Sisters. Ada Cambridge

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СКАЧАТЬ I could ride your horse home for you if they'll lend me a saddle; yours could be put in the buggy—"

      Even as he spoke, Deb came round the corner from somewhere, with swift steps and a brilliant complexion, Dalzell hurrying after her.

      "Mr. Carey," she called, while the sailor was still yards away from her, "Molly and I are going to change skirts. I am tired with my ride this morning, and am going to drive home. Will you trust your neck to me?"

      Would he not, indeed? He was but a pawn in the game, but what did that matter? Eighteen miles absolutely alone with her! And possibly half of them in the dark! No saddle horse in the world could have tempted him now. He could hardly speak his gratitude and joy.

      "Delighted, Miss Deborah!—delighted!—delighted!"

      But Dalzell, black as thunder, swung aside, muttering in his teeth.

      "Oh, oh!" Francie's loud whisper followed. "DID you hear what he said? He said 'damn'. That's because—"

      "You cut along," Jim's drawl broke in, "and get ready if you want to ride."

      Mr. Thornycroft tucked Deb into the pony-carriage with the solicitude of a mother fixing up a young baby going out with its nurse. He insisted that she should wear a shawl over her linen jacket, and brought forth an armful of softest WOOL, Indian wove.

      "Where did you get this?" she asked, fondling it, for she loved fine fabrics.

      "Never mind," said he. "Put it on."

      "I am suspicious of these shawls and fallals that Bundaboo seems full of. Who is the hidden lady?"

      He only smiled at her.

      "Ah, godpapa, you spoil me!"

      She drew the wrap about her, and he assisted to adjust it, with gentle skill. Then he turned abruptly to Carey, as to a groom.

      "See that she doesn't throw that off. It will be chilly presently. No, she'd better drive—she knows the road. But take care of her. Good-night."

      "Isn't he an old dear?" said Deb to Carey, as they drove off. "He has been a second father to me ever since I was a child."

      She did not hurry the ponies, being anxious not to appear to be tearing after her offended swain.

      "The evening is the pleasantest time to be out, this weather," she said, lolling back in her seat. "And I'm sure I don't want to look at dinner after such a lunch as I have eaten. I don't know how you feel."

      "I feel the same," he assured her, with truth.

      So, for her own purposes, she made their drive half as long again as it need have been. And was so friendly, so free, so intimate!—leading that poor innocent to the belief that his great rival was already virtually out of his way. He was an unsophisticated sailor-lad, who, with that rival's help, had reached a certain stage and crisis—another one—of his man's life; and—let us be honest in our diagnosis—the bubbles of Mr. Thornycroft's fine champagne still ran in his blood and brightened his brain, lifting him above the prosaic ground-level where a craven timidity would have smothered him. Not touching the balance of his wits, be it understood; just heartening him—no more.

      Twice and thrice she branched off from the road to show him something that could well have waited for another day. She was imprudent enough to introduce him to so sentimental a spot as the family cemetery—established at a time when there were only Dalzells and Pennycuicks to feed it. "Their shepherds were killed by the blacks," said Deb, as she pushed the ponies up to the wall, and he rose in the carriage to look over the top, "and they buried them here, marking the place with a pile of stones. There were other deaths, and they enclosed the piece of land. Then a brother of Mr. Dalzell's, and a girl; and Mr. Dalzell himself wished to be put here, beside his brother. Not his wife, she wouldn't; she lies in the Melbourne cemetery. Then some of our babies, then mother. She was the last. I don't suppose there will be any more now. The State will insist on taking charge of us."

      Real English churchyard elms crowded about the wall and blightingly overshadowed the lonely group of graves. English ivy, instead of neatly clothing the wall, as it had been meant to do, straggled wildly over the part of the enclosure which had once been a garden around them. Out of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up, and ragged things that had gone to seed. The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones—several of them ornate and costly—stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular.

      "It ought not to look like this," Deb apologised for it. "It ought to have been seen to. We used to come often, and bring water from the dam. But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn't think—or care. Poor dead people! How out of it they are! And we shall be the same some day—neglected and abandoned, just like this."

      "DON'T!" muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering. The ghost of his sweet Lily seemed to reproach him with Deb's voice. But the ghost-woman fifteen months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if one can look at the thing dispassionately and with an unbiased mind.

      "Let us go and see the dam," Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies' heads. "You haven't seen our big dam, have you? Everybody that comes to Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why. 'Pennycuick's Folly' some people call it, because he spent so much money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen'orth of paint. He likes to do things thoroughly. So do I."

      And soon they halted on the embankment of a mile-wide sheet of water, shining like a mirror in a setting of soft-bosomed hills, their dun day colour changed to a heavenly rose-purple under the poetic evening sky.

      "Why, it is a lake," said Guthrie Carey. "You could hold regattas on it." "We do, now and then, with our little boats. We have three over there"—pointing with her whip to a white shed on the farther shore. "And swimming matches. We used sometimes, when we were younger, to come down on hot nights and be mermaids. Once we moored ourselves out in the middle, away from the mosquitoes, and slept in the bottom of the boat, under the stars."

      "How charming!"

      "It was holiday time, and our parents were away. We took cushions and things, and it was great fun; but Keziah reported us, and we were never allowed to do it again."

      They sat in the pony-carriage on the dam embankment, gazing silently. A flock of wildfowl had been scared away by their approach, and now not a wing, not an eye was near. At a great distance curlews wailed, only to make the stillness and solitude more exquisite, more profound. The purple of the hills grew deeper and softer, the lake a mere pulseless shimmer through the twilight haze. And then, last touch of magic, the moon swam up—the same moon that had transfigured Five Creeks garden and Alice Urquhart last night.

      He poured out his soul to Deborah Pennycuick.

      First, it was only the story of the baby—the story he had told Alice, with some omissions and additions. He took advantage of the opportunity to ask Deb's invaluable advice.

      Deb, well aware of the influence of a summer night and certain accessories, tried her best to be practical. She asked straight questions about the baby.

      "Where have you got him? Where does this friend live who has been recommended to you?"

      "In Sandridge—all at Sandridge—"

      "That СКАЧАТЬ