"Do you?" she said, sitting up eagerly. "Would you marry him without any fear if you were me?"

"I would--right at once. In spite of all its shortcomings I have a profound belief that not woman, as the poet has it, but all humanity--

'Holds something sacred, something undefiled, Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light.'"

The rain that was temporarily washing the perfume from the flowers pattered against the window-panes and accentuated the silence, till I added--

"I will tell you my history some day, so that you may see that when I have belief in my fellows how little reason you have to fear. I have been an actress, you know."

"Yes; Ernest told me."

"Well, I'll tell you about it one day." I did not mention that I had expressly requested Ernest to keep my past a secret. However, I was not displeased that he had been unable to do so. If a man of his inexperience, and in the zenith of his first overwhelming pa.s.sion, had been able to keep such a secret in the teeth of his love's wheedling, he would have proved himself of the stuff to make an amba.s.sadorial diplomat, but not of the calibre to be the affectionate, domesticated husband, having no interests of which his wife might not be cognisant--the only character to whom I could without misgiving entrust the hot-headed Dawn.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

LET THERE BE LOVE.

I so nearly "pegged out" with an attack that fell to my lot a little time after the election, that Dr Smalley considered it advisable to summon Dr Tinker to a consultation, but sad to say I was too comatose to have become acquainted with the husband of the famous Mrs Tinker, whose individuality afforded considerable interest, because it was very conspicuous when surrounded by the neutrality of life in Noonoon.

However, with the aid of some "powltices" constructed by Grandma Clay and energetically applied by Mrs Bray, and because my hour had not yet come, against the time when we slid into a splendid October I was tottering about once more.

During my time of confinement the old valley had put on its finishing touches of spring glory. Only a few golden oranges now remained on the trees, and amid the bright green leaves were thick cl.u.s.ters of waxy bloom. The perfume from them was heavenly, and sometimes almost too powerful after the sun had toppled behind the great level-browed range which, viewed from the plain, guarded the west of the valley of Noonoon like a mighty wall. Some of the land had been cultivated for a century without attention to artificial renewal of its fertility, but still it gave forth a wondrous variety and wealth of vegetation. The widespreading cedars hung out their scented bloom like heliotrope flags amid surrounding greenery of pine, plane, poplar, and loquat, and the peach and apricot orchards contributed banks of their delicate flowers, which in the glory of their ma.s.sed bloom could have out-j.a.panned j.a.pan. Along the lanes, where their stones had been thrown, they sprang up and bloomed and bore liberally; roses of many kinds and colours clambered up verandah posts and peeped over fences; the garden plots were like compressed bouquets; the brilliant, graceful, and exquisitely perfumed pink oleanders grew wild in the fields; and altogether the vale of melons had graduated to a valley of flowers.

The days had stretched out so that the mail from the far West trundled down the mountains in time to cross the queer old bridge across the Noonoon at daybreak, and the first beams of morning turned its windows to gold as the waking flowers were lifting their dew-drenched heads and the soft white mists were dispersing themselves betimes from the plains dotted with ramshackle little homes and cut into squares by barbed-wire fences. The weather had warmed, so that the fashionables'

week-end exit to the cool Blue Mountains had begun; and the youngsters near the railway line sometimes left their play and stood agape in the soft twilight to watch the governor's car, painted in a strikingly different colour to all the others and emblazoned with the British coat of arms, go by.

Uncle Jake, a hired man, and Andrew were very busy on the farm, and we none the less engaged in the house, where every article of furniture was made a receptacle for drapery and haberdashery, and where the wedding was the only subject. It so often gave Andrew the "pip" that his const.i.tution must have been seriously impaired by such frequent attacks of this complaint.

In those days Dawn was too engrossed to take me for drives, and Ernest too occupied to pull me on the historic stretch of water running like the moats of old beside his lady's castle, so that Ada Grosvenor, in her office of doing good to all with whom she came in contact, stepped into the breach, and sought to aid my recovery by taking me for gentle exercise.

It was one day when we had driven east from Noonoon that she remarked--

"It's a wonder that Mr Breslaw would care for Dawn's style when he moves in such a smart set. She is a handsome girl, which covers a mult.i.tude of sins in that respect, but still she is very downright, and--and, well, doesn't quite conform to the rules of refinement."

I only smiled, and waited till the pony's head was turned for home, when I covered the necessity for reply by admiring the incomparable panorama before us. From the alt.i.tude we had reached on the Sydney road, we could see above the unbroken line of the horizon west from Noonoon town, and the Blue Australian Mountains stretched across the view in an endless succession of round-topped peaks painted in their matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the fringe of the endless plains was reached--peak after peak, gorge on gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and gold, rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her forerunners,--twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points between earth and sky.

Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were disillusioned and she was not.

We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island, surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other fashionable society, where the majority were animated by nothing higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.

Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and conspicuous violation of syntax, as she could easily do, for she had been somewhat educated in a school patronised by the Australian _beau monde_. Had not her grandma told me of the magnitude of her education when I had first arrived? and did she not constantly repeat the story now? For having survived the fear of Ernest being too aristocratic, she took pride in his worldly possessions and position, and characterised him as "more likely than most, if he only turns out true to name, which in the case of husbands is as rare as bought seed potatoes turnin' out what they're supposed to be; but there ain't any good of meeting troubles half-way."

As the wedding preparations made so much bother, grandma got in a woman to clean and another to sew, and determined to admit no summer boarders until after Christmas.

"I can do without 'em, only I like to see money changin' hands quicker than happens with a farm," said she; while also, in consideration of the wedding, the doors, whose opening and shutting had been obstructed by the ravages of the white ants, were at last satisfactorily repaired.

Dawn, after the manner of most youthful brides, was desirous of the full torture of "keeping up" her wedding, while Ernest, as usual with bridegrooms, so shrunk from display that he would have paid half a year's income to escape it; but it was only to me he made this confession, to Dawn he was manfully unselfish, allowing her full rein and agreeably falling in with her requirements.

I did not think much of fussy weddings, but these were such a splendid pair of young things that I was pleased to endure the preparations with a smile instead of a sigh, and contribute some old silks and laces towards the trousseau; while a few dainty and expensive trifles, sent to me from a traveller over the sea, found a place in the furnishing of the bride's boudoir.

Like all strictly reared girls, a certain prudishness at first caused Dawn to shrink from her love as something that should be resisted, but as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting influence of youth's master pa.s.sion. The roseate mists it weaves before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and disillusioning experiences, looked out towards a future beautified with as many shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the irreverent as "gooseberrying."

Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by one whom the world has all gone by.

I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where its deep clear pools lay like basins under the overhanging cliffs, and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree, wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were safely moored again after their jaunts.

I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery. Grandma Clay, however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely to be greater than the supply, I generously presented her with one, unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"

with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of Noonoon munic.i.p.ality.

This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy[2] and provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by Noonoon's banks.

[Footnote 2: A tin pail.]

Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung their shade.

There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spiraea in Clay's drive, and intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.

Coming down the little pathway gained by the creaking garden gate, we shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the Canadian champion had lost his laurels to New South Wales; on, on the strong arms took the craft till a wall of mountain loomed straight across our way, and the river had every appearance of coming to a sudden end, but round a sudden surprising elbow we went till a similar prospect confronted the navigator, and the river came round another of its many angles. On, on we steered till the warm rich scent from the flowering vineyards was left behind and the sound of the trains could not be heard. Far up the ravines beyond the pasture lands and men's habitations, we found the desired privacy, and the solitude was broken only by the dip of the oars, the flash of an occasional water-fowl, the cry of some night-bird, or the "plopping" of the fishes that Andrew could never catch as they fell back after rising to s.n.a.t.c.h some unwary insect. The gentle breezes sighing down the gullies, dim and lone in the eerie moonlight, were laden with the scent of wattle and other native flowers, and otherwise fresh and sweet with the inexpressible purity of summer night on the great unbroken bush-land.

In such dryad-like resorts we were tempted to dawdle so long that the big hours of the evening frequently found us still on the breast of the river. I was wont to recline on an impromptu couch of rugs in the bottom of the well-built craft identified with our excursions, where I could feign to be asleep. At first Dawn suspected me of only pretending, but I was so emphatic in declaring that the fresh air and motion of the boat induced the sleep I could not woo in bed, that they grew to believe me, and carefully covering me from mosquitoes, it became invariable that at a certain distance on our homeward way the rower relinquished rowing, the steerer stopped steering, and the boat drifted down-stream with the gentle flow, while two-thirds of its occupants tasted of the elixir--

"That burns beneath the beauty of the rose, And in the hearts of youth and maiden glows, And fills and thrills the world with life and light, And is the soul of all that breathes and grows."

And what did the old moon see in that peaceful valley ere she sank behind the great primeval gum-tree forests on the mountain crests, across which zigzagged the noisy trains? There were heavy crops above ground, vineyards abloom, orchards forming fruit, hundreds of comfortable homes, and no doubt many pairs of lovers abroad, for lovers love their friend the gentle moon; but none were more fitted for love's consummation than the two drifting on the old river whose limpid waters never again "shall blacken below, spear and the shadow of spear, bow and the shadow of bow," and which, after rushing a tortuous way between its wild gorges, steadies by the old settlement on the plain, and saunters smooth and straight and deep a s.p.a.ce between fertile banks gardened with lucerne fields, orchards of peach and apricot, and delightful orange groves. The air was intoxicatingly heavy with the exquisite perfume of these bridal blooms, and the soft-scented breezes laughed as they too kissed the close-pressed lips of the fair young pair who--

"Gathered the blossom that rebloom'd, and drank The magic cup that filled itself anew."

Ah! Love's idyllic hours on the breast of a grandly gliding river, when the dews were on the flowers, and all was enchantingly sweet and fair under the sleep-time silver of a southern summer moon!

TWENTY-NINE.

"The savage sells or exchanges his daughter, but in civilisation the man gives his away, and is thankful for the opportunity."--_Reflections of a Bachelor Girl._

Dawn took a great deal of her own way, Ernest and I were privileged to make suggestions so long as we were careful to remember our insignificance, and grandma saw to it that her lawful rights were not altogether usurped.

Occasionally it fell to my lot to act in a slightly mediatorial capacity, owing to the divergence of the swell wishes of the bridegroom-elect, and the plebeian determination of his grandmother-in-law to be, regarding the wedding celebrations, but Ernest was exceptionally unselfish and therefore very long-suffering.

Dawn being under age, her grandmother came forward with a project that her father should be apprised of what was transpiring, requested to give his daughter away, and to bring some of his side of the house to the wedding. Dawn raised vigorous opposition.

"It would be like my father's presumption to interfere in any way, considering his career with my mother. I hate him for a mean coward.

He's the very style of man I'd be ashamed to acknowledge as an acquaintance yet alone own as a _father_! I'd like to see him dare to give me away,--he'd have to own me first!"

"Well, Jake, there, will have to give you away then," said grandma.