Materfamilias

"I suppose," he said, in a heavy voice – "I suppose I'd better resign my billet and come home, Polly. They're getting pretty old now for you to struggle with them single-handed. It's not fair to you, my dear."

I treated this remark as if I had not heard it, and he soon rose from his seat and left the room. He went into his little smoking den, shut the door behind him, and locked it.

When I thought him safely out of the way I stole off to see and comfort my poor boys. They shared the same room, their beds standing side by side, with a chair between them. When I crept in they were talking in a low voice together; as soon as they heard me they fell silent and pretended to be asleep. A smell of moist dog and an otherwise unaccountable protuberance implied the presence of a third culprit – and a flat contravention of one of the strict rules of the house – but I took no notice, although terrified lest Bobby's shirt and sheets should be dampened, and sickened by the thought of the fleas that would infest him. Oh, how thankful I am now that I took no notice, and did not snatch his bit of comfort from his arms!

I sat down on the chair and leaned over Harry, smoothed his hair from his brow, and kissed him. I might as well have kissed the bed-post. He is a peculiar boy – a little hard-natured and perverse – and he can never bear anybody to pity him. I was not surprised that he repulsed me, though I felt dreadfully hurt. My beloved Bobby – my angel, whom I never rightly appreciated until I had lost him – he was quite different. He kissed me back again, and whimpered when I talked to him, and told me he had never meant to be as naughty as father thought. Bless him! I knew he never did. I told him so. But even then he was just a little reserved with me, as if he could not quite forgive me for what I had brought upon him – which was bitter enough at the time, but an agony to think of afterwards, as it is to this day. So I went away to my room and cried in the dark, utterly miserable. And I thought to myself, "If this is how they feel towards me, how will they regard their father, who has treated them so brutally? Why, they will never have an atom of affection for him again!"

But when I went back to them, hoping for a warmer welcome, and anxious about their poor empty stomachs, there was Tom, sitting on the chair between their beds, chatting to them, and they to him, as if nothing had occurred – aye, although Waif had been deposed and banished. Another chair had been dragged up, and a tray stood on it – a tray piled with food, duck and sweetbread, cold beef and tongue, all mixed together – which he was serving out in lavish helpings, with plenty of bread-and-butter. Harry, leaning on his elbow, rested his head on his father's arm; Bob, crouched at his knees on the floor, looked up at him with his dear merry eyes, that bore no malice – not even a reproach. They did not see me at the door, where I stood a minute to watch them, suffocated by the sense of being shut out.

I did not think it was quite right of Tom. But I did not say so. When he called to me to come in and be apologised to – the boys did it handsomely, but still rather perfunctorily, I fancied – I was glad to let bygones be bygones, and to feel we were a united family once more.

And I thought the incident ended there. Nothing more was said about it while Tom remained at home, and he went away as usual, giving me – even me – not the faintest indication of what was in his mind. So that I was completely dumfoundered when, on his next return, he said, in a tremulous tone of voice and with quite a tragic air generally:

"Well, Polly, I've done it."

"What?" I cried, guessing his meaning in an instant, for I remembered his remark at tea that night when we were all so unhappy. "You don't mean to say you have thrown up your command – thrown away everything – just now, when we want so badly to increase our income and not to lessen it – without a word of warning?"

"No warning?" quoth he. "Why, haven't you been at me every day for the last dozen years to do it? And quite right too. It's bad for boys to grow up without a father to look after them, and their welfare is of more importance than anything else."

"You say that, and at the same time take away all chance of their having a decent education and a fair start in the world! How am I to keep them at the Grammar School, and have a governess for the girls, and support the house and all, on my poor three hundred a year?"

I should not have said it, and could have cut my tongue out before the words were half uttered, but somehow the first news of the shock that we were to lose half our income, on which we already found it no easy matter to make ends meet, was overwhelming. And we were so accustomed to speak freely whatever was in our minds that I never anticipated he would take a chance remark so ill. I suppose his interview with the owners had agitated him; as I heard afterwards, the whole office had expressed regrets at his leaving the service, and said all kinds of nice and flattering things about him; otherwise I am sure he would not have given way as he did. He just turned from me, put his arms on the mantelpiece, and, dropping his head down, gave a sob under his breath. My own good husband! That ever I should have been the cause – however innocently – of bringing a tear to his dear eyes, a moment's pang to his faithful heart!

Of course he forgave me at once – he always does; and in a few minutes we were talking things over in peace and comfort, while I sat on his knee – for the children were in school, happily.

"As for income, Polly, you don't suppose I am going to live on you?" he said – and a very unkind thing it was to say, as I told him. "You don't imagine I intend to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs, while you take the whole burden on your little shoulders – do you?"

"I don't see why you shouldn't," I replied. "At any rate for a long while to come. I'm sure if any one ever earned the right to a thorough rest, you have. And, oh, Tom, no burden can be a burden with you here to help me!"

"Thanks, old girl. That's good hearing."

"As if you wanted to be told that! And by and by, when you have had a nice long spell, there are sure to be posts offered to you about the ports – "

"No, Polly; don't delude yourself with that idea. There are no posts for a sailor who leaves sea – that is, one or two, perhaps, and a hundred fellows wanting them. I should be no good at office work, among the smart hands, and the life would kill me. No, I've a better notion than that – it's been in my mind a long time, and I've been talking it over with experts, men who thoroughly understand the matter – "

"And not with me!" I interposed reproachfully.

"Well, I didn't see the use of disturbing your mind until one could do something. But now the time has come." He was quite bright and excited. "Look here, Polly – listen, dear, till I have explained fully – my idea is to take a little farm place on the outskirts of Melbourne – "

"A farm!" I broke in. "Are you one of those who think that farming comes by instinct and doesn't have to be learned like other trades?"

"I don't mean that kind of farm, but just a few acres of good land – more on the edge of the country than in it, you understand – near enough for the boys to get to the Grammar School by train or on ponies – and breed pigs – "

"Oh, pigs!" I echoed, sniffing.

"Well, if you objected to pigs, there's poultry. With a few incubators we could rear fowls enough to supply all Melbourne. Or bees. There's a great trade to be done in honey if you know how to set about it. Bees feed themselves, and flowers cost nothing – I particularly want us to live among plenty of flowers – and I could make the boxes myself. But pigs are the thing, Polly. I've gone into the question thoroughly, and there's no doubt about it. You see, we should be able to keep cows – think how splendid to give the children fresh milk from our own dairy, as much as they can drink! – and we could send the rest to a factory and get the buttermilk back for the pigs. And vegetables – of course we'd have a big garden – and they'd eat all the surplus that would otherwise go to waste, and the fallen fruit, and the refuse from the kitchen; so that really the cost of feed would be next to nothing. The pork would be first-class on such a diet, given the right breed to begin with, and what Melbourne markets couldn't absorb we might ship frozen to England."

And so on.

Well, it was a fascinating picture, and his enthusiasm was contagious. I, too, thought it would be lovely to live amongst cows and flowers, and at the same time be making a fortune out of our Arcadian surroundings. So I went in for the little farm, and all the three classes of profitable stock – pigs, fowls, bees – in short, everything. What would have happened to us if Tom had not made a few unexpected thousands by the purest accident, I don't know. He did a little deal in mining shares, under the direction of a strangely disinterested friend who was expert at that business, and so saved us all from ruin. I may add that it was his sole exploit of the kind. I would not let him gamble any more – beyond putting an annual pound or two in Tattersall's Sweeps – because, although he thought he had been very smart, he was as ignorant as a confiding infant of the ways of money dealers, and never could have experienced such another stroke of luck. He was easily persuaded to let well alone, as always to defer to and see the reasonableness of any wish of mine.

It was before we had fairly plunged into our messes and muddles – in the very beginning, when the couleur de rose was over all – when the dilapidations of our country cottage were all repaired, and everything in the most beautiful order – when the fields were rich with spring grass and the scent of wattle-blossom, and the sleek cows had calved, and the hens were clucking about with thriving families of chicks – when the bee boxes were still a-making, and the two first pigs only in their smart new sty – when the children, released from the schoolroom, were scampering everywhere with their father, who was more of a child than any of them, and growing fat and rosy on the sweet air and the pure milk – when we were telling one another all day that we never were so happy and so well off – it was then that the calamity of our lives befell us.

A small creek touched the borders of the two paddocks that we called our farm, and, like all creeks, was fringed with wild vegetation, bushes and trees that interposed a romantic screen between its little bed and the world of prosaic agriculture. It so happened that the children – like many thousands of native Australians, far older than they – had never seen the bush. When they had wanted change of air Tom had taken them to sea; and as he had never had holidays himself, and I had never cared to go away from home without him, we were nearly in the same case. That strip of scrub was true bush, as far as it went, and we were delighted in it.

We were too busy just then to go thither in daytime, and would not allow the children to ramble there alone, for fear of snakes – although it was much too early and too cool for them; besides which, there were none – but we would take the fascinating walk about sundown in a family party, and sometimes have our tea there, returning after dark with strange treasures of leaf and insect, clear pebbles that we made sure were topazes in the rough, and stones with mica specks in them that we thought were gold. And once we went there in moonlight – the full moon of our first October – when it was mild and balmy, and we could easily imagine ourselves in forests primeval untrodden by a human foot except our own! How well I remember it – as if it were yesterday! – the enormous look of the trees in that beautiful, deceptive light, and how we stood in an ecstatic group under one of them to look up at an oppossum sitting in the fork of a dead branch.

Many people think that oppossums, like snakes and laughing jackasses, are common objects of the country in all its parts; but that is not the case nowadays with any of the three, and none of our family had beheld the dear little furry animal, except dead in a museum or torpid in the Zoölogical Gardens, while it had been one of the great ambitions of our lives to do so. And here he was, alive, alert, and unmistakable, his ears sticking up and his bushy tail hanging down, sitting against the moon, as I had seen roosting pheasants in the woods at home, looking down at us with the intense interest that an oppossum is able to take in things at that hour. The excitement was tremendous. The boys literally danced round and round the tree, and Waif was beside himself; he made frantic leaps upward, turning somersaults in the rebound, wildly tore at the bark of the tree and the earth at its roots, and filled the quiet night with his impassioned yaps and squeaks. He also, to the best of our belief, had never seen an oppossum before; yet he was as keen as a foxhound after a fox to get at and destroy it.

The little animal did not seem to mind. It sat still and gazed at us, as is the way of an oppossum, even when you have no camp-fire or lantern to mesmerise and paralyse it; we could almost fancy that we saw its fixed eyes, large and liquid, in the light of the moon. And suddenly Bobby ejaculated, from the depths of his heart, "Oh —oh– if only I'd got my gun!"

We took no notice – never heeded the warning given us – but only laughed to hear the little chap talking of his gun as if he were an old sportsman. It was a small single barrel, presented to him on his going to the country by his godfather, Captain Briggs (much to my dismay at the time, and the natural chagrin of the elder brother, who should have been the first to possess one), and Tom had given the child but two lessons in the use of it – shooting bottles from the top of the paddock fence.

Being without a gun, the boys flung aloft such missiles as came to hand, and, when a stick of wood touched the branch it sat on, the 'possum ran along it to a place where it was lost in leaves. Then we bethought ourselves of the late hour, called off Waif, and went home to bed – to bed, and to sleep as tranquil and unforeboding as the sleep of other nights.

The next day was exceptionally full of business. Recreation was not thought of. It was nine o'clock when we left off work – Tom and I.

Lily was long in bed, but the other children had no proper hour for retiring at this unsettled time. I went to the sitting-room to look for them, and found only Phyllis there. The lamp was not lit, nor the blinds drawn. I noticed that the moon was up, and by its light saw her crouched at one of the windows, pressing her face against the glass. I asked her what she was doing there, and she did not hear me; on my repeating the question, she sprang up with such a start of fright that I at once divined mischief somewhere.

"Where is Harry?" I cried sharply. Somehow it was always Harry, my handsome first-born, that I expected things to happen to.

Phyllis stammered and shuffled, and then said that Harry had gone to look for Bobby.

"And where is Bobby?"

She seemed still more reluctant to reply, but suddenly exclaimed, with an air of joyful relief, "Oh, there he is! There he is! There's Waif – he can't be far off!"

She followed me to the verandah, whither I went to meet and reproach my poor little fellow for having strayed without leave, and there was no boy visible – only the dear, ugly, faithful dog for whose sake all dogs are beloved and sacred for ever and ever. Waif ran to my feet, pawed them and my skirts, squirmed and jumped, yelped and whined, all the time looking up at me with eyes that were full of desire and supplication – trying to tell me something that at first I could not understand. I took a few steps into the garden, and he scampered down a pathway to the gate; seeing I did not follow so far, he ran back, seized a bit of my frock in his teeth, and tried to drag me with him.

"What does he want?" I called to Tom, as he sauntered towards me, pipe in mouth. "Tom, Tom, what does it mean?"

"Where's Bob?" was his instant question.

"Harry has gone after him – Harry is with him – Harry will bring him home," piped Phyllis, trembling like a leaf. Then she burst into tears. "Oh, mother – oh, father – I heard the gun such a long, long time ago!"

The gun! Who would have dreamed of that?– locked up in a wardrobe, as we supposed, and forbidden to be so much as looked at except under parental supervision. At the word our hearts jumped, and seemed to stop beating.

"He wanted to shoot the oppossum and cure the skin for a present to you on your birthday, mother. And he wanted it to be a secret – for a surprise to you."

Waif whined and ran, and we ran after him – Tom in silence, I wailing under my breath, already in despair and heart broken. I can see the devoted creature now, pattering steadily over the moonlit paddocks towards the creek and the trees, stopping every now and then to make sure that we were coming; and see him tracking through the scrub with his nose to the ground, and hear his little uneasy whimper when for a moment he could not perceive us.

Once we stopped at the sound of a distant whistle, and I shrieked with joy.

"No," said Tom gently. "That's Harry calling him."

And we came to the place where we had seen the oppossum the night before. The moonbeams trickled through the branches from which it had looked down upon our happy, united family, and just where we had stood together there was a dark something on the ground. Waif ran up to it and licked it —

I can't write any more.

CHAPTER V

A LITTLE MISUNDERSTANDING

It was years, literally, before I got over it. Indeed, I have never got over it – never shall, while I have any power to remember things. Death – we all know, more or less, what it means to the living whom it has robbed. To lose a child – the mothers know, at any rate! It is no use talking about it. Besides, there are no words to talk with that can possibly explain.

I often hear the remark that my husband has the most patient temper in the world, and I realise its truth when I think of that dreadful time – how I must have wearied and discouraged him, and how he never once reproached me for it, even by a glum look. He knew I could not help it. For one thing, I was ill – physically ill, with the doctor coming to see me. He ordered me tonics, stimulants, a complete change of scene, and so on, but no doctor's prescriptions were any good for my complaint. Winding a watch with a broken mainspring won't make it go. Tonics gave me headaches – tonics accompanied by constant tears and sleeplessness – and, hideous as the house was, with an empty place staring at me from every point to which I could turn my eyes, I knew it would be worse elsewhere. I clung to my own bed, my own privacy, my home where I could do as I liked and shut out the foolish would-be sympathisers and their futile condolences; and I could not bear to leave the other children. Once you have lost a child, you never again feel any confidence that the rest are safe; you seem to know they are going to die if they but catch a cold or scratch a finger, and that they will have no chance at all if you let them out of your sight. Besides, there were things to see to – the poultry, for instance, which was under my charge – if only I could have seen to them! I tried, but sorrow made me stupid; and when the incubator was found stone-cold, and again overheated, and on one occasion burnt to ashes with dozens of poor chicks inside, and when dozens more were drowned in a storm for want of timely shelter – all fine, thriving birds, when, you couldn't get a decent turkey in Melbourne for under a pound – I suppose it was my fault. But Tom always said, "Never mind – don't you worry yourself, Polly," and his first thought was to get me a glass of wine. He was like an old nurse in the way he cosseted and coddled me. When I was more ill than usual, he thought nothing of sitting up all night by my bedside, and making little messes for me in the kitchen with his own hands. He never even said, as I have heard men say at the first starting of tears – not after they have been flowing, like mine, for weeks and weeks – "Why don't you make an effort to control yourself? You know perfectly well that crying only makes you worse and does nobody any good" – as if a poor mother cried from choice and perversity and the pleasure of doing it, when her heart was broken! He knew my heart was broken. He understood. No one else understood. They all thought I could control myself if I liked. Some of them said so, and told one another, I am sure, though I did not hear them, that it was the calm and composed ones who felt the most. That is the theory of books and cold-hearted people; I don't believe in it for a moment. Whenever I see a woman bearing up, as they call it, without showing ravages in some way or other, I know what supports her – not more courage, but a harder nature than mine. A man is different. Tom mourned for our little son with all his heart, though he did not show it; and he did not show it because he is so unselfish. He thought of me before himself, and would not add a straw to my burden. Never was a tenderer husband in this world! I believe those women thought him foolish and weak-minded to indulge me as he did, but that was envy, naturally; they did not know, poor things, what it was to have such a staff to lean on.

However, one day, when I was showing him how thin I had grown, taking up handfuls of "slack" in a bodice that had been once tight for me, he began to look – not impatient or aggrieved, but determined – as he used to look on board ship when the law was in his own hands.

"Polly," he said, "this has gone on long enough. I'm not going to stand by and see you die by inches before my eyes. Something must be done. I shall take you to sea."

"To sea!" I exclaimed. "We can't leave the children. We can't leave the farm. We can't afford – "

"I don't care," he broke in. "I'm not going to lose you, if I can help it, for anybody or anything. You're just ready to fall into a rapid decline, or to catch some fatal epidemic or other, and I can't have it, Polly; it must be put a stop to before it is too late. The sea's the thing. The sea's what you want. Come to that, it's what I want myself; I've got quite flabby from being away from it so long. It would brace us up, both of us, and nothing else will. You pack a few clothes, pet, and I'll go into Melbourne and look up a nice boat. Don't you bother your head about the farm or the children or anything – I'll see that they're left all safe."

He was so firm about it that I had to give in. The sea, of course, was not like any other change of air and change of scene – it did seem to promise refreshment and renovation, peace even greater than that of my home, where I still suffered from the mistaken kindness of neighbours coming to expostulate with and to cheer me. Besides, when Tom said he had got flabby for want of it, I noticed that he was not looking well. There could be no doubt about the proposed trip being beneficial to him – I must have urged him to take it for his own health's sake – and I could not be left without him. So I mustered a little energy to begin preparations while he went to town; for though I had begged for time to think the matter over, he would not hear of delay. I never knew him so resolute, even with a crew.

At night he brought back a brighter face than had been seen in our house for many a long day. I was sitting up for him, and even I had stirrings in my heavy heart of a reviving interest in life. All day I had been thinking of our old voyage in the Racer – remembering the beautiful parts of it, forgetting all the rest.

"Well, Polly," said he; "did you wonder what was keeping me so late? The old man" – he meant the head of his old firm – "insisted on my dining with him, and I couldn't well refuse. Talked about everything as frank and free as if I'd been his brother – all the business of the old shop – and said they'd give a hundred pounds to have me back again. By Jove, if it wasn't for you and the children – no, no, I don't mean that; we're happiest as we are – or will be when you are well and heartened up a bit. What do you think, Polly? I'm to take the old Bendigo her next trip. Watson hasn't had a spell for years, and there's a new baby at his place; I saw Watson first – he put me up to it – but the old man was ready to do anything I liked to ask him. 'Certainly,' says he; 'by all means, and whenever you choose. And bring the missus, of course – only too proud to have her company on any ship she fancies.' You know he always thought a deal of you, Polly; I declare he was quite affectionate in his inquiries after you – never thought he could be so kind and jolly. I could have got free passages for both of us easy enough, but it's pleasanter to work for them; and I don't think, somehow, that I could feel at home in the old Bendigo anywhere but on the bridge."