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Chapter Nine

page 164

Chapter Nine

I

Up in her room, Jenny dressed for dinner with hands that shook a little nervously. Life was so exciting now, with Lydia and Maria giggling and looking sly at her, and Mr. Paige turning the music while she sang "Maid of Athens" or "When We Two." No young lady sang other than the songs of Lord Byron—the fascinating wretch—just now, and Jenny wondered if Lord Byron could have been at all like Mr. Paige. Certainly this siege by Mr. Paige was a very different matter from Adam's, and there were elements connected with it that she did not dare think about. Madam was taking more than usual interest in Jenny's clothes. Susan had begun to talk at large about bottom drawers. Jenny felt herself the focus of something deliciously romantic and vague as she ran about the ugly room made up of Susan's discards.

But until these last few nights she had slept well in the great bed with its raking half-tester of faded moreen with clumsy red woollen tassels and the counterpane knitted in bunchy circles of coarse cotton. Cheerfully every morning she had splashed her face with cold water from the cracked crockery on the unpainted wash-stand, and brushed her hair with a plain wooden brush at the dressing-table of two boxes nailed above each other. When Susan made the table a petticoat of spotted net over pink glazed calico Jenny had been dizzy with pride for a whole day, and the pink crochet pincushion Maria had given her "to match" stood on it still. There was nothing else but a red-velvet box with a lid of little shells and a small scarred looking-glass which lost its head and fell over backward every time she looked in it, an occurrence which might have warned her of what she was later to expect from its betters.

An impossible room which gave Madam la grande misère, but Jenny felt it perfection because it was her own at a time when page 165privacy was for only the very few. She sang French catches as she brushed her chestnut curls out and knotted them up with a scarlet ribbon.

"En passant par la Lorraine
Avec mes sabots,
Recontrai trois Capitaines,
Avec mes sabots,"

she sang. And then Aunt Ellen came in quickly, closing the door in a mysterious way, and turned to take her by the shoulders. Her hands were cold on Jenny's warm skin, and she whispered hoarsely:

"I see it coming. Don't deny it, Jenny. Don't deny it."

"Deny what, Aunt Ellen?" asked Jenny, much startled.

"Do not remain Unplucked," said Aunt Ellen, making capitals of it. "Even if there are lions in the way. Jenny, I implore you, defy the lions. Take warning by me and do not remain Unplucked."

"N-no, Aunt Ellen," faltered Jenny. Aunt Ellen had lost her red cheeks and her big shoulders. She was gaunt and yellow. All Jenny's lively vision could not see herself like Aunt Ellen.

"It is leap-year," said Ellen, "but only for one week more. Remember, Jenny, that it is better to leap than to remain un-plucked. But be sure that you leap far enough. Half-way is of no use."

She slipped away; tiptoe and finger to lip like some uneasy ghost. Jenny lit the tallow candle, not yet being allowed the thick yellow sperm ones made in Hobart Town, and peered into the crazy glass. What she saw did not content her. There seemed so little of her but eyes…. No one could really admire me, she thought in sudden terror. I suppose I really shall be like Aunt Ellen some day and never be married or have any darling babies.

But because Susan had thoroughly taught her that all the natural instincts are shameful, Jenny could no longer face the glass. With cheeks burning, she dashed out the candle and went skimming like a white ghost along to the nursery where her baby brother was wakened by soft lips wandering over his bare limbs, a soft voice cooing love-words. The baby cooed back, and old page 166Nurse, like a withered apple sprouting cap frills, came scolding

"Did 'ee rouse 'ee, my lovey? … A main naughty girl you are, then, Miss Jenny, as ought to know better."

Jenny went soberly downstairs, avoiding Mr. Paige on the veranda, and slipping out to join Mab, who was smoking a pipe on the balustrade above the river. Mab put an arm round her, but he did not speak. He did not know how to reach Jenny now. Julia and the dark shadow of passion stood between while his dear maid in her young brightness was being drawn away to this tailor's dummy brought home by Oliver, who never had any conscience.

Perhaps Mab was unfair to Mr. Paige, who, if he knew himself to be over-virtuous, over-rigid in his desires, at least hoped that marriage would better that. He was anxiously conscious of lacking a Temperament which, he again hoped, marriage might create. All about him he saw men damning themselves and the dear women for love—such as lived sober as the heads of families he did not trouble to see—and he would have liked to court some denied fair, but had not the courage. He longed to cut a figure and would have liked it to be dashing; but finding nothing in himself that answered to that demand, he had decided to be intellectual, which, if more troublesome, was certainly less dangerous. Yet it was a real grief to him that he preferred rat-hunts to hunting his own horses, and always had to get his stimulation from outside.

This young colony, keen and quarrelsome, with pioneer stock, stimulated him. So did the red-shirted blaspheming bullockies, and the stockmen roping steers for the branding, with that deep-chested big Mab Comyn swinging on the rope and being dragged through the dust like some triumphal chariot. As for little Miss Jenny, she stimulated Mr. Paige so effectively that Maria and Lydia had him in their diaries nearly every night.

Maria, very pensive with her hair down, thought of Humphrey, but wrote principally of Mr. Paige, with a great many italics:

Never did I see any one so truly elegant as V.P. His rings and waistcoats are a heavenly dream and in the Pasterole on Xmas night he and Mr. Oliver excelled themselves, although O.C. is better in page 167the pigeonwing. It is clear that V.P. is devoted to Jenny and he squeezed her hand in Sir Roger with a look that spoke Volumes. Volumes!!!! Humph v. forward and k. me under mistletoe which I know I shd. not have allowed.

Sharp-nosed Lydia Quorn had another angle:

I long to play a trick on V.P. To quiz and hurt him and discover if the idle [after several re-writings it remained thus] has possible feet of clay. I want to make him Suffer. Oh, me! Wretch that I am when I know that if he looked at me twice I'd fall at his feet. Yes, if they were tin. Is there any subjeck on which he cannot discourse with brilliance? I do not know it. He makes every other man seem an ignorant worm, and if I can find Uripydees in the Tingvally Library I will read him all night long and win from Jenny at the Post. N.B. If Jenny has uripidees I shall make her lend it to me.

Then below, very agitated:

His buckskin breeches! Oh, my heart

It was really an excellent Christmas, even although Mr. Merrick, in addition to his brown trousers, had pinned back the tails of his blue surtout to serve as a dress-coat, thereby sending Oliver into the male equivalent for hysterics; and Mr. Paige's conversation (much stimulated by first-class port and sherry) became so very erudite and dull that even Madam was hypnotized into thinking him clever; and the Captain, gallantly handing Mrs. Merrick through a quadrille, had the misfortune to lose his footing among her trailing shawls and jerk them all from her. She shrieked as though she had not a stout black-satin gown and four flannel petticoats below. She stood shrieking while the Captain heaped her with apologies and shawls and her daughters ran to enswathe her. But she would not continue the quadrille.

"Something always happens to me in this horrible place," she cried. "Bush-rangers or warming-pans, and worse. But thank Heaven I try to continue modest, in spite of captains."

The Captain, too upset to answer, walked away to Oliver. "Nothing could be more painful to me than a scene like this, my dear boy. Any suggestion of lack of gallantry toward a lady——"

page 168

"Where's the lady?" asked Oliver, dryly. He was suffering from a surfeit of William, whom he had tentatively approached that afternoon with respect to Mr. Paige and Jenny. "I shall allow no engagement for at least a year," announced William, his hands beneath his coat-tails, and Oliver retorted, "Well, don't refuse him before he asks, will you?" and went off whistling "Nix My Dolly," a popular low song which might have upset William considerably if he had recognized it.

If Madam at this period did not actively encourage Mr. Paige, her salon did; and Oliver skilfully made the most of its beautiful austerity of Louis Quinze chairs standing far apart on a hardwood floor, its tall mirrors dimly gilt, and Watteaus on pale walls, the Isabey miniatures of Madam's father (an imperious wigged aristocrat with orders on his scarlet coat) and mother, the silken curtain blowing wide to a hot night which now held no fear of bush-rangers.

An exquisite atmosphere, through which slipped Jenny like a nymph that smelled of lavender and fresh water and other pure bright things, with an elegantly embroidered Mr. Paige in chaste pursuit.

III

Christmas at Clent was a great stimulation to Mr. Paige. There were no prayers in the morning, because presently there would be church. But there was an extraordinary amount of noise and laughter, of sunshine and gay summer dresses and sweet airs; of Madam and the Captain distributing presents in the hall to a neat curtsying line of servants; of children everywhere with shining faces and loaded arms. And to Jenny there seemed an extraordinary amount of Mr. Paige, sentimental in the epigrams of Meleager and Agathias, and unaccountably arch over telling her how Dr. Johnson "beat the world with pedagogic rods." And then there was something about the Duchess of Bedford, who, it appeared, having accomplished her world's work by the invention of afternoon tea, had lately gone to her reward.

"I observe that in the colony you still adhere to the earlier page 169wine and cakes," drawled Mr. Paige, archer than ever. "Strange. Strange. A great loss to the histrionic world, the duchess. Possibly as much so as the lamented Count d'Orsay, who invented my neck-cloth. A mystic, I grant you. A pure mystic."

Bewildered and yet flattered, Jenny escaped to the joviality of the kitchen, where the Bodges twins, Christmas Eve and Goldish-Bronze—freckled and wide-mouthed and wonderful in garments made from Madam's old boudoir curtains and trimmed from Susan's piece-bag—rushed about, helping cook. A Homeric place, the kitchen, where a flagged floor was already wearing into the ridges of age, a smoked ceiling with hams and herb bunches hanging like bats already taking on dark mystery. There was a great colonial oven with blazing fires above and below, a long dresser full of crockery and earthenware and copper, two longer tables scrubbed shining white with sand. Cook, whose son, Tom Jerrold, now ran his own race-horses in Melbourne, was a slow mountain of a woman in wide frilled cap and unthinkable spread of apron. She had the hand of a fairy with pasties and jellied brawns and chicken pies all golden with round of egg, and Jenny peeped at the covered mounds of tarts greedily.

"Cookie, I am so hungry. It's nearly an hour since breakfast."

"There's a-many young ladies," said Cook, profoundly, "as 'as lost the love of a young genelmun by comin' the 'ungry hover 'im. They're main sentimental, is young genelmun, an' passions to think of young ladies as hangels without stummicks. Don't you heat no dinner in the 'ouse to-night, Miss Genevieve, dear. Jest you slip hout to old Cookie when as you wants feedin'. It's wiser."

"But … but …" began Jenny, burning up with her blushes. And then some one knocked at the outer door, flinging a crooked shadow.

"Beggars," said Cook, wrestling with the boning of a turkey. "Feed 'em, Golly."

Beggars were plentiful as frogs in a bog, but none left Cent empty-handed. Jenny, glad to efface herself, cut great lumps of yellow cheese, helped Goldish-Bronze draw two loaves from the brick oven beside the chimney, filled a cider bottle with milk for the shaggy half-naked children. The crooked woman begged a page 170"nugget," which was old convict slang for tobacco long before convicts went to the Australian gold-fields and applied it there to the lumps of gold. Another woman came through the courtyard later, but she did not beg. She stood in the door with blue eyes grown dim with seeking and asked, "Has any one seed my man?"

Jenny knew her for the young woman who had once been at Lovely Corners and had chosen a convict's life in order to follow her husband. She cried pitifully, "Oh, haven't you found him yet?" And the woman went on in a monotonous patter:

"Has any one seed my man? Sam Hall, that's him. Five fut three and spits a lot when he's got a quid. Full-rigged ship on right arm, two ankers an' 'Mary' on chest. Mermaid on right leg. S'posed to have come out on the Thunderer twelve year agone. Any one seed my man?"

Cook came to the door, big and crimson. "Now, you be hoff. I knows all about you, an' no good neither. You never stays no-where, young 'ooman. You're a jade, that's what. Be hoff, now."

"I wants my——"

"Well, we ain't got 'im. Go hask at the perlice." She slammed the door. "Since she's time-expired she's a reg'lar noosance…. More wood, Chrissy."

Jenny stood still. The woman had worn men's boots padded with straw which stuck through the uppers. Her clothing was principally a coachman's long caped coat and a dirty neckerchief called a "susy." Her battered bonnet had often been slept in. The very dregs of womanhood and tragedy she was. Jenny thought of her going on forever: on bare dusty roads under the blinding sun; down steep hill tracks with gaunt bush ghostly each side; begging a drink of billy-tea at some splitter's lonely shanty; putting her piteous question where men gathered round the hitching-post outside some bush hotel. Because she could not find her man, old Mary could never stop going on. Because Aunt Ellen could not find a man, she might not leave that grim dark house at Lovely Corners. How terrible it was, Jenny thought, that a man should have to mean so much to a woman! It seemed that Mamma was right when she said girls were very foolish if they had the chance and didn't take one. Her mind flew to Mr. Paige and hurried away, alarmed. She ran down the back passage to page 171the pantries, where Susan and Charlotte, very important in big aprons, were getting out the custard glasses. Jenny, in blue frills with a white muslin collar, always felt very frivolous when she saw Charlotte.

"Oh, Mamma," she cried, "we really must help poor Mary. Couldn't we get the governor to have a description of her husband posted at all the police offices or something?"

"Ridiculous," said Susan. New ideas were abominable to her. You never knew where they would get you to. "Ridiculous! Jenny, don't go jumping about like that. You'll have the tray over."

"But Mamma, it's so terrible. Oh, people shouldn't be allowed to be so unhappy!"

"How you do grumble!" said Charlotte. "Always something."

"Yes." Susan remembered that Jenny was always fussing about something. Celeste with a cold or Golly with toothache or somebody's sick baby. "Yes, Jenny, dear Lottie is quite right. I can't see what you've got to grumble about. I'm sure you have everything you want."

"But Mamma! That's just it. I have, and so I can't bear to think——"

"It's not your duty to think." Susan knew herself on safe ground here, only having to repeat William. "Let your betters think, and do as you're told. That's all God asks of you, Jenny."

This was vieux jeu. William had first advanced this theory to an eight-year-old Jenny, who had found her heart hotly postulating that God must be a fool. True, she had been instantly seized with the conviction that she had sinned the Unforgivable Sin of which Grandma Merrick talked so much, and had run straight up to the attic where she considered three desperate methods of suicide among the tarantulas. But it had all come to nothing, as so many of her plans did, although for months she had walked beneath that shadow. Now, even more dreadful because more personal, she found herself shelving that suspicion, for one regarding her parents…. No, no, Jenny, she thought, you must not think that of Mamma.

"Grumbling! After that beadwork necklace I made you, too," page 172said Charlotte, virtuously. Jenny walked off. She wished she could think Lottie a fool, but she wasn't. She was exactly like a large pale glassy gooseberry, with prickles.

III

Every one, Jenny had read, carries with him a certain moral atmosphere, but had there ever been any one more moral than Mr. Paige? She felt not, somehow, driving to the Trienna New Year's Races with Grandma and Mamma and her first grown-up parasol with an ivory handle and pink silk fringes. It seemed to her that Grandpa oughtn't to take him there in the gig where he would see (Jenny felt) sights that would distress him. For herself there was a rough roistering exhilaration about it all that made her want to swagger about, chewing straws with the smocked farmers, tilt her hat, and cry, "Make yer bets, genmen," like Warrego Jack, smack her leg with a riding-whip (standing straddled to discuss a horse's points) like Uncle Mab, like Adam and Brevis and all the other lucky ones who knew what being a man meant. Mr. Paige, she suspected, had other views.

Oh, a joy, a good rich joy this, like hot roast beef and Yorkshire pudding! Even through the carriage window she saw the red bullock-drays come lurching up, come creaking with solid wheels as they had creaked out of the bush hills before the magpies began whistling or mist was gone from the gullies. And the frowsy eager women in them, the shirted men with wide straw hats, the brown, untidy children. And here, if she leaned forward, were bushmen in furry hats of kangaroo-skin; harvesters, their trousers tied with string at the knees; the young Fremps perspiring in heavy broadcloth; old beggars in tatters, a faded scarlet coat with the regiment buttons gone. And women: how happy they looked, the women wandering about instead of sitting prim by Grandma in a carriage!

A very representative meeting, men thought, with plenty of four-in-hands, tandems, singles, and riding-horses. Plenty of the fine upstanding country racers in the long sheds under the gum trees. Plenty of food and drink: chicken and sherry for the quality; slabs of bread and pale cheese for the labourers, and page 173black bottles filled at the three Trienna taverns. There was no gate yet, no restrictions, Oliver explained to Mr. Paige. The grand stand was a hill-slope cleared of timber. On that course marked only with little red flags some of the keenest horsemen in the world would presently ride their well-bred hunters and racers over those big fences, for the love of it, winning from one another the handsome prizes they had put up. And because most women rode like Amazons, Oliver explained to a Mr. Paige keeping well away from the horses' heels, the fair were less inclined to scream when a man went down than to blame him for poor horsemanship.

That big black hunter of Adam Sorley's, said Oliver, was bred by Cox of Melbourne, and Kay had a mare out of Beltane by Lamplighter, one of the colony's greatest sires. The Sorleys could pay what they chose for their horse-flesh, said Oliver, dryly, helping Mab to strip Vanity. The old satin-skinned beauty with her wise lean head and her fired hocks was being asked to do far too much in these days. But Mab said he must make money somehow and there was never any to spare at Clent. Mab, Oliver guessed, would never beg earrings from Madam, any more than he would resign his mad dream of Julia Berry. "I resign," Oliver thought he could hear him saying, stepping out with his fierce eyes, his young mouth like Tannhäuser from the Courts of Love. But he wouldn't. They were tenacious, the Comyns. More fools they.

Kay and Adam were noisy in the saddling paddock among the other young bucks. Already in the hot sun they had been drinking. Oliver moved Mr. Paige softly among the gentry with puggarees to their white top-hats, with field-glasses and loose pale trousers; among the little cockatoo-farmers who, probably, were once indentured to the big settlers; among the sons of these—the colonial-born, with their leaner, harder look, more brown than red, more long-limbed than stocky. The bare hill blossomed now with glinting silks and nodding plumes and the blowing fringes of gay parasols, and just as Henry Sorley rode down to start the first race on his old white cob Mr. Paige suggested that they should go up and see the ladies.

"Oh, certainly, if you like," said Oliver, inwardly cursing.

page 174

Julia called Mab up, to wish him luck. She was wearing his colours, and he frowned a little. "I wish you'd be more careful," he said, and then she was angry, as she so often was now. Never any tears now.

"I give what I can, but it seems I can't please you," she said, walking off with a shrug.

What she could? Was a crimson parasol with a black tassel all she could give after these wasted years? Mab wondered, flying the first low hurdle and steadying away for the brook. Beside him Bob Beverley, two years his junior and already the jovial father of a family, was bringing up brown Werribee, and ahead was Brevis Keyes, slim and elastic as a faun. The man of substance and the youngster. And himself, Mab Comyn, in between; still nothing; still getting nowhere.

Over, by Jove, and a near shave, too. Adam was pounding up behind…. Over again, with a stagger from good old Vanity and Brevis dropping back against his knee. A stone wall now … a brush-and-rail with the sun right in the eyes and a regular rattle of striking hoofs. Lord, but Adam was hitting up the pace! At the ditch he and Kay took charge and some one went down. These boys … racing already. Foam from a reefing bit flew back in his face, and Vanity was fencing like the dainty veteran she was, and good old Bob somersaulted into the water-jump.

Mab saluted with his whip and he swept over. If only one could ride forever! Ride away from troubles and hopes! Here came Brevis like a slung stone, by George! Brevis had it! Brevis! Vanity was done, and Mab wouldn't gruel the old darling. Just another chance chucked into limbo after so many others. But the boys were flogging up the straight: these slick and clever children of the dragon's blood springing up everywhere. But Brevis had it! Brevis …

Faces with open mouths reeled past. And the tall box where Conrad Beverley in a white panama with a puggaree stood shining like the sun in judgment, and the little red flags. But Brevis had it, and Vanity was lame and Julia up on the hill in Madam's coach. You ask me if I am going to the masquerade. I am at it, said some one once. Mab felt just like that, walking off to rub Vanity down and rug her.

page 175

IV

"There's a kind of vulgar lust in us all," said Bevis, strolling with Humphrey and Sigurd, "which can be satisfied only by this sort of thing."

He snuffed up the good homely smells of dried grass and heated horses, of stale spirits and meat sandwiches and bullocks and sweating men crowding about the punters who shouted their wares from gigs and tip-drays. He stopped to listen to the plump goodwives in stuff shortgowns and huge bonnets who in loud voices were discussing intimate matters; and had a word for Chrissy and Golly on the arms of Alsode Fremp, who was feeding them with liquorice.

"In this way one can study humanity without having to suffer its limitations," he said. But Humphrey, rubbing up his hot face with hotter hands, wouldn't agree to that.

"You can't study humanity unless you suffer with it. What do you really know about all that lot, for instance?"

They halted under a gum tree creamy-white with blossoms, to look back at the wagon where Henny and her blowsy female companions were camped with a handful of government men whose masters had allowed them by special favour to come to a public meeting. The two military police, like Shem and Ham in scarlet tunics, white trousers, and flat straw hats, walked by the wagon several times with sharp glances; but the men lay lazy in the sun, chewing nuggets of the best Virginia begged from the gentry, and the women sat up decently against the wagon wheels, drinking very politely in their turn from black bottles.

"You could study Henny all day and you'd know nothing of her," said Humphrey. He looked a little awed. "My Heaven! With convicts I always think what a whole ghastly world they know that we couldn't even dream of in nightmares."

To Henny the world was no nightmare now. She had come through it. She had been pretty at a time when even plain women were much sought after in the colony, and by the time that power had left her she had gained others. In this underground world she stood for infinitely more than the police could find out, whatever they guessed, and there were caves back in the page 176hills behind her hut that were full of unsuspected treasure yet. Collins had a heap of booty there when he made a mistake in sticking up Sylvester and ran his neck into the noose which finished most of them. She could have done a lot for that harnsome young painter who wanted to rouse the country. He could a'done it at that time, with her behind him. For the fiftieth time she asked: "Don't any one know what happened that theer Snow?"

But none knew nor cared. He had made no splash as Rocky Wheelan had, before they turned him off. And bush-ranging was not worth it now, they told Henny, with conditions improving all the time. Better run straight and get your ticket, be a free man.

"No guts left in the lot on yer," said Henny. "Rocky were the larst wi' guts. He did it proper. Ah, an' swung proper fur it, too."

A little man in a red nightcap gained some attention through having ridden for a while with Rocky, that Nero who slew old and young for the joy of it, and had been hanged at Hobart Town the year before. "Seen 'em hang seven blarsted blokes on the ole gallers, pokin' above the Pen," declared Barcelona Mike. "A tight fit fur seven, but I've heard as it were main comftubble fur six."

They laughed. Herein lay their native jests. A groom in corduroys and highlows turned his straw, saying: "They 'ung Rocky a bit forrarder back to the jail, but Hi seen 'im kickin' agin the sky. Hi were there."

"D'ye mind the auld gallows on New Town Hill?" asked a gentle Scotch shepherd. "It wadna be used in oor time, but when we were camped near by the wee chainies wud clank the nicht lang, and niver a stir o' wind."

A burly Northcountryman told a yarn in the unprintable prison slang. He reached a thick arm and drew his wife near, a scrap of a creature in a drab gown and big black stuff bonnet. "Aw reet, Betsy lass…. I been dustin' o' her jacket for she," he explained to the company. "But I got 'ee some black 'ile from the chimist for't. Eh, domned but I did."

Betsy wriggled her beaten back against him and grinned. And the young groom, moved thereby to his own amour, sought page 177Molly Hempson's hand and held it. There was a pause with the hot peace welling about them.

"Better'n the hulks, lass," murmured the Northcountryman.

"Yon's a pratty maid," said one, jerking a thumb as Jenny went by with Mab and Humphrey. Henny grunted. Then grinned. "Her name ain't Julia, though," she said. Had that wild Muster Mab ever shown Lady Berry the name Snow pricked on his breast, she wondered wickedly as she rose up her gaunt height and straightened her crazy bonnet. "Mebbe I'll go round and tell a fortune or two." She twitched her features into a cozening smile. "Cross me hand wiv silver, pretty genelmun, an' I'll tell ye …"

The men laughed. Molly said as she ambled off: "The old mare'll do the blarstedest things to fill her nose-bag…. Dave, I'll guv yer one on the nob if yer do that again."

V

Madam, lunching with dignity behind glass doors in the coach, made room for Jenny when Mab brought her.

"God, what sights!" she cried. "Never before have I seen so many silk purses made of sows' ears. Dairy-and scullery-maids gold-encrusted as the high priests of Solomon's Temple, and ploughmen more jewelled than the Queen of Sheba. Alas, for poor humanity! The less there is below, the more, apparently, we put on the surface."

"But it's magnificent to have brought all that from the goldfields," said Oliver. "I have nothing to wear on the surface except my skin."

"Obviously," agreed Madam, briefly. More than the emerald earrings had gone to Oliver, and now she was calling a halt. "Remember that already I have given you a dot like a daughter, my son," she had told him. "With it you must marry good-luck … or even laborious days."

Oliver had been so gracious, so charming that she had to turn him out in a hurry or she would have forgiven him and begged him to rape where he would. With an asset like that, what need page 178had he of her? And now he would marry this jejune Paige to Jenny and select the best rooms in their mansion for himself. She doffed her chapeau in admiration to Oliver, but she took off her coat at the same time. Paige did not passion her, but he had not the low vices of so many men, and assuredly he was dignified and would give the child a position. But not until Jenny had made her curtsy to the governor did Madam intend to make her choice.

Julia came, languid and coldly handsome. She had had luncheon, thank you, but the Sorley coach was so full of Henry's children; one never remembered how many nor knew what they were all for. And was Madam really taking Jenny down for the ball in that shocking old Government House? Although certainly the ballroom was improved.

Mr. Paige leaned with bared head through Jenny's window. "Fair charmer, I may have the first valse?" he murmured.

"I … I can't say."

"You … surely you will not break hearts by refusing to gladden us with round dances?"

"I … I don't know."

She could have bitten herself for her sudden shyness. Apparently he liked it.

"Aw … you're behavin' like the sex. 'Pon honour, I prefer a woman to behave like her sex," vowed Mr. Paige. And Jenny, who had never been called a woman before, was so intoxicated that she sat up straight, flung back her veil to cast a careless glance at Lydia Quorn walking by with the Beverleys, and promised Mr. Paige the first dance, "if Grandma allows …"

"Again the sun shines," said Mr. Paige, who really was more than usually conscious of life and colour when with Jenny. That vitality which is the very genius of living shone in her small body to stir his sluggish blood. He had a sudden insane longing to frolic, woo her with pigeonwings and whistles as maids were wooed on Hampstead Heath, quip and pun as airily as Oliver was doing. But he could only transfix her with his quizzing-glass and tell her that Plato's proper name was Aristocles. "Plato means Broady. I suppose he was fat," simpered Mr. Paige, archly. And although Jenny listened in all politeness, he felt page 179dismally that his persiflage lacked dash. Assuredly he must marry Jenny and cultivate Oliver. And then … He saw himself lifted upon their wings, witching the world.

"Here's a fortune-teller," said Oliver. "Come, my good woman. Are fortunes hot or cold to-day?"

"Hot for you, young sir," said Henny, ogling. "Cold for the yaller-haired genelmun wherever he goes."

"Aw, no! I protest!" cried Mr. Paige. But Julia (always superstitious) was holding out a delicate palm and Henny began her patter. What she knew of the Berry household along underground ways would have staggered Julia.

"Friends. Everywhere you has friends, m'Lady." Then Oliver cried: "In both places? Is she like the dying duchess who didn't care a fig where she went, for she had so many friends in both places?"

"Noll, you are too bad," said Julia, and Henny gabbled: "I see blood. I see a harnsome young genelmun wi' breast bared and the little needles a-workin'. They're writin' 'Julia' on his heart."

Oliver had never cause to quarrel with his wits. Mab! That was just what Mab would do, the lunatic. And at Henny's of all places. Madam was looking keen, Julia scared. He burlesqued it boldly. "Good Heavens! How did the old hag guess! But, forgive me, it was never intended for your name, Lady Berry. The fellow started to write me 'Jubilate' and misspelled it."

Julia's smile was too wan to be appreciative. "I think I'm cold and the woman stupid. I shall walk on the hill."

"Many are cold, but few frozen," agreed Oliver, gaily. He helped her out and stepped after Henny. "Watch your tongue, woman," he said sternly. "Even the time-expired may find their way to the House of Correction."

He went down to the saddling paddock, considering. Was this escapade of late date and leading sharply up to something more? There were not wanting people who hinted at something more. Undoubtedly Julia knew of the tattooing. Had probably seen it. Oliver, with a tolerant knowledge of human frailty, was assured that Julia had seen it. And now, what to do? Any scandal in the family would scare off that prig Paige quicker than page 180anything. Feeling himself on the dangerous edge of things, he sought Mr. Paige, who inquired languidly: "Aw, shall we go and make our bets? I vow I would love to make a bet."

An extraordinarily unsullied Paige, this, for Jenny to write her virgin experiences upon. She ought to be grateful to Oliver.

VI

Jenny, not inquiring of herself how she felt, was yet conscious that life was stranger and more exciting than ever she had dreamed. She believed that she walked on air, and yet she was conscious of pitfalls. She heard her voice speak, but was not sure what it said. She felt neglected when Mr. Paige went away, and wished him away when he came. She felt … after the manner of a young female whose friends are trying to persuade her that she is in love, this seventeen-year-old Jenny straight from the rigid rule of the schoolroom of the 'fifties did not in the least know how she felt.

It was the Romantic Age; an age drenched in simple sentiment, and scattered with nosegays, little silk aprons, sentimental verses, blushes, and perfumed memories. An age when young ladies sang to vamping accompaniments, "Hast sorrow thy young days shaded?" and men were not ashamed to brush away a tear. The Captain invariably did when Jenny sang that, and Oliver's mellow tenor following with "She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps," was certain to breach floodgates in other directions.

A courteous, simple age, too soon to be succeeded by the antimacassars and antiseptic gentility of the 'seventies, and no more artificial than every age in its turn. For that would poor humanity do if it dared fling off its motley, be that motley fans and drooping curls or cocktails and cigarettes?