"Marcella," he sobbed, kissing her hands, kneeling beside her desperate in his self-abas.e.m.e.nt. "I thought I'd killed you."

"You're not much of a doctor if you don't know I'd take much more killing than that," she said. "And I wanted to kill you for a minute, so we're equal."

In a torrent all his explanations came pouring out. He had thought the whisky hunger was killed; he had tried to test his certainty and had failed.

"I got c.o.c.ky, old girl. I sw.a.n.ked to myself! I thought I'd got it beat and I'd just go and have one whisky at the Station Hotel to satisfy my own conviction. But when I'd had one I couldn't help it. I seemed to be outside myself, watching myself for the first two or three. I was interested. I kept thinking 'I'll tell Marcella she need not be frightened any more. I can drink two or three whiskies and not be a bally Blue Ribb.o.n.e.r any more. We need not be banished to the Bush for the rest of our lives to keep me out of danger.' Then I got muddled and quite lost grip. It had a sort of chemical effect, you know. I hated you for keeping me from whisky that was making me feel so fine and jolly again. I felt I'd been a bit of a prig lately. I loved the stationmaster and a few manganese miners who came in. In fact, I just wallowed again.

I came home hating you. I didn't come to see you. I came for money. And that's all. The whole thing's hopeless."

"It was my fault this time, Louis. I went to bed and left you. If I'd not been so proud and so huffy I'd have kept you."

"Yes, but only for a time, dear. I saw it all in a flash to-night when you lay there and I thought you were dead. Marcella, no savage would have done that--hurting you just now."

"What rubbish! If you hadn't done it to me I would have done it to you,"

she said easily.

"Don't you see how hopeless it is? The very first time I go near whisky, I want it. And this happens. I was a madman to-night. It means that we've got to stick here for the rest of our lives. I daren't even go to the store to fetch things for you when you're ill. I have to hide in a hole like a fox when the dogs are after it."

"After all, is it so very horrible here, Louis?" she whispered. "I think it's been heaven. Our Castle, and the clearing--and next month my seeds that Dr. Angus sent will be coming up. And the baby, Louis! Just think of the millions of things we've got!"

But he knew better than she did the torment of his weakness and refused to be comforted. He was near suicide that night; he too had been happy, happier than ever in his tormented, unfriended life before. He had the terrible torture of knowing that it was he who had brought the cloud into their sky; he had the terror before him, with him, of knowing that he would keep on bringing clouds, all the more black because they both so loved the sunshine.

And she, when she undressed, sick and faint but comforted with the thought that once more a fight was over, blew the light out quickly so that he should not see the ugly purple mark of the pickaxe.

She usually slept with her nightgown unfastened so that the cool winds should blow over her through the trellis of the window. To-night she m.u.f.fled herself up tightly, and when he came in from a strenuous ten minutes in the lake, feeling once more as though she had sent him to dip in Jordan, she pretended to be asleep. Seeing her so unusually wrapped up, he thought she was cold, and fetched a blanket to cover her. She dared not yield to her impulse to hold out her arms to him and draw his aching head on to her breast for fear the bruise should grieve him.

CHAPTER XXV

Once more came peace, so sunlit and tender that it seemed as though they had wandered into a valley of Avilion where even the echoes of storms could not come, and doves brooded softly. They talked sometimes now of the coming of their son; Louis, once he had got over his conventional horror of such a proceeding, said that she would be as safe in Mrs.

Twist's care, with him hovering in the background, as though she had gone to the nursing home in Sydney, as he had suggested at first.

"I shall funk awfully to know you're going through it, old lady," he told her. "You know nothing about it yet. I've seen this thing happen dozens of times, and it's much worse than you imagine."

She decided, privately, to spare him the misery of it all by sending him off into the Bush on an errand for Mr. Twist as soon as she was taken ill. But her scheme fell through. All one day of blue and silver in June, a winter's day with keen exhilaration in the air, she stayed with him in the clearing, burning the branches as he hewed them down. She felt scarcely alive. Her body was a queer, heavy, racked and apprehensive thing down on the ground. She watched it slowly walking about, dragging f.a.ggots of gorse fastened together by the swag-straps which she loosened as she cast the branches cracking and creaking into the flames. Her mind was restless, a little fey. Louis, seeing something of her uncertainty, stopped work early, and they walked home slowly over the cleared land that was now being ploughed.

"I feel proud of it, don't you?" she said, looking back. He nodded, watching her anxiously.

As she was making the tea pain, quite unbearable, seized her. She got out on the verandah so that he should not see her. After a while it pa.s.sed and, looking white, she came back into the room.

"I was going across to the Homestead to-night. Jerry's got a new record and wants to try it on us. But I feel tired. Will you ask Mrs. Twist to come and have a gossip?" she said casually.

The pain came back, quite astonishing her. She had heard that it was horrible, but had not expected it to be quite so horrible as this. Her mind had only room for one thought--that Louis must not suspect--or, in his anxiety; he would lose grip on himself and make away for Cook's Wall and oblivion. Going into her bedroom she took pencil and paper and wrote a note to Mrs. Twist, who understood the plot and was ready to invent some lost sheep for Jerry and Louis to hunt up.

"Can you come up? I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away,"

she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down.

That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it against Louis. She heard his steps coming along the verandah and clenched her hands fiercely over her mouth.

"Did you cry out then, dear?" came his voice as he pushed at the door.

Feeling an obstruction he pushed all the harder: she could not speak, but he took in at a glance her twisted figure and as he bent over her, shaking with fright, she caught at his hands.

"I thought I'd do it all by myself, but I can't bear it," she gasped.

"Oh my darling," he cried, lifting her in his arms and holding her tight. "How long has this been going on?"

It was some time before she was able to speak. In the bleak aloneness of pain she was very glad of his presence.

"All day--only I didn't want you to know," she said. He groaned.

"For fear it'd bowl me over? Oh G.o.d--"

"I'd a plot to send you away. But I'll be glad to know you're not very far! Will you go for Mrs. Twist, Louis? It will be back in a minute."

Kissing her, he ran out across the paddock. In that moment he felt he would cheerfully die for her; it was not her illness that made him so tender, so unusually exalted. He had not it in his nature to regard pain as other than interesting. But the rending thought that she had suffered alone rather than risk his getting drunk--that jerked him. He felt he could beat any weakness that night, as he recalled her eyes, trying to smile at him through pain, her hands as they clung to his for help. He lived a thousand lives during the next few hours until, at two o'clock, he heard the heart-stopping cry of a newborn child that brought stuffy London nights in the slums back to his mind for an instant until Mrs.

Twist said, with an air of personal pride, that it was a boy.

And then Louis cracked again; kneeling beside Marcella, who was quite calm and very tired, he sobbed out his love and his penitence and his stern and frantic resolves for the future, his undying intention to be as good a man as she was until Mrs. Twist, who was not very used to emotional young men, packed him out of the way to take the news to Mr.

Twist, who was sitting up waiting for it.

The two women had never told Mr. Twist of Louis's tragedy. He had guessed that he had been "on the shikker" that week he stayed away, but he took that as the ordinary thing done by ordinary men--he himself was past "having a burst," he had no heart for it now; but no young man was any the worse for it if it didn't take hold of him. And so, when Louis went there with his eyes shining, his hair wild and his hands shaking, he brought out a bottle of brandy.

"We must drink the young fellow's health," said Mr. Twist, pouring out a microscopic dose for himself and pa.s.sing the bottle to Louis. "I got that bottle a bit ago, as soon as mother told me your missus was like that. You never know when a drop of brandy may save life."

Louis refused the drink, but Mr. Twist laughed at him--and Louis could not bear to be laughed at. He too poured a microscopic dose, and they solemnly toasted the unnamed son. Louis was fidgety, anxious to get back.

"Leave them alone--they're better alone for a bit. All sorts of things to see to," said the man who had weathered seven birthdays. "Have a pipe with me."

They smoked; Mr. Twist talked. Louis answered vaguely, his mind with Marcella; he had suddenly determined that he could not keep his son, as well as his wife, chained in the Bush with him. Visions of the boy growing up--going to school--going to the hospital to do what his father had failed to do--floated before him. He was making t.i.tanic resolutions for the future. His eyes strayed past the brandy bottle. Mr. Twist pushed it generously forward.

"Have another dose. You need it, lad," he said. Louis stood up, astonishing Mr. Twist. He was trembling violently, his forehead wet and shining, his eyes wild.

"Put the d.a.m.ned stuff in the fire!" he cried, and dashed off over the paddock as though a pack of devils was after him. It was an epoch; it was the first time he had refused a drink.

CHAPTER XXVI

Marcella lay afloat on a warm, buoyant sea of enchantment, her eyes closed; life seemed in suspension; she had never, in her life, known pain of any severity until a few hours before; it had appalled, astonished her. She felt it unfair that a body which could quiver to the swift tingle of frosty mornings on the hills, the buffetings and dashings of the North Sea waves, the still glamour of an aurora evening on a house-top, and the inarticulate ecstasy of love, should be so racked. But as she put out her hand across the bed and felt the faint stirrings of the child at her side she forgot those few nightmare hours as a saint, bowing his head for his golden crown at the hands of his Lord, must forget the flames of the stake, the hot reek from the lion's slavering jaws. She looked across to Louis, who was sleeping heavily in his hammock; he had found time to tell her that, for the first time, he had held temptation literally in his hand and been able to conquer it.

And she felt that Castle Lashcairn was not big enough to hold all the kindliness and happiness that seemed to be focussing upon it from all the round horizon. Faith in the logical inevitability of good had changed to certainty: it seemed to her, now, that faith was only an old coward afraid to face fact. She was looking at the world from her mountaintop that night; it seemed to her that it could never be the same again for anyone in it, since she herself felt so different, so exalted.

The next two days brought complications. When Louis, coming in at noon, all smelling of sunshine and wind and smoke, kneeled beside the bed for a moment and, peeping underneath the folded sheet at the pink, screwed-up face of his son, happened to touch her breast with his hand, she was bathed in a sea of pain. Later in the day Mrs. Twist said he would have to go to the township to get a feeding-bottle for the baby; he was inclined to dispute the necessity for it, but he set off at once, for the child, fed with sugar and water in a spoon, kept up a dissatisfied wailing. Marcella forgot to be anxious about him, so completely had she sponged fear from her mind. When, at breakfast-time next morning, Jerry came in with the bottle, she guessed that Louis was washing off the dust of his swift travel before he came to see her. In the absorption of feeding the child and talking to Mrs. Twist she almost forgot him; it was nightfall next day before she saw him, and then he looked haggard and pinched, and she was almost frantic with fear; when he was away from her she never thought he was drunk; always she thought he had met with an accident. He told her, between sobs and writhings, that once again he had failed, but he had been too ashamed to come to her until he had slept off some of the traces of his failure. Seeing him buying a baby's bottle at the store the men of the township had chaffed him into "wetting the baby's head," and he had forgotten his recent victory, his adoring love, his fierce resolves, and the little hungry thing waiting to be fed. Once again she felt stunned, incredulous; later, when she was up again and going about the cottage and Homestead, she determinedly forgot. His pa.s.sionate struggles made it impossible to feel resentment against him, however much he made her suffer. Always she was sure this particular time was the last time; always she thought Louis, like Andrew, had been going along the Damascus road and had seen a great light.

And so, for two years, they lived on at Castle Lashcairn; for long days sometimes Louis went off to Cook's Wall, and she despaired. Most of the time she hoped blindly. Much of the time they were incredibly happy in small things. Some slight measure of prosperity came to Loose End. The uncle who used to send the gramophone records retired from business and, buying himself an annuity, divided his money between his few relatives so that he could see what they did with it before he died. Quite a respectable flock of sheep came to take the place of those drowned in the flood and burnt in the fire; a horse and buggy went to and fro between Loose End and the station; Scottie the collie got busy and two shepherds came, building another hut at the other side of the run. A plague of rabbits showed Mr. Twist the folly of putting off the construction of rabbit-proof fencing any longer, now that he could afford it, and the gorse was once more left uncleared for months in the pressure of new things. Neighbours came, too--the deposit of manganese at Cook's Wall was found cropping up on the extreme borders of Gaynor's run, and a tiny mining township called Klond.y.k.e settled itself round the excavations five miles from the Homestead. Marcella made friends with everyone, to Louis's amazement. To him friendliness was only possible when whisky had taken away his self-consciousness; the parties of miscellaneous folks who turned up on Sundays, bringing their own food, as is the way in the Bush where the nearest store is often fifty miles away, worried him at first. He stammered and was awkward and ungracious with them, but Marcella, dimly realizing that it must be bad for him to be drawn in so much upon their _egosme a deux_, tried to make him more sociable. When he forgot himself and was effortlessly hospitable, he was charming. When he felt shy and frightened, and was fighting one of his rhythmical fits of desire, he was difficult and rude.