Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land.

by Rosa Praed.

BOOK I

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF MRS GILDEA

CHAPTER 1

Mrs Gildea had settled early to her morning's work in what she called the veranda-study of her cottage in Leichardt's Town. It was a primitive cottage of the old style, standing in a garden and built on the cliff--the Emu Point side--overlooking the broad Leichardt River.

The veranda, quite twelve feet wide, ran--Australian fashion--along the front of the cottage, except for the two closed-in ends forming, one a bathroom and the other a kind of store closet. Being raised a few feet above the ground, the veranda was enclosed by a wooden railing, and this and the supporting posts were twined with creepers that must have been planted at least thirty years. One of these, a stephanotis, showed ma.s.ses of white bloom, which Joan Gildea casually reflected would have fetched a pretty sum in Covent Garden, and, joining in with a fine-growing asparagus fern, formed an arch over the entrance steps.

The end of the veranda, where Mrs Gildea had established herself with her type-writer and paraphernalia of literary work, was screened by a thick-stemmed grape-vine, which made a dapple of shadow and sunshine upon the boarded floor. Some bunches of late grapes--it was the very beginning of March--hung upon the vine, and, at the other end of the veranda, grew a pa.s.sion creeper, its great purple fruit looking like huge plums amidst its vivid green leaves.

The roof of the veranda was low, with projecting eaves, below which a bunch of yellowing bananas hung to ripen. In fact, the veranda and garden beyond would have been paradise to a fruitarian. Against the wall of the store-room, stood a large tin dish piled with melons, pine-apples and miscellaneous garden produce, while, between the veranda posts, could be seen a guava-tree, an elderly fig and a loquat all in full bearing. The garden seemed a tangle of all manner of vegetation--an oleander in bloom, a poinsettia, a yucca, lifting its spike of waxen white blossoms, a narrow flower-border in which the gardenias had become tall shrubs and the scented verbena shrubs almost trees. As for the blend of perfume, it was dreamily intoxicating. Two bamboos, guarding the side entrance gate, made a soft whispering that heightened the dream-sense. The bottom of the garden looked an inchoate ma.s.s of greenery topped by the upper boughs of tall straggling gum trees, growing outside where the ground fell gradually to the river.

From where Mrs Gildea sat, she had a view of almost the whole reach of the river where it circles Emu Point. For, as is known to all who know Leichardt's Town, the river winds in two great loops girdling two low points, so that, in striking a bee-line across the whole town, business and residential, one must cross the river three times. Mrs Gildea could see the plan of the main street in the Middle Point and the roofs of shops and offices. The busy wharves of the Leichardt's Land Steam Navigation Company--familiarly, the L.L.S.N. Co.--lay opposite on her right, while leftward, across the water, she could trace, as far as the grape-vine would allow, the boundary of the Botanical Gardens and get a sight of the white stone and grey slate end of the big Parliamentary Buildings.

The heat-haze over the town and the brilliant sun-sparkles on the river suggested a cruel glare outside the shady veranda and over-grown old garden.

A pleasant study, if a bit distracting from its plenitude of a.s.sociations to Australian-born Joan Gildea, who, on her marriage, had been transplanted into English soil, as care-free as a rose cut from the parent stem, and who now, after nearly twenty years, had returned to the scene of her youth--a widow, a working journalist and shorn of most of her early illusions.

Her typewriter stood on a bamboo table before her. A pile of Australian Hansards for reference sat on a chair at convenient distance. A large table with a green cloth, at her elbow, had at one end a tray with the remains of her breakfast of tea, scones and fruit. The end nearest her was littered with sheaves of ma.n.u.script, newspaper-cuttings, photographs and sepia sketches--obviously for purposes of ill.u.s.tration: gum-bottle, stylographs and the rest, with, also, several note-books held open by bananas, recently plucked from the ripening bunch, to serve as paper-weights.

She had meant to be very busy that morning. There was her weekly letter for THE IMPERIALIST to send off by to-morrow's mail, and, moreover, she had to digest the reasons of the eminent journal for returning to her an article that had not met with the editor's approval--the great Gibbs: a potent newspaper-factor in the British policy of the day.

It had been an immense honour when Mr Gibbs had chosen Joan Gildea from amongst his staff for a roving commission to report upon the political, financial, economic and social aspects of Australia, and upon Imperial interests generally, as represented in various sideshows on her route.

But it happened that she was now suffering from a change at the last moment in that route--a subst.i.tution of the commplace P. & O. for the more exciting Canadian Pacific, Mr Gibbs having suddenly decided that Imperialism in Australia demanded his special correspondent's immediate attention.

For this story dates back to the time when Mr Joseph Chamberlain was in office; when Imperialism, Free Trade and Yellow Labour were the catch words of a party, and before the great Australian Commonwealth had become an historical fact.

THE IMPERIALIST's Special Correspondent looked worried. She was wondering whether the English mail expected to-day would bring her troublesome editorial instructions. She examined some of the photographs and drawings with a dissatisfied air. A running inarticulate commentary might have been put into words like this:

'No good ... I can manage the letterpress all right once I get the hang of things. But when it comes to ill.u.s.trations, I can't make even a gum-tree look as if it was growing .... And Gibbs hates having amateur snapshots to work up .... Hopeless to try for a local artist.... I wonder if Colin McKeith could give me an idea..... Why to goodness didn't Biddy join me! .... If she'd only had the decency to let me know in time WHY she couldn't.... Money, I suppose--or a Man! .... Well, I'll write and tell her never to expect a literary leg-up from me again...'

Mrs Gildea pulled the sheet she had been typing out of the machine, inserted another, altered the notch to single s.p.a.cing and rattled off at top speed till the page was covered. The she appended her signature and wrote this address:

To the Lady Bridget O'Hara, Care of Eliza Countess of Gaverick, Upper Brook Street, London, W.

on an envelope, into which she slipped her letter--a letter never to be sent.

A snap of the gate between the bamboos added a metallic note to the tree's reedy whimperings, and the postman tramped along the short garden path and up the veranda steps.

'Morning, Mrs Gildea ... a heavy mail for you!'

He planked down the usual editorial packet--two or three rolls of proofs, a collection of newspapers, a bulky parcel of private correspondence sent on by the porter of Mrs Gildea's London flat, some local letters and, finally, two square envelopes, with the remark, as he turned away on his round. 'My word! Mrs Gildea, those letters seem to have done a bit of globe-trotting on their own, don't they!'

For the envelopes were covered with directions, some in j.a.panese and Chinese hieroglyphics, some in official red ink from various postoffices, a few with the distinctive markings of British Legations and Government Houses where the Special Correspondent should have stayed, but did not--Only her own name showing through the obliterations, and a final re-addressing by the Bank of Leichardt's Land.

Mrs Gildea recognised the impulsive, untidy but characteristic handwriting of Lady Bridget O'Hara.

'From Biddy at last!' she exclaimed, tore the flap of number one letter, paused and laid it aside. 'Business first.'

So she went carefully through the editorial communication. Mr Gibbs was not quite so tiresome as she had feared he would be. After him, the packet from her London flat was inspected and its contents laid aside for future perusal. Next, she tackled the local letters. One was embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her--first along the route originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely paragraphed newspaper correspondent.

The telegram was phrased thus:

SORRY IMPOSSIBLE NO FUNDS OTHER REASONS WRITING BIDDY

Mrs Gildea's illuminative 'H'm!' implied that her two inductions had been correct. No funds--and other reasons--meaning--a MAN. She scented instantly another of Biddy's tempestuous love-affairs. Had it been merely a question of lack of money with inclination goading, she felt pretty certain that Lady Bridget would have contrived to beg, borrow or steal--on a hazardous promissory note, after the happy-go-lucky financial morals of that section of society to which by birth she belonged. Or, failing these means, that she would have threatened some mad enterprise and so have frightened her aunt Eliza Countess of Gaverick into writing a cheque for three figures. Of course, less would have been of no account.

Mrs Gildea opened the two envelopes and sorted the pages in order of their dates. The first had the address of a house in South Belgravia, where lived Sir Luke Tallant of the Colonial Office and Rosamond his wife--distant connections of the Gavericks.

Lady Bridget's letters were type-written, most carelessly, with the mistakes corrected down the margin of the flimsy sheets in the manner of author's proof--the whole appearance of them suggesting literary 'copy'.

Likewise, the slapdash epistolary style of the MS., which had a certain vividness of its own.

CHAPTER 2

'Dearest Joan,

You'll have got my wire. Vancouver was right, I suppose. I sent it from Rome. Since then I have been at Montreux with Chris and Molly, and since I came back to England with them, I've been in too chaotic a state of mind to write letters. Really, Chris and Molly's atmosphere of struggling to keep in the swim on next to nothing a year and of eking out a precarious income by visits to second-rate country houses and cadging on their London friends gets on my nerves to such an extent that Luke and Rosamond's established "Colonial Office" sort of respectability is quite refreshing by contrast.

I should have loved the Australian trip. Your "Bush" sounds perfectly captivating, and, of course, I could do the ill.u.s.trations you want.

Besides, I'm stony-broke and, financially, the great G.o.d Gibbs appeals to me. I'd take my pa.s.sage straight off--one would raise the money somehow--if it wasn't for--There! It's out. A MAN has come and upset the apple-cart.'

Mrs Gildea gave a funny little laugh. The letter answered her thought.

'"Oh, of course!" I can hear you sneer. "Just another of Biddy's emotional interests--bound to fizzle out before very long." But this is a good deal more than an emotional interest, and I don't think it will fizzle out so quickly. For one thing, THIS man is quite different from all the other men I've ever been interested in. The first moment I saw him, I had the queerest sort of ARRESTED sensation. He's told me since, that he felt exactly the same about me. Kind of lived before--"WHEN I WAS A KING IN BABYLON AND YOU WERE A CHRISTIAN SLAVE" idea. Though I'm quite certain that if I ever was a slave it must have been a Pagan and not a Christian one. Joan, the experience was thrilling, positively electrifying--Glamour--personal magnetism.... You couldn't possibly understand unless you knew HIM. Descriptions are so hopeless. I'll leave him to your imagination.

By the way, Molly annoyed me horribly the other day. "You know, dear,"

she had the audacity to remark, "he's not of OUR cla.s.s, and if you married him, you'd have to give up US! For could you suppose," she went on to say, "that Chris and Mama--to say nothing of Aunt Eliza--would tolerate an adventurer who tells tall stories about buried treasure and native rebellions and expects one to be amused!"

OUR CLa.s.s! Oh, how I detest the label! And that unspeakably dreadful idea of social sheep and goats--and the unfathomable abyss between Suburbia and Belgravia! Though I frankly own that to me Suburbia represents the Absolutely Impossible. After all, one must go right into the Wilderness to escape the conditions of that state of life to which you happen to have been born.

Well, that speech of Molly's came out of a fascinating account my Soldier of Fortune gave us of how he stage-managed a revolution in South America, and of an expedition he'd made in the Andes on the strength of a local tradition about the Incas' hidden gold. I call him my Soldier of Fortune--though he's not in any known Army list, because it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed.

He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a colonial governorship, he wants to sc.r.a.pe up all the information he can about such posts.

I answered Molly that one may have a violent attraction to a man without in the least wanting to marry him, and that relieved her mind a little.