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Pageant

II

II

With Mab there were never any half-measures. Four years ago he had pinched Julia's trousered legs. Now, leading her to the barouche when service was over, he found himself all but dumb before this inscrutable mystery, this heavenly glory which was Julia.

"You'll come over early?" he stammered. "I'll come for you." Sorleys and Merricks, Beverleys and Keyes would take their Christmas dinner at Clent, but Mab could not wait until then. Five hours! A lifetime! An eternity!" You will come over earlier?" he implored.

Julia shook blond ringlets over her face. She managed her crinoline delicately, stepping in. "Sometimes," she murmured,page 53not looking round, "I take a book over to the old hut on a hot afternoon."

Mab flung himself on his chestnut mare and rode home across-country. Nothing but those flying leaps through the hot clear air could ease his charged heart. "Burn your incense," he murmured, trying to remember the only possible words to fit this tremendous moment, "burn your incense at that shrine." And so he came home, unaware that just then the shrine was making demure eyes at Captain Berry.

The two wattle-and-daub huts by the boundary fence where Comyns and Sorleys had first lived were frankly disreputable now, pagan temples where birds nested and little animals brought forth their young much as Madam and Louisa Sorley had done. And it was Julia who had been born there. And it was Mab. This appeared to Mab as the most extraordinary coincidence that had ever happened in the world. It held colossal imports, colossal significations. Under some bright heaven this thing had been planned by beneficent gods, the enchantment laid.

"We were meant for each other," he said, almost helplessly. "We must have been, even before we were born." Then he thought of the years he had wasted. Years when he and Henry had gone birds'-nesting, leaving Julia in a flat hat and frilled pantaloons to cry on the ground. He thought of a thousand uncouthnesses toward her, and, doubting if she could ever forgive, went on faster to find her.

Under the weeping-gums by Clent wool-sheds some station hands were sprawling, chewing the hot coarse tobacco they loved, making their endless rootless plans in their prison slang. A few would escape in the next months when nights were clear and warm, be betrayed by some mate for the two-pounds-sterling reward, be thrust back into some choked jail, and bartered out again on the same old round with a black mark against them and probably a worse master. Not worth it, Robert Snow was thinking, lying on his back with thin muscular legs drawn up and those dark brooding eyes Ellen admired staring half shut at motionless scimitar-shaped leaves against pale sky. He was thinking that, and yet he was thinking of Ellen. Once he put his hand in his shirt and brought out, damp from his body, what page 54under the circumstances was surely the strangest letter ever written even by an untaught and love-sick girl.

Mediaeval ideas about women died hard among the colonial gendemen, and Jasper Merrick differed from his neighbours only in that he had not educated his son either. But Robert Snow the convict, lying on his scarred back, winced at the lady's scrawl and her shocking spelling: "I do not think of you the way other people do," Ellen had written. "Do you remember wen I gave you the milke I am at Clent 4 days. I will sea you." It was unsigned, for she had had that much sense, but he had never doubted the origin of the missive, and since this morning he had worked out all its possibilities. Before he had left England he had not neglected opportunities with women. It was one of these which, with a young man's foolhardiness, he had let crash into the gay year of university life so deeply that his people, with that deep-rooted horror of shame which seemed indigenous to some old families, had thankfully helped England's laws to blot him out.

He had cursed God after that. And he had cursed man. But he had not died; not even in the Dumb Cell at Port Arthur, which took away so many men's wits forever. He had held on, even if for years he had not been able to do more. But gradually, with wrenches of agony, life had reasserted its power. Clean hard living and commerce with the patient animals and with nature on the hills had helped. His blood was running full tide again; there was a constant flutter in his spirit like a bird trying to be free, and the ugly underground knowledge filtering through his companions' rough talk kept it fed.

All over the country there was unrest, dissatisfaction, even fear, The settlers were rebelling against the system which, they said, was destroying them. Regiments were being withdrawn to help in New Zealand's wars against the Maoris. There were rumours that they soon would be withdrawn for India. The jails were swarming, and food short, and supervision slackening, and still the convicts poured in. Yet, with the freed men, they already outnumbered the settlers, and if many were just brute beasts without direction there were a few like himself, results of England's misbegotten political system and sharpened, not blunted, by it. And—he felt a queer hot pride in his English blood to think page 55of it—men and women still feasted, still laughed and bred up their families in the big houses, defiant of the ground shaking under their feet.

For months he had had a dream that worked like a powerful spell. If the convicts rose, not sporadically like bush-rangers, but in one great wave. If they rose altogether they could have the country in a week. And England … one never knew what England might do. Perhaps she would withdraw her troops and leave them to it, glad to pull such a thorn out of her flesh. It was possible. All things were possible. As he thought of Ellen's letter, new and staggering possibilities raised eager faces…. She would hide me, he thought. And then: She could get me money. That old hog must be rich…. And then he went on thinking, his denied unslaked body quivering at the thought. Her mouth would be soft… and her shoulders … and her breasts.

Mab forgot the men under the trees as soon as he passed them, walking fast on the well-trod track to Bredon. With the sun white-hot in a white sky the land seemed like a pale virgin not yet stirred into life. Tawny Clent was asleep on its green hill, sheep were asleep on the sparse yellow tussock lying for miles and miles under the scattered grey gum trees. In the distance the ranges floated like mirage. Even the native odours of hot trodden grass, of the gum trees, bush-burning, sheep, seemed vague, unreal. Mab walked through them with hushed steps. He had a sense of listening to something very far off. Laughter, mocking, glad, pitiful … he could not hear.

Sometimes when he had gone to those old huts at night he had felt a goatish jovial spirit in them, as though now they leaned together and talked in contented dualism of things that may not be thought alone. And sometimes he found magic there and stood awed while a veil twitched, the ineffable Beauty shadowed. And sometimes he just sat on one of the broken beds, and smoked, and smelt the possums scrambling on the roof, and threw gum-nuts at the rats.

He pushed open the sagging door of the Comyn hut and went in. There, in the shadowy warmth, sat Julia on the side of an old couch; her sandalled feet prim together, her blue eyes prim on her book. But she looked up when Mab came in, and page 56then she was prim no longer. With a scatter of books, scarfs, gloves, she ran laughing from him through the echoing house. Through empty rooms with dropping plaster and broken windows she went like a glowing lapwing, darting in and out of the light. And now she was silent, and that wordless pursuit quickened in Mab something which never quite died away.

He caught her in the attic with a scolding possum up in the rotting beams and sucked birds' eggs on the floor. He held her hands roughly, and suddenly did not know what to do with this lovely half-averted thing, her slim bosom heaving under the gold ringlets as she strained from him. He said, half bullying, half in prayer, that they had been playmates once. "You haven't forgotten, Julia? You couldn't forget. I … I've never forgotten."

"My goodness!" cried Julia, thinking how Mab was much handsomer than Captain Berry. "Is it a French verb the man would be at?"

"You're so wonderful," cried Mab, despairing. "I didn't know. I had forgotten."

"La! He's forgotten and he's never forgotten. What a weathercock," laughed Julia. Then, suddenly remembering that no young miss of the 'forties should make so free with a man: "Mab, you are behaving unpardonably. Let me go."

Mab was young at it yet. Younger by far than Julia, who was already the toast of Hobart Town at sixteen and therefore as far above him socially as the stars. He obeyed, which was perhaps more than she expected or desired. But it was to go down on his knee in an unspeakable trembling onset of adoration and joy. Silently, as though pledging himself to something, he lifted and kissed her hand.