A letter from Molly Gaverick confirmed that item of the English Intelligence. Rosamond Tallant's condition was certainly far from satisfactory. Molly, however, seemed much more taken up with a recent illness of Eliza Countess of Gaverick than with that of Lady Tallant.

Being a tactless and absolutely frank young person, she had no scruple in proclaiming her hope that 'old Eliza' would make Lord Gaverick her heir. This was the more likely, wrote young Lady Gaverick, because the old lady had lately quarrelled with her own relatives, and never now asked any of her stuffy provincial cousins to share the dulness of Castle Gaverick and of the house in Brook Street. If she did not leave her money to Chris Gaverick, there was not, conceivably, anyone else to whom she would leave it.

'By the way,' Molly continued, as if it had been an afterthought 'Old Eliza is immensely interested in you and your cow-boy husband--ranch-owner is what, I suppose, I ought to call him. She asked Mrs Gildea so many questions about you both that Joan read her your account of your honeymoon journey through the Bush, and all the rest of it. How you can endure such a life is incomprehensible to me--but Aunt Eliza says it shows you've got some grit in you, and that evidently your husband has cured you of a lot of ridiculous nonsense--I am quoting her, so don't be offended, and you needn't show this to Nature's gentleman, which is what Aunt Eliza calls him. I can't help feeling though, that it's rather a pity you didn't wait a bit before taking the Irrevocable Step. I don't know whether you ever heard about Mrs Willougby Maule's death--eleven months after their marriage.'

No, Bridget had not heard. Molly Gaverick was an uncertain correspondent, and, no doubt, Joan Gildea and Rosamond Tallant, if they had known of the event, had thought it wiser, in writing to her, to suppress the news. For a moment, Lady Bridget sat meditating, and all the blood seemed to rush from her brain to her heart--she could almost hear her heart pounding. Then she went on again with Lady Gaverick's letter.

'It was a motor accident--nothing serious at the time, but the baby was born prematurely, and she lingered a week or two, and then died. I must do him the justice to say that he seemed to feel her death very much.

It looked as though, after all, the marriage had been quite a success.

Her money gave him a lift and they were going out a good deal in the political set. She left her quarter of a million to him, ABSOLUTELY. I heard that some remote Bagallys were going to contest the will, but they found that they hadn't a leg to stand upon. I wish now that we hadn't been so sniffy about W.M. As Chris observed with unconscious cynicism, there's a good deal of difference between a penniless adventurer and the possessor of quarter of a million. Unattached men with money can be so useful. As soon as Rosamond Tallant gets better--if she does--I'll make her ask him to meet us. I know he used to be a great friend of Luke's....'

CHAPTER 10

Lady Bridget had read so far when the door of the bathroom opened and McKeith came out, clean again in fresh riding gear, and with a valise ready packed and strapped in his hand.

The noise of the cattle became much louder, though the mob was not yet in sight.

'I wish I hadn't got to go off before the branding,' he said. 'These Breeza Downs people always want to claim every cleanskin*. You might tell Ninnis and Moongarr Bill, Biddy, to keep a sharp look-out. And now let me have my grub--I'm sorry, dear, to have you hurry up your dinner.' He strode along to the dining-room, too absorbed in his own annoyances to notice his wife's face or to ask any questions about her letters.

[*cleanskin--unbranded calf]

Lady Bridget gathered them up and followed him. The Malay boy waited at table with the a.s.sistance of a servant girl from Leuraville, the only female domestic--with the exception of Mrs Hensor--on the head-station.

McKeith swallowed his soup and ate the savoury stew prepared by the Chinese cook with the appet.i.te of a man who had been all day in the saddle. Lady Bridget, who was an extraordinarily rapid eater, as well as a fastidious one, had finished long before he was half-way through.

She sat silent at first, while he growled over the outrage upon the horses. Then suddenly visualising the poor beasts lying stiff in congealed blood, and the mailman's exaggerated description of trees black with crows, she flamed out in wrathful horror, and was as anxious as her husband that the perpetrators of the crime should be brought to justice. He seemed pleased, and a little surprised at the ebullition.

'I thought you weren't taking it quite in, Biddy. I am glad you think like me, though I expect yours is the humanitarian view and mine's the practical one. This touches my pocket, you see. Well, anyway, you won't be so keen now on defending the Unionists.'

'I think they've got as much right to fight for their principles as we have for ours, but I don't think they've the right to torture horses,'

she rejoined. Her sympathy with oppressed shearers and dispossessed natives struck always a jarring note between them. His long upper lip closed tightly on the lower one, and he hunched his great shoulders.

'Well, that sort of argufying won't muster the cattle,' he observed drily, plagiarising Harry the Blower. She changed the subject.

'Did you have a good muster?'

'Oh, fair! Between three and four hundred head. The water is running still up in the range. We should have done better if that skunk Wombo hadn't bolted.'

Lady Bridget leaned forward with interest.

'Oh! Then he HAS gone after the black-gin. Brave Wombo!'

'I wouldn't care a cuss whether he went after the black-gin or not; she's a half-caste, by the way, and all the worse for that. And he might stop with her, if it wasn't that he knows the country, and can spot the gullies where the cattle hide. I've no use for sentiment--especially black sentiment--when it's a case of a forced sale to keep me going. My heavens! there's only one thing, Biddy, that could break me, and it's drought. I believe we're in for a long one, and unless I can make sales quickly and get money to sink new bores on the run, things will go hardly with me. Harry the Blower spoke naked truth for once in his life.'

'Oh! but there's sure to be rain soon. It looked so like it last night,' she answered lightly.

'LOOKED so like it! Yes, and ended in wind and dust. Sure sign of drought! I must be off.... Here, give me the LEICHARDT LAND CHRONICLE, and don't expect me till you see me.... And by the way, Biddy, I hear there's a Unionist Organiser going the round of the stations and pretending to parley with the masters. Don't you be philanthropic enough to let him open his jaws--I've told Ninnis he's to be hounded off before he has time to get off his saddle.'

'Colin, you are unjust all round. You were very unjust to Wombo. Why shouldn't the poor black-boy marry as well as you or anyone else?'

McKeith gave a hard laugh.

'I'm not preventing him from marrying. I only said I wasn't going to have his gin on my station.'

'You wouldn't listen when he told you that he didn't dare go back to his tribe--because his gin's husband threatened to kill him.'

'My sympathies are with the gin's husband. What business has Wombo to steal another man's wife?'

'The husband broke her head with a nulla-nulla, and she loves Wombo and Wombo loves her. I consider that any woman, whether she's black or white, who lives with her husband while she loves another man is committing a sin,' said Lady Bridget hotly.

McKeith stopped in the act of filling his tobacco pouch from a jar on the mantelpiece and looked sharply at his wife.

'You think that, Biddy. I remember long ago you said something of that sort to me. It isn't my idea of morality or of justice. But I'm one with you this far. If I'd ever reason to believe that you loved another man and wanted to go off with him--you might go--I wouldn't put out a hand to stop you. And then....'

'And then?' She had grown very white.

'Well, I think I'd make another notch in my gun first--and it would be a previous one--for myself that time.'

'No, you wouldn't, Colin. Because you know I shouldn't be worth it--and you are not the man to funk.'

'I'm not. But where YOU come in--Good Lord! Mate! What would there be left for me to live for?'

Her heart thrilled to the old term of endearment, to which in their early honeymoon days she had attached a sentimental value. Of late it had fallen into disuse, and when she had heard him on occasions greet the foreman, may be of some stray party of drivers or surveyors with the bush formula: 'Good day, mate!' she had felt with deep aggrievement that she no longer desired the appellative. She had not yet realised that while the word 'mate' in Australese, like the verb AIMER in French, may be used as a mere colloquial term, it implies in the deeper sense a sanct.i.ty of relation upon which hangs the whole code of Bush chivalry.

'Oh, Colin!' Her eyes glistened with tears. She felt ashamed of her neurotic fancies and her resentment of his lacks in the matter of conventional courtesies--of his outward hardness, his want of sympathy with her ideals.

He came to her, taking her two hands while keeping his pipe in one of his own so that the whiff of the coa.r.s.e 'Store-cut' tobacco made her wrinkle her nose and stemmed the tide of emotion. But he did not seem to notice this.

'No, you're not going to put that theory into practice, Mate.... I'm not afraid. So we'll leave it at that. And now what's this about the black-boy to do with my being unjust to that Organiser? There's no beastly sentiment in his case. He's out to make money, that's all.'

'You won't hear what he's got to put forward on his side any more than you would listen to poor Wombo.'

'No, I won't. I'm not taking any--either in gins or in organisers. Let 'em show their faces here, and they'll pretty soon become aware of the fact.'

Lady Bridget took away her hands and moved to the veranda. Outside, McKeith's horse was waiting. He strapped on his valise, finished ramming the tobacco into his pipe, then going behind his wife, bent downward and hastily kissed her cheek. She did not turn her head.

'Good-bye, Biddy. Don't you go worrying over the blacks or the Unionists. And if you're dull and want a job there'll be a spice of excitement in helping to tail that mob of scrubbers. I had to hire two stray chaps, we're so short-handed.' He went down the steps to the outer paling. Still she made no response, though now she turned and watched him vault into the saddle. She also saw his face lighten at sight of Mrs Hensor's boy with the great pawpaw apple. Tommy Hensor was a favourite with the Boss.

'Bless you, boy, it's as big as yourself. Take it back to the Quarters and tell your mother to give you a slice, or perhaps her ladyship will cut it for you.'

He trotted off in the direction of the gully and of the roar of cattle.

Lady Bridget could see the heaving backs of the mob, and could hear the shouts of the stockmen as they rounded the beasts to the crossing.

Tommy Hensor looked up pleadingly to her, holding out the pawpaw apple.

His yellow hair flamed to gold in the sunset, his blue eyes were as bright almost as Colin's. Lady Bridget shook her head.

'No, I don't want you this evening, Tommy. Take that back to your mother.'