The Way Home (17 page)

"Besides we can't dictate to Zara as if she were still a child. She has a right to buy her own experience. . . even if it's only with a poor creature like Hempel."

Another unspoken thought that lurked comfortably at the back of Mary's mind was of the more than liberal pin-money Richard was now giving her. He had said expressly, too, she need render no account of how she spent it. Thus, should the worst happen, she would be able to see to it that neither he nor John had to put hand to pocket.

A last attempt to bring Zara to reason, however, she made. And having only succeeded in fanning the flames -- sister-wise, Zara took interference less well from her than from any one -- Mary tilted her chin, and sighing: "Well, we must just make the best of it!" forthwith requested John to do his share.

One thing, though, she did not yield in: she went off by herself to town and bought the stuff for Zara's wedding-dress. For Zara, she could see, was meditating satin and orange-blossoms; and against this all Mary's common sense rose in arms. "For a place like Wangawatha! And with not even a Bishop to entertain . . . . I mean, Hempel being a Baptist." So she chose Madras muslin -- finest Madras, which cost a good deal more than satin -- and a neat bonnet trimmed with lilac.

"For these you can wear to chur -- to chapel, Zara, you know, when the hot weather comes." But Zara was so angry that she forgot to thank Mary for the gift, and tried the texture of the muslin between thumb and finger as if it were a bit of print.

And so a quiet wedding was celebrated at the Carlton house, a ceremony in which the only hitch was a somewhat lengthy pause for the bridegroom to recover his breath after a fit of coughing; a glass of champagne was drunk to the health of the newly wedded; and off they went in a shower of rice which Mary took care was thick enough to satisfy even Zara. Nor was a satin slipper forgotten for the back of the carriage-and-pair, all flowers and favours, which Mahony had provided to drive the happy couple to the steamboat on which they would sail to Sorrento.

The very last thing, upstairs in the bedroom, Mary pressed a small wad of notes into Zara's hand. "A bit of my wedding present to you, dear Zara. Now don't stint on your honeymoon. Put up at the best hotel and enjoy yourselves. Remember, one is only married once."

"Merci, ma bonne Marie, merci!" said Zara: in the course of the past hour she had gradually taken on the allures of an elder married woman towards her junior. "But I should have done so in any case."

* * * * *

The rice swept up, the hundred and one boxes of wedding cake dispatched which should intimate to even the least of Zara's acquaintances that she had quitted the single state, Mary turned to her next job, and drove one morning to St. Kilda to inspect John's house. She went by herself, for she thought John would thank you to have other eyes than hers quizzing his neglected home. And she was glad indeed no one else was present when, the coachman having unlocked the front door and drawn up the blinds for her, she was free to wander through the deserted rooms. The house had stood empty almost as long as she had been absent from the colony; and, in such a climate as this, two years spelt ruin. No window or door had fitted tightly enough, when hot winds and their accompanying dust-storms swept the town. The dust crunched gritty underfoot; lay in a white layer over all tables and polished surfaces; made it impossible to look out of the windows. The cobwebs that hung from the corners of the ceilings, and festooned the lustred chandeliers, were thick as string with it. You could hardly see yourself in the mirrors for fly-specks, or see the wax flowers under their shades. Everywhere, in hundreds, flies and blowflies lay dead. Moths had ravaged each single woollen article she laid hands on. The beautiful Brussels carpets were eaten into holes, as were also curtains and bed-hangings, table-covers and the backs of wool-worked chairs. It was truly a scene of desolation.

In John's bedroom she chanced to open a leaf of the great triple-fronted mahogany wardrobe, to look if any clothes had been left hanging to share in the general dilapidation; and there, the first thing she lighted on was a shawl of "poor Jinny's" -- or what had once been a shawl, for it was now riddled like a colander, and all but fell to pieces as she touched it. For a moment Mary stood lost to her surroundings. What memories that shawl called up! Of softest white cashmere, with a handsome floral border, it had been John's present to Jinny on the birth of their first child: "And if the next's a boy, Jane, I promise you one of richest India silk, my love!" But, even so, this gift had filled Jinny's cup to the brim. Mary could only remember it tied up with ribbons in tissue paper, and smelling of camphor to knock you down -- Jinny had hardly dared to wear it for fear the dust should discolour it, or the sun fade the bordering. There had been quite a quarrel one day, when John and she were staying with them in Ballarat, because Jinny had visited the Ococks in her second-best. "Far from me be it, Mary, to inculcate an extravagant spirit in Jane, or encourage her to run up bills at the milliner's. But she is now my wife, and it is her duty to dress accordingly," had been John's way of putting it. Well, poor Jinny, she might just as well have worn her finery and worn it out . . . as only have had it on her back some dozen times in all. She was gone where no shawls were needed.

"It's really a lesson not to hoard one's clothes, but to use and enjoy them while you can. Not to get anything too grand, either, which makes it seem a pity to wear."

"John ought to have given all such things away," she aid to herself a few minutes later. For a nudge of memory had drawn her to a lumber-room, where four zinc-and-wood saratogas were lined up in a row. These held all that remained to mortal eyes of "poor Emma." For Jinny had once soon after marriage confessed to a wild fit of jealousy, in which she had packed away every scrap of her predecessor's belongings. -- Fifteen years dead! The things were now, no doubt, mere rags and tatters, for the box-lid was not made that could keep out the moth. Some day she, Mary, must make it her business to run through them, to see if no little enduring thing was left that could be handed on to Trotty, as a memento of her long-dead mother.

"Regular Bluebeard's chambers," was Richard's comment, when she told him of her discoveries.

But Mary had on her thinking-cap, and sat wondering how she could best reduce John's affairs to order. The house must be opened up without loss of time, scrubbers and cleaners turned in, painters and paperhangers and then . . .

A few days later she came home radiant.

"I've got the very person for John!" and undoing her bonnet-strings, she threw them back with an air of triumph. It was a hot November afternoon.

"What! . . . yet again?" and having kissed her, Mahony laid his book face downwards and prepared to listen. "Tell me all about it."

"Quite one of the most sensible women I've ever met."

"Then, my dear, you do not mean pretty Fanny!"

For Mary had been out spending a couple of days with the young pair at Heidelberg, to pay her overdue respects to the cottage of which she had heard so much.

"It really is a dear little place. And kept in apple-pie order."

She had soon discovered, though, that the prevailing neatness and nicety were not the result of any brilliant housewifely qualities in the little bride. The good genius proved to be an aunt -- "Auntie Julia" -- who had had charge of the motherless girl since birth.

"One of those neat, brisk little women, Richard, who do everything well they put their hands to. Her hair's grey, but she is not really old. What struck me first was when she said: 'Now please don't imagine I'm a fixture here, Mrs. Mahony. I just came to help my little Fan over her first troubles in setting up house. I don't hold with old aunts -- or mothers either -- quartering themselves upon the newly wed. Young people should be left to their own devices. No, poor old Auntie Julia's job is done; she's permanently out of work.'"

It was here Mary thought she saw a light in John's darkness. Taking the bull by the horns, she there and then told Miss Julia the story of her brother's two marriages, and of his vain attempts to live in peace and harmony with Zara.

"Poor fellow, poor fellow! Dear Mrs. Mahony, I agree with you: relatives are not the easiest people in the world to get on with. They are either so much alike that each knows all the time just what the other is thinking -- and that is fatal; for, if you won't mind my saying so, the private thoughts we indulge in, even of our nearest, are not of a fit kind to be made public." ("But with such a merry twinkle in her eye, Richard, that it took away anything that might have sounded sharp or biting.") "Or else brothers and sisters are so different that they might have been born on different planets."

Mary next enumerated the long line of housekeepers who had wandered in their day through John's establishment. "In at one door, and out at the next!"

"Aha! You needn't tell me where the shoe pinched there. I see, I see. Each of 'em in turn thought she was the one chosen by fate to fill your poor sister-in-law's place. May I speak frankly? If I take the post, you may make your mind perfectly easy on that score. I'm not of the marrying sort. Some men are born to be bachelors; some women, bless 'em, what's known as old maids. I can assure you, my dear Mrs. Mahony, I am happiest in the single life. Nor have I missed a family of my own, for my little Fan here has been as much mine as though I had borne her." Here, however, seeing Mary's rather dubious air, she laid a hand on her arm and added reassuringly: "But don't be afraid, my dear. I do not noise these views abroad. They're just between you, me and the tea-caddy."

"It was really said very nicely, Richard -- not at all indelicately."

"All the same, I should give her a hint that such radical ideas would be fatal to her prospects with his lordship," said Mahony, who had recently smarted anew under his brother-in-law's heavy-handed patronage.

"She won't talk like that to a man. And I feel sure I'm right; she's the very person."

And so she was. No sooner had John, on Mary's recommendation, made definite arrangements with Miss Julia than tangles seemed to straighten of themselves. Hers was a master mind. In less than no time the house was cleaned, renovated, repaired; efficient servants were engaged; John was transferred from his uncomfortable Club quarters to a comfortable domesticity. And Miss Julia proved herself of an exquisite tact in running the establishment, in meeting John's wishes, in agreeing with him without yielding a jot of her own convictions. And thereafter John -- "He couldn't, of course, let the credit for the changed state of affairs go out of the family!" -- John went about singing Mary's praises, and congratulating himself on being the possessor of so capable a sister.

Next, Jinny's three mites were brought home from boarding school; and together Mary and Miss Julia stripped them of their "uniforms," undid their meagre little rats'-tails, and freed their little bodies from the stiff corsets in which even the infant Josephine was encased. Three pleasant-faced, merry-eyed little girls emerged, who soon learned to laugh and play again, and filled the dead house with the life it needed. They adored Auntie Julia: and were adored by their father as of old.

There remained only Trotty -- or Emmy, as she was now called. Mary had confabbed with Miss Julia, and they had shaken their heads in unison over John's extraordinary attitude towards his first family. But, on meeting the girl, Miss Julia struck her palms together and cried: "What! stand out against that? . . . my dear, have no fear! Just let your brother grow used to seeing such a daughter opposite him at breakfast, and he'll soon miss her if she chances to be absent. Exactly what he needs to preside over his dinner-table. It shall be my task to train her for the post."

In the meantime, however, Mary kept Emmy at her own side, in order to renew acquaintance with one she had known so well as a child.

As always when forced to live at haphazard, without a fixed routine, Mahony was restless and ill at ease. He had not even a comfortable room to retire to: his present den was the dull little back parlour of a town house. Books, too, he came very short in; it did not seem worth while unpacking those he had brought out with him; and the newly ordered volumes could not be expected to arrive for months to come. Nor did he see much of Mary: what time she had to spare from her relatives was spent in endless discussions with decorators and upholsterers.

The company of his young niece was thus a real boon to him. Emmy had no obligations, was free to go with him when and where he chose. What was more, with neither the cares of a family nor of house-furnishing on her mind, her thoughts never strayed. And a sound friendship sprang up between the oddly matched pair. No longer afraid of her uncle, Emmy displayed a gentle, saucy, laughing humour. Mahony hired a little horse for her and they rode out together, she pinned up in Mary's old habit; rode out early of a morning while other people were still fast asleep. Their destination was invariably the new house, to see what progress had been made since the day before: holding her habit high, Emmy would run from room to room, exclaiming. Thence they followed quiet, sandy tracks that led through stretches of heath and gorse to the sea. Or they strolled on foot, Emmy hanging on her uncle's arm and chattering merrily: a simple-hearted, unaffected girl, as natural as she was pretty, which was saying a good deal, for she promised to be a regular beauty. "Strawberries and cream" was Mahony's name for her. She had inherited her mother's ripe-corn fairness and limpid, lash-swept eyes; but the wildrose complexion of the English-born woman had here been damped to palest cream, in which, as a striking contrast, stood out two lovely lips of a vivid carnation-red -- a daring touch on the part of nature that already drew men's eyes as she passed. In person, she was soft and round and womanly. But the broad little hands with their slyly bitten nails were still half a child's. She was childishly unconscious too, of her attractions, innocent in the use to which she put them; and blushed helplessly did any one remark on her appearance -- as the outspoken people who surrounded her were only too apt to do. Without being in the least clever, she had a bright open mind, and drank in with interest all Mahony could give her: tales of his travels or of the early days; descriptions of books and plays; little homilies on the wonders of nature. If he had a fault to find with her, it was that she seemed just as sweetly grateful for, say, "Auntie Julia's" enjoinders how to hold her crotchet-needle, or hints on dress and deportment, as to him for his deeper lore. Yes, the child had an artless and inborn desire to please, and dissipated her favours in a manner that belonged very surely to her age . . . and her sex. For he might say "child," but let him remember that his own little Polly-Mary had been but a couple of months older, when he ran her off from among her playmates and friends.