily,
and had afterwards been both cross and obstinate; while part of his
violence was certainly to be ascribed to his coming breakdown. But this
did not cover everything; and the ungenerous spirit in which he had met
her frankness, his doubt of her word, of her good faith--his utter
unreasonableness in short--had left a cold patch of astonishment in
her, which would not yield. She lit on it at unexpected moments.
Meanwhile, she groped for an epithet that would fit his behaviour.
Beginning with some rather vague and high-flown terms she gradually came
down, until with the sense of having found the right thing at last, she
fixed on the adjective "silly"--a word which, for the rest, was in
common use with Mary, had she to describe anything that struck her as
queer or extravagant. And sitting over her fancywork, into which, being
what Richard called "safe as the grave," she sewed more thoughts than
most women: sitting thus, she would say to herself with a half smile and
an incredulous shake of the head: "SO silly!"

But hers was one of those inconvenient natures which trust blindly or
not at all: once worked on by a doubt or a suspicion, they are never
able to shake themselves free of it again. As time went on, she suffered
strange uncertainties where some of Richard's decisions were concerned.
In his good intentions she retained an implicit belief; but she was not
always satisfied that he acted in the wisest way. Occasionally it struck
her that he did not see as clearly as she did; at other times, that he
let a passing whim run away with him and override his common sense. And,
her eyes thus opened, it was not in Mary to stand dumbly by and watch
him make what she held to be mistakes. Openly to interfere, however,
would also have gone against the grain in her; she had bowed for too
long to his greater age and experience. So, seeing no other way out, she
fell back on indirect methods. To her regret. For, in watching other
women "manage" their husbands, she had felt proud to think that nothing
of this kind was necessary between Richard and her. Now she, too, began
to lay little schemes by which, without his being aware of it, she might
influence his judgment, divert or modify his plans.

Her enforced use of such tactics did not lessen the admiring affection
she bore him: that was framed to withstand harder tests. Indeed, she was
even aware of an added tenderness towards him, now she saw that it
behoved her to have forethought for them both. But into the wife's love
for her husband there crept something of a mother's love for her child;
for a wayward and impulsive, yet gifted creature, whose welfare and
happiness depended on her alone. And it is open to question whether the
mother dormant in Mary did not fall with a kind of hungry joy on this
late-found task. The work of her hands done, she had known empty hours.
That was over now. With quickened faculties, all her senses on the
alert, she watched, guided, hindered, foresaw.




Chapter VIII

Old Ocock failed in health that winter. He was really old now, was two
or three and sixty; and, with the oncoming of the rains and cold, gusty
winds, various infirmities began to plague him.

"He's done himself rather too well since his marriage," said Mahony in
private. "After being a worker for the greater part of his life, it
would have been better for him to work on to the end."

Yes, that, Mary could understand and agree with. But Richard continued:
"All it means, of course, is that the poor fellow is beginning to
prepare for his last long journey. These aches and pains of his
represent the packing and the strapping without which not even a short
earthly journey can be undertaken. And his is into eternity."

Mary, making lace over a pillow, looked up at this, a trifle
apprehensively. "What things you do say! If any one heard you, they'd
think you weren't very. . . very religious." Her fear lest Richard's
outspokenness should be mistaken for impiety never left her.

Tilly was plain and to the point. "Like a bear with a sore back that's
what 'e is, since 'e can't get down among his blessed birds. He leads
Tom the life of the condemned, over the feeding of those bantams. As if
the boy could help 'em not laying when they ought!"

At thirty-six Tilly was the image of her mother. Entirely gone was the
slight crust of acerbity that had threatened her in her maiden days,
when, thanks to her misplaced affections, it had seemed for a time as if
the purple prizes of life--love, offers of marriage, a home of her own
--were going to pass her by. She was now a stout, high-coloured woman
with a roar of a laugh, full, yet firm lips, and the whitest of teeth.
Mary thought her decidedly toned down and improved since her marriage;
but Mahony put it that the means Tilly now had at her disposal were such
as to make people shut an eye to her want of refinement. However that
might be, "old Mrs. Ocock" was welcomed everywhere--even by those on
whom her bouncing manners grated. She was invariably clad in a thick and
handsome black silk gown, over which she wore all the jewellery she
could crowd on her person--huge cameo brooches, ear-drops, rings and
bracelets, lockets and chains. Her name topped subscription-lists, and,
having early weaned her old husband of his dissenting habits, she was a
real prop to Archdeacon Long and his church, taking the chief and most
expensive table at tea-meetings, the most thankless stall at bazaars.
She kept open house, too, and gave delightful parties, where, while some
sat at loo, others were free to turn the rooms upside-down for a dance,
or to ransack wardrobes and presses for costumes for charades. She drove
herself and her friends about in various vehicles, briskly and well, and
indulged besides in many secret charities. Her husband thought no such
woman had ever trodden the earth, and publicly blessed the day on which
he first set eyes on her.

"After the dose I'd 'ad with me first, 'twas a bit of a risk, that I
knew. And it put me off me sleep for a night or two before'and. But my
Tilly's the queen o' women--I say the queen, sir! I've never 'ad a
wrong word from 'er, an' when I go she gits every penny I've got. Why,
I'm jiggered if she didn't stop at 'ome from the Races t'other day, an'
all on my account!"

"Now then, pa, drop it. Or the doctor'll think you've been mixing your
liquors. Give your old pin here and let me poultice it."

He had another sound reason for gratitude. Somewhere in the background
of his house dwelt his two ne'er-do-well sons; Tilly had accepted their
presence uncomplainingly. Indeed she sometimes stood up for Tom, against
his father. "Now, pa, stop nagging at the boy, will you? You'll never
get anything out of 'im that way. Tom's right enough if you know how to
take him. He'll never set the Thames on fire, if that's what you mean.
But I'm thankful, I can tell you, to have a handy chap like him at my
back. If I 'ad to depend on your silly old paws, I'd never get anything
done at all."

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.