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II

Mab took Jenny and Madam to town because the Captain refused to enter the house of Councillor Sorley until Councillor Sorley had entered his. "Mais que les homines sont enfants!" cried Madam in despair. For it seemed that James was saying just the same to his Louisa. But the Captain assured Madam that James must have got the notion from him in the first place. "I must have said it first, my love. Nor has Sorley any reason for his pig-headedness," said the Captain, very dignified.

So Jenny (said Susan, almost impressive and stuck all over with pins) was to have her chance and it was to be hoped she was properly careful. And if she were careful with these fine clothes and didn't go rushing about in her usual way, so unbecoming in a young lady, they would do for the bottom drawer later on.

Undoubtedly they were fine clothes. Madam believed more in art than in that Destiny which is the refuge of the inefficient. She sent to Launceston, Melbourne, everywhere for mousseline de laines (Jenny loved their soft sprigging of pinks and greens), Victoria silks, jaconets, silk gauzes, and satins superbe in all the strong unsubtle colours of the time. Jenny's richly tinted youth could bear anything, thought Madam, who proceeded to make her bear it, being minded to present Jenny as a challenge, while Mrs. Beverley, artistic without being artful, decided to garb an also budding Maria always and only in white.

The Main Road spread itself good-naturedly for a small Jenny going to conquest by means of the mail-coach. Passed away were the pony-post riders who had dared black and bushranger in the 'twenties. Passed the tandem mail-cart driven by Cox of Launceston during the 'thirties. And passed the famous Cobb & Co. with whose high green wheels America conquered Australia and bid fair to conquer Tasmania until Page's Royal Mail Coaches were doing the hundred and twenty miles for five shillings, with a good breakfast thrown in. No American could stomach so unlucrative a business for long. Cobb retired, and the horns of Page and his red-coated successors blew triumphant to the bush hills and long valleys every night and day.

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Jenny drove by settlers' timbered huts with their lichened roofs, and pigs grunting about the bare feet of their bearded owners; by great houses gleaming out of their rough gum-tree parks, and humble taverns overtopped by splendid stables where ostlers came running in bright waistcoats to change the smoking teams. Wrapped in the heavy dark garments without which no lady could travel abroad, she walked for a while on the trampled grass with Mab, who was worried because she was not so bubbling-bright in these last days. Perhaps it was the huge trunks of clothes which had gone on in a chaise with the Beverley trunks, and perhaps it was the shadow of that society which, adventurous although she was, must loom rather high and strange. But he feared much that it was the thought of Paige, that prig to whom his dear maid was evidently to be given as a Christian to the lions.

Paige, Mab felt, hadn't even the manhood to dispose of her in one snap. He would mumble her stupidly, wearing her gay youth down. And all this because, by Madam's relentless code, Jenny must be sacrificed since he himself had failed. For the first time he wished that he were now a big man in the colony; something of a shape to deny them all, snatch up Jenny, and put her where she should be. "What have I not endured in this bitter land that my blood may rule here?" Madam had cried. And, since he had so disappointed her, she was backing little Jenny now.

And little Jenny, ill mated, might grow to be like Julia, hard against the world and himself, yet taking all she wanted from both…. But at least there's no one else with Jenny, yet, please God, thought Mab, taking no pleasure from the crisp sweet air and the rolling distance gold with wattle and gorse. And then he was ashamed for having judged even momentarily poor unhappy, bewildered Julia who needed him so much. Didn't she always tell him how she needed him!

A posse of military police trotted by, their long white-trousered legs in the short English stirrup that Mab found so impossible, and their glossy horses a sheer joy to the eye. Fine horses, too, in the gigs, four-in-hands, and other vehicles crowding the road, for the gentlefolk were proud of their blood stock; page 185and if many the farmers rode had been illegally bred by the bush-rangers, they were none the worse for that. Some of the best mares in the colony had been stolen and taken to the hills.

On the coach-top Mab talked a little with a stout old gaitered fellow who wore his long upper lip clean-shaven and a grey fringe under the chin. He had come out "with a free passage" as the business was called now, and was at last time-expired with a rich little farm of his own.

"An' I can putt my name to my own cheque noo," he said, with simple pride. "I made oot to work wi' a stick i' the muck at the back door till I could do it good as the next man. An' them lads o' mine, they'll get eddication. No thart aboot that. Aye …"

Mab thought that there was much of Madam's spirit in the old chap. He had broken the thing which had tried to break him. He had held on just as Madam was holding on. But Mab had never found that easy to do.

There were others who had not found it easy. These old men and women with pipes and swags and with "convict" written all over them had not found it easy. They sat in the sun by the roadside, and doddered on from town to township, never getting anywhere, never knowing where they wanted to get. Like Mab, this, he thought, driving by Oatlands Gaol where many navy-and-yellow figures worked, harnessed to the little carts of dressed stone.

The coach flung at a gallop over the bridge and Celeste groaned. She was one of those great soft Frenchwomen whom Madam likened to human Percherons, and no longer young.

"Mon Dieu! I am in purgatory!" cried Celeste.

"Confess your sins, then," retorted Madam, upright in her uneasy corner. "But not aloud."

Jenny looked wistfully. How wonderful Grandmamma was! Never tired, never complaining, never uncertain or pitiful. Consistently always the great lady. Jenny, conscious of many confusions within, hoped she was not going to disappoint Grandmamma. But how was a girl to know who was liable to be snatched at suddenly by a poignant sense of approaching and hidden futures which left her trembling? Or visited slowly and page 186intensely in the night by the shadow of dim mysteries, passions, and denials from that unquenchable past built up by the weak hands of women with unfathomable grave faces? Or, in the midst of life and laughter, feel the spinning world pause a moment to listen to some uninterpreted cry and then creak on again, leaving her like one who has listened in a strange land to an alien tongue?

Because she had never confessed all this to anyone, there was none to tell Jenny that in the 'fifties such notions were bad form. But undoubtedly Mr. Paige would tell her if a honeymoon intimacy ever moved her to confide in him.

The coach clattered down Bagdad Valley, soon to blossom richly with orchards from end to end. Beyond pale paddocks of grazing sheep and ripening grain a large brownstone house—Georgian in design like most of the early houses—stood on the hillside with its feet in green lawns. "Twickenham Park. Now Mr. Paige's residence," said Madam, with empressement. "I stayed there just after the Austins built it."

Jenny was angry at her blushes. She did not want to think of Mr. Paige. But with the Bridgewater estuary bringing scarlet sunset and the first salt tang of the sea; with the advancing of that high-shouldered blackness which was Mount Wellington; with the beckoning lights of the village of New Town reeling up, reeling past, it was impossible to forget him. Undoubtedly she would soon have to see a great deal of Mr. Paige; and sleeping that night in a room of chintz and elegance, with a fat frilled nosegay of pink roses under the bed because Mr. Paige had sent it to her, she was suddenly seized with terrors and would have flung the hateful thing from the window but that she feared Madam's questioning in the morning. And yet by morning (so inexplicable is a maid) she was smoothing out its ruffled petals and showing it with much satisfaction to Maria, who had run down with a servant in attendance to see her darling Jenny.

"Oh, my sweetest, how he must admire you!" cried generous Maria. "And the ball is on the eve of St. Valentine. Do you suppose that any of our partners will send us valentines next day?"

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"I hope they all will," said Jenny, who was realizing that there is sometimes safety in numbers.