'Lady Bridget O'Hara will you come away with me to the Bush, leaving everything else behind you?'

She stood very slender and erect, her eyes shining in the moonlight out of her small pale face and fixed upon him thoughtfully as if she were weighing his proposition. After a few minutes, she answered deliberately.

'Yes, Mr Colin McKeith, I will go away with you into the Bush, leaving everything else behind me--the old "Lady Bridget O'Hara" included.'

He gave an indescribable e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n--joy, surprise, triumph--all were in the utterance. Dropping her hands, he stooped to her and his arm went round her.

'Oh! Biddy ... darling.'

She knew he wanted to kiss her, and that he scarcely dared so greatly.... As his beard brushed her cheek, she shrank and moved a step from him. He, too, shrank, hurt by her rebuff.

'You mustn't be--ardent,' she said. 'You must give me time to get accustomed to--the fate I've chosen. You know the dragon isn't altogether a sham. He's got a few kicks in him--yet.'

CHAPTER 2

On other occasions also Lady Bridget made McKeith feel that she preferred good fellowship to love-making. She was perfectly charming, always excellent company, and she had a sense of humour which delighted him, but she did not encourage effusiveness. She seemed to want to hear about the Bush a great deal more than she wanted to hear about his feelings towards herself, and appeared anxious to show him that she meant to be a thorough-going 'mate.' The phrase had taken her fancy.

There was not much opportunity however, for exchanging sentimental confidences. Everything was rush and hurry during the few weeks between the engagement and the marriage. It was plain that Lady Tallant wished to get the wedding over before she and the Governor started upon a tour of the important stations in the settled districts round Leichardt's Town, officially contemplated. Bridget had a shrewd suspicion, which she confided to Colin, that Lady Tallant was getting tired of her.

Perhaps Bridget did not keep herself sufficiently in the background to please the lady of Government House. Her unpunctuality too often annoyed Sir Luke.

Another reason for not delaying the marriage was that the Leichardt's Land government was expected to go out of office on a Labour Bill, and that an appeal to the country would certainly follow its defeat. In that case McKeith's re-election would have to be considered, and an electioneering honeymoon in one of the out-back districts was an inspiring prospect to Lady Bridget. Then the preparation of a Bush trousseau needed thought and discussion. She had not much money, either, to buy her trousseau with. Bridget would have none of Sir Luke's suggestions of conciliatory letters and cablegrams to Eliza Lady Gaverick on the subject of settlements. She said she did not intend to cadge any longer upon her rich relative, and that she preferred to marry without settlements. Sir Luke was not satisfied with McKeith's views upon the financial question, and had some difficulty in getting him to tie up even the insignificant sum of three thousand pounds in settlement upon his wife. Colin pointed out that his capital was all invested in cattle, and that though things would be all right as long as there were good seasons, a bad one would cripple him, and he would need money to recoup his losses and buy fresh stock. Bridget took his view and Sir Luke frowned, but did what he considered his duty so far as the paltry settlement went. At all events, it was a satisfaction to Colin McKeith's shrewd Scotch mind that n.o.body insisted upon getting the better of him in the matter. He knew that Bridget never gave it a second thought. She was much more interested in the social and racial problems of this new country of her adoption, and especially in the blacks. What time she could spare from her trousseau she spent in reading books about them, which some of her official friends got her from the Parliamentary Library, and had already learned to think of herself as a 'bujeri* White Mary,' whose mission it might be to compose the racial feud between blackman and white.

[*Bujeri--Black's term of commendation.]

To Colin, knowing now the tragedy of his youth, she did not speak much on this subject. The time went with startling rapidity. The two were borne on the tide of Colin's wild elation and Bridget's more impersonal enthusiasms. They were like travellers steaming through strange seas, not knowing what they were going to find at the end of the voyage and too excited to care.

That was the way of Bridget O'Hara, but it was not the way of Colin McKeith.

Yet his closest intimates would scarcely have known him at this period.

He was as a man bewitched, with intervals only of his ordinary commonsense. In these intervals the consciousness of glamour made him vaguely uneasy.

Had Joan Gildea been there she would have seen all this and would have observed signs of over-strain in Bridget--something faintly apprehensive yet obstinately determined. And Joan would have understood that when an O'Hara woman gets the bit between her teeth, she will not stop to look back or to consider whither she is galloping. Bridget kept herself continually on the go. Latterly, even Colin was warned by her nervous restlessness. When they were alone together, which was not long, nor often, her body seemed never still, her tongue rarely at rest. Sometimes her talk was brilliantly allusive; at others it was frothy chatter. One day it really irritated him. She had been fluttering about the sitting-room opening on to the terrace, which Lady Tallant had made over to her guest. An English mail had come in. She read him bits of a letter from Molly Gaverick and made explanatory, satiric comments upon those impecunious, aristocratic relatives who were on the fringe of the London smart set of which Bridget herself had lately formed a yet more outside part.

'Chris Gaverick has gone into the wine business, and they've taken a tiny house in Davies Street, Berkeley Square, and the Eaton Place house pays its rent ... You don't understand? ... No.... Molly and I talked it out when they were married. Of course, it seemed madness, with their means to take a house in Eaton Place. They ought to have had one in Bayswater. But it has answered splendidly. You see, they put their wedding presents into it and let it for the season, and managed to live rent free and have the use of other people's motors and all the going about they wanted without paying even for their food ... and no expense of entertaining, outside a dinner or two at Hurlingham.... Cadging!...

In London Society everybody cadges except the millionaires--and they're cadged upon... You see, as Molly said, you can't entertain in Bayswater, or know the right people, and go about to the right houses, which is the most important thing for a poor couple who want to keep their heads up. Now the result is that Chris is able to bring in quant.i.ties of clients and gets a commission on all the wine he sells.... What's the matter, Colin? You look quite fierce.'

'And that,' commented McKeith, 'is an English belted Earl!'

'Irish--there's a difference. And are they belted--really? Isn't it a figure of speech?'

'I don't know, and I don't care.'

'But wouldn't you care to hear Molly's account of their visit to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Brockenhurst to meet the King and Queen of Hartenburg? Molly is very sorry I wasn't there. She says that it would have made everything so much nicer for her and Chris, and that the King might have ordered some wine from his firm.'

She was teasing. He knew it, and it infuriated him.

'Oh, no doubt you're sorry too that you weren't there with the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess, and the King and Queen, and your cousins, the Earl and Countess,' he flung at her.

'They'll be your cousins too--by marriage. And if you ever become a very rich man and take me back to England, you'll have to "Chris and Molly" them and to give him a big order for wine....'

That mollified McKeith.

'And if I wasn't a rich man, and didn't give a big order, they wouldn't care a twopenny d.a.m.n for me.'

'Molly mightn't--unless by chance you were taken up in high quarters and made the fashion--like Cecil Rhodes and "Doctor Jim," or some new edition of Buffalo Bill. Then she'd call you "one of nature's uncrowned kings." But Chris Gaverick isn't a bad sort, if his wife would let him be natural.... They hadn't got my cablegram about you, Colin, when this was written,' she went on. 'I wish I could have told the Queen myself.

I'm sure she would have been sympathetic. And now I don't suppose I shall ever meet her again.'

He rejoined with clumsy sarcasm.

'I see. The Queen of Hartenburg was an intimate friend of yours--the sort of chum who'd have been likely to drop in any day for a yarn and a cup of tea!'

'She often did when she hunted with our hounds in Ireland, and it IS true that the Queen of Hartenburg was quite an intimate friend of mine--for two winters, anyhow. But I a.s.sure you, it hasn't made me proud, and if the Queen of Hartenburg bores you, let us talk of something else.'

She gave another glance at the last sheet of Lady Gaverick's letter and thrust it into a pigeon-hole of the writing-table, then came back to the long settee on which he sat. All the time, his gaze had never left her. She saw that he was disturbed.

'What is the matter?' she asked again, and sat down, a little way from him, on the settee. He turned sideways to her, bending forward, one large hand twisting his fair beard. There was a hungry look in his eyes, but his pa.s.sing ill-humour had melted into a deep, adoring tendeness.

'Biddy--my mate--will you answer me a question--truthfully?'

'I believe I can say honestly, that truth is one of my strong points,'

she parried lightly.

'I want you to be serious. I mean it seriously. I want you to tell me what determined you on marrying a rough chap like me? That letter--thinking of you among those grandees, you talking a language that's worse than Greek to me, brings the wonder of it home. As I look at you, the thing seems just incredible.'

'I can't understand why it should seem so surprising.'

'WHY! You know what I mean. It's not only that your birth and bringing up are so superior to mine, and that you had a right to look for a husband in a very different sort of position--I can see plainly that is what Sir Luke thinks....'

'I don't care--a twopenny d-a-m-n--as you said--for what Sir Luke thinks. I've got my own ideas as to the kind of husband most likely to suit me.'

'There's the marvel of it. For you must have had dozens of men wanting you. You are so beautiful.'

'Oh, Colin, I've told you what I feel about the English marriage system. And, PAR PARENTHESE, I'm not beautiful. I don't come up in the least to the artist's standard. My measurements are wrong. I'm too small.'

'That's rot. There's a fascination about you no man can resist--or woman either. I see it in the people who come here.'

'If I happen to have drawn them into what Rosamond used to call my mysterious sphere of influence--which I seem to do without knowing it.

I'm not sure, though, that either Rosamond or Luke approve of my drawing the Leichardt's Town people into my mysterious sphere of influence.'

'I think, if you ask me, that Lady Tallant is a bit of a cat, and Sir Luke more than a bit of a prig.'

'No. You mustn't say a word against them.' It was not in Bridget to be disloyal. 'They've given me the time of my life.'

'When you smile like that, you remind me of a photograph of a picture I've seen--a woman, I don't remember her name.'