Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Philiberta: A Novel

Chapter III. Time, the Great Healer

Chapter III. Time, the Great Healer.

JOHN CAMPBELL affected to be hard-hearted.

'It wass an ungrateful little baggage,' he said, gazing loftily down upon his red-eyed wife where she sat rocking the child page 19on her knees, 'It iss not worth the crying ofer, whateffer; an unthankful little baggage!'

'An' what has it to be thankful for at all—with its mother taken from it, and itself among strangers?' flashed out the little woman. 'An' where would its poor heart go—and its feet aftewards—but to its mother, the only friend it's ever known, poor lamb?'

John Campbell sat down, and fell to studying the smoke that rose spirally from his pipe.

'I suppose,' said he presently—'I suppose it will pe to-morrow that I had petter take the coach to Pallarat.'

'And what for will you be going to Ballarat, John dear?'

'Ou, to see apout getting the wean into the orphan place only!'

'Holy Virgin! John, it is not in earnest you are, surely?'

'And why not, Rosamond—why not, whateffer?'

But there was a wicked twinkle in his eyes all the time, only his wife did not see it until she had come quite close to him in her anxiety and distress. Then she fell on his neck and laughed and cried in a breath.

'Ah, darlin', to tease me so! An' me always prayin' for a baby!'

'But I thought it wass one of your own you wass praying for, Rosamond O'Brien?' said John Campbell, with an air of serious surprise. 'And a boy, mirofer, or a bhoy, as you call it in your treadful English. Wass it not a boy you wass particular for hafing, Rosamond O'Brien?'

'Be done wid yer!' laughed Rosamond, wiping her eyes. It's a sin to be joking, an' the poor soul scarce cold in her bed beyant there. An' failin' a bhoy, faith, one may thank the blessed heavens for a girl; and failin' a girl of me own, I may be well glad to get somebody else's.'

'But perhaps it wass not too late for one of your own yet, Rosamond O'Brien,' said her husband, with an expression of affronted dignity.

The smart answer he might have received came to nothing, for Philiberta waxed restless, and Mrs. Campbell could attend page 20to nothing else. Before morning the child was in a high fever, and the good woman nigh distracted with fear of losing her; but the malady was not dangerous nor of long continuance. In a week Philiberta was convalescent, weak and worn, but safe, and the worst of her agony of bereavement mercifully tided over. It is well that the hearts of children are so elastic, that their wounds are so easily healed. The little Phil, as John Campbell soon called her, in losing one parent had found two; and the change was healthy and beneficial in every way. But if there be a world for the souls that leave this, and the dwellers therein be permitted to look back, how was it, I wonder, with that mother-soul that, turning loving eyes earthward, saw the old love give place so soon to the new? Glad, of course, she must have been, since it is the nature of mother-souls to efface themselves, and rejoice in the effacement, if thus come joy and pleasure to those who are dearest; but it would seem somewhat bitter and hard if we were not so well used to the inequality of arrangement and unfairness of dispensation in the great system that is said to be worked by Love.

Rosamond Campbell was satisfied. To her there was in this wondrous event of her life indisputable evidence of the working of a higher power for her individual happiness. Her circle was completed; the void in her heart was filled. Her hands and thoughts were given new occupation, new inspiration; her world was made. To a nature as full of maternal instinct as hers a child was a necessity. She had room and love enough in her heart for a dozen; but in case of a dozen her affection would have expanded into a wide comprehensive shower, like water rained from the rose of a watering-pot bedewing many blossoms; now it must all fall in one condensed stream, as when the rose of the watering-pot is removed.

So the little Phil came in for a concentrated outpouring of love that, economically dispensed, would have served to gladden a well-filled orphan asylum, and the child throve apace in this wholesome atmosphere. The bugbear of Mrs. Campbell's life after this was that one day her treasure would be claimed from her. There had been nothing to prove among the dead mother's page 21few possessions that the father was alive, yet neither was there anything to indicate that he was dead. There was a marriage certificate, testifying to the legal union of one Philip Tempest with one Miriam Yewdall; and a registration paper of the birth of Philiberta, their child, dated some ten months later; and that was all. The little one herself knew nothing of her father, and there were no letters, no portraits, no souvenirs—nothing that could be used to trace and discover either friends or enemies, yet Mrs. Campbell lived for a long time in constant dread of Philiberta's father.

'One of these days he'll come and claim her, John Campbell; see if he doesn't, now.'

And John Campbell would answer that' there wass no such luck. There wass no doubt whatever that the poor man would pe glad to pe rid of the little baggage.'

And yet it had already become the chief pleasure of John Campbell's life to spoil and dance attendance upon, and be tyrannized over by that' little baggage;' to exercise all his ingenuity in contriving things that might afford her an hour's interest or pleasure.

Presently, as Merlyn Creek progressed and grew respectable, there came a schoolmistress thither, and Philiberta was made to profit thereby. She learned to read and write, to do sums and samplers during school hours; in the intervals outside she had her combative instincts healthily developed. She took to reading as a duck takes to water, and to fighting quite as naturally. It is doubtful if she derived most pleasure from perusing the accounts of Dr. Livingstone's adventures in Africa, or from banging her schoolmates—when aggravated—with the handles of her skipping-rope. But when the Robinson children, her special antipathies, were withdrawn in consequence of frequent 'shindies,' then peace and Livingstone reigned together and supreme.

At the age of twelve the girl's fixed ambition was to be a missionary's wile; and she set about training herself in accordance. She studied bread-making; she coaxed an old woman who lived near to teach her the manufacture of candles. She page 22tried to learn needlework, but her restless active nature rebelled against the necessary monotony of application; and so she never advanced beyond herring-boning and feather-stitch, which she practised industriously in coloured wools on the border of an old lubra's dirty blanket, thereby increasing that gentle savage's natural vanity inimitably. Then she tried her hand, or rather her tongue, at preaching to these benighted sons and daughters of young Australia; but found that rum and tobacco were foes too powerfully influential to admit of a chance for religion, so despairingly gave them up to their lies and their drunkenness and all the other vices essential to their happiness.

She got on much better in the Chinese camp up the creek. The amiable heathens there would listen to her by the hour while she dilated at length upon the blessings of Christianity, and explained the dead certainty of hell-fire for all who bow down and worship graven images.

'Welly good,' and 'All litee,' they would observe, with charming applause and encouragement; at every pause in the exhortation. They did not understand a word of it; and at the conclusion of the amateur services would exchange notes with the preacher upon culinary matters, and from them Philiberta learned the proper way to boil rice.

She and the almond-eyed brethren became yet faster friends and allies after a little affair here now to be narrated. Certain ill-conditioned boys had for some time been robbing the Chinamen's sluice-boxes, breaking windows, damaging property, and in all possible ways harassing and tormenting the unfortunate foreigners. Until at last the long-suffering men rebelled and gave chase one day to the offenders, even unto the parental doors. And then one of the parents, a natural brute and bully, came out and punched two Chinese heads. There is not the slightest doubt that he would have gone the entire Celestial round but for the sudden intervention of our heroine, who, witnessing the commencement of the fight from afar off, now rushed in upon the European tooth and nail, like a young infuriated tigress. He desisted at once in sheer astonishment, page 23and then my lady lectured him, fluently, eloquently, and at length. Finally, she led off her battered Chinamen, washed and dressed their wounds, smoothed their dishevelled pigtails, and—cried.

There was a great fuss about the affair; and the wife of the bully aforesaid took it upon herself to call upon Mrs. Campbell and inform that lady that she ought to be ashamed of herself to allow an innocent girl—that is, if she was innocent—to go mixing in with those filthy murdering heathens for hours at a time. Every one knew what it must come to—if indeed it hadn't come to that already. It was only the other day a Chinaman had been hanged for the outrage and murder of a little girl that he had coaxed away from home with sweets and things. (This was quite true—the hanging, I mean—only it was discovered soon after that the Chinese was not the man at all. It was an English swagman to whom the child had fallen a victim. Yet a trifling miscarriage of justice like that really cannot matter, you know, when the sufferer is only a barbarian. Readers of James Payn's most interesting novel 'By Proxy' will, however, see that the barbarian gets level with us now and then.)

The meddlesome neighbour, yon may be sure, gained little satisfaction from her interview with Mrs. Campbell; yet she left that lady much perturbed and sick at heart with the suggested idea that she had failed in her duty to Philiberta. She had given the child too much of her own way; had not watched and curbed her properly; this communion with the Chinamen must be stopped at once. Too late. Philiberta had a will of her own, and had been sadly encouraged in its exercise by both her adoptive parents. And she possessed a gift of logical argument that carried all before it when her mind was set on a thing; so now she staunchly stuck to her yellow-skinned friends, and argued Mrs. Campbell off her feet—metaphorically speaking, of course. And after all Mrs. Campbell could not but feel ashamed of any suspicion that crept into her mind against the Chinamen when she witnessed their utter adoration of Philiberta.

page 24

On the day after the memorable fight they came in a body to John Campbell in his house, and each of them extended a long lean yellow paw with a wash-leather bag of some weight to him.

'And what is this, John?' said he, making of the customary proper name a noun collective, so to speak, as he looked round upon eight saffron faces inquiringly. Eight individual mouths widened out into a straight bland smile, and eight voices said softly at once, 'For littlee missee. All litee.'

The wash-leather bags were full of alluvial gold.

Of course, John Campbell would not accept them, and the disappointed Mongolians departed in sadness and perplexity. Next day one of them started afoot for Ballarat, and Heaven knows where besides; and in ten days returned, trotting along gaily under a bamboo stick and paniers. That evening there was another deputation at John Campbell's house, and there was no possibility of refusing the offerings on this occasion. A carved ivory toy-ship, ditto ditto toy-house; ditto ditto card-cases, cabinets, baskets, and fans; chop-sticks; opium pipes, paper lanterns and kites; tiny idols and nodding mandarins; coloured candles that smelt fearfully, and were about as big as overgrown bodkins; several gross of Chinese crackers; and last, but not least, two Chinese pills, larger than walnuts, and made up with a coating of white wax a quarter of an inch thick, on which were inscribed gilt hieroglyphics of the type familiar to us through tea chests.

Mrs. Campbell cried, and said she never saw such a thing before in her life. Philiberta offered voluble acknowledgments in bad Chinese (she had been picking up the language during her acquaintance), and her friends responded in their best pigeon-English—they too had been acquiring a language John Campbell brought out his best whisky, of which the visitors partook for civility's sake, though it made them all very sick afterwards; and then they departed again—this time elated and happy.

It was not till long afterwards, when the Campbells had been some time located upon their station at Emu Creek, and the Chinamen were dispersed goodness knows whither, that Rosa-page 25mond one day, in dusting a small carved cabinet, pulled it somehow open and found within it those identical eight wash-leather bags full to the top of gold. There was nothing to be done then but put it in the bank in Philiberta's name; and that is what John Campbell did.

But returning: the crackers were let off by the small fry of the township; the other gifts were arranged in ornamentation of the small family mansion; and the friendship with the Chinamen sustained. They never obtruded themselves, these men; yet if Mrs. Campbell had a headache, one of them was promptly on hand with a small quaint phial of some subtle essence that, applied to the place, caused the pains to vanish as if magically. And when John Campbell had that terribly bad hand—blood poisoned by the bite of some venomous insect—he would almost certainly have lost his arm or his life but for that marvellous lotion brought to him by Kum Fo. The pills introduced for ordinary internal ailments, of course no one could take, at least all in one dose; and it required more courage than any member of the house of Campbell possessed to attempt to take them by instalments.

The missionary mania grew upon Philiberta. How she hated to think that she was only a girl! Had she been a boy, her way was clear to the very pinnacle of her desire; as it was, she must be debarred from the delights of battling with wild beasts in wild jungles; from riding a bullock, à la Livingstone, through nearly impenetrable forests, across almost impassable rivers. She must even content herself with being no higher than a missionary's first lieutenant, a missionary's wife; and meantime, where was the missionary?

Philiberta was fifteen now, with no more idea of love and marriage, in their reality, than a child of five; but a husband was to her then as a means to an end, and she made up her mind that she must find him soon.

The nearest approach to the required article that ever came in her way was a revivalist preacher and temperance lecturer—a noble fellow, whose advent in any settlement was ever the beginning of good; whose name is written in bright letters on page 26hundreds of men and women's hearts in Australia. But he was already married; and even if he had not been, was not likely to dream of wedding this child, who had not more than half his years, and was as fickle in her fanaticisms, her pursuits—in all save her attachments—as she was zealous in them while they lasted. But he took kindly notice of her; let his shining great eyes rest often and pleasantly upon her, spoke to her encouragingly, discovered her present craze, and relieved it by starting her with a Sunday-school class; this she, being ultra-fastidious in some things, abandoned after three months because of the dirty noses and bad smells. The great man went on his way, shutting up the public-houses in every township he entered, doing much good through judicious workings upon the emotions of humanity which good, if evanescent as far as actual religion and total abstinence went, yet lasted long enough to show many a wise man that he had been a fool, and to help him back into the paths of temperance and common-sense.

In the religious circle this preacher established at Merlyn Creek the enthusiasm continued for a considerable time after he was departed; but it was a thunderous and brimstony enthusiasm. The preacher's teachings had been all of love; Divine, omnipotent, omnipresent love; the love whereof it is written, that 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.' But the tenets of the preacher's followers were that 'The Lord our God is a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon their children;' and again, that 'Many are called, but few are chosen,' and that in every way God is a Being to be feared. And into this fold Philiberta entered, ardent, enthusiastic, passionate, and desiring only martyrdom that she might reveal her zeal and the might of her faith. Fasting, praying, and in all possible ways crucifying the flesh; wearing her heart out with the perplexities and contradictions of the many theological books she got hold of; fretting herself into a morbid certainty that of the few that were chosen she could not be one, and into a condition of health that nigh drove her adoptive parents wild, until at last John Campbell slackened the tension suddenly and wisely by change of scene.

page 27

He resigned his sergeantship, which, for the matter of that, never suited his peculiar temperament, sold out of all his mining speculations profitably, bought a station in the Emu Creek district, and removed thereto with all his belongings. The effect was wonderful and splendid. Philiberta took to botany and geology, and her father had a dray-load of books on both subjects sent up all the way from Melbourne. And in a few months 'atonement,' 'faith and works,' 'eternal condemnation,' 'the worm that dieth not,' and all the other technicalities of religionists, faded completely out of the girl's mind. Before she was a year older Philiberta had become a sort of hybrid evolutionist.